Excellent short story (well, not excellent qua story, but excellent qua editorial, as it were) on copyright, by Richard Stallman. (CHT Kevin Carson.)
I’m reminded of this cartoon.
Tag Archives | IP
8th from the 90s
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 not great.) But it looks like the legal obstacles to a Region 1 dvd are finally being cleared away.
The tv-movie, a failed pilot for the first attempt at a Who revival, isn’t as good as the revived series that would eventually succeed a decade later; for one thing, it’s too oriented (or orientated, as our transoceanic cousins would say) toward American audiences to feel quite authentic. (The Master with an American accent? Really? It makes me tremble for Torchwood.) Still, this was the first time that Who was presented with modern production values and a decent sfx budget, and it serves as an interesting bridge between the classic show and the new one.
Pages of Liberty
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 Menger’s Origins of Money, and Murray Rothbard’s Anatomy of the State and Left & Right: The Prospects for Liberty. (Now they just need to publish this baby.)
In other news, check out Kevin Carson on a day in the life under the corporate state.
Ideas That Stick With You
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 alienable property is as much a violation of property right as any other.
Now even libertarians who defend IP generally regard it as alienable; so the current move by the IP lobby to attack the voluntary alienation of IP rights should be something that pro-IP and anti-IP libertarians can agree in opposing.
An argument one sometimes sees for the inalienability of IP is the consequentialist one that if IP is treated as alienable then creators will be exploited by big companies. It’s certainly true that under the current IP system, the chief beneficiaries of copyright tend to be not the original creators but instead large publishing and recording companies; and making IP inalienable is one way to address that. Yet inasmuch as IP, whether alienable or inalienable, constitutes both protectionism and censorship, it remains objectionable on both rights-based and consequentialist grounds. A better solution to the exploitation problem is to replace IP-based business models with ones that secure compensation to creators in nonviolent ways.
Stateless News
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 installment of Gary Chartier’s introductory course on anarchism for Stateless U.:
Watch some more here.
Atlas Shrunk
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.)