KOL420 | There Ain’t No Intellectual Property: The Personal Story of a Discovery (PFS 2023)

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast: Episode 420.

From the recently-concluded Seventeenth Annual (2023) Meeting of the PFS, Bodrum, Turkey (Sep. 24, 2023). The slide presentation is streamed below (ppt). Video is also below.

Also podcast as Property and Freedom Podcast PFP265; see also the panel discussion later in the day (video below).

Kinsella talk:

https://youtu.be/QEmRgapffNQ

Panel discussion:

https://youtu.be/aEryCGV2oWU

Slides:

Notes from the slides:

Stephan Kinsella

C4SIF.org • StephanKinsella.com

@nskinsella

Property and Freedom Society

2023 Annual Meeting

Bodrum, Turkey

September 24, 2023

Overview

►       Spoken about intellectual property (IP) before here (in 2010 and 2015), but today I’d like to talk about how I came to my current views

§   And how figuring this out required coming to a deeper understanding and more clarity about the foundation and nature of rights, and property rights, in general

►       I came to the conclusion years ago that all IP law—patent, copyright, trademark, trade secret, and others—are completely illegitimate and should all be abolished

►       I started publishing articles on various aspects of libertarian theory in the early 1990s—rights and punishment theory, inalienability, legislation, and so on

Against IP

►       In 2001 I published “Against Intellectual Property” in the Journal of Libertarian Studies.

§   Original title: “The Legitimacy of Intellectual Property”

§   Hoppe suggested I change it, just like he suggested the title of today’s talk

►       The article was controversial and influential, so I became well known in libertarian circles as being “the IP guy”

§   Even though it’s not my only area of research

§   E.g., Legal Foundations of a Free Society (2023) [LFFS]

IP Man

How I got here

►       Libertarian since high school, initially influenced by Ayn Rand

►       Never satisfied with her case for patent and copyright

►       Initially practiced oil and gas law (1992) but decided to switch to patent law (1994)

►       Around the same time I was learning patent and IP law as a lawyer, I tried to come up with a better argument for IP

►       Finally I came to my current IP beliefs

§   I was trying to justify the unjustifiable

►       Heavily influenced by the work of Hoppe (on scarcity and property), and Tom Palmer & Wendy McElroy (on IP)

§   Hoppe was instinctively against IP from the beginning

►       Because I understood IP law very well, I put together what I had learned and published “Against Intellectual Property,” and many articles since

How I got here

►       I kept encountering different objections to my basic argument, so developed further arguments to explain their errors

►       Summarized in “Against Intellectual Property After Twenty Years: Looking Back and Looking Forward,” in LFFS

►       Sorting out the basic case against IP and responding to various objections required rethinking and clarifying other aspects of libertarian theory, namely the nature and purpose of property rights, contract theory, and so on

►       Figuring out IP and finding ways to explain it to others improved my understanding of other areas of libertarian theory

►       I’ve lost track of how many people have written me or told me that my IP work opened their eyes. That’s gratifying for a writer.

§   See “My IP Odyssey”

Absurd Arguments for IP

►       “Thank goodness the Swiss did have a Patent Office. That is where Albert Einstein worked and during his time as a patent examiner came up with his theory of relativity.” —Patent attorney Gene Quinn