Greetings!

Some time ago, I brought you a piece the primary function of which was to provide a free resource to understand the radical notion, largely held only in libertarian circles, that IP laws are not compatible with libertarian principles. You can find a link to that earlier piece here.

I’d like to direct you now to a piece that I perhaps should have led off with. It is still by Stephan Kinsella, a Houston, TX patent attorney*, Executive Editor of Libertarian Papers and Director, Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom (c4sif.org). However, it is a smaller, more condensed version of his primary argument, and is rife with excellent citations and thorough notes that any budding libertarian or anarchist theorist will find invaluable.

Those aren't creations of the mind, they're creations of a fucking factory. What are you, Q?

There aren’t many useful pictures that come up when you search “Intellectual Property Images”

In the article Law and Intellectual Property in a Stateless Society, Mr. Kinsella takes the reader through a very brief but illuminating explanation of the evolution of the view of self-ownership and how property rights are inherent to this concept. He then goes on to reiterate how IP laws contradict those property rights, which argument those of you who read Against Intellectual Property will already be familiar with.

The portion that I think our small army of arm-chair commenter-philosophers will find most interesting and conducive to discussion is the latter part of the article. Mr. Kinsella discusses what an IP regime might look like in a stateless society. This directly addresses those who dismiss an idea as being too radical, or unworkable, if no direct formulation is provided of how the idea might play out in a practical fashion.

When downloaded, the PDF shows a length of 44 pages, but due to the voluminous notes, there is really only about 25 or so pages of narrative text. You can read it over your lunch break! Assuming you work for a weak-kneed progressive who actually allows you to not be working for a precious few minutes in order to eat. No true libertarian master would ever permit such indulgence among his (and I do exclusively use the male pronoun when discussing both libertarians, and business owners) chattel.

 

*Don’t we have a commenter who is also an attorney in Houston? If you disagree with Mr. Kinsella’s positions, you should meet him for lunch and fight to the death. It’s the only way to prove which one is right.