Show notes
Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 174. This is the third of six lectures of my 2011 Mises Academy course "Rethinking Intellectual Property: History, Theory, and Economics" (originally presented Tuesdays, Mar. 22-April 26, 2011). The first lecture may be found in KOL172. Youtube and slides for this lecture are provided below. The course and other matters are discussed in further detail at KOL172. The “suggested readings” for the entire course are provided in the notes for KOL172. Transcript below. Lecture 3: EXAMINING THE UTILITARIAN CASE FOR IP SUGGESTED READING MATERIAL See the notes for KOL172. ❧ Transcript Rethinking Intellectual Property: History, Theory, and Economics—Lecture 3: Examining the Utilitarian Case for IP Stephan Kinsella Mises Academy, April 5, 2011 STEPHAN KINSELLA: Okay, where we left off. We talked the first two lectures about the different types of IP, basically the law, what the law is, the positive law. And I explained that this course will and why it will focus on patent and copyright. Also, we had a good deal of discussion about the historical origins of patent and copyright, how copyright arose from government censorship and patents from monopoly privilege. So today’s lecture – I’m going to go over the – a little bit more about what this history has resulted in, the entire overview of the kind of modern web of treaties and statutes, legislation that defines and governs all of these different IP rights just to give you a good overview of what it’s like. Then we’re going to basically discuss the main two justifications offered for intellectual property, which is the – basically the principled case, which is rights-based or deontological or natural law-based, and the more practical wealth-maximization-based, which you could call utilitarian or consequentialist. [indiscernible_ Now, I do post a lot there, and I think I put about one-third of those posts here to summarize, to discuss. And there’s just so much news on a daily basis of trademark, trade secret, patent, especially patent and copyright news, usually completely outrageous cases of abuse and injustice. Okay, so I’m going to go over here a few of those just to give you a flavor of what’s going on. Jock says the Death of ACTA song was taken down in a copyright claim today. I did not know that. I’m curious what the – who claimed copyright in – oh my God, yeah. Techdirt – that was on Techdirt. I might post that later. Thanks for posting that. Mike Masnick is the guy at Techdirt, and he’s a friend, and he’s actually on the board of my C4SIF. And he is so prolific. I can’t keep up with the guy. He posts more anti-IP stuff than I can ever hope to. I’ll put this microphone right in front of me, see if that works a little bit better. So here’s one here. Lawmakers are pushing for a rogue websites bill. So this is just I think last week. Some congressmen vowed to pass legislation to give the justice department new authority to go after foreign and domestic websites that sell pirated music and movies and counterfeit goods. So now we have rogue websites. I did a post called “Patent Defendants Aren’t Copycats. So Who’s the Real Inventor Here?