Mutual Exchange is the Center’s goal in two senses — we favor a society rooted in peaceful, voluntary cooperation, and we seek to foster understanding through ongoing dialogue. Mutual Exchange will provide opportunities for conversation about issues that matter to the Center’s audience. A lead essay, deliberately provocative, will be followed by responses from inside…

No último exemplo de um fenômeno tão antigo quanto o estado, Stan McCoy — ex-chefe de representação comercial dos Estados Unidos especializado em “propriedade intelectual”, que escreveu o Acordo Comercial Anticontrafação e o capítulo sobre PI da Parceria Trans-Pacífica — acaba de receber um confortável emprego na Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). Ele é…

In the latest example of a phenomenon as old as the state itself, Stan McCoy – formerly the US Trade Representative’s chief “intellectual property” negotiator, who wrote ACTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership’s IP chapter – was just given a cushy job at the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). He’s one of over a dozen…

Libertarians tend to see two worlds: one with private property that works reasonably well, and one without that farcically implodes. What they often miss, however, is that this dichotomy is conditional. Private property isn’t morally meritorious or great in itself, but only insofar as it is the best and only way to avoid conflict given…

The modern libertarian case against so-called intellectual property (IP) has been building steadily since the late 1980s, when I first encountered it. Since then, an impressive volume of work has been produced from many perspectives: economics, political economy, sociology, moral and political philosophy, history, and no doubt more. It is indeed a case to be…

For years now the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has been trying its best, unsuccessfully, to enforce its “intellectual property” claims upon those who would dare share and distribute media. They are of course not the only ones trying to get IP enforced; we have seen the same trends in music and gaming. Since…

Naomi Klein, to a casual reader, might seem to hate the free market. Or at least she hates what most people think of as the free market, based on the conventional use of that term by mainstream politicians and journalists. And the usual vulgar libertarian suspects (see here and here and here) have reacted with exactly the kind of by-the-numbers polemics you’d…

The strongest argument in favor of the fiction of “intellectual property” is consequential rather than moral: Creators of good things — novels, songs, drugs, what have you — we are told, will essentially go on strike if government doesn’t guarantee their profits by vesting them with monopoly “rights” to ideas. Instead of writing that next…

Back in the ’90s, the Financial Times referred to the G8 countries and the Washington Consensus they enforced as a “de facto world government.” As if we needed any reminder that such a global corporate regime exists in practice, consider the Trans-Pacific Partnership currently under negotiation. Although in theory the authority of all treaties signed…

Em 399 antes da Era Cristã, pelo crime de “corromper os jovens” e debilitar a crença nos deuses tradicionais de Atenas, Sócrates foi sentenciado a beber taça de cicuta. Se o objetivo era silenciar a voz de Sócrates, é seguro dizer que o tiro saiu totalmente pela culatra. A história de Sócrates só fica em…

In 399 BCE, for the crime of “corrupting the youth” and undermining belief in the customary gods of Athens, Socrates was sentenced to drink a cup of hemlock. If the goal was to silence Socrates’ voice, it’s safe to say that plan backfired in a big way. The story of Socrates stands second in the…

How many times have you heard a politician, addressing some issue of regulatory policy, speak of “all the stakeholders” being at “the table?” That phrase has become popular recently, in particular among sponsors of maximalist copyright law proposals like SOPA and ACTA. “All the stakeholders had seats at the table — the RIAA, MPAA, Microsoft…

“You wouldn’t steal a car, you wouldn’t steal a handbag, you wouldn’t steal a television, you wouldn’t steal a movie.” Sounds familiar doesn’t it? For years the copyright industry has been telling us that piracy is a crime. However, recently another supposedly heinous copyright crime has been added to the list: exposing racism. On September…

The latest threat to internet freedom is an expanded and strengthened CFAA, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

C4SS Media presents Charles Johnson‘s “Anticopyright“, read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford.

Thomas L. Knapp: O problema da “propriedade intelectual” é que, em nossos dias — graças ao progresso tecnológico — quase toda escassez de produtos de informação TEM de ser artificial, isto é, criada pelo governo.

Knapp: Monopolists don’t like living in the real world, and politicians traffic in telling them they don’t have to.

Trevor Hultner: La solución al problema del secuestro de patentes no es “regularlo” con medidas erróneas o pasos a medias en la “dirección correcta”.

Hultner: The solution to the problem of patent trolling is not to “regulate” it with faulty measures and half-steps in the “right direction.”

Não acredite naquela de que os funcionários do estado “trabalham para nós.” Dê uma olhada onde eles trabalharam antes de entrar no “serviço público” e veja para onde eles irão depois disso. Adivinhe só: Eles estão trabalhando lá, também, já agora.