Intellectual property ‘rights’ trace their origins back to copyright in literature, from which they have since expanded. With this in mind, it is fruitful to examine how authors can be compensated in the absence of copyright. Essentially, proponents of copyright in literature argue that they see no other way of compensating authors for their work. Indeed, many…

[Di Kevin Carson. Originale pubblicato su Center for a Stateless Society il 9 marzo 2017 con il titolo Time tu Use Uber’s Weapons — Against Uber. Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.] Uber, la controversa azienda corporativa mascherata da servizio di “ride-sharing”, ha recentemente provocato nuove polemiche rivelando alcuni aspetti di Greyball, il programma che permette di…

Uber, the controversial corporate employer masquerading as a “ride-sharing” service, has recently stirred up more controversy with new revelations about its Greyball program for circumventing enforcement of local taxicab monopolies. Greyball maintains a database of likely local government officials. This database is populated by users who frequently open and close the Uber app near government buildings,…

Remember the Oxfam report early last year that found sixty-two individuals owned as much wealth as the entire bottom half of humanity put together? It’s gone down to only six — that’s right, six — in the past year: Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, Amancio Ortega, Mark Zuckerberg, and Carlos Slim Helu. The total wealth held…

[Di Kevin Carson. Originale pubblicato su Center for a Stateless Society il 18 gennaio 2017 con il titolo On Lemon “Free Trade”. Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.] Nella politica americana (dai Berniecratici all’establishment neoliberista centrista, ai libertari di destra, ai nazionalisti reazionari come Trump e i suoi seguaci) c’è molto disaccordo sul TTIP e altri accordi…

There’s a lot of disagreement in American politics — from Berniecrats, to the centrist neoliberal establishment, to right-libertarians, to nationalist reactionaries like Trump and his followers — on TPP and other trade agreements. But there’s one thing they all agree on: calling it “free trade.” And they’re all wrong. At Reason (“The Neoliberal Era is…

[Di James C. Wilson. Originale pubblicato su Center for a Stateless Society il 7 gennaio 2017 con il titolo Steal This Film Review: See it, Share it, Copy it!! Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.] Se siete abbastanza interessati da leggere quanto segue, allora guardate il film. Steal This Film è disponibile gratis su Youtube e altrove su internet…

If you are interested enough to read this, you might as well just watch the movie. Steal This Film is available for free on Youtube and other locations on the internet and is less than an hour and twenty minutes in length. The film was created by a group calling itself the League of Noble Peers, for the…

[Di Kevin Carson. Originale pubblicato su Center for a Stateless Society il 24 novembre 2016 con il titolo Lamenting the “End” of What Never Began. Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.] Nick Gillespie, redattore di Reason, ha intervistato Dan Griswold di Mercatus Center (“Donald Trump and the End of Free Trade,” 21 novembre) sulla possibilità che Trump…

At Reason, editor Nick Gillespie interviews Dan Griswold of the Mercatus Center (“Donald Trump and the End of Free Trade,” Nov. 21) on Trump’s likely abandonment of TPP and his trade policies in general. Trump’s views on economics, like his views on everything else, are obviously nonsense; but they’re not nonsense because TPP embodies “free…

[Di Kevin Carson. Originale pubblicato su Center for a Stateless Society il primo novembre 2016 con il titolo Open Source Revolution Circumvents Capitalist Monopoly. Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.] Come fa notare l’amico Charles Johnson di C4SS, aggirare l’autorità statale e il monopolio capitalista è molto più efficace economicamente che fare lobbismo e spingere per le…

As my C4SS comrade Charles Johnson has pointed out, circumventing state authority and capitalist monopoly is far more cost-effective than lobbying and organizing to reform the law. This is confirmed, once again, by news of open-source hardware projects that offer much cheaper versions of two outrageously expensive medical devices: the EpiPen and the MRI machine….

The Electronic Frontier Foundation recently filed a lawsuit challenging Section 1201 of the Digital Millennial Copyright Act (DMCA) on constitutonal grounds. According to the suit, that section — which criminalizes not only the circumvention of Digital Rights Management (DRM), but criminalizes the sharing of information about how to do it — is a violation of…

The only function of “intellectual property” is to snatch scarcity from the jaws of abundance — to take goods that, thanks to the advance of human knowledge, should naturally be getting cheaper, and make them artificially expensive. This is nowhere more evident than in the war corporations are fighting against their own customers’ right to…

At Techdirt, Mike Masnick reports (“Photographer Learns to Embrace the Public Domain — And is Better Off For It,” Aug. 5) that that Swiss photographer Samuel Zeller has discovered the benefits — to his livelihood! — of putting his work in the public domain. He’s put a lot of his work into the public domain…

The heat of a presidential election campaign is a good time to reflect on the old Howard Zinn quote about voting: “Would I support one candidate against another? Yes, for two minutes—the amount of time it takes to pull the lever down in the voting booth.” But what really matters, for building a genuinely just…

If right-libertarians have a “comparative advantage,” it’s in writing by-the-numbers puff pieces on “free trade” that borrow the language of Ricardo and Cobden to defend what amounts to a totalitarian corporate lockdown on the world economy. This time it’s Richard Ebeling of the Future of Freedom Foundation (“Free Trade Versus Political Fallacies,” June 15) doing…

Michael Gibson tries to demonstrate the infeasibility of a universal basic income by showing that people actually like to work, as evidenced by the increase of hours relative to increased prosperity witnessed during the 20th and 21st centuries. According to him, a UBI would not work as major disincentives are created, which Gibson shows by…

Throughout American history centralized, federally subsidized infrastructure projects have been a recurring theme for plutocratic interests. Under the Whigs (“internal improvements”) and the Gilded Age GOP (railroad land grants) it was promoted by parties that unabashedly identified themselves as advocates for national commercial interests. But with the rise of the Progressive movement at the turn…

Habitual apologists for agribusiness like Reason‘s Ron Bailey gushingly cite studies that show glyphosate, the “active ingredient” in Roundup, is unlikely to cause cancer in the concentrations that appear in supermarket produce. But as it turns out, the focus on glyphosate may actually have been a distraction. There’s evidence (“New Evidence About the Dangers of…