by Stephan Kinsella
on April 20, 2025
[From my Webnote series]
See: Stephan Kinsella, “Law and Intellectual Property in a Stateless Society,” in Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2023), Part III.C.
Also:
- Against Intellectual Property, the section “Contract vs. Reserved Rights” and the subsections “The Limits of Contract” and “Contract vs. Reserved Rights”
- Wendy McElroy’s perceptive comments on the “copyright by contract” approach in her note to me reprinted in McElroy: “On the Subject of Intellectual Property” (1981)
- You can’t oppose IP without opposing contract; IP simply flows from contracts
- See also my 2011 Mises Academy course on IP, Lecture 6 (in particular, see slide 12; or see the transcript there and search for mousetrap; or go to 45:10 in the video )
- See also Leonard Peikoff on IP here (go to 5:41). Peikoff thinks that whether reading books in a library or buying a used book violates the copyright of the author depends on the contract of sale. Thus he appears to be making an argument similar to Rothbard who thought you could have some type of contractual copyright (in inventions, oddly) system. He doesn’t seem to understand Rand’s own argument for IP, which is not based on contract.
- See also Wendy McElroy, The Last Gasp of Copyright Dies Within Me
- Also explained in detail here: Bryan Caplan’s view on Slavery Contracts and IP
- See also Adam Mossoff, a pro-IP Objectivist law professor: “one can try to create through contracts some of the protections provided by the concept of an IP right, but it is impossible to create all of them” (emphasis added). “Intellectual Property,” in The Routledge Companion to Libertarianism (Matt Zwolinski & Benjamin Ferguson, eds., 2022), at p. 482, n.2.
- Some thinkers, like the Tannehills and LeFevre, also seem to think some form of IP can be arrived at privately, by contract or arbitration and so on.
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by Stephan Kinsella
on April 19, 2025
From a twitter post. Kinsella on fie-ya.
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by Stephan Kinsella
on April 19, 2025
In the wake of Jack Dorsey’s and Elon Musk’s recent criticism of intellectual property (IP) law, it’s no surprise the usual suspects—vested interests, IP attorneys—are pushing back. Case in point is a Bloomberg Law article by Christopher Suarez, an IP litigator with Steptoe, “Musk and Dorsey’s Call to ‘Delete All IP Law’ Ignores Reality,” Bloomberg Law (April 18, 2025). But it’s of the same old confusions and myths and provides no coherent argument in favor of IP law, especially its two most harmful forms, patent and copyright.
Doing a complete fisking would merely illustrate Brandolini’s Law, so I’ll just mention a few things. [continue reading…]
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by Stephan Kinsella
on April 18, 2025
Faketoshi Patent Oppositions – The Story So Far
For the past few years, in my spare time I have been working on oppositions against three European patents granted to nChain Licensing AG, each of which originated from GB priority applications filed in April 2016. Each patent named Craig Wright and fellow Australian Stephane Savanah as co-inventors. For those few people who may still be unaware, Wright has since 2015 been falsely and fraudulently claiming to be the person behind the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin. Wright’s implausible, and easily disprovable, claims were disputed in late 2015 almost as soon as they became public through engineered leaks to the press. It was, however, only after several lengthy, and extremely costly, legal battles involving many others (including myself), that his claims were finally and comprehensively demolished by Mr Justice Mellor in a mammoth judgment handed down on 20 May 2024 (Crypto Open Patent Alliance v Craig Steven Wright [2024] EWHC 1198). The judgment was appealed by Wright, but permission was denied by Lord Justice Arnold in, for him, an unusually brief 3 page judgment issued on 29 November 2024. There are further strands to the Craig Wright story, including a contempt of court finding, alleged tax fraud in both the UK and his native Australia and a likely upcoming criminal prosecution for perjury, but here is not the place to go into them.
Going back to the beginning, the company nChain was set up in 2016 by Wright and his business partner Stefan Matthews, with help from Canadian businessman Robert MacGregor, and enabled by substantial financial backing from Antiguan-based Canadian online gambling tycoon Calvin Ayre. The stated business aim of the company was to patent and commercialise inventions arising from Wright’s alleged extensive knowledge of Bitcoin and related technology by virtue of his being Satoshi. As explained in the 2016 article by Andrew O’Hagan, “The Satoshi Affair“:
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See also
This is absolutely heroic work by Tufty (David Pearce), with whom I worked for couple years at the Open Crypto Alliance (Announcing the Open Crypto Alliance to Protect Bitcoin, Blockchain and Crypto, KOL323 | World Crypto Network: Announcing the Open Crypto Alliance to Protect Bitcoin, Blockchain and Crypto, KOL321 | The Pending Patent Problem with The Open Crypto Alliance – The Tatiana Show Ep. 296, KOL320 | Stephan Livera Podcast # 249–Bitcoin Patents & Open Crypto Alliance), before we disbanded. I concluded this game of whack-a-mole was an uphill battle because the way the system works, patents can be granted, and unfortunately do have a presumption of validity, and it’s complicated and expensive to fight them (which is one reason they cause problems and can be used by patent trolls and (legal) extortion).
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by Stephan Kinsella
on April 18, 2025
It is easy to see that the patent for invention is a privilege and an industrial monopoly, of the same family as those of the Middle Ages which were abolished immediately after 1789.
Il est facile de voir que le brevet d’invention est un privilège et un monopole industriel, de la même famille que ceux du moyen âge qu’on a abolis immédiatement après 1789. —Michel Chevalier
From Stéphane Geyres’s tweet:
From Michel Chevalier et les brevets d’invention (Treaty of Invention Patents and Industrial Counterfeiting); Traité des brevets d’invention et de la contrefaçon industrielle, précédé d’une théorie sur les inventions industrielles; Gallica version. See also: Michel Chevalier (Wikipedia); Louis Rouanet, “Michel Chevalier’s Forgotten Case Against the Patent System,” Libertarian Papers 7 (1) (2015): 73–94.
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by Stephan Kinsella
on April 18, 2025
Podcast (kinsella-on-liberty): Play in new window | Download (10.8MB)
Kinsella on Liberty Podcast: Episode 460.
I mean the title says it all. I kept getting interrupted by calls and deliveries. Oh well, what you gonna do.
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by Stephan Kinsella
on April 16, 2025
Excerpt from this 2009 article:
Control freak
One striking feature of Objectivism is it outspoken support of intellectual property. A key scene in Atlas Shrugged is where metallurgist genius Hank Rearden is compelled by the government to hand over his intellectual rights to his innovative metal alloy, and Ayn Rand acted in kind. She passionately used the copyright on her works to bar people from forming “John Galt Societies”, citing that the name John Galt is her creation and her intellectual property.
For a person bent on propagating her ideas to the maximum extent possible, this would seem eerily counterproductive. Stealing an object from someone is obviously depriving the original owner of his property, but copying it isn’t. It may or may not be harmful to potential income, but that income remains potential, in the realm of the unprovable. This is a debate that incites extreme passion.
While Objectivists, libertarians and conservatives strongly agree on the principle of physical property rights, the picture is much more divided when it comes to ‘intellectual property’, a catch-all phrase for several different items, including patents, copyright and trademarks. In a landmark essay by Stephan Kinsella, Against Intellectual Property, argues that ‘Intellectual property’ is not only meaningless and harmful, it is in direct violation of the general principle of private property, and primarily constitutes a state-sanctioned creation of artificial scarcity, leading ultimately to poverty, not job creation and wealth.
The wider libertarian movement accepted the argument, put it into action (see www.mises.org/books) and moved on. Objectivists, on the other hand, maintain that what Ayn Rand spoke and practiced on the subject remains the unalterable truth.
[continue reading…]
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by Stephan Kinsella
on April 15, 2025
A commentary on and summary of Contre la Propriété Intellectuelle, a French translation of Against Intellectual Property, by Marius-Joseph Marchetti, has been published here: Contre la propriété intellectuelle : un essai éclairant [Part 1], and Part 2. The Google auto-translation is appended below, with light edits.
Against Intellectual Property: An Enlightening Essay
By Marius-Joseph Marchetti
August 7, 2019
Let’s dive into a quality libertarian work: Against Intellectual Property by N. Stephen Kinsella (and translated into French by Stéphane Geyres and Daivy Merlijs). The 76-page book aims to fulfill several roles, which it fulfills very well. It is divided into four parts, each essential for having an overall vision of intellectual property. [continue reading…]
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