Hayek viewed strong intellectual property rights as pernicious legal monopolies.

Evidence

Hayek’s own position shifted little over the decades. In The Road to Serfdom, he suggested that patent law had been one of the measures that had “led to the destruction of competition in many spheres,” and he repeated the statement almost verbatim twenty-five years later. IP law was a specific case because of its potential to block the flow of knowledge. As Hayek wrote in 1960, “Knowledge, once achieved, becomes gratuitously available for the benefit of all. It is through this free gift of the knowledge acquired by the experiments of some members of society that general progress is made possible, that the achievements of those who have gone before facilitate the advance of those who follow.” Obstructing the dissemination of knowledge threatened the very mechanism of advancing civilization itself. For Hayek, patents and copyrights could be a particularly pernicious form of legally sanctioned monopoly. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 176

In The Road to Serfdom, he suggested that patent law had been one of the measures that had “led to the destruction of competition in many spheres,” and he repeated the statement almost verbatim twenty-five years later. IP law was a specific case because of its potential to block the flow of knowledge. As Hayek wrote in 1960, “Knowledge, once achieved, becomes gratuitously available for the benefit of all. It is through this free gift of the knowledge acquired by the experiments of some members of society that general progress is made possible, that the achievements of those who have gone before facilitate the advance of those who follow.” Obstructing the dissemination of knowledge threatened the very mechanism of advancing civilization itself. For Hayek, patents and copyrights could be a particularly pernicious form of legally sanctioned monopoly. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 176

Categorization

• SEED: The godfather of free-market thought being deeply skeptical of IP — a counterintuitive essay angle on how the ‘freedom’ canon actually treated patents and copyrights.
• SHARE: For someone working on IP law or the history of the free-market movement — Hayek’s repeated condemnation of patents across decades is a sharp, idiosyncratic data point.
• QUESTION: Hayek as an intellectual-property skeptic contradicts the modern association of Austrian/neoliberal thought with strong IP rights — worth tracing how later IP maximalists arose outside Hayek’s own line.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 176
• XREF: connects to: Hayek personally opposed strong intellectual property despite his followers endorsing it — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 2191; Hayek rejected capital-labor collaboration as monopoly-promoting — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 966

Broader Connections

• Hayek personally opposed strong intellectual property despite his followers endorsing it #corroborates (0.95) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 2191
• Hayek rejected capital-labor collaboration as monopoly-promoting #expands (0.72) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 966