C4SIF Tagline Contest

Our current tagline is “Property, Freedom, Knowledge”; it will be replaced presently with “Pro-commerce, Anti-monopoly.” What we are getting at is the idea is that Property is key; on a property based market, there is Emulation of others’ succesful practices and ideas, which leads toKnowledge and thus innovation and prosperity and productivity. We have toyed with others and are open to suggestions as to a better formulation, even a nice short quote (as the PFS has with Bastiat‘s “Property does not exist because there are laws, but laws exist because there is property”; Liberty uses various quotes) or a newly-coined slogan (C4SS’s slogan is “building awareness of the market anarchist alternative”; LewRockwell.com‘s is “anti-state, anti-war, pro-market”; Reason‘s is “Free Minds and Free Markets”).

In the spirit of openness, some we toyed with include:

• Commerce ? Emulation ? Innovation
• Commerce ? Emulation ? Knowledge
• Commerce ? Competition ? Emulation
• Property ? Emulation ? Knowledge
• Knowledge ? Sharing ? Property ? Learning ? Ideas

Or slogans such as:

• The Market for Ideas Rests on Emulation
• Opposing impediments to emulation and learning
• Fighting Pattern Privilege
• Competition plus emulation equals innovation
• Fighting legal barriers to the spread of information

I have some favorite quotations, but none seem quite apt and short/pithy enough:

• “Let us stand on each other’s shoulders, instead of each other’s feet!”– Are “Intellectual Property Rights” Justified? (2000), by Markus Krummenacker
• “Those who started using the word property in connection with inventions had a very definite purpose in mind: they wanted to substitute a word with a respectable connotation, ‘property’, for a word that had an unpleasant ring, ‘privilege’.” Fritz Machlup & Edith Penrose, The Patent Controversy in the Nineteenth Century, Journal of Economic History, v. 10, (1950).
• Edmund Burke paraphrase: “In vain you tell me that intellectual property is good, but that I fall out only with the abuse. The thing! the thing itself is the abuse!”
• “although the logos is common, most people live as if they had their own private understanding.” Heraclitus

We are content with “Pro-commerce, Anti-monopoly,” but are not wedded to it. We welcome any other suggestions. If we adopt one of them, I’ll send the person who suggests it an autographed copy of my Against Intellectual Property.