The Blessings of Compulsion

Of what import are brief, nameless lives ... to Galactus?? Compulsory IP licensing (where anyone can use your IP but they have to pay you a fee) is not my ideal – I favour getting rid of IP entirely – but it does seem preferable to the current system, both on rights-based grounds (having to pay to exercise your rights to free speech and press is less unjust than not being able to exercise them at all) and on consequentialist grounds (the creator of the IP can’t restrict the flow of information).

Barry Deutsch has an interesting post on AOTP arguing that comic-book artists like Jack Kirby would have benefited much more from compulsory licensing than from conventional copyright.

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One Response to The Blessings of Compulsion

  1. Administrator October 9, 2008 at 8:38 pm #

    I picked that picture just to give a cool example of Jack Kirby’s work, but I suspect I will have all too many occasions to re-use it to illustrate political stories (such as the foreign policy positions of Madeleine Albright or the right-Randians).

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