Download: “Intellectual Property”: A Libertarian Critique I. The Ethics of “Intellectual Property” II. Privilege as Economic Irrationality III. “Intellectual Property” and the Structure of the American Domestic Economy IV. “Intellectual Property” and the Global Economy V. “Intellectual Property,” Business Models and Product Design VI. Is “Intellectual Property” a Necessary Incentive? Patents promoted the stable control of markets by oligopoly firms through the…

Download: “Intellectual Property”: A Libertarian Critique I. The Ethics of “Intellectual Property” II. Privilege as Economic Irrationality III. “Intellectual Property” and the Structure of the American Domestic Economy IV. “Intellectual Property” and the Global Economy V. “Intellectual Property,” Business Models and Product Design VI. Is “Intellectual Property” a Necessary Incentive? Artificial property rights create irrationality by holding productive resources out of use…

Download: “Intellectual Property”: A Libertarian Critique I. The Ethics of “Intellectual Property” II. Privilege as Economic Irrationality III. “Intellectual Property” and the Structure of the American Domestic Economy IV. “Intellectual Property” and the Global Economy V. “Intellectual Property,” Business Models and Product Design VI. Is “Intellectual Property” a Necessary Incentive? “Intellectual property” is a contentious issue among libertarians. Among the individualist anarchists alone,…

O editor do The Freeman, Sheldon Richman, discursando na George Mason University, levantou a questão sobre o que os libertários convencionais querem dizer quando chamam um país de “capitalista”. O que qualifica um país como “capitalista”? Muitos países com índices relativamente baixos de liberdade econômica (incluindo aqueles classificados como “majoritariamente não-livre”) são normalmente considerados “capitalistas”, e referenciados…

The modern libertarian case against so-called intellectual property (IP) has been building steadily since the late 1980s, when I first encountered it. Since then, an impressive volume of work has been produced from many perspectives: economics, political economy, sociology, moral and political philosophy, history, and no doubt more. It is indeed a case to be…

Los aficionados de la tecnología y defensores de la privacidad observaron atentamente el ataque que Microsoft lanzó a finales de 2013 contra el sistema operativo Chrome de Google. Por un lado, es inusual que una empresa gaste los dólares de su presupuesto publicitario atacando a sus competidores en lugar de promover sus propios productos. Por…

Tech aficionados and privacy advocates took notice in late 2013 when Microsoft rolled out an attack on Google’s Chrome OS computers. For one thing, it’s unusual for any company to spend its advertising dollars attacking its competitors rather than promoting its own products. For another, Microsoft’s position atop the computer operating systems market is such that…

AUTHOR’S NOTE: TechCrunch has reported that the Iron Maiden story that this article was centered around was misreported, if not an outright fabrication. We have corrected the factual inaccuracies and regret the error. For years, advocates of strict enforcement of intellectual property law on the Internet and elsewhere have said that the single largest detriment…

C4SS Senior Fellow and Lysander Spooner Research Scholar, Nathan Goodman, gives a fantastic presentation on rape culture, transphobia and strategies for resistance for the Genderevolution Conference in Salt Lake City, Utah.

C4SS Senior Fellow and Lysander Spooner Research Scholar, Nathan Goodman, took part in and represented C4SS on the Salt Lake City, Utah, Trans-Pacific Partnership Welcoming Committee coalition and protest. Salt Lake Residents Resist the Trans-Pacific Partnership! Salt Lake City, UT November 19, 2013 Delegations from twelve national governments are meeting this week at Grand America…

For years now the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has been trying its best, unsuccessfully, to enforce its “intellectual property” claims upon those who would dare share and distribute media. They are of course not the only ones trying to get IP enforced; we have seen the same trends in music and gaming. Since…

Naomi Klein, to a casual reader, might seem to hate the free market. Or at least she hates what most people think of as the free market, based on the conventional use of that term by mainstream politicians and journalists. And the usual vulgar libertarian suspects (see here and here and here) have reacted with exactly the kind of by-the-numbers polemics you’d…

On November 13 Wikileaks published the leaked “intellectual property” chapter of the draft Trans-Pacific Partnership treaty. The IP section is a bundle of draconian provisions curtailing Internet freedom in the interest of protecting proprietary content industries like movies and music and imposing new restrictions on commerce to enforce corporations’ patent monopolies on genetically modified organisms…

This week I had the great pleasure of talking with Ben Stone, the Bad Quaker, about a wide range of important topics. We discussed left-libertarianism, the IP attacks against C4SS from earlier this fall, the symbiotic relationship between corporations and government, the dangers of bigotry, and much more. The podcast can be found here.

Amia Srinivasan has four questions for free-market moralists, specifically those who accept something like a Nozickian account of individual rights. My own take is more Rothbardian than Nozickian, but that still seems close enough to give her four answers, and to ask four questions in return about the assumptions that underlie her essay. Amia begins by asking: 1….

An October 20-22, 2013, Fox News national poll revealed that the implementation of ObamaCare (the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act) by the American state has been so chaotic that 60% of registered voters characterize the process as “a joke.” The economic reasons for the incompetence are well known by libertarians familiar with the Austrian tradition…

The strongest argument in favor of the fiction of “intellectual property” is consequential rather than moral: Creators of good things — novels, songs, drugs, what have you — we are told, will essentially go on strike if government doesn’t guarantee their profits by vesting them with monopoly “rights” to ideas. Instead of writing that next…

“Reformism” is one of those words that’s hard to pin down sometimes. It’s usually taken to mean advocating for “reform within the system” — in other words, the bad kind of reform. A bad reform operates from the unstated – often unconscious – starting assumptions of the system. It takes the existing institutional framework of…

Back in the ’90s, the Financial Times referred to the G8 countries and the Washington Consensus they enforced as a “de facto world government.” As if we needed any reminder that such a global corporate regime exists in practice, consider the Trans-Pacific Partnership currently under negotiation. Although in theory the authority of all treaties signed…

Em 399 antes da Era Cristã, pelo crime de “corromper os jovens” e debilitar a crença nos deuses tradicionais de Atenas, Sócrates foi sentenciado a beber taça de cicuta. Se o objetivo era silenciar a voz de Sócrates, é seguro dizer que o tiro saiu totalmente pela culatra. A história de Sócrates só fica em…