KOL365 | Guest Lecture on IP for Walter Block’s Law and Economics Class
Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 365. My friend Walter Block, economics professor at Loyola University-New Orleans, asked me to give a guest lecture today (Dec. 8, 2021) for his Law and Economics course, on the topics of intellectual property. This is it. Transcript below. Youtube: https://youtu.be/PclRRN6podw TRANSCRIPT "Intellectual Property: Law and Economics: Guest Lecture Walter Block’s Law and Economics Class" Loyola University-New Orleans, Dec. 8, 2021 by Stephan Kinsella 00:00:00 WALTER BLOCK: Okay, it’s 12:37. We usually start the class with a moment of silence, so we’ll start the class with a moment of silence. 00:00:09 [moment of silence] 00:00:12 Okay, students, let me introduce you to my friend, Stephan Kinsella who is a lawyer in Houston, working in Houston, and he is, I would say, one of the preeminent libertarian theoreticians. So without any further ado, you’ve all read his paper, and he’ll go over it a bit and have a nice dialogue with you. So Stephan, start. 00:00:36 STEPHAN KINSELLA: Okay, can everybody hear me okay? What is this course? What’s the name of the course? 00:00:43 WALTER BLOCK: Law and Economics. 00:00:44 STEPHAN KINSELLA: Okay, Law and Economics. Okay, so I can touch on both. I think what I’ll do is I’ll try to speak around 25-30 minutes, and then open it up for questions. And if you guys have any questions while I’m speaking, I don’t mind if you interrupt me if there’s something I said that needs clarification or if I’m not clear. So feel free to interrupt me during it. Otherwise, you can wait until I’m done. 00:01:08 So I think what I’d like to do is kind of maybe explain how I got to my views and where the paper came from. Basically, I started practicing law and patent law around 1993-94, and I had been a libertarian for a long time, and I had been thinking about the intellectual property issue because I was not satisfied with the arguments in favor of it by Ayn Rand and others partly because these rights terminate at a certain time, and it just didn’t make sense to me. Like if it’s a natural right or real property right, why would it terminate? And then how do you know what the right length of time is? All those issues. 00:01:45 So I searched for a better argument thinking I’m a libertarian, and I’m a patent lawyer. I’d know more about it than anyone else. I’ll figure this thing out. And finally I came to conclusion right around the time that I started practicing patent law that all of intellectual property law is totally unjustified. And so I ended up writing that paper in 1999 or so, which is over 26 years now. In the meantime, I’ve come across other arguments, other data, other ways of presenting it, and although I think the original argument is still sound. So that’s where we are. 00:02:23 I think what I’d like to do is focus on two types of intellectual property just because of the time constraint, and those are the two most important and the two most damaging in my view, which is patent and copyright. The other types are trademark and trade secret, and then there are some other more recent types like mask work protection for semi-conductors and database rights in some countries and boat hull designs. And I would also include defamation law as a type of intellectual property because the arguments for it are the same, although in the law it’s not usually considered that way. 00:02:57 So let me first talk about the term. I do think the term intellectual property is a loaded term, and it’s as misnomer, but we’re stuck with it for now and what we want to talk about it be...