LSU Law Professor Saúl Litvinoff passed away yesterday. As noted in the LSU Law Center press release about this, Litvinoff was a true giant in the field of civil law scholarship.
Professor Emeritus and Boyd Professor of Law Saúl Litvinoff, whose impact on the legal traditions of Louisiana spanned more than 43 years, died earlier today. [continue reading…]
A friend of mine is going to be a panelist at this event, World’s Fair Use Day, which
is a free, all-day celebration of the doctrine of fair use: the legal right that allows innovators and creators to make particular uses of copyrighted materials. WFUD will take place at the Newseum in Washington D.C. on Tuesday January 12, 2010, and will be organized by Public Knowledge (PK), a Washington D.C.-based non-profit, consumer-advocacy group. PK works to ensure that communications and intellectual property policies encourage creativity, further free expression and discourse and provide universal access to knowledge. As part of its campaign to return balance to copyright law, PK hopes to use WFUD to educate the public about the importance of fair use in an information society.
Enhancing the fair use exception is all to the good, but it does not go far enough. Fair use is a vague, ad hoc, utilitarian legislative exception designed to blunt some of the edges of copyright law so as to help masque its manifest injustice. An analog would be a slavery law that permitted a judge to allow the slave a month of temporary freedom if he can demonstrate to the judge that his master has been mistreating him according to a balance test in which the judge weighs four “factors” to make this determination. Or an exception to tax law that says a judge can reduce your tax rate by 1% for one year, if you can persuade him of a “hardship” as proved by weighing four legislatively enshrined “factors.” If the law is unjust and needs its edges blunted by ad hoc, unprincipled exceptions–the law itself is the problem and should be abolished.
This event is produced by the group Public Knowledge, which appears to be generally IP-skeptical (“Our first priority is promote innovation and the rights of consumers, while working to stop any bad legislation from passing that would slow technology innovation, shrink the public domain, or prevent fair use”; and they seem to be appropriately skeptical of the horrible DMCA), although their approach is somewhat ad hoc and unprincipled, and intermixed with the standard pro-democracy (and pro-Democrat), pro-“consumer,” pro-network neutrality (see my A Libertarian Take on Net Neutrality) sentiments, and so on. Still, another ally in the fight against pattern privilege and intellectual monopoly.
From Mises blog and Against Monopoly. Archived comments below.
See also Stephan Kinsella, “Ideas are Free: The Case Against Intellectual Property: or, How Libertarians Went Wrong“; idem, “Law and Intellectual Property in a Stateless Society,” in Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2023), Part III.D; idem, “Against Intellectual Property After Twenty Years,” in Legal Foundations of a Free Society, Part IV.E; idem, “Intellectual Freedom and Learning versus Patent and Copyright,” Economic Notes No. 113 (Libertarian Alliance, Jan. 18, 2011).
***
There are various ways to explain what is wrong with IP. You can explain that IP requires a state, and legislation, which are both necessarily illegitimate. You can point out that there is no proof that IP increases innovation, much less adds “net value” to society. You can note that IP grants rights in non-scarce things, which rights are necessarily enforced by physical force, against physical, scarce things, thus supplanting already-existing rights in scarce resources. (See, e.g., my Against Intellectual Property, “The Case Against IP: A Concise Guide,” Mises Daily (Sept. 4, 2009) (comments on Mises blog archived here) and other material here.)
Another way, I think, to see the error in treating information, ideas, patterns as ownable property is to consider IP in the context of the structure of human action. Mises explains in his wonderful book Ultimate Foundations of Economic Science that “To act means: to strive after ends, that is, to choose a goal and to resort to means in order to attain the goal sought.” Or, as Pat Tinsley and I noted in “Causation and Aggression,” “Action is an individual’s intentional intervention in the physical world, via certain selected means, with the purpose of attaining a state of affairs that is preferable to the conditions that would prevail in the absence of the action.” [continue reading…]
Interesting recent article on Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs), Arbitrating over BIT claims, by attorneys Mark Friedman and Gaetan Verhoosel.
[continue reading…]
from LRC 2003:
From Rothbard’s great article, H. L. Mencken: The Joyous Libertarian:
In discussing how to punish guilty public officials (“jobholders”), Mencken said, “What is needed is a system (a) that does not depend for its execution upon the good-will of fellow jobholders, and (b) that provides swift, certain and unpedantic punishments, each fitted neatly to its crime.”
Mencken’s proposed remedy “provides that any [citizen]…having looked into the acts of a jobholder and found him delinquent, may punish him instantly and on the spot, and in any manner that seems appropriate and convenient – and that, in case this punishment involves physical damage to the jobholder, the ensuing inquiry by the grand jury or coroner shall confine itself strictly to the question whether the jobholder deserved what he got. In other words, I propose that it shall no longer be malum in se for a citizen to pummel, cowhide, kick, gouge, cut, wound, bruise, maim, burn, club, bastinado, flay, or even lynch a jobholder, and that it shall be malum prohibitum only to the extent that the punishment exceeds the jobholder’s desserts. The amount of this excess, if any, may be determined very conveniently by a petit jury, as other questions of guilt are now determined…. If it decides that the jobholder deserves the punishment inflicted upon him, the citizen who inflicted it is acquitted with honor. If, on the contrary, it decides that the punishment was excessive, then the citizen is adjudged guilty of assault, mayhem, murder, or whatever it is, in a degree apportioned to the difference between what the jobholder deserved and what he got, and punishment for that excess follows in the usual course…. “
Regarding Mencken’s proposal for punishing bureaucrats–Brett Middleton writes,
“This is in regard to your lewrockwell.com blog entry on 10/23, in which you describe Mencken’s proposed justice system for those who take it upon themselves to punish a public official. If you’d like to see an example of a similar system in (fictional) action, I suggest that you try to find a copy of H. Beam Piper’s short novel “Lone Star Planet“. I think you’d appreciate the trials held in the “Court of Political Justice.””
from LRC 2003
So here I am, yesterday, on my daily drive home from work in Sugar Land, back to home in Houston, wending my way through a one-mile stretch that passes through an island of suburbia known as (we’ll call it, to protect the not-so-innocent, namely me) Brookhollow Place. It’s a well-known speed trap. Drive fast–they bust you. My last encounter with them was a bad day about 2 years ago. I had run a red light in down town Houston at lunchtime, and worked until almost midnight. Driving home, I went about 50 in a 35–in Brookhollow Place. The cop stopped me. I was in a suit that day, looked totally legit, driving a car with all lights working–you know, the kind of guy who doesn’t deserve a ticket.
I told the cop, “Man, this has not been my day, I already got another ticket a lunch,” hoping he would let me go. He says, “Let me see it,” getting my hopes up. He’s gonna give me a break, I thought. A few minutes later, he saunters back up to my car and hands me the ticket. “What did you need to see the other ticket for?” I splutter? “Just wanted to check your story out,” answers the redneck. [continue reading…]
from LRC 2003
[An edited version of an email I prepared and sent to friends shortly after Christmas, 1998. Before 9/11/2001, when the world was still innocent. Sigh.]
So our Cocker Spaniel, Muffy (yeah, that’s her name, what of it?), kicks the bucket a couple years ago [around 1996], when we lived in Philly. Cin loved that dog, I gave her to her back in college, in 1989, as a present. We buried her in Great Valley Pet Cemetary. Putting the rose in her little paws was too much to bear. I paid $400 for the hole in the ground but I was not gonna shell out $400 more for a coffin. Nosirree. I’m not some stupid, soft, manipulable yuppie. In fact, I insisted on carrying her out of the vet’s office, after they had to put her to sleep, in the black Hefty bag I had brought along to protect the car seats on the way to the pet graveyard. It was a pitiful scene, as wife and I walked out in tears, with our poor dead Cocker (nestled in a Hefty bag) in my arms. We made such a commotion and upset the other patrons waiting to get FiFi’s annual shots, that they didn’t even make us pay for the euthanasia (ohhhhh, but someday, I tell you, SOME DAY, we will pay for all those youths in Asia). I showed them. Or maybe, they were content with the $1300 we had shelled out the preceding 6 days on ultimately ineffectual Cocker Spaniel dialysis treatment. [continue reading…]
From LRC 2003
Anna Belle (da poodle) ‘n Me
[From about February 1999]
So the other day, Cin’s sister Amy and her family were visiting. On a fine Saturday morning, I decide to take my 6-year-old nephew, Thomas, and our standard poodles Sophie & Anna Belle for a walk to a park a few blocks fom our house. Well, I had to walk the dogs anyway, and it was an excuse to have a cigar. And I get brownie points w/ the wife and sister-in-law because it looks like I’m bonding with my nephew at the same time. A win-win. Also have a coffee travel mug full of beer–don’t want my WASP neighbors to sneer at me. Or my wife and sister-in-law. After all, this is like 10:30 in the morning. Multitasking, man. Made cell phone on the way there, and have a comic book stuffed in my pocket, just in case I get bored. Fat chance. [continue reading…]
From LRC, 2003
Ahh, I’m learning a lot these days.
If you ask, “Where exactly do I put dirty baby clothes? Where is this alleged special baby clothes hamper you always refer to?” and the wife answers, “In the green hamper on top of the little fridge in the laundry room–where we’ve been putting them for two months–where have you been? What planet do you live on?”–I suggest you don’t mutter under your breath loud enough for her to hear, “at least I don’t live on b*tch-world”.
Another suggestion: if you are leaving the house with wife and baby in tow, and the wife pulls your wedding ring out of her pocket, saying, “so, why aren’t you wearing THIS?”, don’t say, “Look, I’m walking your two poodles on pink leashes, I’ve got the baby in a Baby Bjorn carrier on my stomach, I’ve got a Brighton diaper bag over my shoulder–just how married do I need to look?”
I was interviewed today for the Who Owns You? documentary, by Taylor Roesch. We spent almost an hour on the interview part in my study (luckily I had put my standard poodles Sir Boudreaux and Anna Banana Belle to the groomers to avoid barkage), then a couple hours, with his two assistants Ben and Jorge, partaking of beer, bourbon, and cigars and on my back porch. Then I sent them off to Fogo de Chao. “Begone!,” I said, “you roving documentarians!”
Update: my friends mock my standard poodles. Some pix of my babies are below. And here are some blogposts about them: Poodles Bite; Anna Belle (da poodle) ‘n Me.
As noted at Libertarian Papers: For those who like paper, Libertarian Papers is offered in a Print Archive version, at cost, via print-on-demand. Our second print archive is Vol. 1 (2009), Part 2: Articles 18-44 (555 pages). It’s available for $16 (our cost), from Lulu. It may be ordered from our Print Archive page.
(Thanks to Gil Guillory for putting this print archive together.)
Stephan Kinsella is a libertarian writer and retired patent attorney in Houston, Texas. He has published widely on various areas of libertarian legal theory and on legal topics such as intellectual property law and international law. His publications include Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Papinian Press, 2023), Against Intellectual Property (Mises Institute, 2008), International Investment, Political Risk, and Dispute Resolution: A Practitioner’s Guide (Oxford, 2020), and The Universal Principles of Liberty (2025).
My Failed Libertarian Speaking Hiatus; Memories of Mises Institute and Other Events, 1988–20192025
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