Intellectual Property — A Libertarian Critique
Posted by Kevin Carson on May 14, 2009 in Studies • 5 commentsIn 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.
Download: Intellectual Property — A Libertarian Critique
Excellent!
Great article!
Just a suggestion: it would be nice if the quoted sections were within actual quotes, or a different font.
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.
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!
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/lm0039.cfm