Wednesday, August 26, 2009
A patent attorney who gets it!
Many kudos to Stephan Kinsella, who is a patent attorney who writes at the againstmonopoly.org blog. He posts a nice rebuke to Randall Mayes, and makes the case that patents in general are not necessarily efficient in encouraging innovation, and are de facto usurpations of property rights (making all my statements about the scope and effect of gene patents true, not fiction). His post can be read here. He also lends his support to my responses to Chris Holman, writing here. I have added his blog to my blogroll too, and will be following it diligently.
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5 comments:
Kinsella perpetuates the myth that patents are inconsistent with a free market. The basis for this point of view is the "scaricty theory of property rights". This scarcity theory is incorrect both historically and factually - see http://hallingblog.com/2009/06/22/scarcity-–-does-it-prove-intellectual-property-is-unjustified/
Dale, scarcity is not the basis for Kinsella's arguments, as best I can deduce, nor is it the basis for mine. See here
David, Halling is correct in one way: my argument is a libertarian-Lockean one that is based on the recognition that property rgihts are rights of control to scarce resources. Of course, as Hoppe notes in his withering retort to a critical review by Loren Lomasky (p. 411 of Economics and Ethics of Private Property): "Like most contemporary philosophers, Lomasky gives no indication that he has grasped the elementary yet fundamental point that any political philosophy which is not construed as a theory of property rights fails entirely in its own objective and thus must be discarded from the outset as praxeologically meaningless moonshine."
In any event, I provided a lengthier response here to Halling's similar comment on my own blog post (which is too long to repost here).
In a free market, governmentally-created monopolies would not alter prices as they do under the current IP regime. Rather, individuals valuing goods according to their subjective valuations would decide prices. IP is artificial scarcity, and skews the free market artificially.
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