Right now on Amazon, in the "Intellectual Property" legal books subcategory, my Against Intellectual Property (Amazon link) is ranked #22, and Boldrin and Levine's Against Intellectual Monopoly (Amazon link) is #48. Eat my dust, suckas! :)

Interestingly, both books are available for free online, yet the print editions are still selling well.

Details from the L.A. Times:

Caltech economics professor R. Preston McAfee finds it annoying that students and faculty haven't looked harder for alternatives to the exorbitant prices. McAfee wrote a well-regarded open-source economics textbook and gave it away -- online. But although the text, released in 2007, has been adopted at several prestigious colleges, including Harvard and Claremont-McKenna, it has yet to make a dent in the wider textbook market.

"I was disappointed in the uptake," McAfee said recently at an outdoor campus cafe. "But I couldn't continue assigning idiotic books that are starting to break $200."

McAfee is one of a band of would-be reformers who are trying to beat the high cost -- and, they say, the dumbing down -- of college textbooks by writing or promoting open-source, no-cost digital texts. ... "What makes us rich as a society is what we know and what we can do," he said. "Anything that stands in the way of the dissemination of knowledge is a real problem."

McAfee said he wrote his open-source book because the traditional textbook market is broken. Textbook and college supply prices nearly tripled between 1986 and 2004, an audit by the federal Government Accountability Office found in 2005.

Read the whole thing here.

Then, if you want to learn something about economics, download Professor McAfee's textbook here.

Also check out the Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching [MERLOT] here.

The United States thinks of itself as a free economy with lots of competition. But I am often struck by the number of petty monopolies that exist. Here is one in Montgomery County Maryland where a woman, certified to massage people, can't massage her favorite patients, horses link here. Why? Because to massage horses, you have to be a veterinarian. The case gets worse. She has also been informed that chiropractors are specifically forbidden from practicing on animals. She is suing to be allowed to massage animals but is being opposed in court by the state veterinary board and the state chiropractic board.

Doesn't survive the laugh test, does it? It would be of interest to add all these cases up and see what they cost the public.

From time to time, there have been stories about countries asserting ownership of pathogens for a variety of diseases. Indonesia's Minister of Health is the latest, and the story took a darker turn when the Indonesian government accused U.S. Naval Medical Research Unit Two (NAMRU-2) scientists of profiteering off its "sovereign" viruses and allegedly manufacturing the H5N1 bird flu in a biological warfare scheme link here. As a practical matter, the H5N1 strain is not limited to Indonesia and the fear is that the most deadly strain will cross national borders and kill millions before an effective vaccine can be developed. But it is also in Indonesia's interest to have the world working on cures for its own benefit.

This isn't the usual sort of intellectual property, but the monopoly that Indonesia wants to create is certainly akin to that of copyright and equally objectionable.

Recently, re-listening to the 1991 lecture "Ayn Rand, Intellectual Property Rights, and Human Liberty," by Objectivist attorney Murray Franck, I was struck by one of quotes given in defense of IP. During his lecture, Franck reads (most of) the following quote approvingly:

"When we come to weigh the rights of the several sorts of property which can be held by man, and in this judgment take into consideration only the absolute question of justice, leaving out the limitations of expediency and prejudice, it will be clearly seen that intellectual property is after all the only absolute possession in the world. The man who brings out of the nothingness the child of his thoughts has rights therein which cannot belong to any other sort of property. Land or chattels are pre-existing in some form, and the rights therein are limited in many ways, and are held in the great service of the world, but the inventor of a book or other contrivance of thought holds his property, as a god holds it, by right of creation; with his silence or inaction the sustenance and advance of millions yet to be may vanish into the great darkness again. His brain has brought the seed out of the infinite, planted it in good soil, tended it with the care that only the sower can feel. Surely the world should not deny him a share of the increase he has brought about, and if he, giving the reversion of his property for all time to his race, is granted the product of his creation for half a score of years, he should surely be secured against being plundered by the law as well as by the lawless."

Franck says the quote is from one "Forvold Solberg" [sp?], "a former register of copyrights", but my google-fu indicates that the author is one Nathan Shaler, Professor of paleontology and geology at Harvard from 1869-1906, in his Thoughts on the Nature of Intellectual Property, and Its Importance to the State (1878). It's perhaps a bit ironic that the author quoted approvingly by an Objectivist in support of IP was a racist, one-time Creationist, and author of a book about some idea's "importance to the state"!

In any event, the latter part of the quote is extremely utilitarian: "the world" should give the innovator or creator "a share" of the wealth he contributes... by giving him a monopoly on it for about ten ("half a score") years.

The first part--about how inventors are "like gods" calls to mind Rand's embarrassing justification for smoking--that it's symbolic of fire "tamed" at man's fingertips.

The quote also emphasizes very explicitly that Randians and other IP advocates believe "creation" is an independent source of rights: you hold your intellectual creation like a god, "by right of creation."

I note also that Franck says in the lecture that copyrights should survive in perpetuity.

Incidentally, I graduated from law school in 1991, the year of this lecture, and listened to it soon after, about the time I was beginning to practice IP law (1993 or so). I had recently morphed from an initial flirtation with Objectivism to Rothbardian anarcho-libertarianism. I was very interested in this lecture, since I had long struggled with Rand's weak justification of intellectual property--which was especially troubling since she claimed that "patents are the heart and core of property rights." The lecture failed to convince me; I kept searching for better justifications of IP than I'd seen from Randians. After shooting blanks for a few years, I finally came to the realization that I was unable to find a justification for IP ... because it's unjustifiable and contrary to individual rights. By 1995 I had reached my current views on IP, as can be seen in this exchange between me, Franck, and David Kelley, in the IOS Journal: Murray I. Franck, "Intellectual Property Rights: Are Intangibles True Property," IOS Journal 5, no. 1 (April 1995); Kinsella, Letter on Intellectual Property Rights, IOS Journal 5, no. 2 (June 1995), pp. 12-13; David Kelley, "Response to Kinsella," IOS Journal 5, no. 2 (June 1995), p. 13; and Murray I. Franck, "Intellectual and Personality Property," IOS Journal 5, no. 3 September 1995), p. 7 (all of these except the first are here; I find only this bad link to Franck's first piece).

There is an interesting op-ed in today's New York Times by Tim Wu warning of the dangers of allowing one or two large telecoms to control the bandwidth of the internet. He then goes on to argue that reforming the rules for allocating spectrum could enhance the competition the wire-based telecoms face by allowing competitive innovation in the provision of wi-fi service.

While the point about the need for regulatory reform in the way the spectrum is allocated is well-taken, what the piece fails to address is the whole debate over net neutrality and whether the large telecoms should be declared common carriers subject to the fair access rules that govern how truck lines and freight trains operate in the market.

Wu's analogy of the telecom monopoly/duopoly to OPEC is reasonable, but OPEC is an international cartel that is beyond the reach of any particular nation's antitrust laws. AT&T, Verizon and Comcast aren't, and I would hope that with the passing of the Bush administration, our government would get serious about the need to regulate these monopolies. Enhanced competition is obviously a good thing, but given that the telecoms have been successful in preventing cities (Philadelphia comes to mind) from putting up their own public wi-fi services, the playing field would hardly be level even if the FCC managed to come up with a good set of policies for allocating the spectrum. And, given the lobbying clout of the telecoms, my guess is that good publicly-oriented policies won't have much of a chance unless the Justice Department is standing behind the FCC waving the big antitrust stick.

While it is still minor league, the amount of free downloadable material continues to grow. Here is one source, a website called Legal Torrents, which uses the Bittorrent software to distribute Creative Commons licensed material link here. Have a look at what is currently available here. All legal and fast to download.

The more people who come looking and download, the more licensed material is likely to be made available.

Variety reports here on how copyrights have actually prevented the classic Fugitive television program from being re-distributed in its original form.

One of the reasons I tend to dismiss the notion of 'moral rights' for artists is because of how it is selectively enforced (in addition to the obvious dangers of creating a mutant form of 'super-copyright). The Fugitive is a clear example. If the concept applies to painted canvases, then why not television shows?

Of course this is not a new phenomenon. My own personal experience (and confession) with the problem can be found:

Here and here and here.

Wired reports on this astonishing claim, and provides a copy of the MPAA's legal brief to back it up.

Rasmus Fleischer, a Swedish anti-copyright activist, has the lead essay in Cato Unbound on "The Future of Copyright".

Money quote:

Believers in copyright keep dreaming about building a digital simulation of a 20th-century copyright economy, based on scarcity and with distinct limits between broadcasting and unit sales. I don't believe such a stabilization will ever occur, but I fear that this vision of copyright utopia is triggering an escalation of technology regulations running out of control and ruining civil liberties. Accepting a laissez-faire attitude regarding software development and communication infrastructure can prevent such an escalation.