Intellectual Property Fraud
Lying and distorting the truth is the opposite of adhering to the principles of critical thinking.
“Libertarian” “intellectual” Stephan Kinsella is an ignoramus.
In a piece published by the Brownstone Institute, he claims with fierce and insistent certainty that intellectual property does not exist, that is, that you can’t “own ideas.”
Wow. Amazing insight… (That is sarcasm for the benefit of those who don’t know me and/or are tone-deaf…)
This, of course, is true, in the strict sense of those words. It is also a trivial observation, akin to stating that day follows night.
But, naturally, this is not what anti-IP fools really mean when they oppose the very notion, the actual concept of “intellectual property.”
They are not primarily focused on “ideas,” as such. That gets them nowhere. They simply use that common sense stance as a launching pad to smuggle in their anti-intellectual craziness as they rapidly shift ground from “ideas” to copyrights and patents. That is a wholly untenable proposition. It is conjured into existence because of a completely unjustified and arbitrary shift in context that would do any flimflam man proud; an exercise in legerdemain designed to obscure reality rather than elucidate it.
Indeed, Kinsella says “IP is inherently statist, an artificial manufacturing of pseudo-rights even as it systematically violates property rights.” They are “not part of capitalism.”
Sure. You cannot properly copyright or patent general concepts, i.e., ideas.
(Though our current corrupt copyright system has occasionally allowed such travesties to occur. But that is an indictment of a debased legal system. Such unconstitutional breaches say absolutely nothing about the propriety of copyrights and patents per se as viable concepts and policies.)
No defender of intellectual property rights of whom I am aware has ever claimed that ideas can be copyrighted or patented. This is a blatant Straw Man Fallacy: to distort and/or misstate someone’s position then attack that warped proposition, a position that the other person never believed or said, in the first place.
Great start for this darling of the “libertarian” in-crowd… Well, and for anti-IP fanatics, overall…
Pace anti-IP advocates (nah…at this stage, to hell with “peace.” These yahoos don’t deserve any such leeway or implication of respect. Their debased arguments do not arise from simple “errors of knowledge.” We are waaayyy past that. So. Fuck ’em…), you can copyright specific instantiations of ideas. After all, virtually every single word in any book has been used first by other people. But NO ONE has EVER put them together, for example, in the specific manner in which I have done here.
For bestselling authors who rake in millions of dollars for their works, it is not the words themselves that lead to such success. It is how those words are arranged by the writer, an ordering of words that would not exist without the author’s one-of-kind-mind and talent.
Kinsella and his ilk are guilty of intellectual fraud. They either know or should know the truth. As Ayn Rand said, “An error of knowledge is not a moral flaw, provided you are willing to correct it… But a breach of morality is the conscious choice of an action you know to be evil, or a willful evasion of knowledge, a suspension of sight and of thought. That which you do not know, is not a moral charge against you; but that which you refuse to know, is an account of infamy growing in your soul. Make every allowance for errors of knowledge; do not forgive or accept any breach of morality.” (Emphasis added.)
For whatever wacky-doodle reasons, the anti-intellectual property acolytes insist on and persist in their evasion of facts, logic, and reality. Just as their fellow collectivist fools twist the concept of “sacrifice”—first equating it to the reasonable perspective of “cost” then shifting it to mean “self-destruction,” that is, the surrender of one’s values for non- or anti-values—anti-IP charlatans start with “ideas” then smuggle in copyrights and patents as though they are identical to ideas, slipping from one stance to another as convenience and contrivance demand.
Why? Who knows? I suspect, as is true for other collectivists, that their wily maneuverings are ultimately traceable to a sick desire to enforce illicit control over other people and to the destruction of rights, morality, liberty, and free enterprise.
Nihilism, but of a more subtle and pernicious brand.
These maroons (with apologies to Bugs Bunny) conflate “true-A” (“ideas cannot be copyrighted”) with “true-B” (“copyrights and patents are specific, unique instances of ideas”) and then proceed to gloss over and ignore what B actually is. They then attack B because B is supposedly equivalent to A (“ideas can’t be copyrighted (true); copyrights and patents are nothing more than ideas (false); therefore copyright and patents are invalid concepts that do not exist”) (really, really false).
What a chump move. This tarnished “logic” discredits the pseudo-intellectual person advancing such an obviously invalid connection. Ditto for anyone who falls for and supports this utter claptrap and bilge.
But anti-IP folks refuse to grapple with the indisputable fact that a general idea is not the same as a specific expression of ideas.
It is the difference between discovering a fact of nature (“a general idea”) that is available to everyone and which exists regardless of its discovery by any specific person…and creating a new Y THAT DOES NOT, DID NOT, AND WOULD NOT EXIST WITHOUT THE INDIVIDUAL PERSON WHO CREATED Y.
And viva la différence…
Anti-intellectual property dolts are inherently waging a war against the intellect and demeaning the crucial importance of the individual and his mind in the progress and advancement of civilization. Just like anarchism, the assault on intellectual property is statist and collectivist, unprincipled and immoral at its center. It relies on the premise that the individual person—the individual mind—has no place in this realm. The anti-IP activists promote the fantasy that the collective is identical to the individual. Anyone can do whatever they want with what others have brought into being because the mind is not to be countenanced as important in the concept of property or property rights or freedom or capitalism.
Anti-IP fanatics don’t understand—or rather, refuse to understand—the concept of “property rights”: its foundation and basis in the individual and the mind. They likewise excel at being ostentatiously ignorant of what capitalism (free enterprise) means. Their ludicrous, clown-like declaration of “support” for property rights and capitalism is as laughable as the old Soviet Union solemnly declaring its endorsement of “freedom.”
They are guilty—and, boy, are they…!—of the Fallacy of the Stolen Concept.
Ayn Rand discussed this fallacy a number of times. Perpetrators of this cheat “use effects while denying causes…they use our concepts while denying the roots and the existence of the concepts they are using.” The anti-IP people try (but fail) to dismiss the very concepts that their “arguments” rely upon. (Ditto for anarchists…) They babble on incessantly while remaining deliberately blind to what the ridiculous ideas they seek to defend require as foundations.
(Compare to those idjits, e.g., most “philosophers” and almost all religious types, who seek to discredit “reality” and “reason” and “logic” and “existence” and “certainty”…by implicitly or explicitly appealing to and using those very concepts! An absurd and laughable goal and an equally preposterous and impossible task.)
These arrogant and illogical nimrods offer false “definitions” (if they bother to define things, at all…) of property and rights and capitalism and what those concepts require. They then dishonestly assign that distorted vision to those individuals who do properly understand the basis of property, rights, and capitalism. From these shaky bastions, they then attack the fantasy of what they pretend those concepts are as they simultaneously obscure or completely evade the primary referents that underpin the nature of copyrights and property and are integral with them.
Kinsella is and always has been…unadmirable…shall I say, in his approach to politics and philosophy, but his approach here is baldly dishonest, disingenuous, and flat-out wrong.
But when push comes to shove, I don’t give a whit about Kinsella himself. He’s just another yahoo, a “fellow traveler” on the road to collectivism. The truth will outlive him and his tribe and the joke that embodies their “arguments.” They are no more consequential in the grand scheme of things than those who tried desperately to foist masks, a non-pandemic, and a dangerous Jab onto an unwitting and gullible public. Any short-lived success they enjoy will ultimately unravel and expose their absurd and ineffectual fraud for the cockeyed pretentiousness that it is.
Not to mention the extreme likelihood that if you scratch an anti-IP idiot, you’re more than likely to reveal an anarchist or “anarcho-capitalist.” (And vice versa, of course.)
(Cripes. Talk about an oxymoron…or at least the latter part of that word.)
I’ve thoroughly debunked the essential self-contradictions in both camps, but, apparently, few people care. Indeed, I would wager good money that the Brownstone Institute would never sully themselves and deign to reprint any of my articles delving into these controversies.
It’s also a truism that this “institute” goes out of its way to ignore what Ayn Rand had to say about this and other pseudo-intellectual garbage…
For me, this was the final straw for the Brownstone Institute, echoing the Future of Freedom Foundation when it started supporting and promulgating anti-IP lunacy. These organizations and any others like them have, in my eyes, outlived their usefulness.
Luckily, I have moved on from both. I get enough nauseating anti-freedom, anti-rights bullshit from self-avowed statists and collectivists. I don’t need to hear this kind of loathsome propaganda from collectivist wannabes masquerading as lovers of liberty as they seek to commit an unconscionable fraud.
For quotes from my articles “All Property Is Intellectual” and “All Property Is Intellectual II,” see:
To purchase the articles:
The source of property rights is the law of causality. All property and all forms of wealth are produced by man’s mind and labor. As you cannot have effects without causes, so you cannot have wealth without its source: without intelligence.
— Ayn Rand, “The Property Status of the Airwaves,” Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.
The anti-“intellectual property” movement is a threat to liberty represented by a belief that—at its core—is statist and collectivist as it seeks to remove the human mind from a correct understanding of what property is and is not.
It is not physical “labor” that forms the foundation for human values. It is not physical “labor” that forms the foundation for property (as one particular type of value). As important and necessary as action (physical “labor”) is for instantiating our values, the truly indispensable factor in value of any kind is the human mind, i.e., the human intellect.
The anti-intellectual property people are guilty of “definition by nonessentials.” A proper definition focuses on those traits that explain the most about what “X” is metaphysically and how “X” operates or functions epistemologically. Without human intellect, there is no such thing as property of any kind, physical or intellectual. Anti-intellectual property people equate property with mere physicality, thus evading what is most fundamental about property and necessary for its very existence: the human intellect.
The anti-intellectual property people are also aligned with economic materialism: the notion that the external, the physical determines human intellect; that those external factors are what is most important about people: that “it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence that determines their consciousness.” (Karl Marx, in the Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.) This is a reversal of cause-and-effect.
The anti-intellectual property people also implicitly endorse the mind/body dichotomy by illogically maintaining that the mind (intellect) is irrelevant to property rights; that the mind is, in essence, divorced from the body (the physical) (the material) rather than being integral to human existence and property.
The anti-intellectual property people also deny cause-and-effect when they divorce the creation from the creator, i.e., separate property from the intellect of an individual that is required for any and all creation. They focus only on the result (the effect) (the intellectual property) as though such a result magically comes into being and would exist without the cause (human intellect). This view is consonant with how statists view creators and producers: they are magical beings who will continue to function and provide goods regardless of what chains are placed upon them and regardless of how their rights are violated.
All of this is horrendous in its origins, execution, and implications.
For a thorough debunking of the bunkum that is “anarchy” (and an intimate brother to the denial of intellectual property) see my various articles on Amazon and Substack. Links to my Amazon articles are included in the Substack essays.
Anarcho Nonsense
Doug Casey: “As long as the State exists, you’re either the ruler or the ruled. That’s why I ‘identify,’ to use a currently fashionable word, as an AnCap or anarcho-capitalist.”
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