Stephan Kinsella Archive

Kinsella IP Interview

November 22, 2009 12:07 PM by Stephan Kinsella

I was invited to be a guest on The Peter Mac Show last night and ended up staying on for both hours. It was a pretty in-depth interview. The host asked impressively intelligent questions for someone who had just started coming around to the anti-IP position (after reading my Intellectual Property and Libertarianism just the day before (!)). The MP3 files are here: hour 1 ; hour 2.

Bookmark/Share | Comments (0)

Common Misconceptions about Plagiarism and Patents: A Call for an Independent Inventor Defense

November 21, 2009 12:41 AM by Stephan Kinsella

Defenders of patents commonly say they are against innovators' ideas being "stolen" or "plagiarized." This implies that patents simply permit an innovator to sue those who copy his idea. This position betrays either disingenuity or ignorance about patent law. Let me explain.

Under copyright law, someone who independently creates an original work similar to another author's original work is not liable for copyright infringement, since the independent creation is not a reproduction of the other author's work. Thus, for example, a copyright defendant can try to show he never had access to the other's work, as a defense. The reason for this is that the fundamental copyright is, well, a right to copy one's original creative work. By the nature of creative works that are subject to copyright, it is very unlikely someone would independently create the same novel, say, or painting, as another author. (And if copyright only protected literal copying, it would be much less a problem; but unfortunately it protects a bundle of rights including also the right to make "derivative works".) But, in the rare case where author 2 independently creates a work very similar to that of author 1, it is not an infringement of author 1's copyright, since author 2 did not copy anything.

Patent law is different. Very different. Most defenders of IP do not seem to be aware of this difference--one reason they should not be opining in favor of legal regimes they know little about. When patent defenders say that patent abolitionists are in favor of plagiarism and idea theft, they imply that patent law is like copyright law--that it simply prevents people from copying others' ideas.

Continue reading "Common Misconceptions about Plagiarism and Patents: A Call for an Independent Inventor Defense" »

Bookmark/Share | Comments (13)

Leftist Attacks on the Google Book Settlement

November 20, 2009 4:32 PM by Stephan Kinsella

I posted the following comment to Cory Doctorow's BoingBoing post Competition and Google Book Search:

Cory, Google is not perfect but the attacks on them for attempting this seem to me to be demonizing the wrong party. The problem is copyright law--a state legal system. The state is, as usual, to blame. Why some people are trusting the same state that foists IP law on us to protect is us mystifying. In attacking Google they are allying with the state (see my post Google Digital Library Plan Opposed by German Chancellor), which is the real enemy. I don't see any choice for google to accomplish the quasi-digital libertarian of orphan and other works other than its creative legal-settlement route.

Continue reading "Leftist Attacks on the Google Book Settlement" »

Bookmark/Share | Comments (2)

Beckmann's Economics as if Some People Mattered, or, Small is Not Beautiful
2009.11.18 | Comments (9)

Rand on IP, Owning "Values", and "Rearrangement Rights"
2009.11.16 | Comments (63)

Adolf Reinach's "The Apriori Foundations of the Civil Law"
2009.11.16 | Comments (0)

"Intellectual Property and Libertarianism," Liberty magazine
2009.11.11 | Comments (40)

Hoppe on East vs. West Germany and the Fall of the Wall
2009.11.10 | Comments (4)

Milton Friedman on Intolerance, Liberty, Mises, Etc.
2009.11.09 | Comments (30)

Nokia's infringement suit against Apple illustrates need to scrap US patent system
2009.11.05 | Comments (11)

A Libertarian Take on Net Neutrality
2009.11.04 | Comments (8)

Physicist Howard Hayden's one-letter disproof of global warming claims
2009.10.29 | Comments (239)

"The Definition of Inflation According to Mises: Implications for the Debate on Free Banking" (Libertarian Papers)
2009.10.29 | Comments (12)