tag archive: intellectual monopoly

Just so, 126 years later:

U.S. Supreme Court

Atlantic Works v. Brady, 107 U.S. 192 (1883)

Decided March 5, 1883

MR. JUSTICE BRADLEY delivered the opinion of the Court.

It was never the object of those laws to grant a monopoly for every trifling device, every shadow of a shade of an idea, which would naturally and spontaneously occur to any skilled mechanic or operator in the ordinary progress of manufactures.

Such an indiscriminate creation of exclusive privileges tends rather to obstruct than to stimulate invention. It creates a class of speculative schemers who make it their business to watch the advancing wave of improvement and gather its foam in the form of patented monopolies which enable them to lay a heavy tax upon the industry of the country without contributing anything to the real advancement of the art.

It embarrasses the honest pursuit of business with fears and apprehensions of concealed liens and unknown liabilities …

For today’s lecture, some libertarian thoughts on the problem of intellectual property from Stephan Kinsella.

I’m regularly exposed to libertarian ideas at places like Marginal Revolution and EconLog. I like a lot of the ideas, but I wouldn’t describe myself as libertarian.

Kinsella wrote a paper called “Against Intellectual Property.” I’m slowly making my way through it. TV and the Internet have reduced my attention span down to a nub, so I often find it challenging to digest scholarly pieces like this. Especially when the footnotes consume on average half of the page.

In “Against Intellectual Property,” he talks about the first-possessor rule of property ownership. Since I can’t be bothered at the moment to research this idea further, I’m going by what I read in the paper and what occurs to me to wonder about, and it seems there is …

Originally published in Free Software Magazine, 9 October 2006. (With Diggage!)

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Did you know?

Did you know there used to be a “free” software movement? It was made up of people who believed that software should be free to use and copy without restrictions. These people actually argued that patents and intellectual property laws would hinder innovation.

Fortunately, this was a short-lived movement. The Intellectual …

Started reading Unbounded Freedom and ran in to a great excerpt from a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote to Isaac McPherson in 1813 about the nature of ideas. It’s not the first time I’ve run across it, and like my Ben Franklin quote it has seen a lot of use in patent discussions, but it’s the kind of thing I think needs to be found on movingtofreedom.org. Looking at more of the letter:

It has been pretended by some, (and in England especially,) that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions, and not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs. But while it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all, it would be singular to admit a natural and even an hereditary right to inventors. It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, …