On the Sept. 3, 2008 show of
Free Talk Live, the excellent libertarian radio program, there was an interesting discussion with a caller who is an author and has changed his mind about IP--he realized that by giving online versions of his book away on Amazon, he can sell more copies of it.
The recorded show is here; the IP discussion starts at the beginning, with the first caller, and lasts for a few minutes.
In other news, Google's new Chrome browser "is based on the open-source WebKit architecture, and Google claims that its code will be open source, so it's unlikely that the company is trying to corner the market on browser functionality, since innovations are eminently copyable." I.e., Google's not trying to lock Chrome's code down with copyright. It's not afraid of competition.
Google has more than a hundred patents (including one that issued just this week), dozens more pending, and more than one hundred trademarks either active or pending. I suspect that Google's apparent altruism is more marketing ploy than some sort of admission that IP is bad or not in Google's best interests. Or it may be that policing this particular IP would be more trouble than Google believes it is worth. In any case, I will wait on throwing any ticker tape parades celebrating the demise of IP at Google.
FYI, Google's key algorithms are not patented, as The Economist (and other publications) have pointed out numerous times. Instead they are protected by trade secrecy. Anyone is free to crack their codes by reverse engineering them, but they are complicated and evidently impossible to do.
Google is also an IP chump-also ran compared to Microsoft, which has thousands of patents.
