Anarchist, Author, Lawyer, Electrical Engineer, Stephan Kinsella discusses the Economics and Morality of Intellectual Property with me. We’ll get into the value, subjective and objective, of Crypto-Currencies, NFTs and other Digital things.
Find out more about Stephan and dive into the large body of work he has from books to audio and video on topics from the law to economics to social issues and of course Intellectual Property at StephanKinsella.com.
Continue your trip down the Kinsella information highway at Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom where you can find a growing collection of work aimed at proving the government impedes innovation and creativity with laws and taxes and regulations and all manner of interventions into our personal and economic lives.
Does Bitcoin violates Mises' regression theorem? The debate still rages among Austrians. It is part of the broader debate about whether Bitcoin can become money proper
Right. If I buy a massage, I am paying money for a service. Economically it’s an “exchange” since each actor’s purpose is related to the other’s; you can explain it this way: WHY did A perform this action (transferring a coin to B)? To induce B to perform an action (massage). WHY…
What trips people up is that they intermix legal with economic concepts. Money is a purely economic concept. Anything that can be economically traded or exchanged, even it's not an ownable thing, can in principle be a medium of exchange.
In my various arguments about intellectual property (IP) over the years (since I first started writing and speaking on this, in about 1995) I have gradually come up with new ways of explaining the issue, mostly in response to various criticisms and arguments I’ve seen raised on the pro-IP side. I don’t disagree with much of what I wrote in my 2001 Against Intellectual Property, though I was not hard enough on trademark and trade secret, and I probably would be more careful with the term “scarcity” since I have learned that its dual meanings are an unending source of equivocation by unscrupulous opponents (e.g. when they say “well good ideas are pretty scarce, in my opinion!”). I’ve learned a few supplementary arguments against IP or have learned different ways of making the case, that I would now include in the 2001 monograph, and which I may do someday if I write a new case against IP from scratch (a possibility; tentatively entitled Copy This Book). [continue reading…]
Apparently Facebook retroactively deleted it since it linked to c4sif.org which for some reason Fecebook now censors; I re-posted the link here. [↩]
I was an impromptu guest at the FreeTalkLive tent at PorcFest 2022 today (June 23, 2022), with host Mark Edge (and Aria) discussing corporations and limited liability, and also the recent “Reno Reset” at the Libertarian Party’s 2022 Convention in Reno.
“Thus human economy and property have a joint economic origin since both have, as the ultimate reason for their existence, the fact that goods exist whose available quantities are smaller than the requirements of men. Property, therefore, like human economy, is not an arbitrary invention but rather the only practically possible solution of the problem that is, in the nature of things, imposed upon us by the disparity between requirements for, and available quantities of, all economic goods.”
See also Heath Pearson, Origins of Law and Economics: The Economists’ New Science of Law, 1830–1930 (Historical Perspectives on Modern Economics), p. 151; and Josef Sima, “Praxeology as Law & Economics,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 18, no. 2 (Spring 2004), pp. 73–89, at 78.
This is my discussion with Eric John on Twitter Spaces, on June 18, 2022, about intellectual property—its genesis, common fallacies and misunderstandings, the labor theory of property, libertarian “creationism,” and so on. We discussed ownership of information and touched briefly on ownership of bitcoin.
Tom Jump, of the TJump Youtube channel, had me on to discuss anarcho-capitalism and related issues. I was not familiar with him or what position he would be coming from; turns out he’s a self-professed “centrist liberal” but was very intelligent, and surprisingly civil despite espousing some views completely contrary to libertarianism and my own beliefs.
Is it possible that we’ve been snookered into believing in a nonsensical concept? Is it possible to “own” an idea? Stephan Kinsella walks us through copyright, patent, trademarks, and trade secrets from a libertarian perspective, and also considers the utilitarian arguments for intellectual property.
[Note: I mistakenly posted this as a blog post instead of a podcast entry on March 28, 2022; please see comments on the original post here.]
I had some exchanges with Voice of Reason in the comments section for a Mises.org article on IP a few weeks ago about intellectual property so we decided to have a discussion. Here it is. FWIW. (See the comments section of the Mises.org article titled Why Intellectual Property Isn’t Necessary to Reward Innovation.)
If anyone has links to the original thread send them on and I will include them.
Same people: Project Lifeboat: “From the people who brought you the Oceania project so many years ago comes the Lifeboat project. An attempt to create a spaceship for the purposes of saving the human race from the singularity predicted by Vernor Vinge.”
The “Creative Common Law” project, an anarcho-capitalist project in which I was enlisted as an advisor, only for it to later turn from “Creative Common Law 1.0: Anarcho-Capitalism” to “Creative Common Law 2.0: Anarcho-Socialism/Syndicalism”
“The Libertarian Constitution” by Ilya Shapiro, Tim Sandefur, and Christina Mulligan: “This was probably an easier project for us than for our conservative and progressive counterparts because the current United States Constitution is fundamentally a libertarian or, more precisely, classical liberal document. So much so that, at the outset, we joked that all we needed to do was to add “and we mean it” at the end of every clause
Tom Bell’s “Ulex,” or “Open Source Legal Operating System”;
Galt’s Gulch Chile, a scam that ended in disaster;
Roderick Long’s “Imagineering Freedom: A Constitution of Liberty Part I: Between Anarchy and Limited Government” and Michael Darby’s “Draft Constitution for a Reviving or New Nation,” both at http://freenation.org/a/
Siegen, Bernard H. (1994) Drafting a Constitution for a Nation or Republic Emerging into Freedom. 2d ed. Fairfax, Virginia: George Mason University Press.
“The @LPRadicals agree; our platform plank on IP:
2.13 Intellectual Monopoly and File Sharing
The phrase “intellectual property” is a misnomer. What the state calls intellectual property is more accurately referred to as “intellectual monopoly” as the state grants a monopoly on the use of an idea, or goods and services derived from an idea, to a certain limited group. We call for the elimination of the protection of such monopoly thereby freeing the market, encouraging content providers and product developers to improve on existing products thereby bringing more and better choices to the market.
In particular, we call for the end of the prohibition of online file sharing, just as we oppose all victimless crimes. When content is shared it is not stolen as no one loses any property, only a potential loss of some future revenue, which is natural in any open market.”
The Libertarian Party’s 2022 convention, in Sparks (Reno) NV is over. It was an exhausting but interesting 3 full days. The Mises Caucus swept the LNC. I was also elected to serve on the Judicial Committee (see below). A few ad-hoc amendments to the LP Platform were made as well as a larger set of amendments recommended by the Platform Committee.
My main goal in joining the LP about 5 years ago was to have it field more principled, libertarian candidates and to have clearer, more principled libertarian messaging.
To that end I worked to help develop a definition of aggression and property rights to add to the Platform, since there the current LP Platform (https://www.lp.org/platform/) contained no clear definition of aggression or property rights or the relation between these two fundamental concepts. It is critical to include a clear, general statement to this effect to distinguish what makes the Libertarian perspective unique and to clarify our political principles. [continue reading…]
This is an audio version of my article “
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