Rare is the scholar to inspire a festschrift — a volume of papers written by top specialists in honor of a major thinker-but this one is very special. It is sure to grow in importance as the years move on, for it contains phenomenal contributions written in the tradition of the work of Hans-Hermann Hoppe . Hoppe is one of the most important
Like many libertarians, I initially assumed intellectual property (IP) was a legitimate type of property right. But I had misgivings from the start: there was just something too utilitarian and results oriented in Rand’s purportedly principled case for IP, and something too artificial about the state’s copyright and patent statutory
“Calls for abolition of the patent system — especially those coming from a principled, rights-based approach — are very unlikely to be adopted at the present time.” [This paper is the first of a two-part series. The concluding article is “ Reducing the Cost of IP Law “] Hardly a day passes when we do not hear of one patent abuse or another. [1]
[This article is based on a speech delivered at Mises University 2009 (July 30, 2009; audio ; video ).] Most libertarians find some areas of libertarian theory more interesting than others. My own passion has always been rights theory and related areas, such as the theory of contracts, causation, and punishment. [1] Intellectual property (IP),
The Techdirt post Court Rejects Online Terms Of Service That Reserve The Right To Change At Any Time spurred me to post a comment about this, collecting some of the thoughts I’ve had about such matters for a long time. As I note there, my own theory of contract is presented in my article A Theory of Contracts: Binding Promises, Title Transfer, and
A Baltimore startup with less than 5 employees, WhoGlue , is suing Facebook for patent infringement, based on a patent it previously--unsuccessfully--tried to unload at a patent auction. The patent, no. 7,246,164 , is for a “Distributed personal relationship information management system and method”. In essence, they claim that Facebook infringes
I previously noted that NTP used the patent system to wring over $600M out of RIM, the manufacturer of the Blackberry smartphone. As noted by Mike Masnick , now RIM has coughed up another quarter billion dollars to another company, Visto (”coincidentally” a licensee of NTP). A quarter billion dollars--everyone yawns. Masnick asks, why did NTP have
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
My attention was recently called to Tibor Machan’s paper “Self-Ownership and the Lockean Proviso” ( working paper version ), which will be in his book The Promise of Liberty (Lexington, 2009). As noted in the Abstract , the paper argues as follows: Locke’s defense of private property rights includes what is called a proviso--”the Lockean
What is the Mises Institute?
The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.
Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.