Understanding IP: An Interview with Stephan Kinsella

Jeffrey Tucker:

Stephan Kinsella, it's a pleasure to have you here today. Welcome.

Thank you. It's good to be here.

We're going to talk about your class for the Mises Academy, on intellectual property.

Yes, I'm looking forward to it. We've been planning it for quite a while, as you know. I think the first course will be on November 1st for six weeks and then we'll take a week off. We'll have time to go in depth into many of the issues about intellectual property and its relationship to libertarianism, economic theory, and various other areas.

Why is this an important issue?

Well, it's becoming a more and more important issue as we've seen in our circles and as seen on the internet. Daily, we see horror stories and crazy examples of abuses of IP. People are starting to wonder if these are really abuses of IP or if there's something wrong with IP itself.

In the past, free-market economists and libertarians have sort of given this issue a pass. They took it for granted. It's been in a corner all by itself. Now people are wondering, and as we start looking more closely at it, we can see that a lot of the assumptions about IP have been wrong.

It's striking you mention the history of thought here and why this issue is sort of crystallizing in our time, especially with your pioneering monograph on that subject, Against Intellectual Property.

It's generally true, isn't it, that that theoretical element of economics or law or whatever catches up when the practical need for that new theory comes along. For example, the theory of money and credit was made necessary by the advent of central banking.

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Understanding IP: An Interview with Stephan Kinsella