Article: Intellectual Freedom and Learning Versus Patent and Copyright

Articles, IP Law
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In my various publications and speeches about intellectual property (IP), I’ve approached it from a variety of angles. In this article, I consider the role of information and learning, and the role of property rights, in human action. I use a praxeological analysis to show that human action employs scarce resources or means, but that action is guided by non-scarce ideas and knowledge. Property rights are recognized in means because they are scarce; but ideas are not scarce things: they are infinitely reproducible.  The growing body of knowledge is a boon to mankind. Property rights are needed for scarce means so that they can be peacefully and productively used in action; property rights in ideas restrict, impair, and imped learning and the use of information to guide one’s actions. Copying information and ideas is not stealing.  Learning is not stealing.  Using information is not trespass. In this article, I urge young libertarians to stay on the vanguard of intellectual freedom, and to fight the shackles of patent and copyright.

Mises Academy: Stephan Kinsella teaches Libertarian Legal TheoryThis article is based on my speech of Nov. 6, 2010, at the 2010 Students for Liberty Texas Regional Conference, University of Texas, Austin (audio and video versions may be found here). A previous version was published today under the same title in Economic Notes No. 113 (Libertarian Alliance, 2011).

(Incidentally, my 6-week Mises Academy course “Libertarian Legal Theory: Property, Conflict, and Society” starts at the end of this month (Jan. 31-Mar. 11, 2011). I describe it in my article “Introduction to Libertarian Legal Theory,” Mises Daily (Jan. 3, 2011).)

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Good Guys and Bad Guys in the Media Biz

Business, IP Law, Pop Culture
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I and some friends are trying to compile a list of various notable musicians, artists, and the like who are more or less good on copyright, and those who are particularly bad. For “good” we mean they explicitly oppose copyright or at least fight for their fans and against some of the excesses of draconian copyright. For the bad, we mean those who use the power of the state to attack their fans and/or hypocrites who pretend to be for peace and love and condemn capitalism and commercialism while greedily condoning the use of state copyright law to persecute innocent people. I’ll list a few on both sides below; other suggestions or comments are welcome as are any links documenting the good/bad IP status of individuals listed below; I’ll update this list from time to time.

Good

Bad

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Tom W. Bell on Intellectual Property

IP Law
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Law professor Tom W. Bell of Chapman University is an emerging pro-property rights anti-IP star (and one of the handful of patent lawyers who publicly opposes patent law) — his draft book Intellectual Privilege: Copyright, Common Law, and the Common Good looks very promising. For a concise statement of his views, see his wonderful performance in The Great Debate on Intellectual Property, Cato Policy Report (January/February 2002). Note how solid and refreshingly lucid and libertarian his approach is, as contrasted, say, with that of James DeLong in the same publication (I debated DeLong in an Insight magazine symposium in 2001, where he gave similarly weak arguments for IP).

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Nina Paley on Property, Copyleft, Copyright at HOPE 2010

Anti-Statism, IP Law, Pop Culture, Technology
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Artist and anti-copyright innovator Nina Paley, creator of Sita Sings the Blues1 , has posted an edited video with excerpts of her talk “Sita Sings the Blues: a Free Culture Success Story” at The Next H.O.P.E. (Hackers On Planet Earth) conference, July 16 2010 in New York City. The talk includes:

why I insisted on authentic songs, what is and is not property, software is culture, the difference between Share Alike (copyleft) and other Creative Commons licenses, why I paid to legally license the old songs, how noncommercial copyright infringement is still illegal, legal costs, benefits of audience sharing & decentralized distribution, the Sita Sings the Blues Merchandise Empire (sitasingstheblues.com/store), open-licensed merch, audience goodwill, how fans support artists, rivalrous vs. non-rivalrous goods, the Creator Endorsed Mark, migrating Flash files to open formats, gift income, commerce without monopolies, why I encourage legal sharing, and more!

It is quite impressive to see an artist like this in front of this audience explaining how rivalrous goods are property and nonrivalrous goods are not, and how free distribution of the latter can be used to sell the former.

As my TLS co-blogger Dick Clark observed to me,

HOPE is a pretty big deal. That was the same con where Adrian Lamo got booed for ratting out Bradley Manning.

But don’t think this is just filtering in. I was talking in 2001 with Eric Corley, aka “Emmanuel Goldstein,” the organizer of HOPE and founder/editor of 2600 Magazine about your article, Against Intellectual Property. There are a lot of anti-IP hackers (and libertarian hackers too, if the Jargon file observations on hacker politics are correct). Information Longs to Be Free, baby.

  1. See also The Creator-Endorsed Mark as an Alternative to Copyright; Interview: Nina Paley on Copyright; Nina Paley’s “All Creative Work is Derivative”; Power to the Pixel 2009: Nina Paley. ↩

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