| In this study, Kevin Carson reviews libertarian perspectives on “intellectual property”; the ethics of the practice itself and the harms resulting from it. He finds that IP is an artificial,... |
In this study, Kevin Carson reviews libertarian perspectives on “intellectual property”; the ethics of the practice itself and the harms resulting from it. He finds that IP is an artificial, rather than natural, property right; creating scarcity rather than managing it. In that capacity, it has acted as an unjust and irrational state subsidy to corporate capitalism — distorting markets, doing violence to the concept of real property rights, forcibly transfering wealth to parasitic cartels and generally having a pernicious impact on the US domestic and global economies that is difficult to overstate. He concludes by debunking the myth of IP as supposedly necessary for incentive reasons.
Kregus1 onMay 14, 2009, 12:11 pm:Excellent!
autocrat onMay 14, 2009, 12:51 pm:Great article!
Just a suggestion: it would be nice if the quoted sections were within actual quotes, or a different font.
Kevin Carson onMay 14, 2009, 11:54 pm:Thanks for the catch, Charles. It's corrected now.
Autocrat: I can't look at the pdf right now because all I've got here is an IBM Thinkpad with crappy old Windows 2000 (no pdf reader). But I used blockquoting with indentations–doesn't that make it readable enough? Oddly enough, I used to automatically put blockquotes in italics until a reader complained that made it harder to read.
autocrat onMay 15, 2009, 12:32 pm:The indentation is perfectly clear most of the time, but was a hassle (for me) usually in places where the quoted material began or ended or overlapped page boundaries; in those cases, I found myself needing
to visually scan down the page until I was able to detect indentation context; and every so often throughout the text, the indentation didn't begin correctly, so I developed an internal sort of paranoia… (c8=
Scanning through again, I realize a helpful visual clue would be if the quoted text was indented on the right hand side also; and not only on the left – perhaps that would be a decent compromise between using italics – though it seems as though quotes wouldn't interfere with the readability of the text.
Quoted and indented on both sides would be most immediately clear under all circumstances, I think; and provide helpful redundancy in the case of minor occasional formatting/indentation discrepancies.
Obviously, these are just suggestions based on personal preference.
Thanks so much for the, as always, excellent material!
ricketson onMay 19, 2009, 7:07 pm:Well gee, I don't know why I bothered commenting on "copyright communism" — you've already said it all!
Anyway, your comment on the "shrink wrap contracts" reminded me of a good essay at Heritage describing the implications of the mail fraud laws, and how they were enforced in the Ferrell-Kurtz case.
When Art Becomes a Crime: A Case Study in Overcriminalization:
http://www.heritage.org/research/legalissues/lm00…
AcK onAug 5, 2010, 11:49 am:Awesome study. Working through this has given me much to consider.
Individualist Anarchism Against Bosses, Inequality, Corporate Power, and Structural Poverty
Ed. Gary Chartier & Charles W. Johnson
Individualist anarchists believe in mutual exchange, not economic privilege. They believe in freed markets, not capitalism. They defend a distinctive response to the challenges of ending global capitalism and achieving social justice: eliminate the political privileges that prop up capitalists.
By C4SS Advisory Panel member Gary Chartier. A compelling case for a stateless society.
Anarchy happens when people organize their lives peacefully and voluntarily, without state aggression. This simple but powerful book explains why the state is illegitimate, unnecessary and dangerous, and what we can do to begin achieving real freedom. Paperback, 129 pp.
