Last night I appeared for two hours on FreeTalkLive (1-22-12 show), with hosts Mark Edge and Stephanie. We discussed intellectual property and SOPA. (Audio)
Kinsella on FreeTalkLive re SOPA and IP Read Post »
Mike Masnick has this interesting post up today at Techdirt:
Crowd Cheers Loudly As All Four GOP Candidates Say No To SOPA/PIPA
from the national-issue dept
It really was just a few weeks ago that a Hollywood lobbyist laughed at me (literally) when I suggested that SOPA/PIPA might become a national issue during the Presidential campaign. As he noted, copyright issues just aren’t interesting outside of a small group of people. My, how things have changed. After this week’s protests made front pages and top stories everywhere, it’s not all that surprising that the candidates at the latest GOP debate were asked their opinion of the bills… and all four came out against them. Of course, this seems to fit with the new GOP positioning that they’re the anti-SOPA/PIPA party (so sorry Lamar Smith…). Mediaite has the video:
Masnick quotes each of the four candidates’ responses to the question. I provide them below, with “translations” provided by my friend Daniel Coleman for the three statist candidates:
Gingrich: “You are asking a conservative about the economic interests of Hollywood? I am weighing it and thinking fondly of the many left wing people that I am so eager to protect. On the other hand, you have so many people that are technologically advanced such as Google and You Tube and Facebook that say this is totally going to mess up the Internet. The bill in its current form is written really badly and leads to a range of censorship that is totally unacceptable. I believe in freedom and think that we have a patent office, copyright law and if a company believes it has generally been infringed upon it has the right to sue. But the idea that we have the government start preemptively start censoring the Internet and corporations’ economic interest is exactly the wrong thing to do.”
Translation: I joke about using power to hurt people who disagree with me on policy. But seriously, folks, this bill got way too unpopular for me to be able to support it. I think you need the powers of this bill vested differently so that it won’t cause as much of an outrage. …
Recommended podcasts:
“The Global Rise of the Informal Economy,” Slate’s The Afterword (Dec. 31, 2011): an interview with Robert Neuwirth, author of Stealth of Nations: The Global Rise of the Informal Economy, who argues that “one-half the world’s workers—close to 1.8 billion people—are involved in the informal economy in jobs that are ‘neither registered nor regulated, getting paid in cash, and, most often, avoiding income taxes.’ In researching his book, Neuwirth traveled the world, visiting markets and street vendors in Nigeria, China, Paraguay, Brazil, and around the United States.”TLS Podcast Picks: Stealth of Nations; SOPA Read Post »
From my C4SIF post:
There is nothing wrong with incrementalism. Advocates of private property and free markets want patent, copyright, and other forms of IP to be abolished, but we are also in favor of measures short of abolition that move in the right direction–shortening terms and penalties, etc. Still, it’s frustrating when some commentators identify real problems with IP law but fail to make a more fundamental diagnosis. A case in point is free market economist Alex Tabarrok, who has good criticisms of the existing patent system but who nonetheless resists calls for patent abolition and advocates other statist measures to supplement or replace the statist patent system, like multi-billion dollar taxpayer-funded innovation prize systems.
In the field of copyright, we have Google attorney and copyright lawyer William Patry, whose recent book is How to Fix Copyright (see his recent Volokh post, How to Fix Copyright, Part I). Our mutual publisher, Oxford University Press, sent me a copy a while back. Unfortunately, although Patry makes some useful criticisms of the existing copyright system, his diagnosis and prescriptions are confused (though not as bad as those of Dean Baker, who, like Tabarrok in the field of inventions, recommends taxpayer funded multibillion-dollar “artistic freedom vouchers” to promote artistic creation).
Patry realizes the current copyright system is rife with problems. But he is not willing to support copyright abolition. It is not for failure to understand the law. He is a renowned copyright scholar, author of the seminal Patry on Copyright treatise. Legal credentials are not enough, however. One must have a firm grasp of economics, and one’s political views must be rooted in the propertarian principles that inform libertarian analysis. Given a grounding in Austro-libertarian analysis, it is easy to see that the only legitimate laws are those that enforce individual property rights, and that the purpose of property rights is to permit productive and conflict-free use of scarce resources. The function of law is to make peaceful, productive use of scarce resources possible, by assigning owners to these resources based on Lockean homesteading principles. Copyright law, like patent law, is a grant of monopoly privilege–the remnant of mercantilism and censorship regimes of the past and is antithetical to the free market, competition, and private property.
William Patry on How to Fix Copyright Read Post »
Update: now podcast at KOL172.
In late 2010 I taught my first Mises Academy course, “Rethinking Intellectual Property: History, Theory, and Economics.”1 I reprised the course in Spring 2011: “Rethinking Intellectual Property: History, Theory, and Economics.”2 This was a 6-week course, which provided an overview of current intellectual property law and the history and origins of IP. (In Teaching an Online Mises Academy Course, I offer my reflections on teaching the Rethinking IP class the first time.) Here is some feedback provided by past students of this course:
“The class (everything) was perfect. Content wasn’t too deep (nor too shallow) – the reviewed material was just brilliant and the “tuning” was great for someone like myself (engineering background – no profound legal/lawyer experience). It provided all the material to really “understand” (instead of “just knowing”) all that was covered which I find always very important in a class.”
“Instruction was very comprehensive and thought provoking. The instructor was fantastic and very knowledgeable and answered every question asked.”
“Learned more then i expected, the professor seemed to really enjoy teaching the class, and the readings provided were excellent. Overall for the cost I was extremely satisfied.”
“Very interesting ideas I was not exposed to. Inexpensive, convenient, good quality.”
“It is a very fascinating topic and I was quite eager to learn about what I.P. is all about. I thought that Professor Kinsella was able to convey complicated issues to us clearly.”
“Professor Kinsella’s enthusiasm and extra links posted showed his true knowledge and interest in the subject. Great to see.”
And:
Thank you so very much for all the excellent work — very few classes have really changed my life dramatically, actually only 3 have, and all 3 were classes I took at the Mises Academy, starting with Rethinking Intellectual Property (PP350) (the other two were EH476 (Bubbles), and PP900 (Private Defense)). …
My purposes for taking the classes are: 1. just for the fun of it, 2. learning & self-education, and 3. to understand what is happening with some degree of clarity so I can eventually start being part of the solution where I live — or at least stop being part of the problem.
The IP class was a total blast — finally (finally) sound reasoning. All the (three) classes I took dramatically changed the way I see the world. I’m still digesting it all, to tell the truth. Very few events in my life have managed to make me feel like I wished I was 15 all over again. Thank you. …
[M]uch respect and admiration for all the great work done by all the members of the whole team.
Students would often give real-time feedback, in comments such as the following at the end of the lectures (these are from the actual IP-lecture chat transcripts):
(Student reaction to the first lecture of my Libertarian Legal Theory course can be found in Student Comments for First Lecture of Libertarian Legal Theory Course: Not Too Late to Sign Up!) In the meantime IP has continued to metastasize and increasingly harm property rights, capitalism, prosperity, technology, and freedom of expression–all, perversely, in the name of “property rights.” The patent smartphone wars have continued to escalate. And copyright, as I argue in here, is even worse. It threatens to enable the state to ratchet up the police state and threatens freedom on the Internet.3 The latest threat in this regard is the evil Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA.
Below is an introductory video for the course followed by the audio and slides for each of the 6 lectures. The “suggested readings” for each lecture are appended to the end of this post.
Update: the audio files may also be subscribed to in this podcast feed. (In iTunes (for Windows) you can subscribe to podcast by copying the feed address to iTunes>Advanced>Subscribe to podcast; on Macs, you can click on the link to have iTunes add it to podcasts.)
Introductory video from the Mises Blog post Kinsella Can Be Your Professor:
Lecture 1: INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IN HISTORY
Lecture 2: OVERVIEW OF JUSTIFICATIONS FOR IP; PROPERTY, SCARCITY, AND IDEAS …
Kinsella’s “Rethinking Intellectual Property” course: Audio and SlidesRead More »
Discussed on the Mises Blog in Study with Kinsella Online; Lecture 1. ↩
Discussed in Rethinking IP; and on the Mises Blog in Study with Kinsella Online and in Rethinking Intellectual Property: Kinsella’s Mises Academy Online Course. ↩
See my posts The Ominous PROTECT IP Act and the End of Internet Freedom; Copyright and the End of Internet Freedom. ↩
Kinsella’s “Rethinking Intellectual Property” course: Audio and Slides Read Post »
