KOL452 | Ethics, Politics, and IP for Engineering Students

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast: Episode 452. I was asked recently to guest lecture for a course taught to some mechanical engineering students at Colorado University Boulder (EMEN 4100: Engineering Economics) by the lecturer, David Assad. Assad covers some ethics related matters in the latter part of the course and asked me to talk generally about ethics and related matters. I discussed ethics, morality, politics, and science. I discussed ethics and its relationship to science and politics, and discussed about what science is, the types of sciences, ethics and ethical theories and the relationship to specialized ethics and morality in general, and its relationship to political ethics and political philosophy. I then discussed libertarianism in general, the nature and function of property rights, and then explained how the intellectual property issue can be addressed based on the libertarian and private law perspective. The references and notes I gave the class are embedded in the slides and reproduced below. https://youtu.be/M3SzBjb5zdA Slides here (ppt) and streamed below: Further reading/references IP Issues Part IV of Stephan Kinsella, Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2023; https://stephankinsella.com/lffs/) You Can’t Own Ideas: Essays on Intellectual Property (Papinian Press, 2023) The Anti-IP Reader: Free Market Critiques of Intellectual Property (Papinian Press, 2023) Other resources at https://c4sif.org/resources “Rethinking Intellectual Property: History, Theory, and Economics” (Mises Academy, 2011; 6 lectures) concise argument against IP law: “Intellectual Property and Libertarianism,” KOL037 | Locke’s Big Mistake: How the Labor Theory of Property Ruined Political Theory Intellectual Property Discussion with Mark Skousen “The Overwhelming Empirical Case Against Patent and Copyright” and “Legal Scholars: Thumbs Down on Patent and Copyright,” in Kinsella, You Can’t Own Ideas on the assumption that any additional innovation and creative works incentivized by the IP system are worth more to society than those lost or suppressed due to these same laws: “There’s No Such Thing as a Free Patent,” in  You Can’t Own Ideas on the assumption that even if IP law gives rise to a net gain to society in terms of extra innovation, invention, and creative works, that this net gain is greater than other costs of the IP system: “There’s No Such Thing as a Free Patent,” in You Can’t Own Ideas Intellectual Property Rights as Negative Servitudes “Copyright is Unconstitutional” IP tutorials (on IP law, not policy) KOL409 | IP Law Tutorial, Part 1: Patent Law KOL411 | IP Law Tutorial, Part 2: Copyright Law KOL412 | IP Law Tutorial, Part 3: Trademark, Trade Secret, and Other Further Reading: Libertarianism Stephan Kinsella, Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2023; https://stephankinsella.com/lffs/) Kinsella, The Greatest Libertarian Books, https://stephankinsella.com/lffs/ “Libertarian Legal Theory: Property, Conflict, and Society” (Mises Academy, 2011; 6 lectures)  https://stephankinsella.com/kinsella-on-liberty-podcast/ Other Ludwig von Mises, Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Economic Science and the Austrian Method, A Theory of Socialism & Capitalism, Economics & Ethics of Private Property, The Great Fiction (https://hanshoppe.com/publications/) Randy E. Barnett, “Of Chickens and Eggs—The Compatibility of Moral Rights and Consequentialist Analyses,” Harv. J. L. & Pub. Pol’y 12 (1989): 611–36, and idem, “Introduction: Liberty vs. License,” in The Structure of Liberty: Justice and the Rule of Law, 2d ed. (Oxford, 2014) Hoppe on Property Rights in Physical Integrity vs Value (to invasion of the physical integrity of their property boundaries) Update: see Repealing the Laws of Physics, with this amusing, possibly apocryphal, anecdote: "Mr. Cole explained that to do this you would need a trunk FULL of batteries and a LNG tank at big as a car to make that happen and that there were problems related to the laws of physics that prevented them from... The Obama person interrupted and said (and I am quoting here) "These laws of physics? Who's rules are those, we need to change that. (Some of the others wrote down the law name so they could look it up) We have the congress and the administration. We can repeal that law, amend it, or use an executive order to get rid of that problem. That's why we are here, to fix these sort of issues"."