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, loc. 176