Townhall Opinion: Patents Are Property Rights, Not A “Bizarre Regulatory Lobby”, by Adam Mossoff
This post originally appeared on Townhall on March 13, 2017.
In a recent Townhall op-ed, Mytheos Holt argues that patents are not property rights like other “natural” property rights in land and tangible goods. As his primary foil, he uses my seven-minute talk at CPAC last month on the unique American approach to securing property rights to innovators, which Holt calls a “bizarre regulatory lobby.”
Unfortunately, Holt is not alone in using such confused rhetoric. Today, we are in the midst of a full-blown moral panic about intellectual property (IP) rights. Strangely, some conservatives and libertarians – the very people who should be defending all property rights – have jumped on this populist bandwagon. Luckily, leading conservative groups such as the American Conservative Union and Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum recognize the importance of these fundamental property rights, which is why the ACU invited me to speak at CPAC.