Nostr notes by freemymind 🇨🇭

Why would I think that EU has no competition. Please stop with ...

2026-10-27T22:40:10Z

In reply to nevent1q…03u7
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Why would I think that EU has no competition. Please stop with these stupid strawmens. It feels so humiliating.
And probably you will dismiss. But read yourself what a strawmen argument is and see, that your last note is exactly this. I a not against you. But you are obviously attacking me, when you use such formulations.

I am unhappy. But when you do this again I block you. I do not mind if you have good intentions or not. Your acts are just humiliating.

I think it is mostly focust effort. Not necessary pain. Reading a ...

2026-10-27T21:40:38Z

In reply to nevent1q…2n2j
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I think it is mostly focust effort. Not necessary pain. Reading a book or the study math is not pain. Nor is it pain to build stuff. Unless you tell yourself, that it is such a pain. But I would say this is quiet a negative perspective.

But regulation makes competition deminish. So there is actual ...

2026-10-27T21:36:22Z

In reply to nevent1q…8p52
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But regulation makes competition deminish. So there is actual competition, otherwise regulations would be without effect.

And CEOs of big coorporations look to be close to the government. Because there is the biggest source of easy influence, that helps their companies to make more profits.

And the election system of the USA is constructed in a way, that has to lead to such 2 party system the USA has.

I just find estonishing how much the US citizens seem to perdon Trump for. He breaks almost all his contracts with the voters. How is there still backing for MAGA in this society? To me this seems like a masochistic cult. Selfhumiliation as much as they can. I amjquiet sure they just love suffering.

Yes I totally agree, that extremely rich people can not be a good ...

2026-10-27T20:19:44Z

In reply to nevent1q…7ewh
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Yes I totally agree, that extremely rich people can not be a good sign for a society. Especially, when their wealth was built on extortion of a kind.

Apartheid is also a form of extortion. But one also should not belief in conspiracy theories, that Elon imported the idea of estortion from somewhere else. In society all over the world slavery was part of the economy.

Be it in the empiro of Rome, the vikings, Mongols, modern china, the USA, North corea or wherever. This is an ever recreated pattern through human history.

Really love this note. Hopefully many children want to be druids. ...

2026-10-27T20:13:29Z

Really love this note. Hopefully many children want to be druids.

quoting
nevent1q…s9xg
when people ask me what i believe in I usually say I'm druid.

why not 🤟

I hope you understand that math has no oppinion at all. Math is a ...

2026-10-27T19:49:32Z

In reply to nevent1q…9dcu
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I hope you understand that math has no oppinion at all. Math is a tool. And the economy is not an end, but a means to an end as well.

I feel you are full of knowledge. But you need to explain yourself better. I appreciate your try in this note.

For me it is a good goal to have more free people, which have the opportunity to achiev their goals by their personal preference. Whatever random their goals are. As long as it is within natural law. To not act violently against others.

I have no problem with someone getting rich. But I would always expect that a person with much wealth and power takes a bigger part in improving his surrounding then less potent people.

This is also what I lack to see in your notes. Your notes are ...

2026-10-27T19:42:31Z

In reply to nevent1q…pt5a
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This is also what I lack to see in your notes. Your notes are kind of free from the idea to be completly wrong or the intention to put preferences and explain why.

Only unrelated oppinions or facts. But the why you think something is important or true is all that is intresting for me, when I read a note from you.

quoting
nevent1q…jmmm
A thermostat can read the room perfectly well. What it can't do is notice that its own sensor has drifted three degrees, so it keeps the house wrong with complete confidence. Most errors in judgment work the same way. The reading is off and nothing inside us flags it.

That second sensor is its own skill, separate from intelligence. Put a group of people on a task they all handle equally well and some of them can tell almost perfectly when they got it right, while others feel just as sure about their misses as their hits. Same ability, very different awareness of it. A person can be brilliant and badly calibrated, and plenty of people with modest gifts know exactly where their knowledge runs out.

We already hold this standard for money. Don't trust, verify. Turned inward it gets harder, because the claim under audit is your own feeling of being right, and that feeling shows up instantly and fully convinced. It does train, though. Every time you check a confident call against what actually happened, the second sensor gets a little more accurate, and over the years that adds up to what people mean when they call someone wise.

Where was this?

2026-10-27T18:31:27Z

In reply to nevent1q…3s9n
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Where was this?

Yes it just seems very naiv to me, when people present their ...

2026-10-27T18:25:27Z

In reply to nevent1q…pt5a
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Yes it just seems very naiv to me, when people present their ideas as if they are facts as you do. Since people that belief to know something for sure already lost the opportunity to learn better.

I in contrary belief, that there can be better ways in doing stuff, than what I do or know. And this would still be true even if I dedicate my whole life to only one problem.

You said before it is better to create 1’000 millionairs than 1 billionair. Better for whom? I do not even think that me or you created the billionairs in the first place. And I do much more belief that inclusive markets bring good results.

When a big coorporation wants to sell something, why not let them sell it on this market? I do not get, how exclusion of certain parties can lead to a better market.

I rather want an all inclusive market with transparent products. When someone offers a thing to a price I want, this can end in a trade.

You can decide personally to buy only from small shops, when this is your preference. But I would not say, that small shops or produces give a better life to most people. I like when we have a market of specialists and some dedicate all to produce one good in masses at a decent price.

This is mostly the model of switzerlands direct democracy, which ...

2026-10-27T17:57:52Z

In reply to nevent1q…ty0h
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This is mostly the model of switzerlands direct democracy, which you describe. Still analog for security. But who knows if one day we find good secure digital voting mechanisms.

I definitly see huge improvements from digital voting.

It is also quiet new. Mostly with the goal of being a test suit ...

2026-10-27T17:54:43Z

In reply to nevent1q…chqa
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It is also quiet new. Mostly with the goal of being a test suit of the marmot protocol. But marmot should be a cross client private messaging layer via relays.

What makes you think I am touchy? I just find it quiet ...

2026-10-27T16:23:52Z

In reply to nevent1q…p6lz
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What makes you think I am touchy? I just find it quiet unintresting how you write as if you know all the best solutions. I like more to talk with people, which exchange ideas to find out, which solutions could be good.

To just say what is best has not much value. Even less, when it is far from any good proof for it being good.

I assume you know what is best. Otherwise you would invite people ...

2026-10-27T16:05:48Z

In reply to nevent1q…qu2j
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I assume you know what is best. Otherwise you would invite people in your monolog.

Do you understand, that the deathpenalty for murder is an ...

2026-10-27T16:04:10Z

In reply to nevent1q…9d8r
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Do you understand, that the deathpenalty for murder is an objective wrong, since whoever would execut the sentence is a murder too. So there is no possible way to actually execut this without creating two classes of people. Those who are allowed to murder and those who do not.

I think you argue that cultur can define right and wrong doing, ...

2026-10-27T16:00:01Z

In reply to nevent1q…dxv0
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I think you argue that cultur can define right and wrong doing, while anarchy explains that there are objective rights and wrongs. So independent of the culture.

I hardly think that one can form an argument to say, that there is no objective moral only because there are people, which disrespect those morals. It proves the ignorance of individuals and societies to those objective morals.

But I would argue, that those objective morals are a basic logic of our species survival. So when every human would disrespect them in every encounter with an other person, humanity would selfdestruct.

Therefore objective rights or wrongs are simply a description of general rights and wrongs, which can be adopted by every person and it allowes a properous society.

Maby this exists. But especially for online trade, some kind of ...

2026-10-27T15:47:48Z

In reply to nevent1q…nu6r
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Maby this exists. But especially for online trade, some kind of reputation will be important. I would only trust a dealer, which has some name to loose.

But is there not already some client for this?
https://market.nostr.com/#/ maby?

What is new Amazon? But I also never used Amazon really.

2026-10-27T12:20:17Z

In reply to nevent1q…9na8
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What is new Amazon? But I also never used Amazon really.

GM

2026-10-27T12:14:49Z

In reply to nevent1q…gkkk
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GM

Nostr event nevent1qqsqqq8x6ev5zu4z69umymqu535l0062gjma2y30tsjz57s4e468hmgzyzmul86z57ttpy0gg0wwjxwnaaxqmjpwq2299m0shk7daw0vhyl8shh4hc9

2026-10-27T12:13:01Z

Such a great conversation about the usecases of #nostr and #Bitcoin and how free society could work and oftentimes already does work today.

I can really encourage anyone courisous in anarchic society to listen this conversation with Max (nprofile…g2cl) (and maby someone knows who the interviewers are). I have never listened to a similarly condensed conversation or any type of media, that talks about the practicle usecases and down to the philosophy such straight forward.

It is still nice.

2026-10-27T11:44:15Z

In reply to nevent1q…u4fc
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It is still nice.

Idiocracy will be history

2026-10-27T10:24:46Z

In reply to nevent1q…cjzy
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Idiocracy will be history

What do you mean with NAP?

2026-10-27T07:18:06Z

In reply to nevent1q…z5dh
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What do you mean with NAP?

Yes maby I have to take it with me, when I travel to test it.

2026-10-26T16:37:46Z

In reply to nevent1q…numc
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Yes maby I have to take it with me, when I travel to test it.

I like the concept of local radio transmission. And I bought one. ...

2026-10-26T16:04:35Z

In reply to nevent1q…8786
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I like the concept of local radio transmission. And I bought one. But I did never find an other node. And then similarly to Bitchat, I never used it again, since I could not connect to noone. I would need at least one person to test it with.

I would be so happy if this was an active law in Switzerland. I ...

2026-10-26T11:43:24Z

In reply to nevent1q…793m
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I would be so happy if this was an active law in Switzerland. I think in practice it is not that easy, what predictions and promises can al count as lies. And what circumstances need to be fulfilled, to make a case.

Yes this is clear. But this is no 4D chess strategic move. This ...

2026-10-26T11:40:59Z

In reply to nevent1q…gswt
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Yes this is clear. But this is no 4D chess strategic move. This is the animal brain, which every 5 year old child is capable to manage.
Very simple predictable behavior.

This is humiliation on the highest level, when someone humiliates ...

2026-10-26T10:38:33Z

In reply to nevent1q…0t0h
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This is humiliation on the highest level, when someone humiliates an other person and everyone including the person humiliated laughs and applauds for the humiliation.

But the concept is quiet unspectacular. It is just the display of power and stupid people, which do not understand that they applaud for their own loss.

Whatever story. I find the fact very cringe to applaud to such a ...

2026-10-26T09:47:21Z

In reply to nevent1q…k8k9
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Whatever story. I find the fact very cringe to applaud to such a bahaviour. And hypocritical for all the MAGAs that see themself as faithful christians and Trump as an incarnation of Jesus.

😂 Schon schade, dass da wohl Ursache und Effekt eher eine ...

2026-10-26T09:44:41Z

In reply to nevent1q…3c9v
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😂
Schon schade, dass da wohl Ursache und Effekt eher eine Einbahnstrasse ist.

Wow I am always astonished of MAGA people. Do they realice how ...

2026-10-26T09:35:39Z

Wow I am always astonished of MAGA people. Do they realice how cringe their applause for such stupidity looks to people which use their brain?

quoting
nevent1q…m9yl
⚡️🇺🇸 NEW - Trump:

I looked at one hell of a beautiful ass before, Nicki Minaj, right?

That's hard to miss!

Thanks a lot for this precise mentioning of human rlghts. Really ...

2026-10-26T09:33:42Z

In reply to nevent1q…ppgm
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Thanks a lot for this precise mentioning of human rlghts. Really like Mark Passios Work.

Memes are carriers of information. And memes can discriminate ...

2026-10-24T12:50:30Z

In reply to nevent1q…l4hg
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Memes are carriers of information. And memes can discriminate people and dehumanize them. Then it is not funny no matter if it is a meme, a joke or whatever.

And when you post it you are to blame for it, if it attacks a religion or a citizenship or whatever. This is not funny.

I do not get. Do you have a problem with jews?

2026-10-23T18:53:53Z

In reply to nevent1q…ccgs
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I do not get. Do you have a problem with jews?

Finally a premium fold phone was launched 😂

2026-10-23T18:26:14Z

In reply to nevent1q…jux5
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Finally a premium fold phone was launched 😂

Politics do not have to be like this. There is also direct ...

2026-10-23T05:29:26Z

In reply to nevent1q…66ye
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Politics do not have to be like this. There is also direct democracy and consens government.

Someone will always have more control. So I rather want it to be an institution, which works toward equal rights and obligations, than one that works towards personal enrichment.

There is only one Nostr dev. @nprofile…cy6q has several agents. ...

2026-10-14T11:37:32Z

In reply to nevent1q…jw95
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There is only one Nostr dev. fiatjaf (nprofile…cy6q) has several agents. The agents are called jb55 (nprofile…5cp7), VitorPamplona (nprofile…pt5w), hodlbod (nprofile…u0w6), jeffg (nprofile…mgxf) and Max (nprofile…g2cl).
It is a been g ponzi and here and there some people fall into this trap. I am obviously the trustworthy agent. The onpy one that is still rebelling and telling the truth. *ironyoff 😉

I am not that opinionated about it. I think it is good to use, ...

2026-10-09T10:04:39Z

In reply to nevent1q…vf3n
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I am not that opinionated about it. I think it is good to use, what works as long as migration is easy.

Yes it still is the golf of mexico. Not everyone is crazy and ...

2026-10-05T17:54:55Z

In reply to nevent1q…eulu
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Yes it still is the golf of mexico. Not everyone is crazy and follows the words of a mad man.

I would not assume that you are maga. But that you lost the track ...

2026-09-28T21:05:25Z

In reply to nevent1q…atxj
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I would not assume that you are maga. But that you lost the track in this particular case.Vaccines are among the safest drugs that exist. Check for yourself.

Gehe nicht einig mit deinem Spruch. Gut möglich, dass ich da ...

2026-09-28T10:43:41Z

Gehe nicht einig mit deinem Spruch. Gut möglich, dass ich da einige Aussagen von aussen Links einfach noch nicht kenne.
Aber finde das Video super.
Leistung muss sich lohnen. Jede zusätzliche Leistung soll zusátzliche persönliche finanzielle möglichkeiten zur Folge haben. Alles andere ist sozialer Masochismus.

quoting
nevent1q…3d8d

Der Guido wäre heute nach dem Empfinden so mancher der ultra Nazi.😄

Gib mir einen grund der für das Gegenteil spricht?

2026-09-28T05:07:38Z

In reply to nevent1q…5z6y
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Gib mir einen grund der für das Gegenteil spricht?

Und ich binvöllig bei dir. Gewalttätige akte einer gewissen ...

2026-09-27T15:05:15Z

In reply to nevent1q…ztz6
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Und ich binvöllig bei dir. Gewalttätige akte einer gewissen Schwere (wie z.B. in dem genannten Fall) sollen dazu führen können, dass der Anspruch auf Asyl aufgehoben wird. Unabhängig vom Fluchtgrund.

Jedoch wir in Sturms Note und in deinem der Standpunkt klar, dass alle in einen Topf geschmissen werden. Dass wegen den paar Vergewaltigern tausenden völlig grundlos das Recht auf Asyl abgesprochen werden soll.

Niemand ist verantwortlich dafür, was andere Menschen mit der gleichen Nationalität tun. Jedes Individuum hat das recht als solches behandelt zu werden. Das ist was ich wichtig finde.

This is live. Sometimes the fun thing is to live with things of ...

2026-09-27T10:28:00Z

In reply to nevent1q…svqd
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This is live. Sometimes the fun thing is to live with things of high time peference like eating and drinking something. And sometimes it can be things of low time preference. Like building on something, one expects no private personal payback at all. As many people do in voluntary work, also called freedlm projects.

And they are actually taking place in every society. No matter how small. Everywhere people act for others, without expecting any direct payback. Just for the fun of giving alone.

It is absolutely fullfilling. And sometiems needed, that others acknowledge the efforts in some way.

Do you understand what AGI means? ...

2026-09-27T00:58:58Z

In reply to nevent1q…gey6
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Do you understand what AGI means?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligence

It is an idea of AI that is not controled by human but acts independently. And I do not believe this is theoretically possible.

So first you think to understand markets better than larry fink? ...

2026-09-27T00:55:02Z

In reply to nevent1q…a95m
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So first you think to understand markets better than larry fink?
And second you think an investor really likes uncertainty? Because an intervened market is more certain than a free market. And it is a saver bet to invest in something (for example housing), when there are strong rules in place, which ensure, that the price of housing will go up.
(https://community.newpress.com/c/new-videos-shorts/the-conspiracy-to-make-homes-unaffordable)

This is such a strawman really. What meaningful political party ...

2026-09-27T00:40:18Z

In reply to nevent1q…ff0m
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This is such a strawman really. What meaningful political party advocates, that socialist states are better than capitalist states?

Do you really belief in AGI? And thanks for posting the video. ...

2026-09-26T20:31:38Z

In reply to nevent1q…pju8
_________________________

Do you really belief in AGI?
And thanks for posting the video. Really like the history of images.

Thank you for sharing this particular part of Carl Mengers ...

2026-09-26T14:00:27Z

Thank you for sharing this particular part of Carl Mengers immortal heritage.

May many can read and hear about it. 🙌✌️

I am sure to have missed this a lot of times in my past. But once one learns about it, there is no turning back.

quoting
nevent1q…qckj
Carl Menger destroyed two thousand years of economic fallacy with a single insight in 1871: value is subjective, existing only in the mind of the individual valuer. The classical economists—from Adam Smith to David Ricardo—had spent centuries chasing their tails, convinced that value somehow resided in objects themselves, whether through labor content or production costs. Menger obliterated this nonsense by pointing out the obvious: a glass of water means nothing to a man by a river but everything to one dying of thirst in the desert.

This breakthrough wasn't just academic—it was revolutionary. By grounding value in human choice and preference, Menger laid the foundation for understanding how markets actually work. Prices don't reflect some mystical "intrinsic worth" but emerge from countless individuals making subjective judgments about their personal wants and needs. And this happens spontaneously, without any central planner needed to "coordinate" anything.

The implications were devastating to statist economics before statist economics even fully existed. If value is subjective, then government price controls become acts of pure violence—bureaucrats literally imposing their subjective valuations on millions of others through force. If value emerges from individual choice, then socialism becomes impossible by definition. You cannot centrally plan what exists only in the minds of individuals.

But the establishment couldn't let this stand. The subjective theory of value made government intervention look like what it is: economic barbarism. So they spent the next century constructing elaborate mathematical models to obscure Menger's simple truth. British pedophile John Maynard Keynes and his disciples built entire careers on ignoring subjective value, pretending that wise technocrats could somehow calculate what only individual actors can know.

The Austrian revolution began with Menger recognizing that value lives in human minds, not in objects—and every government economist has been running from this truth ever since.

With #wisp or better #darkwisp I have the same problem. It always ...

2026-09-26T07:41:12Z

With #wisp or better #darkwisp I have the same problem. It always says to recompile the WoT. But after recalculating it, it still gives the warning. And the mentions all appear from spam bots. How to get rid of them? #asknostr

quoting
nevent1q…fc2p
VitorPamplona (nprofile…vhl6)
Good morning. I see very much stupid mention spam on #amethyst .
Is there any way to only see notifications of people within my WOT? Since I see with WOT this is all blocked in #coracle.

@nprofile…vhl6 Good morning. I see very much stupid mention ...

2026-09-26T07:32:58Z

VitorPamplona (nprofile…vhl6)
Good morning. I see very much stupid mention spam on #amethyst .
Is there any way to only see notifications of people within my WOT? Since I see with WOT this is all blocked in #coracle.

Max Fisher this genious! ...

2026-09-25T11:02:47Z

Max Fisher this genious!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpK5HiCKfgU

Ifeel as he just figured out one of the big root causes of expensive #housing. Not simply in the #US. This is also true for #Switzerland.

That the construction of new housing is hugely downregulated. So more and more people bit on a stagnant amount of squaremeters to live in.

And with rules on maximum hight and conservativ rules on how buildings need to fit in, the total amount of newly built room to live is simply far below that of a free market.

But we can fix this. Depending on how many we can convince to get rid of those conservativ rules. When we allow building high houses, this problem is fixable.

Thank you for this nice exchange. And thank you for your genuine ...

2026-09-24T17:21:05Z

In reply to nevent1q…jm9k
_________________________

Thank you for this nice exchange. And thank you for your genuine questions and critiques 🙌

I use currently the Fairphone 6 as a second phone to run ...

2026-09-24T10:58:37Z

In reply to nevent1q…wlps
_________________________

I use currently the Fairphone 6 as a second phone to run PostmarketOS on it. Yet the camera and sensors do not work. But I willmreport when those are working 😉

Such a strong argument about why "intellectual property" ...

2026-09-24T10:04:53Z

In reply to naddr1qq…kjxm
_________________________

Such a strong argument about why "intellectual property" is non-existant. Since property does only make sense on finite resources. When I eat a portion of paste, this same portion of pasta can not be eaten by somebody else.

But when Max (nprofile…c0ve) was writing this article I refer, I am not taking away anything from him in order to share his ideas.

Means we can accept intellectual exchange as pure increase of knowledge. I can learn about it without anybody needing to forget it. Therefore one can not logically suppose, that one can own information the same way one can own physical resources. Therefor intellectual property is logically non-existant. What does not mean, that it is without value. Therefore I can freely decide to give something for a information that was shared with me.

quoting
naddr1qv…7674

Chapter 6: Information, Scarcity, and Property

"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it."

Thomas Jefferson, letter to Isaac McPherson (1813)^1^

Introduction

What is the relationship between information and property? The answer determines how privacy can be protected. If information content can be property, privacy might be protected through property rights in information itself. If information content cannot be property, privacy must be protected through other means.

Stephan Kinsella's analysis provides the framework.^2^ Property rights apply only to scarce resources, those that one party's use precludes another's use. Information content, once known, can be used by unlimited parties simultaneously without depletion. It is non-scarce and therefore cannot be property.

This chapter follows the Kinsella framework because it is the direct application of scarcity-based property theory that Austrian economics has developed from Rothbard forward. The framework is not the only Austrian-libertarian position on intellectual property, and the chapter says so plainly. Murray Rothbard, in Man, Economy, and State, treated patent and copyright as separate cases: patent grants a monopoly that suppresses independent inventors and is illegitimate; copyright restated as a contractual reservation by an author against purchasers (the original meaning before the modern statutory regime) is in principle legitimate as a contract, though it does not bind third parties who never agreed to it. Kinsella's later development sharpens Rothbard's analysis by showing that the contractual route does not in fact reach what copyright statute does in operation (binding non-parties, controlling downstream physical media, surviving into the public domain), and by extending the same scarcity-based logic to all categories of state-granted information monopoly. The two positions converge on the points that matter for privacy: self-ownership covers the body and mind, physical property covers devices and premises, and contract creates enforceable confidentiality between parties who agree to it.^3^ The chapter develops the Kinsella version because it is more precise about what contract can and cannot do, but the privacy argument the book defends survives in either form.^4^

This does not leave privacy unprotected. Privacy is protected through self-ownership (control over one's body and mind), physical property (devices, papers, homes), and contract (confidentiality agreements). These mechanisms protect privacy without treating information content as property, and understanding this distinction is essential for clear analysis of privacy economics.

6.1 Scarcity as the Foundation of Property

Why Property Rights Exist

Property rights exist to resolve conflicts over scarce resources. A scarce resource is one that, when used by one party, cannot simultaneously be used by another in the same way. Land, food, tools, and bodies are scarce: my use of this apple precludes your simultaneous use of the same apple.

Scarcity creates the potential for conflict. If multiple parties want to use the same resource in incompatible ways, they must either fight over it or agree on allocation rules. Property rights are allocation rules that assign control over resources to specific parties. Economists call this property of physical goods "rivalrousness": one party's use excludes another's. Information is non-rivalrous — when you learn something I know, my knowledge is not reduced — which is why the same property logic does not apply to it.

Without scarcity, property rights serve no purpose. If a resource can be used by everyone simultaneously without conflict, no allocation rules are needed.^5^

A related distinction makes the framework cleaner. Possession is a factual matter: who currently controls a resource. Ownership is a normative one: who has the legal right to control it. Roman law and the Anglo-American common law both recognize the distinction, and Kinsella's treatment makes it foundational.^6^ Property rights provide normative support for possession; they answer the question of who, in a dispute, has the better claim. Possession is descriptive. Ownership is prescriptive. The acquisition rules below allocate ownership; they do not describe who happens to be holding the thing at any given moment.

Physical Scarcity vs. Artificial Scarcity

Physical scarcity is inherent in the resource itself. Land is scarce because occupying one location precludes simultaneous occupation by another. Apples are scarce because eating one prevents anyone else from eating the same apple.

Artificial scarcity is imposed by external force on resources that are not inherently scarce. If I write a poem and you memorize it, you can recite it without diminishing my ability to recite it. The poem, as a pattern of words, is non-scarce. But if the state grants me a "copyright" enforced by violence, it artificially restricts your use of a non-scarce resource.

Property rights in physically scarce resources resolve real conflicts. "Property rights" in artificially scarce resources create conflicts that would not otherwise exist. They give one party control over how others may use their own legitimately owned physical resources.

6.2 "Intellectual Property" as Aggression

Section 6.1 established that property rights exist to resolve conflicts over scarce resources, and that information content is non-scarce. The implication: "intellectual property" creates artificial scarcity through state violence, violating actual property rights in physical resources.

Consider a simple case. Alice invents a new mousetrap design. Bob independently develops the same design, or learns of it and implements it using his own materials.

If Alice has "intellectual property" in the design, she can use state violence to prevent Bob from using his own materials (wood, springs, wire) in certain configurations. The state will punish Bob for arranging his own property in ways Alice disapproves.

The claim constitutes aggression. Bob has done nothing to Alice or her property. He has used his own property. The "intellectual property" claim is a claim that Alice can control how Bob uses Bob's property, backed by state violence.

The Patent Example

Patents grant monopolies on ideas. A patent holder can prevent anyone else from implementing the patented idea, even someone who invented it independently.

The patent holder controls how others may use their own physical property. Independent inventors have no defense because the first to file wins. Competition is restricted not by superior service but by legal privilege. Innovation is taxed, as anyone improving on patented ideas must pay tribute.

Patents are state-granted monopoly privileges enforced through aggression against others' actual property.^7^

The Copyright Example

Copyright grants control over copying patterns. A copyright holder can prevent others from arranging their own physical property (paper, ink, hard drives) in certain configurations.

You cannot print certain patterns on your own paper, store certain bit patterns on your own hard drive, or speak certain word sequences in commercial contexts. Your physical property is controlled by others' claims to patterns.

Copyright operates as censorship backed by state violence: it restricts what you may do with your own physical property based on pattern similarity to patterns someone else claims.

IP as Nonconsensual Negative Servitude

The legal name for what the state grants the IP holder makes the framework precise. A negative servitude (or easement) is a property interest that lets one party prevent the owner of another resource from using it in specified ways. Consensual negative servitudes are common and unobjectionable: a restrictive covenant in a residential subdivision that forbids commercial use is a negative servitude every buyer accepts when buying in. What patent and copyright create is a nonconsensual negative servitude, granted by the state without the agreement of the owner whose use is restricted. The independent inventor never agreed to refrain from arranging his own materials in the patented configuration. The reader who buys a book never agreed to refrain from arranging bits on his own hard drive in the copyrighted pattern. The IP holder acquires, by state grant, the power of a co-owner over property he never owned and never bought.^8^

Creation Is a Source of Wealth, Not of Property

The error that keeps recurring under all this is the Lockean intuition that creation is a source of property rights, the idea that mixing one's labor with something gives one ownership of it. Creation is a source of wealth, not a source of property. Every act of creation transforms already-owned input materials into a more valuable output configuration; the owner of the inputs is the owner of the outputs because he was the owner of the inputs, not because he created the outputs. Employees in a factory create the products and do not own them. Original appropriation, contractual transfer, and rectification are the three sources of property rights in scarce external resources. Self-ownership of the body grounds rights in one's person. Creation is not a fourth source. The intuition that creators ought to own their creations is the ghost that animates IP advocacy, and it has to be rejected explicitly: useful ideas, original expressions, and recognizable brands are products of creation that increase wealth in the world, and none of them is property.^9^

6.3 Content vs. Media: The Critical Distinction

Information Exists on Physical Media

Information is always instantiated on physical media: a book is paper and ink arranged in patterns, a hard drive contains magnetic domains in specific configurations, and a brain contains neural patterns encoding memories and knowledge.

The media (paper, hard drive, brain) are scarce physical objects. The content (patterns, information, ideas) is non-scarce.

Property Rights Apply to Media, Not Content

You own your paper. You can do anything with it: write on it, burn it, fold it into a hat. Your property rights are complete.

You own your hard drive. You can store any bit patterns you want. Your property rights include determining what configurations your property takes.

But once you communicate content to another person, you cannot control what they do with their own media. If you tell me a secret and I write it in my notebook, you have no property claim to my notebook. The content, now in my mind and my notebook, is not your property.

What "Owning Information" Would Mean

If information content were property, teaching would be transfer of property (do teachers lose their knowledge when students learn?), learning would be acquisition of property (from whom? with what consent?), memory would be storage of others' property (can they demand deletion?), and conversation would be property exchange (tracking who "owns" each idea discussed?).

These absurdities reveal that information-as-property is incoherent. Knowledge is not a thing that can be owned, lost, stolen, or transferred in the way physical objects can.

The "Theft" Confusion

When someone copies your file without permission, have they "stolen" it? No. You still have your file, nothing has been taken from you, and your property is intact.

What has happened is that they have created new patterns on their own media, patterns similar to patterns on your media. This may violate contract if they had agreements with you. It may be wrong for other reasons. But it is not theft because nothing was taken.

The language of "stealing" ideas confuses the issue by importing property concepts where they do not apply.

6.4 How Privacy Is Protected

If information content cannot be property, how is privacy protected? Through three mechanisms that do not require information-as-property claims.

Self-Ownership

Chapter 4 argued that self-ownership follows from argumentation ethics. Self-ownership grounds claims to mental privacy and bodily integrity, as well as control over what you express. Your thoughts are yours, and extracting them without consent stands in tension with that claim. Your body is yours, and uninvited examination or monitoring stands in the same relation. You choose what to communicate, and silence remains within your control.

Self-ownership protects privacy at the source. Before information is communicated, it exists only in your mind and body, which are yours.

Physical Property

You own your devices and papers, your home and hard drives. Property rights over these objects include deciding who may enter and refusing search without consent. You determine how your property is configured, including what data your devices store.

Physical property rights protect information by protecting the media on which it exists. Your encrypted hard drive is your property. Others have no automatic right to access it, and any claim to compel decryption would need separate justification beyond the property claim itself.

Contract

Voluntary agreements can create enforceable obligations.^10^ Non-disclosure agreements bind parties not to reveal certain information. Employment or service contracts may include confidentiality clauses. Attorneys, doctors, and clergy operate under traditional professional privilege requiring confidentiality.

Contract protects privacy through voluntary commitment. When someone agrees to keep information confidential, they become bound by that agreement.

Breach of confidentiality agreements is more than "breaking a promise." When payment is made under the condition of secrecy, revealing the secret can amount to taking payment under false pretenses. The money was transferred conditionally; accepting payment while violating the condition is at least fraud, and in some cases can be treated as theft of a conditional transfer, not mere breach of an abstract obligation. Contract violations have teeth because they involve transfers of scarce resources made under specific conditions.

Contract binds the parties who agreed to it. It does not bind third parties who never agreed. An employee under a non-disclosure agreement is bound by it; a stranger who finds the document on a sidewalk has no obligation under it. A licensee who accepts terms of use is bound on those terms; a friend who borrows the licensee's copy is bound only by whatever separate agreement, if any, the friend made. The reach of contract is the reach of consent, and consent does not propagate to non-signatories. This is what distinguishes the contract route from a property claim in the information itself: a property claim would reach everyone, including independent discoverers and downstream non-parties; a contract reaches only those who agreed. The book treats this limit as a feature of the framework, an honest accounting of what voluntary agreement can and cannot do.

Trade Secrets

The trade secret is the cleanest case for showing what the framework does and does not protect, because it isolates the question from the patent and copyright debates.

Consider a beverage firm with a recipe its competitors would value. The recipe is protected by a combination of measures: the document itself sits in physical security; employees with access have signed non-disclosure agreements; the firm has invested heavily in vault construction and personnel screening; and the firm trades on the brand and the manufacturing capacity it has built around the secret. None of these measures involves a property claim in the recipe pattern itself. They are property claims in scarce physical resources (document, vault, manufacturing plant) and contractual claims against parties who agreed to confidentiality. The combination is sufficient to keep the secret in practice over the long run.

The framework's predictions for the edge cases are clear. A burglar who breaks into the vault commits aggression against physical property and is liable on those grounds. An employee who leaks the recipe in violation of the NDA has accepted payment conditionally and committed fraud or breach of contract on those grounds. A chemist who buys a bottle off the shelf and reverse-engineers the formula commits no aggression: the chemist has used his own equipment and his own mind to arrive at a pattern that happens to match the firm's. He owes the firm nothing. An independent inventor who arrives at the same recipe without ever encountering the firm's product commits no aggression for the same reason. These predictions match what a reasonable libertarian intuition holds, and they match Rothbard's position on patent in Man, Economy, and State: independent discovery is not theft, and reverse engineering of legitimately acquired physical property is not theft either.

The trade secret holder's position is therefore strong without requiring property in the pattern. The holder's protection comes from physical security of the storage media, contractual obligations of the people granted access, plus the labor and capital invested in keeping the secret close. What the holder does not have is a claim against the world. That absence is the whole content of the disagreement with patent law, and it is the position Rothbard and Kinsella converge on, the same position the framework this book follows extends.

These three mechanisms do not include property rights in information content itself, claims against people who independently discover the same information, rights to prevent others from using their own property in certain ways, or control over information after voluntary, unconditional disclosure. If you tell a stranger your secret with no confidentiality agreement, you have no property claim to prevent them from sharing it. You controlled disclosure (self-ownership); you could have kept silent. Having chosen to speak, you cannot claim property rights in the patterns now in their mind.

6.5 Implications for Privacy Analysis

What "Privacy Violation" Means

Given this framework, privacy violation is not someone knowing information you wish they did not know; that may be unfortunate but is not a violation. In the standard case, privacy violation means someone accessing information through aggression against person or property.

Examples of violation include forcibly extracting information through torture or coerced testimony, trespassing to obtain information by breaking into home or device, breaching confidentiality contract which constitutes theft of conditional payment, and fraud to obtain information through impersonation or deception.

Examples of non-violation include observing someone in public, receiving information voluntarily shared, independently discovering information, and learning information from someone who was told without confidentiality agreement.

Reputation Is Not Property

A related case the framework rules out is that reputation is not property. A reputation is what other people think about a person. It exists in their minds and on their media, not in any resource the person being talked about owns. Defamation law, like trademark and copyright, asserts a property-like interest in something non-scarce, in this case what other people believe and what audiences attend to. The framework treats false speech the same way it treats true speech: legitimate response is counter-speech, withdrawal of patronage, and social withdrawal. Where speech plays a causal role in actual aggression, a witness lying on the stand to send the defendant to prison, an order to commit assault, incitement of a crowd to lynch, the speaker is liable for the aggression his speech causes, not for damaging the victim's reputation as such. The same conclusion this chapter reached for patents and copyrights applies here: state enforcement of reputation rights against peaceful speech is aggression, not protection.^11^

The Role of Technology

Technology changes what is possible, not what is legitimate.

Encryption protects physical property (your devices) from search. This is an exercise of property rights, not a new right created by technology.

Anonymous networks protect self-ownership by enabling communication without revealing identity. This extends the natural privacy of in-person cash transactions to digital contexts.

Privacy technology implements existing rights. It does not create new rights or new categories of property.

Free and Open-Source Software as the Working Example

Free and open-source software^14^ is the standing proof that the non-scarcity framework describes a functioning economy. Source code is a pattern; once released under a permissive or copyleft license, the pattern can be copied, modified, and redistributed by anyone with the physical media to hold it. No artificial-scarcity enforcement is invoked, and the software still gets written, maintained, and improved at a scale that now runs most of the world's servers, embedded devices, and cryptographic infrastructure. Linux,^15^ OpenSSH, OpenSSL, GnuPG, Bitcoin Core, Tor,^16^ Signal,^17^ and the compiler toolchains that produce them are all instances of valuable software produced without the patent and copyright assumptions mainstream economics treats as necessary conditions for software production.

The revenue models that support this work are consistent with the framework. Developers are paid for scarce inputs: their time, their attention, their domain expertise, and their reputations for delivering working code. Firms pay for support contracts, custom development, hosted instances, and hardware that runs the software. Foundations collect voluntary contributions from users who benefit from the work and want it to continue. None of these arrangements requires property claims over the patterns themselves; they require ordinary contracts over the scarce labor and services that produce and maintain the patterns. The license attached to the code is a disclaimer of certain state-granted privileges, not an assertion of property in the content.

The licenses in wide use fit the same logic. Permissive licenses (MIT, BSD, Apache) allow any downstream use and rely on the underlying fact that the content is not property; they disclaim the state-granted copyright privilege entirely. Copyleft licenses (GPL, AGPL)^18^ use the copyright privilege instrumentally: a conditional grant that requires downstream distributors to extend the same freedoms to their users, so that the artificial scarcity cannot be closed back up at a later stage in the supply chain. Both strategies treat copyright as a privilege to be neutralized, and both produce software with longer service lives, broader audit exposure, and greater resistance to supplier capture than the closed-source alternatives the framework's critics predicted would outcompete it.

The practical implication for privacy is direct. Every privacy-critical primitive this book relies on, including the cryptographic libraries in Chapter 14, the anonymity networks in Chapter 17, the Bitcoin implementations in Chapters 18 through 20, the zero-knowledge tooling in Chapter 15, and the secure-computation runtimes in Chapter 16, is free software. Their auditability is what makes the resistance claims in Chapter 5 credible in the first place; a privacy tool whose source is closed is a privacy tool whose adversary-model includes its own author. Free software is the operating environment in which the book's technical arguments hold, and its existence is the economic vindication of the non-scarcity framework developed in this chapter.

"Surveillance Capitalism" and Information Economics^19^

Whether companies that collect data about users commit privacy violation depends on the terms. If users agree to data collection (however unwisely) in exchange for services, no violation occurs: it is voluntary exchange. The exchange may be foolish, the terms may be buried in dense agreements, but consent was given.

If companies collect data without consent or through deception that exceeds the scope of agreements, this may violate contract or involve fraud.

But the data collected, once in the company's possession, is stored on their media. They own their servers. The information patterns on those servers are not "your property" that you can reclaim. The remedy for excessive data collection is not property claims but better contracts and privacy-preserving competition.^12^

Chapter Summary

Property rights apply to scarce resources, and scarcity is what creates the conflicts property rights exist to resolve. Information content is non-scarce: unlimited parties can hold the same idea without conflict. It cannot be property, and the mechanisms patents and copyrights use to pretend otherwise create artificial scarcity through state violence, granting some parties control over how others may arrange their own physical media. That is restriction enforced by aggression, not protection of rights.

Privacy does not need information-as-property to be defensible. Self-ownership protects mind and body, physical property protects devices and papers and homes, and contract creates enforceable confidentiality obligations through voluntary agreement. These three mechanisms cover the person and their possessions, not abstract patterns of information. They do not reach independent discoverers, downstream use of other people's property, or information voluntarily disclosed without condition, and they should not; the framework rejects ownership claims over patterns and limits ownership to scarce things. Free and open-source software is the standing empirical confirmation of the framework. Source code is a non-scarce pattern released under licenses that disclaim or neutralize the copyright privilege, and the resulting software runs most of the world's cryptographic and communications infrastructure while developers are compensated for scarce inputs (time, attention, expertise) through ordinary contracts for labor, support, and services.

What this chapter sets is the criterion, not its full application. A complete theory of commercial data practices needs Chapter 11's treatment of deceptive collection, and the technical means of enforcing privacy when contract alone does not suffice belong to the later chapters on cryptography, anonymous networks, and private monetary layers. The privacy tools this book relies on implement existing rights, and the next three chapters carry the framework into exchange, capital theory, and monetary analysis.^13^

Endnotes

^1^ Thomas Jefferson, letter to Isaac McPherson, August 13, 1813, in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert E. Bergh (Washington, DC: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1905), 13:326–338, available at the Library of Congress at https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-06-02-0322. The letter is the canonical statement of the anti-intellectual-property position by one of the officials who would, in his role as Secretary of State and then President, administer the American patent system. The modern restatement of Jefferson's argument is Stephan Kinsella, Against Intellectual Property (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2008), 15, which this chapter develops in detail and which provides the contemporary theoretical framework.

^2^ Kinsella's fullest statement is Against Intellectual Property, originally published as "Against Intellectual Property," Journal of Libertarian Studies 15, no. 2 (2001): 1-53. See also his blog at https://stephankinsella.com for ongoing elaboration and responses to critics.

^3^ Rothbard's treatment in Man, Economy, and State (cited at Chapter 3, note 3), chapter 10 §7, distinguishes patent (a state-granted monopoly that suppresses independent inventors and is therefore illegitimate) from copyright reframed as a contractual restriction freely accepted by purchasers (which Rothbard argues is in principle legitimate as a private agreement, though he acknowledges it does not bind third parties who never agreed). The distinction was a real intellectual contribution and is the version of the libertarian-Austrian position most commonly cited in the older Mises Institute orbit. Eric Voskuil's libbitcoin "Patent Resistance Principle" (https://github.com/libbitcoin/libbitcoin-system/wiki/Patent-Resistance-Principle) works within the same Rothbardian register at the protocol-design level, treating patents as a state-granted monopoly that Bitcoin's open-source-license-and-prior-art posture is built to neutralize.

^4^ Kinsella's developments since Against Intellectual Property (2001) sharpen the contract-route argument by showing what it does and does not deliver. A contract binds its parties; it does not bind third parties; downstream readers of a book never agreed to the publisher's terms; therefore "copyright as contract" cannot reach what statutory copyright reaches in operation (binding all third parties, including those who acquire the work without notice). Kinsella's title-transfer theory of contract, developed in The Title-Transfer Theory of Contract (Papinian Press Working Paper No. 1, 2024), explains why obligations transfer with consent and not otherwise. The disagreement between Rothbard's older treatment and Kinsella's later one is narrower than it appears: both reject patent, both accept that a contract binds its signatories on the conditions they agreed to, and both deny that the contract route delivers a claim against third parties. The book's privacy argument depends on the points the two positions share, not on the points where they diverge.

^5^ On scarcity as the foundation of property, see Murray N. Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty (cited at Chapter 2, note 3), chapters 6-8, and Hans-Hermann Hoppe, A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism (cited at Chapter 3, note 7), chapter 2. On the economics of non-rivalrous goods and the empirical case against intellectual monopoly, see Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine, Against Intellectual Monopoly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), https://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/against.htm.

^6^ On the possession-vs-ownership distinction, see Stephan Kinsella, "Another Way to Explain the Problem with IP: Resources v. Knowledge, Ownership v. Possession," Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom (February 2017), https://c4sif.org/2017/02/another-way-to-explain-the-problem-with-ip-resources-v-knowledge-ownership-v-possession/. The Roman-law sources are summarized in J. A. C. Thomas, Textbook of Roman Law (North-Holland, 1976), §§13–14. For the modern statement of the same distinction within Kinsella's framework, see Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Papinian Press, 2023), Appendix I, on possession, ownership, and the right to possess.

^7^ On the distinction between property and privilege, see Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty (cited at Chapter 2, note 3), chapter 10, and Lysander Spooner, "The Law of Intellectual Property" (1855), which argued for intellectual property but illuminates the issues.

^8^ On intellectual property as a nonconsensual negative servitude, see Stephan Kinsella, "Intellectual Property Rights as Negative Servitudes," Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom (June 2011), https://c4sif.org/2011/06/intellectual-property-rights-as-negative-servitudes/. The framing is restated in Kinsella, The Problem with Intellectual Property (Papinian Press Working Paper No. 2, 2025), §III.A.2. On the distinction between consensual and nonconsensual servitudes in property law, see A. N. Yiannopoulos, Louisiana Civil Law Treatise: Predial Servitudes, 4th ed. (West, 2013), and the Roman-law treatment in Justinian, Digest, Book 8.

^9^ The Lockean intuition that mixing one's labor with a resource gives one ownership of it is set out in John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (1689), §27 ("Whatsoever then he removes out of the State that Nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his Labour with, and joyned to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his Property"); the canonical online edition is at https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7370. On the rejection of creation as a source of property rights, see Stephan Kinsella, "Libertarian Lockean Creationism," Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom (May 2025), https://c4sif.org/2025/05/libertarian-lockean-creationism/, and Kinsella, The Problem with Intellectual Property (Papinian Press, 2025), §III.A.1. The same point is made at length in Kinsella, "Locke on IP; Mises, Rothbard, and Rand on Creation, Production, and 'Rearranging,'" Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom (2010). For the broader case that IP is not property at all, see Kinsella, "IP Is Not (Not) Property" (April 2025), https://c4sif.org/2025/04/ip-is-not-not-property/. Roderick T. Long, "Owning Ideas Means Owning People," Cato Unbound (November 19, 2008), http://www.cato-unbound.org/2008/11/19/roderick-long/owning-ideas-means-owning-people, and Long's earlier "The Libertarian Case Against Intellectual Property Rights," Formulations 3, no. 1 (Autumn 1995), http://freenation.org/a/f31l1.html, develop the implication that IP claims trace back to claims over other persons.

^10^ On contract as the basis for confidentiality, see Randy Barnett, "A Consent Theory of Contract," Columbia Law Review 86 (1986): 269-321, and Kinsella's discussions of trade secrets in Against Intellectual Property (cited in note 2 above).

^11^ On reputation as non-property and the incompatibility of defamation law with the framework, see Stephan Kinsella, "Defamation as a Type of Intellectual Property" (cited at Chapter 2, note 10), and the earlier post at https://c4sif.org/2024/07/defamation-type-of-ip/. The framework treats reputation as the contents of other people's beliefs, which are non-scarce and therefore non-ownable; the same scarcity-based reasoning that rules out patents and copyrights rules out reputation rights. Murray N. Rothbard's classic statement is "Knowledge, True and False," in The Ethics of Liberty (cited at Chapter 2, note 3), chapter 16, which argues that defamation actions are illegitimate because no one owns the contents of others' minds. Walter Block, "The Slanderer and Libeler," in Defending the Undefendable (Fleet Press, 1976), reaches the same conclusion through a different route. On the causal-incitement cases that are sometimes mistaken for defamation, see Kinsella, "Causation and Aggression," in Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Papinian Press, 2023), chapter 8.

^12^ On data and privacy in the digital age from a property-rights perspective, see Stephan Kinsella's ongoing writing at https://stephankinsella.com (in particular his essays tagged "intellectual property" and "Against IP Reader") and the Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom at https://c4sif.org. See also Kinsella, You Can't Own Ideas: Essays on Intellectual Property (Papinian Press, 2023), which collects his most recent treatments. On the "data ownership" framing specifically, see Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future? (Simon & Schuster, 2013), which argues for data as property from a non-libertarian standpoint; Kinsella's response is in his blog post "Data Ownership Misses the Point."

^13^ Further reading on intellectual property from multiple perspectives.

^14^ Richard Stallman, "What is Free Software?", GNU Project, https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html. The canonical definition of free software: software that grants users the freedoms to run, study, modify, and redistribute it. The Free Software Foundation, founded by Stallman in 1985, provides the ideological and legal infrastructure (including the GPL) behind the examples this section cites. For the broader movement, see Sam Williams, Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software (O'Reilly Media, 2002), https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/. The term "open-source" was coined in 1998 by Christine Peterson and formalized by the Open Source Initiative; see https://opensource.org/history.

^15^ Linus Torvalds announced the Linux kernel in a 1991 Usenet post to comp.os.minix: "I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones." The kernel's source is at https://kernel.org. Linux is the paradigm case of large-scale software production without intellectual-property enforcement; see Steven Weber, The Success of Open Source (Harvard University Press, 2004), for the political economy of its development model.

^16^ The Tor Project, https://www.torproject.org. Tor (The Onion Router) is a free, open-source anonymity network that routes traffic through a series of volunteer-operated relays, encrypting each layer so no single relay knows both source and destination. Originally developed by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory; see Roger Dingledine, Nick Mathewson, and Paul Syverson, "Tor: The Second-Generation Onion Router," Proceedings of the 13th USENIX Security Symposium (2004), https://svn.torproject.org/svn/projects/design-paper/tor-design.pdf. Tor is the primary anonymity-network primitive this book's Chapter 17 relies on.

^17^ Signal, https://signal.org. Signal is a free, open-source encrypted messaging application developed by the Signal Foundation (formerly Open Whisper Systems). Its cryptographic protocol - the Signal Protocol, combining the Double Ratchet Algorithm and the X3DH key agreement - is the basis for end-to-end encryption in WhatsApp, Google Messages, and several other mainstream applications. See Moxie Marlinspike and Trevor Perrin, "The Double Ratchet Algorithm" (2016), https://signal.org/docs/specifications/doubleratchet/. Signal is cited in this book as an instance of privacy-critical infrastructure produced under open-source licensing.

^18^ Richard Stallman, GNU General Public License, version 2 (1991) and version 3 (2007), https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html. The GPL is the founding copyleft instrument: it grants all the freedoms of free software while requiring that any distributed derivative work carry the same license, preventing downstream parties from closing the code. The Affero GPL (AGPL) extends this to network-deployed software. The legal mechanics are analyzed in Eben Moglen, "Enforcing the GNU GPL," Columbia Law School (2001), https://moglen.law.columbia.edu/publications/lu-12.html. The strategy described in the body text - using the state-granted copyright privilege instrumentally to prevent re-enclosure - is Stallman's invention and represents the clearest example of the framework in section 6.2: using an existing legal mechanism against the grain of its original purpose.

^19^ Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (PublicAffairs, 2019). Zuboff's argument is that platform firms extract "behavioral surplus" - data beyond what is needed to provide the service - and use it to build predictive products sold to advertisers. The section heading uses her term; the analysis differs: where Zuboff argues for a new property right in behavioral data, the framework here denies that data patterns can be property and locates the remedy in contract and competition rather than data-ownership claims. The disagreement is fundamental and is the precise point at which the Austrian property-rights framework and the progressive data-rights framework diverge. Kinsella's most recent restatements of the framework: The Problem with Intellectual Property (Papinian Press Working Paper No. 2, 2025), https://stephankinsella.com/wp-content/uploads/publications/kinsella-problem-intellectual-property-v1.1-2025.pdf, is the current book-chapter treatment, with The Title-Transfer Theory of Contract (Papinian Press Working Paper No. 1, 2024) as the companion contract paper. The libertarian-Austrian case at book length: Stephan Kinsella, Against Intellectual Property (Mises Institute, 2008), http://www.stephankinsella.com/wp-content/uploads/publications/kinsella-against-IP-book.pdf; his You Can't Own Ideas: Essays on Intellectual Property (Papinian Press, 2023) collects the more recent essays. The shorter pieces directly relevant to this chapter's framing: Kinsella, "Intellectual Property Rights as Negative Servitudes" (cited in note 8 above), develops the negative-servitude framing this chapter relies on; Kinsella, "Another Way to Explain the Problem with IP" (cited in note 6 above), develops the possession-vs-ownership distinction; Kinsella, "Libertarian Lockean Creationism" (cited in note 9 above), names the recurring error this chapter rejects. Roderick T. Long, "Owning Ideas Means Owning People" (cited in note 9 above), traces the IP claim to its implication that the holder owns part of other persons. On the mainstream-economics critique of intellectual monopoly, Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine, Against Intellectual Monopoly (cited in note 5 above), is the empirical treatment. Fritz Machlup, An Economic Review of the Patent System, Study No. 15 (U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Patents, 1958), is the classic institutional-economics study that concluded the patent system could not be justified on the evidence available. For historical context, Adrian Johns, Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates (University of Chicago Press, 2009), is the standard history. On copyright specifically, Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity (Penguin, 2004), is the canonical mainstream-progressive critique; Tom W. Bell, Intellectual Privilege: Copyright, Common Law, and the Common Good (Mercatus Center, 2014), is the more libertarian version. The opposing view, for fairness: William M. Landes and Richard A. Posner, The Economic Structure of Intellectual Property Law (Harvard University Press, 2003), is the standard law-and-economics defense of the existing system.

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The Praxeology of Privacy -- third edition. New chapters publish daily at 1600 UTC.

Really nice. On what hardware are you planning to use ...

2026-09-24T04:33:41Z

In reply to nevent1q…hdmu
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Really nice. On what hardware are you planning to use PostmarketOS?

Ok. So what was the reason you got to Gnome after using a tiling ...

2026-09-23T11:00:24Z

In reply to nevent1q…qpn8
_________________________

Ok. So what was the reason you got to Gnome after using a tiling WM?

When this is exactly what it is written to be, this is all I have ...

2026-09-18T14:51:09Z

When this is exactly what it is written to be, this is all I have been looking for in Nostr during the last years.
A ordered forum is such an important thing 🥳

quoting
nevent1q…tmct
Launching nostr-proto.org, an old school forum for the Nostr community.

No infinite scroll, no algorithm, no rush. Unlike a chat, where good answers scroll away and every question gets asked again next week, a forum keeps conversations slow, asynchronous, and easy to find: threads stay readable, searchable, and worth returning to months later.

It is organized in five rooms:

Agora, for open conversation, news, and opinions
Help, where no question about using Nostr is too basic
Protocol, for NIPs, specs, and proposals
Apps, for releases, showcases, and feedback
Relays, for the people who run them

Everything is built on NIP-29 groups hosted at wss://relay.nostr-proto.org, so you can take part from the website or from any NIP-29 client like Flotilla or Nostrord. Your key works everywhere, and your posts are not locked inside a site.

The forum runs on Squalk, an open source forum software built on Nostr: https://github.com/dtonon/squalk

Come say hi in the Agora: https://nostr-proto.org/room/agora

Ok. Nice to know. I think the last time I checked, this was nit ...

2026-09-18T11:55:37Z

In reply to nevent1q…5hm3
_________________________

Ok. Nice to know. I think the last time I checked, this was nit yet available 🫣✌️

Do you at least agree, that extreme situations, like earthquakes ...

2026-09-10T15:48:58Z

In reply to nevent1q…twq3
_________________________

Do you at least agree, that extreme situations, like earthquakes (as in Venezuela or Colombia recently), floods (as in Nepal) or Zunamis like the one in Fukushima cause a huge destruction. So the loss of value is inherently created naturally.
We live in a world, where it is normal, that nature destroys stuff, takes live and makes total worldwide wealth shrink.

Just the same way illnesses are very powerful natural desasters, which can lower health of thousands of people and in extreme cases kill us.

When such a natural disaster takes place, what is the first priority?

Is it to help fast and focus on the people, where lives can be saved? Is the main concern to negociate best prices? I assume you know the mechanics of markets? When demand spikes and production didlnot have yet time to adapt to the demand, high prices are a natural result. The most expected result.

You state quiet a lot of extreme positions. You state interventions (as isolation and keeping distance) as propaganda.

When you call it propaganda, do you assume, that viruses can spread equally fast independent of how many people meet eachother, how close they are to eachother or if they use protection like masks?

Since these interventions stand on very strong logic explanations, that one can even explain to children. No doctor title needed to understand their efficiancy in lowering infectionrate.

Could you might propose some alternative behavior, you would applaud people? The behavior you would have really liked to see?

Can I ask a simple question? What is it that makes you think all ...

2026-09-10T12:06:54Z

In reply to nevent1q…us9x
_________________________

Can I ask a simple question?
What is it that makes you think all the tematics around the covid vaccines is of high importance?

In what do you feel treated unfair? And what do you need from the people around you, so you can shake hands and talk about other stuff?

Since as I know COVID is not pandemy anymore. The virus is still in existance. But today it is a more controled virus, since many people have some tolerance againstit.

I get your take even when your thoughts saden me a bit. Did you ...

2026-08-11T22:14:41Z

In reply to nevent1q…q2xs
_________________________

I get your take even when your thoughts saden me a bit.

Did you personally already experience it once or several times, that you changed your habits? Or in other words. Do you think humans have the possibility to change their habits?

I leave you with this perspective. But genuinly promoting privacy ...

2026-08-09T17:34:27Z

In reply to nevent1q…9j5d
_________________________

I leave you with this perspective.
But genuinly promoting privacy on Mastodon or Nostr is not as useful, as doing it on Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, X or Google.

Simply since those users are those which let those companies save their data. When you want to sell a solution, you need to advertise it, where the problem lives. Not within the solutions.

You would also not go to a sports camp to teach them how important physical activity is for your health. This advice is more helpful in circles that do not practice any sport at all.

Isn’t it a bit untrue to say isreali? Epstein still was a US ...

2026-07-05T06:31:58Z

In reply to nevent1q…khg8
_________________________

Isn’t it a bit untrue to say isreali?
Epstein still was a US citizen or not?

Maby you say which part? Since I remember a part, where he ...

2026-05-12T04:25:02Z

In reply to nevent1q…mrdk
_________________________

Maby you say which part? Since I remember a part, where he mentions that freedom can only be accomplished if all concious beings make part of freedom. So including Animals.

So true. Only free software can be ethical software. ...

2026-05-03T16:22:58Z

So true.
Only free software can be ethical software.

quoting
nevent1q…gufj
"Proprietary software is an injustice. It denies users freedom and keeps them divided and helpless."

— Richard Stallman (Free Software, Free Society, 2002)

#proprietarysoftware #freedom

And why is butter yellow?

2025-09-14T06:57:38Z

In reply to nevent1q…ehvy
_________________________

And why is butter yellow?

Can be true. But I think rules still matter. Maby when not today ...

2025-06-17T20:06:46Z

In reply to nevent1q…y8rl
_________________________

Can be true. But I think rules still matter. Maby when not today in 5 or 10 years people are made accountable for their criminal actions.

"Cybersecurity does not have to be difficult. All it takes is ...

2025-03-17T10:03:45Z

"Cybersecurity does not have to be difficult. All it takes is being aware of the most pressing issues and doing what you can to encrypt your information, and ensure your personal data is not readily available on the internet."

https://techstartups.com/2024/11/07/consumer-privacy-in-2025-the-biggest-online-threats-ahead/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZ3j4hHMO5E Important for people ...

2025-01-02T14:19:13Z

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZ3j4hHMO5E

Important for people in the #USA speaking about Communism.
Or people who justify low Taxes for the rich (19:33 of the video): All people who have the money to buy goods and services are the ones who produce workplaces. So if the rich have more money, there are more workplaces in the goods they demand. And if lower class has more money more jobs are created wherever their demands are.

But it is a flat out lie, that low taxes for wealthy and companies creates jobs. The only thing it does is enforcing their power.

#asknostr Why would @nprofile…hcpn endorse X as freedom ...

2024-09-18T06:53:52Z

#asknostr
Why would jack (nprofile…hcpn) endorse X as freedom technology, when it is just as centralized as any other legacy social media?
Why not mention nostr?

https://time.com/6974971/jack-dorsey-leaves-bluesky-board/