Owing to complex IP issues, the 1996 Doctor Who tv-movie – featuring the one and only tv appearance of the 8th Doctor – has long been unavailable here in Region 1. (Well, I say unavailable … of course there are region-free bootleg copies of the Region 2 disk floating around, but their picture quality is [...]
I’m done with my two-week libertarathon – tiring but fun. Now just two weeks before fall classes begin! I notice that the Mises Institute has a lot of good pamphlets out, suitable for tabling – including Fréderic Bastiat’s The Law, Gustave de Molinari’s Production of Security, Étienne de la Boétie’s Discourse of Voluntary Servitude, Carl [...]
Under the feudal system, rights to one’s person were alienable (swearing fealty to a lord was irrevocable) while rights to land often weren’t (a feudal lord couldn’t sell his estate, as it belonged in perpetuity to his heirs) – the exact reverse of the rights system that most libertarians advocate. Forbidding the alienation of rightfully [...]
Kevin Carson’s latest C4SS study, The Thermidor of the Progressives: Managerialist Liberalism’s Hostility to Decentralized Organization, is now online. As the subtitle suggests, the study documents the tendency of so-called “progressives” to side with power and privilege against genuine left radicalism. In other C4SS news (not so new at this point), check out the first [...]
Sometimes the good news is worse than the bad news. (Note that in this case the badness is in part the result of IP; they had to go ahead with a half-ass production to prevent the rights from reverting.)
If I believed in copyright, I’d say J. Neil Schulman’s case against the government(s) for enacting a public performance of the central plot of Schulman’s novel Alongside Night was a good one. (But I hope JNS won’t sue us when we enact the Revolutionary Agorist Cadre part of the story.)
Another blast from the past, out of the same box: I believe this letter to the Durham-based Independent Weekly was published, in some form at any rate. 3 February 1995 To the Editor: The copyright hassles of Blaise Faint (Independent Weekly 2/1/95) [2010 note: alas, I no longer recall what Blaise Faint’s copyright hassles were] [...]
Intellectual property rights are a cause of disagreement between Lysander Spooner, Stephan Kinsella, and Ayn Rand. That’s the first sentence of a paper I’m grading for my business ethics class. It seems true (grammar aside). But it strikes me that this creates a problem for my anti-IP position. After all, it’s an established philosophical principle [...]
From an info page about the 1996 Doctor Who tv-movie: Due to complicated licensing and ownership of the telefilm, no North American (a.k.a. Region 1) home video release has occurred in either VHS or DVD formats as of 2009, and no such release is expected in the foreseeable future. Ironically, several of the featurettes on [...]
Gosh! What if substantial portions of the pro-IP lobby aren’t motivated by a passionate concern for property rights after all? Next I expect we’ll hear that copylefters are violating their own rights. Or, um, something.
The Empirical Me
I’m Roderick T. Long, Professor of Philosophy at Auburn University. I’m an Aristotelean/Wittgensteinian in philosophy and a left-libertarian market anarchist in social theory. (More about me here.) This blog, Austro-Athenian Empire, is a continuation of my earlier blog, archived here.
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