Editor’s Pick. Written by Matthew Alexander. I come to the battlefield after the fires have extinguished and the embers cooled, but having fully intended to write something on the subject when it was hot, I feel the central topic is timeless and the particular affair in question momentous enough to warrant some comments, even if…
Tag: intellectual property
The Last Gasp of Copyright Dies Within Me
Editor’s Pick. Written by Wendy McElroy. A few weeks ago, my position on intellectual property (IP) shifted. I abandoned the possibility that copyright by contract could function within a libertarian framework. I have argued for decades that IP cannot be derived from natural rights. Most IP advocates claim IP is a product of your labor…
3 Ways to Think About Intellectual Property
Editor’s Pick. Short lecture by Stephen Davies for LearnLiberty.org.
Copyright and Patents – What a Racket
Editor’s Pick. Written by Malcolm Greenhill for his personal blog. Growth comes from competition. Anything that stifles competition has a negative effect on the incentive to innovate. Protect a company completely from competition by giving it a monopoly, like the United States Postal Service, and stagnation is virtually guaranteed. The granting of monopolies and special…
Law and Intellectual Property in a Stateless Society
Written by Stephan Kinsella for LibertarianPapers.org. Abstract: An ethic of self-ownership combined with Lockean homesteading of external resources provides a plausible grounding both for anarchist opposition to the state and for an attractive anarchist legal order. Such an ethic can be understood as specifying that each person prima facie has the right to control his…
How “Intellectual Property” Impedes Competition
Written by Kevin Carson, as published at the Center for a Stateless Society. Any consideration of “intellectual property rights” must start from the understanding that such “rights” undermine genuine property rights and hence are illegitimate in terms of libertarian principle. Real, tangible property rights result from natural scarcity and follow as a matter of course…
Intellectual Property as a Form of Slavery
Written by fifth_imp for /r/Anarcho_Capitalism. I say that the notion of claiming an idea as property is absurd, and in fact constitutes a form of slavery. So, let’s break this down. What is an idea? Is an idea a tangible object? No, of course not. An idea is a pulse of electricity in your brain.…
The Case Against Intellectual Property Rights
Written by Roderick Long for Formulations in 1995. The status of intellectual property rights (copyrights, patents, and the like) is an issue that has long divided libertarians. Such libertarian luminaries as Herbert Spencer, Lysander Spooner, and Ayn Rand have been strong supporters of intellectual property rights. Thomas Jefferson, on the other hand, was ambivalent on the…
Intellectual Property Is Childish
Guest post by Isaac Morehouse. When children play with Legos, violence sometimes ensues. “He knocked down my tower!” “Only because she built it to look exactly like the one I made, and that’s not fair. I made mine first!” All the parents I’ve ever met handle this situation by pointing out to the aggressor that…
It’s Time To Debunk The Myth That Copyright Is Needed To Make Money – Or That It Even Makes Money
Guest post by Rick Falkvinge. One of the most persistent myths about the copyright monopoly has been that it’s needed to make money. This assertion turns out to be false for a very large number of observed cases, but the plural of anecdote is never statistics. So let’s look at some sound statistical evidence for…