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“Law and Intellectual Property in a Stateless Society”

Abstract: An ethic of self-ownership combined with Lockean homesteading of external resources provides a plausible grounding both for anarchist opposition to the state and for an attractive anarchist legal order. Such an ethic can be understood as specifying that each person prima facie has the right to control his or her own body; and that Lockean homesteading, under which the owner of any scarce resource is its first user (or his contractual transferee), should provide the basis for property rights in such previously unowned goods. Given these rules, monopoly privileges like patent and copyright (intellectual property, or IP) cannot be justified, as they infringe on self-ownership-based body-rights and/or property rights in external resources. In this article, I explain why IP rights are inconsistent with the moral grounds for a stateless society’s legal order, and speculate about the practices or laws that might prevail in the absence of IP in such a system.

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February 28, 2013, By Stephan Kinsella (Editor) Filed Under: Libertarian Papers, Volume 5 (2013)

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  1. Glibertarians | Another Day, Another IP Think-Piece. We’re Such Party Animals Here At Glibertarians.com! says:
    March 10, 2017 at 12:00 pm

    […] the article Law and Intellectual Property in a Stateless Society, Mr. Kinsella takes the reader through a very brief but illuminating explanation of the evolution […]

  2. A Selection of my Best Articles and Speeches on IP says:
    November 1, 2017 at 6:40 am

    […] “Law and Intellectual Property in a Stateless Society,” Libertarian Papers 5 (1) (2013): […]

  3. Against Intellectual Property After Twenty Years: Looking Back and Looking Forward says:
    May 13, 2022 at 12:14 am

    […] [31]“Law and Intellectual Property in a Stateless Society,” Libertarian Papers 5, Art. no. 1 (2013): 1-44, restates the basic case against IP and incorporates some new arguments developed after AIP. […]

  4. The problem of particularistic ethics or, why everyone really has to admit the validity of the universalizability principle says:
    August 2, 2022 at 1:37 pm

    […] from this symposium due to a disagreement with the editors; a version was published as “Law and Intellectual Property in a Stateless Society,” Libertarian Papers (vol. 5, […]

  5. Kinsella, “Law and Intellectual Property in a Stateless Society” says:
    December 25, 2022 at 12:01 am

    […] article “Law and Intellectual Property in a Stateless Society,” has just been published in Libertarian Papers vol. 5 (1) (2013), pp 1-44. This is my […]

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