I’ll be a guest on the Austin-based radio show “Live and Let Live” tonight, discussing IP. The host is Gary Johnson; the time is 9pm CDT. I’ll be on during the second hour of the two-hour program, which is live on the Rule of Law radio network. It can be heard on www.ruleoflawradio.com and on affiliate stations, including 90.1 FM in Austin. The episode will be archived on ruleoflawradio.com/archive.

Update: audio is here.

On NoodleFood, pro-IP Objectivist Diana Hsieh has a post asking for money for a pro-IP webcast by Objectivist law professor Adam Mossoff.¹ Coincidentally, this lecture is planned to coincide with my own (anti)IP webcast Mises Academy course.

Last Last Chance: Pledge for a Webcast on Intellectual Property by Adam Mossoff

By Diana Hsieh

The pledging for Adam Mossoff’s webcast on intellectual property closes in 48 hours — on Sunday, November 14th at 2 pm ET.

Once again, here’s the basic information:

The webcast will be held — and recorded — on Monday, November 15th at 8 pm ET. It will be between 60 and 90 minutes. Those not attending live will be able to view it on Tuesday.

Read more>>

1. For previous discussion of Hsieh and Mossoff see Hsieh and Mossoff on IP and Sewing Machines; IP: The Objectivists Strike Back! [↩]

Yet another alarming IP development–a post from Volokh by David Post (h/t Skip Oliva):

Once Again, the Copyright/Trademark Tail Tries to Wag the Internet Dog

David Post • November 13, 2010 9:17 am

Congress is set to once again consider the Sen Leahy’s Combating Online Infringements and Counterfeit Act, a truly awful bill (with the appropriately awful acronym “COICA” …). I have written a (relatively brief) “Law Professors’ Letter in Opposition,” which now has about 35 signatories, which you can read here. [There’s a summary of the bill’s provisions in the Letter — and the full text of the current version is posted here]

The bill would allow the Attorney General to institute an in rem action against the domain name of any Internet site “dedicated to infringing activities” — defined to include any site that “engages in” copyright or trademark-infringing activities where those activities, “taken together,” are “central to the activity” of the site. The court would then be authorized to issue injunctions — not against the offending website, but against “the domain name” itself — ordering the domain name registrar where the target site’s domain name was registered, and the domain name registry responsible for maintaining the authoritative database of names for the target site’s top-level domain, to “lock out” the domain name (and therefore prevent access to the site through use of the domain name). The court could also enjoin any of the thousands of Internet Service Providers, or any “operator of a nonauthoritative domain name server” (a category that includes virtually all ISPs or operators of networks linked to the Internet), ordering them to “take technically feasible and reasonable steps designed to prevent [the] domain name from resolving to that domain name’s Internet protocol address.”

It’s awful on many fronts. It would allow a court to effectively shut down a site operated out of Brazil, or France, without any adversary hearing (unless, I suppose, “the domain name” itself comes into court to argue the case) or any reasoned determination that the site actually is engaged in unlawful activity. There is a name for that in our law: “prior restraint,” and we don’t like them — even in cases where truly compelling governmental interests are at stake, let alone where the purpose is merely to protect the rights of copyright and trademark owners.

And it’s awful because, as I wrote in the Letter:
Read more>>

[Mises cross-post]

From Mises Blog; archived comments below:

State Antitrust (anti-monopoly) law versus state IP (pro-monopoly) law

As discussed in previous posts,¹ the state grants monopolies (patents and copyright) then penalizes companies for using (“abusing”) them, in contravention of state antitrust law–so that there is a “tension” between these state laws. (And of course the state exempts its own monopoly powers from antitrust regulations, and partially exempts the IP monopolies it hands out to supplicants.) On Techdirt, Mike Masnick points out another example of this “tension”: Once Again, Security Company Suggests Microsoft Making Its Own Software Secure Is An Antitrust Violation.

I have an idea. Eliminate the only true monopoly: the state and its agencies, its monopolization of the roads, courts, legal system, police, military, and also its monopoly-granting agencies–the USPTO (patent and trademark) and commerce department (copyright)–remove Microsoft’s copyright and patent monopolies but remove antitrust laws too and let them be.

True, large corporations often lobby for and benefit from (relatively speaking) antitrust and other regulations,² but still, remove their state-granted monopolies and remove state anti-monopoly restrictions, and let the free market work.

Update: See Jeffrey A. Tucker, Does Favoring Free Enterprise Mean Favoring “Business”?:

The first great error here is the mental habit that many have of thinking that big government and big business are somehow at odds. The whole of American history from the beginning to the present suggests precisely the opposite. From Alexander Hamilton to Goldman Sachs, a careful look at the history shows that there has been no major expansion of government that some sector of big business hasn’t backed with pressure and funding.

Who won from the mercantilism of the 19th century? Who came out ahead in the war socialism of Woodrow Wilson? Who was the major power behind the economic regimentation of the New Deal? What sectors of American life made out like bandits during World War II and the Cold War and the regulation of medical care and the American workplace in the 1960s and 1970s? Without exception, the corporate elite were behind every push for expanding the leviathan state.

The 19th-century history here has been carefully documented by Thomas DiLorenzo. Murray Rothbard has revealed the role of business in World War I. The postwar period through the New Deal is documented by Butler Shaffer in his great book In Restraint of Trade. The New Deal racket received a thorough exposé with John T. Flynn. The Cold War and after are shown to be radically probusiness in For a New Liberty, as well as Robert Higgs’s excellent works. And this is just the US case: it’s been true in every country where free competition was overtaken by state interventions.

[Cross-posted from Mises blog]

Archived comments:

Bennette Sebastian November 12, 2010 at 2:31 pm

Libertarianpress.blogspot.com

Ohhh Henry November 12, 2010 at 4:58 pm

It is not unprecedented for different factions of government to fight with each other for the right to control and steal from the public. In Nazi Germany the rivalries between top leaders were notorious. It was said to be one of Hitler’s favorite management techniques, to give ambivalent orders for overlapping responsibilities to two or more of his underlings. In Mao’s Cultural Revolution the factional rivalries apparently got so heated that there were army units fighting in the streets with tanks. In these extreme cases it may have been the deliberate policy of top leaders to divide and control their underlings, or it may be a natural and inevitable result of total government.

Each government department naturally wants to expand forever. When the public has been so tyrannized that there is almost no activity left which is not already controlled by some part of government, the departments must then fight to displace each other if they want to expand. Given the recent lack of fresh, new wealth and unregulated, successful industries to control and plunder in America, perhaps you will see a turf war between the IP Zealots and the Trust Busters.

Stranger November 13, 2010 at 1:40 pm

The distinction is really quite obvious. Anti-trust law limits what you can do with your property, while IP laws limit what other people can do with your property (you are still free to limit or not limit other people’s access to your own property).

This makes anti-trust laws anti-economic, while IP laws are pro-economic.

Stephan Kinsella November 13, 2010 at 2:25 pm

Stranger, you are confused: IP laws tell others what they can do with their OWN property. For example one effect of a patent on a method for tweaking your engine to get better mileage would be that I cannot tweak my own car’s engine to get better mileage.

Stranger November 13, 2010 at 2:45 pm

There’s no need for me to explain this fallacy, as Rothbard already did so long ago in Man, Economy and State.

http://mises.org/rothbard/mes/chap10e.asp#7._Patents_Copyrights

Matthew Swaringen November 13, 2010 at 3:21 pm

You said “IP law” when you should have said copyright then. If you agree only with copyright you should clarify your terms. You engage in (perhaps unintentional) deception when you have spoken in defense of IP only to trump someone who gives a patent example with talk of how only copyright is valid.

Nevertheless, Rothbard was wrong.

“For literary creations are unique products of the individual; it is almost impossible for them to be independently duplicated by someone else.”

One might agree with this statement, but it only applies towards the whole sum of a book. Surely someone can write a similar plot, paragraph, character, or come up with a similar name? And yet copyright applies not only to entire books. There is “fair use” but fair use excludes the right to produce adaptations or extended works. Why would Rothbard disallow this? He might not disallow this, in which case his argument is not for anything like current copyright law. The problem is he doesn’t say, so exactly what copyright entails is entirely unclear.

He does imply copyright could be used for inventions that are sold, requiring the purchaser not to reverse-engineer them. But say that the purchaser does anyway, and a third party benefits who wasn’t party to that agreement. Say the third party has no knowledge of that agreement whatsoever, and produces a similar device. What recourse has the original seller against the third party? And what justification is there for recourse?

Rothbard didn’t think this through. And the reason he didn’t think this through is because the conditions of his time didn’t warrant a lot of thought on the subject. This is unfortunate. I think if Rothbard were from this era he would have come to the right conclusions. You may think differently on that matter, but what should at least be clear is that Rothbard didn’t spend nearly sufficient time to explain the whole of what his copyright entailed in comparison to the state, and all of it’s ramifications in a society where copying is nearly free.

“There would, however, be copyright for any inventor or creator who made use of it, and this copyright would be per­petual, not limited to a certain number of years. Obviously, to be fully the property of an individual, a good has to be perma­nently and perpetually the property of the man and his heirs and assigns.”

This idea is not so devastating when one thinks of an entire book and the rights to print and reproduce that book, except what if the heirs of the man’s heirs are fools and don’t give anyone the right to print the book, a choice the man would not have made? What if knowledge is lost to all because of their choice? This is ok? Perhaps to you it is, but to me it is a travesty.

When I think of land as property, I think of homesteading and improvements made to the land. But if an heir allows the property to be reclaimed by nature, does not exist on the land or use the land… is he the owner of it? I would say he isn’t any longer. One cannot gain land simply by claiming it, one has to do something to earn that ownership. And that something has to continue. To disagree with this principle is to say that ownership should last even when the scarce resources aren’t in use, and to say that I should be able to claim “all unused parts of the world” and shoot anyone who dares enter them.

ABR November 14, 2010 at 12:24 am

Rothbard believed that land once homesteaded must remain ‘owned’ until or if the owner declares otherwise.

Matthew Swaringen November 14, 2010 at 1:38 pm

I wouldn’t agree with him on that either.

Zorg November 14, 2010 at 8:34 pm

As I recall, he left the door open for abandonment of property in land.
His underlying assumption was that the present owner of record had
the superior *claim*. If another comes along to challenge that claim, then
that newcomer would have to show that his claim is superior.

Rothbard pretty much dismissed other theories of land ownership. He
talked about the importance of land being managed by absentee owners
and speculators even if it’s “unused” at present. I think he correctly sensed that there are a lot of pitfalls here. Some people have gone over the edge and seem
to want to start from scratch. If that is not a recipe for disaster, I don’t know
what is.

Rothbard just said that you’d have to challenge a title and then prove your
case. I don’t think he dismissed the idea that property could be considered abandoned at some point and that a “squatter” could homestead it. But he
was arguing against people – mostly socialists of one kind or another – who
still view property through collectivist lenses even when they give a nod to
private property.

I think there is more work to be done regarding land just like there is more
to be done on IP and other property issues. It does take time for these issues
to unfold and get the attention they deserve. Bad arguments take time to
reveal all their flaws just as good arguments need to be proven over time as they
withstand the attacks of less worthy arguments.

Latarsha Aunkst November 27, 2010 at 11:56 am

I’m sure I will get very angry reading more of this.

1. See Hsieh and Mossoff on IP and Sewing Machines; When Antitrust and Patents Collide (Rambus v. FTC); The Schizo Feds: Patent Monopolies and the FTC; The Schizophrenic State; Intel v. AMD: More patent and antitrust waste; Are Patents “Monopolies”?; Patents, Prescription Drugs, and Price Controls. [↩]
2. See note 10 and accompanying text of my article Reducing the Cost of IP Law (“Once again, as in the case of minimum-wage, social-security, and prounion laws, federal legislation works in favor of big business, … For a recent example, UPS is currently lobbying Congress to enact legislation that would redefine its rival, FedEx, as a trucking company rather than the airline it started out as in an attempt to make it easier for the Teamsters union to unionize FedEx drivers and raise their wage rates—and of course FedEx’s cost structure. See Del Quentin Wilber & Jeffrey H. Birnbaum, Taking the Hill By Air and Ground: Shift in Congress Favors Labor, UPS Over FedEx, Washington Post (September 14, 2007).

   See also Murray N. Rothbard, “Origins of the Welfare State in America,” in The Progressive Era (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 2017), originally published as “Origins of the Welfare State in America,”, J. Libertarian Studies 2, no. 2 (Fall 1996): 193–232 (“Big businesses, who were already voluntarily providing costly old-age pensions to their employees, could use the federal government to force their small-business competitors into paying for similar, costly, programs…. [T]he legislation deliberately penalizes the lower cost, ‘unprogressive,’ employer, and cripples him by artificially raising his costs compared to the larger employer.… It is no wonder, then, that the bigger businesses almost all backed the Social Security scheme to the hilt, while it was attacked by such associations of small business as the National Metal Trades Association, the Illinois Manufacturing Association, and the National Association of Manufacturers. By 1939, only 17 percent of American businesses favored repeal of the Social Security Act, while not one big business firm supported repeal.… Big business, indeed, collaborated enthusiastically with social security.”); Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., “The Economics Of Discrimination,” in Speaking of Liberty (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 2003), at 99 (“One way the ADA [Americans with Disabilities Act] is enforced is through the use of government and private ‘testers.’ These actors, who will want to find all the “discrimination” they can, terrify small businesses. The smaller the business, the more ADA hurts. That’s partly why big business supported it. How nice to have the government clobber your up-and-coming competition.”); Rothbard, For A New Liberty (2002), pp. 316 et seq.; Rothbard, The Betrayal of the American Right, 185-86 (2007) (“This is the general view on the Right; in the remarkable phrase of Ayn Rand, Big Business is ‘America’s most persecuted minority.’ Persecuted minority, indeed! To be sure, there were charges aplenty against Big Business and its intimate connections with Big Government in the old McCormick Chicago Tribune and especially in the writings of Albert Jay Nock; but it took the Williams-Kolko analysis, and particularly the detailed investigation by Kolko, to portray the true anatomy and physiology of the America scene. As Kolko pointed out, all the various measures of federal regulation and welfare statism, beginning in the Progressive period, that Left and Right alike have always believed to be a mass movement against Big Business, are not only backed to the hilt by Big Business at the present time, but were originated by it for the very purpose of shifting from a free market to a cartelized economy. Under the guise of regulations “against monopoly” and “for the public welfare,” Big Business has succeeded in granting itself cartels and privileges through the use of government.”); Albert Jay Nock, quoted in Rothbard, The Betrayal of the American Right, 22 (2007) (“The simple truth is that our businessmen do not want a government that will let business alone. They want a government they can use. Offer them one made on Spencer’s model, and they would see the country blow up before they would accept it.”).

   See also Timothy P. Carney, The Big Ripoff: How Big Business and Big Government Steal Your Money (2006), and also Rothbard, Confessions of a Right-Wing Liberal (“This is the general view on the right; in the remarkable phrase of Ayn Rand, Big Business is “America’s most persecuted minority.” Persecuted minority, indeed! Sure, there were thrusts against Big Business in the old McCormick Chicago Tribune and in the writings of Albert Jay Nock; but it took the Williams-Kolko analysis to portray the true anatomy and physiology of the American scene. … As Kolko pointed out, all the various measures of federal regulation and welfare statism that left and right alike have always believed to be mass movements against Big Business are not only now backed to the hilt by Big Business, but were originated by it for the very purpose of shifting from a free market to a cartelized economy that would benefit it. Imperialistic foreign policy and the permanent garrison state originated in the Big Business drive for foreign investments and for war contracts at home.”)

   See also the Wikipedia article on Rothbard: “Rothbard was equally condemning of relationships he perceived between big business and big government. He cited many instances where business elites co-opted government’s monopoly power so as to influence laws and regulatory policy in a manner benefiting them at the expense of their competitive rivals. He wrote in criticism of Ayn Rand’s “misty devotion to the Big Businessman” that she: “is too committed emotionally to worship of the Big Businessman-as-Hero to concede that it is precisely Big Business that is largely responsible for the twentieth-century march into aggressive statism…”^[49] According to Rothbard, one example of such cronyism included grants of monopolistic privilege the railroads derived from sponsoring so-called conservation laws.^[50]”

   Patents are state-granted monopolies, which are in “tension” with antitrust law; you can have and use this monopoly, even though it technically seems to violate the antitrust laws, so long as you don’t abuse it. This means that the larger companies who amass the large patent arsenals (and cross-license with each other) sort of have immunity from antitrust law while smaller competitors are not only subject to the anticompetitive effect of the patent monopolies possessed by the big players but also subject to antitrust law still. Absent antitrust law perhaps smaller companies could cartelize somehow to combat the patent monopolies of the big companies–for example perhaps they could form defensive patent pooling arrangements–pools that might under current law violate antitrust (I am not sure, have not looked into it in detail). I.e., the antitrust law (maybe) gives enough of an exemption to big companies to acquire large patent monopoly arsenals and to cross-license with each other forming anticompetitive barriers to entry but does not give enough of an exemption for smaller companies to collude and cartelize and form defensive patent pools. I sense that this is basically one thing that is going on.

   Another example would perhaps be Big Sports. If I recall correctly federal antitrust law had to grant a special exemption to certain college or large sports leagues, so that they would not be hampered by antitrust law. I can imagine that the combined effect of antitrust law and the special exemption might give some favoritism to the NFL etc. This may be on point but not sure it’s the only one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sports_Broadcasting_Act_of_1961. [↩]

We are pleased to announced that Terence Kealey has joined the Center’s Advisory Board. Professor Kealey is Vice Chancellor & Clinical Bio-Chemist of the University of Buckingham. He is author of The Economic Laws of Scientific Research (1996, Macmillan) and Sex, Science and Profits: How People Evolved to Make Money (2008, Heinemann).

We are pleased to announce that Bertrand Lemennicier† has joined the Center’s Advisory Board. Dr. Lemennicier is Professor of economics at the economic department of the Faculty of Law of the University of Paris Sorbonne, Pantheon-Assas. In his research career he followed the approach of economists such as Gary Becker, Ronald Coase, James Buchanan, and Friedrich Hayek who applied the tools of the economic analysis to fields outside  from the core of economics like marriage, crime, law, and politics. Influenced by the work of Murray Rothbard and other radical libertarian writers, he joined the French intellectual libertarian movement in the 1980s. Executive director of the Institut de Recherche sur la gouvernance et l’Economie des Institutions (IRGEI). He is author of numerous articles and books, including The Market of the Marriage and the Family (1988 Editions P.U.F), Five Questions about the Trade Unions (in collaboration with Jacques Garello and Henri Lepage, 1990 Editions P.U.F), Economy of the Right (1991 Cujas Editions), Morals Vis-à-Vis the Economy (Editions of Organization, 2006), and a textbook, Microeconomic: Theory and Applications (CDROM, 2003-2005, bwm-mediasoft, Luxemburg). His IP-related writings include Brevets d’invention, droits de reproduction et propriété intellectuelle (Patents, Reproduction Rights and Intellectual Property). He is member of the Mount Pélerin Society (MPS), the International Society for Individual Liberty (ISIL), and the Property and Freedom Society (PFS).

“If the government objects to monopoly prices for new inventions, it should stop granting patents.”
–Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

(For further background on Mises’s and Hayek’s thoughts on IP, see my post “Mises on Intellectual Property“; Jeff Tucker, “Misesian vs. Marxian vs. IP Views of Innovation“; Jeff Tucker, “Hayek on Patents and Copyrights“.)

Update:

• Are Patents and Copyrights “Monopolies”?
• Are Patents “Monopolies”?

From Guardian.co.uk. The take-away: “Could we be in a place now where technology has brought us full circle? Where that which took us away from stories is now set to bring us back to them?”

As my friend and TLS co-blogger Rob Wicks noted, “Of course the IP-whores would rather kill culture than allow it to be given away. Note that it’s being distributed as a PDF. Should be easy enough to distribute freely, meaning they will likely get a bigger readership than they would if people had to pay for the dead-tree version. This is how culture is going to be distrubuted, and the IP lovers are going to fight it every step of the way.”

A renaissance rooted in technology: the literary magazine returns

Thanks to the internet, which has eased the burden of print and distribution costs, literary periodicals are flourishing anew

Old news … the London Review of Books is no longer top of young people’s reading lists as other literary magazines embrace technology. Photograph: Graham Turner

When was the last time you looked out of the window when sitting on a bus? With the internet now in the palm of our hands, it’s so much a part of our daily lives that it permeates our every spare second, taking up the time and energy that we once used to read books.

If the novel is struggling in this new environment, what of literary magazines? Long extinct? The opposite: literary magazines are getting popular again.

What’s going on? Are young people suddenly discovering the London Review of Books? Hardly. It’s currently £27m in the red. In fact, mention the LRB to anyone under 50 and you’re liable to send them into a deep coma. To say it has serious relevancy issues is like saying that the Titanic had slight buoyancy issues. Granta fares better, but how many people outside of the literati actually read it regularly? Not many, I bet. The same goes for the Times Literary Supplement.

“Some literary magazines have grown precious to the point where the humour and liveliness has long since evaporated,” says Craig Taylor, editor of Five Dials, the literary magazine published by Hamish Hamilton.

Damian Barr, who runs the Shoreditch House Literary Salon, recognises this too: “The conversation about reading and writing is open to more people than ever before, though rarefied heights – the LRB and TLS – remain.”

By contrast, Five Dials (mission statement: “Be inclusive. Embrace both ends of the spectrum”) is far from taking itself too seriously. They actually make jokes.

Keegan Wilson, founder of Pop Cult, says: “The Paris Review and Ambit can be a little daunting and serious. I wanted Pop Cult to be fun, through contemporary and humorous stories.” Or, as the novelist Gavin James Bower says: “It’s our generation’s way of giving the publishing industry a much-needed kick up the arse.”

The growing number of irreverent literary nights – The Book Stops Here (formerly To Hell with the Lighthouse), The Book Club Boutique, Firestation Book Swap, BookSlam – suggests that serious literature might be becoming cool again. Literary fiction is no longer rollnecks and Radio 4. It’s hip and it’s young and it’s happening live in fashionable areas of London like Shoreditch, with readers such as Ned Beauman, Naomi Alderman, Nikesh Shukla, Stuart Evers and even the venerable Diana Athill. Todd Zuniga, creator of Literary Death Match, says it’s “as much about putting four fantastic writers on stage as it is about promoting literary entities like Pen Pusher“.

All of this has had a knock-on effect on the popularity of literary magazines. But it’s only part of the story. Something else, more fundamental, is going on.
Read more>>

[Cross-posted from The Chant Cafe]

I see that Adam has posted two more sets of Simple Propers and hundreds of people who currently benefit from these postings are right now breathing a sigh of relief. I also note that he did not post the badge like you see to the right here, and that’s fine. He is on the giving side of this great endeavor and feels shy (most likely) about making a direct appeal for financial support.

I have no such hesitancy, and I especially want to thank everyone who has donated. Some of these people certainly cannot afford to do so on the level that they did, and such efforts are genuinely moving and inspiring. What would also be great would be to see more $10, $5, and $1 donations – because they help (they do!) and also because they express solidarity and good will support, which Adam and the project very much need.

But actually there is much more at issue here even beyond the Simple Propers Project itself. It concerns the culture of music and its distribution in the Catholic world. When we think back to the early Church, we note that scripture reports that the first action of the early Christians was to share what they owned privately with others, to put their possessions and their money in a common pool. No, they were not communists and this was not an early experiment in liberation theology. But it does establish an ethos of giving and sharing toward the common good that defined Christianity from the earliest times to the present.

It is particularly true with regard to the texts and music of the faith. Unlike food and housing, the sharing of texts and music does not depreciate the existing stock of the good. One person can write a song and the entire world can sing it. One person can know a verse and give it to the entire world with no loss of the original copy. There is something of a miracle associated with this reality, and this is precisely what gave rise to the evangelical spirit in Christian culture. We can give and give, share and share, without limit. This impulse became the foundation of an ethos in the Catholic world. We do not hesitate to offer help to others and we do not feel guilt when we draw from the help others give us.

Sharing leads to an ever greater flowering of all things shared, as we learn from each other and improve the results in an ever more progressive way. This is how the music of the Church was built and grew from the earliest days, until the entire Church year was filled with chants suitable to every conceivable reading and liturgical action. The culture of giving and sharing made this happen. It made possible the development of organum and polyphony and the whole of the Western musical tradition.

An ethos of grasping and privatizing of art were unknown during this time. The goal of the composer was to release the music as far and as widely as possible. The composer hoped to have the music performed, hoped to have it imitated and elaborated upon, hoped to see others influenced and inspired by it. All music was a gift to the world and to the faith. This was the very essence of what it meant to be a Christian artist. You put your “possessions” at the feet of the Apostles and ask that they be used for the good of all.

But how can these people live if they are forever giving away? This is the question that is always asked about the institution of Christian charity. There is always and everywhere a material case to make against charity. Why rescue abandoned children when there are other things calling on our time? Why help the guy who is beaten and bleeding on the side of the road when there are places that we need to be? There is a sense in which charity itself seems irrational, and that is why it didn’t exist in any institutionalized form in the ancient world apart from particular tribes and groups. The idea of universal love and universal charity is a Christian contribution. We have the faith to believe that when we give, we end up gaining more than we ever had in the first place.

The 20th century invention of what is called “copyright” took direct aim at this institution in a form that turned the Christian ethos on its head (I’m bypassing the Elizabethan history here because it was a very different institution). The newly internationalized law said: the state will guarantee that your art remains your art only and is accessed by others only on terms that financially benefit you personally. To be sure, this goes against the very nature of music and text, which are necessarily universal upon their public appearance. To make copyright stick required the state and its laws, which meant that Christian artists were encouraged to draw closer to the civic culture and its ruling magistrates.

Whatever else this has done, it dramatically upended 19 centuries of artist practice in the Christian world. It has fostered, on one side, a culture of grasping, hoarding, and myopia among artists, and, on the other side, led those who benefit from the work of artists to not understand their obligations to give more than they get in return from the work of the artists themselves. The attitude of artists becomes “give me what I am due” and the attitude among would-be benefactors becomes “I gave at the office.” And now that digital downloads make it possible to download thousands upon thousands of pages of music for free (and this is all to the good!), that mutual element of gratitude and its expression must also be cultivated among those who benefit.

So we can see here that the Simple Propers Project is about more than just providing quality chant settings for the ordinary form. It is an experiment in bringing the Christian ethos of giving and sharing back to Christian art itself. Adam is putting all of his music into the commons, just as the early Christian put their possessions at the feet of the Apostles. And as members of the community that benefits, what can we do? We can follow the example of giving, knowing with faith that we will gain more in the long run than we ever had or ever gave.

It is up to all of us to contribute and show how this seemingly irrational system of giving and sharing works to the benefit of all.

Excellent and ifnormative wide-ranging discussion of IP by two intelligent libertarian radio talk show hosts: FreeTalkLive episode discussing “IP for the Masses” (11/6/2010 show; MP3).

From Mike Masnick on TechDirt:

Musician: Sell Physically Attractive Objects Worthy Of Purchase; Let Free Music Drive Success

from the someone-gets-it dept

Hypebot points us to a great post on the new blog Pirate Verbatim, which posts quotes from various musicians about their thoughts on “piracy.” One recent post is from musician Phil Elverum, of the bands Mount Erie and also The Microphones. His response touches on a lot of the themes we cover around here, including how giving away infinite goods for free can help you out by making scarce goods more valuable and desirable. The key part:

It seems pointless to try to stop the practice because it’s a reality of the world we live in. People will find a way. It’s not a bad thing. In fact, I probably owe like 80% of my success to the fact that people can hear my music for free to see if they like it. My approach to the question of making a living off this “work” has been to make physically attractive objects that seem worthy of purchase. He also points out that this doesn’t mean that everyone who downloads needs to buy something, but that it’s their choice:

Of course there will be people who don’t care about owning an object, or maybe don?t have any money, or maybe who live in Siberia, and so they can just find a way to hear it for free if they want to. I don’t think there’s an inherent moral duty for the listener to support the singer. In the broad historical perspective music is frivolous non-work and we are lucky to have time to make it at all. Those of us who are temporarily feeding ourselves by this activity are even luckier. The internet changed the world. Old ways need to adapt. There is a new way taking shape that no one knows yet. Trying to impose the old model of lucrative systems of parasitic labels, managers, agents, distributors, etc., on the new reality is a little blind. It’s always nice to see more musicians who seem to understand the key issues, and how to take advantage of them, rather than complain about them.

By Mike Masnick on TechDirt:

Microsoft’s Anti-Piracy Efforts: Millions Spent Driving People To Open Source Software

from the surely-that’s-not-the-best-use-of-money? dept

In the past, Microsoft used to be willing to admit that unauthorized copies helped the company, as it helped establish its software as a near-monopoly in certain areas, and kept competitors out. But, in the past few years, the company has become more adamant, not just about denying any possible “benefits” to unauthorized copies, but in trying to crack down on them at any cost. The NY Times has an article highlighting Microsoft’s “fight” against unauthorized copies, and does so with dramatic (and cinematic) claims about how organized crime groups are turning to software copying, as an alternative to drugs.

Of course, this ignores the fact that such organized crime groups have actually discovered that it’s harder and harder to make money with counterfeit software — because more and more such software is just available for free online, leaving little reason to pay anything for it, especially from counterfeiters. But, what strikes me as most interesting through the blatantly ridiculous claims throughout the article from Microsoft’s folks and its stand-ins at the BSA, is that all the company is really doing here is spending a ton of money to convince people to look at cheaper (or free) alternatives.

By Mike Masnick from TechDirt:

Time To Remix Copyright Law: The Hip Hop Case Study

from the it’s-how-music-is-made dept

Michael Scott points us to an interesting paper by a law professor, Tonya Evans, talking about how poorly copyright law is designed to handle a concept like hip hop. Of course, this is an issue that we (and plenty of others) have covered for years — noting how copyright law has drastically hindered certain aspects of hip hop music, once the lawyers started accusing samplers of infringement, and some courts suggested that using just a tiny snippet of a song, and even changing it so the original was unrecognizable, still constituted copyright infringement. From the abstract:

Read more>>

My friend and TLS co-blogger Rob Wicks says regarding this post:

I’ve been thinking about this a bit. Copyright law basically killed traditional hip hop. Traditional hip hop was built on sampling, and consisted of both singing and rapping. You still get a few big acts with major money behind them who can do things, but the entire development of hip hop as an art form has been completely warped by IP. You can still get traditional hip-hop, and it has evolved over the years, but you have to get mixtapes, which are generally released free to the streets. But the stuff which gets all the press and which inspires the virulent reaction (because of the large gangsta/antisocial element) is almost entirely a creation of large corporations leveraging IP.

Exactly. Just like state regulations distort the catallactic market, IP law distorts the culture. For example it has caused fashion designers to incorporate their trademarked logos in their products as part of the design, since there is no IP in fashion so they incorporated the trademark. Would this phenomenon exist without IP? Omega put a copyrighted globe logo on their watches to stop arbitrary importing. HP puts needless patented circuits in their cartridges to leverage patent law to stop competition. (See my post Leveraging IP for more on this.) And maybe there are forms of music that never existed, or that are marginalzed, such as hip hop, and other forms of art including film and photography and documentaries and collages and painting, that would otherwise have relied on some kind of “sampling,” that never got off the ground b/c of threat of copyright law. The seen and the unseen.

Rob’s reply to this: “Yes, and then people look to counteract those distortions by censoring music, establishing age requirements, etc.”

Update: See Everything is a Remix Part 4