Against Monopoly
defending the right to innovate
Blogroll
Monopoly corrupts. Absolute monopoly corrupts absolutely.
Copyright Notice: We don't think much of copyright, so you can do what you want with the content on this blog. Of course we are hungry for publicity, so we would be pleased if you avoided plagiarism and gave us credit for what we have written. We encourage you not to impose copyright restrictions on your "derivative" works, but we won't try to stop you. For the legally or statist minded, you can consider yourself subject to a Creative Commons Attribution License.
Open Source Games
A new blog on Gaming with Free Software by Shirish from India. He also draws our attention to copysouth.org - addressing some of the same issues we consider here.
[Posted at 06/05/2010 08:21 AM by David K. Levine on Blogroll 
comments(0)]
Free Association
I also wanted to shamelessly plug my own blog, Free Association. It covers more than IP issues, but those are definitely key.
[Posted at 07/15/2009 10:37 AM by Sheldon Richman on Blogroll comments(0)]
FEE's Blog
The blog of the Foundation for Economic Education is Anything Peaceful. Obviously anything peaceful includes using your physical property peacefully even if that involves using ideas generated by others.
[Posted at 07/15/2009 10:32 AM by Sheldon Richman on Blogroll comments(0)]
Rufus Pollock
I met Rufus in Cambridge (England) last week. He is working tirelessly trying to convince UK and European politicians to show some common sense on copyright law. He has his own blog about both the politics of IP and his own scientific work rufuspollock.org. I'll be posting later about some of his scientific work. In the meanwhile, you can catch up on political events in Europe at
and he recommends this site as well.
[Posted at 06/15/2009 06:09 AM by David K. Levine on Blogroll comments(0)]
The Knowledge Ecology
Andrés Bucio of the School of Environmental Sciences at University of East Anglia has been contrasting environmental policy (not enough property) with IP policy (too much property). He's started the Intellectual Footprint blog on the topic.
[Posted at 05/06/2009 11:33 AM by David K. Levine on Blogroll comments(0)]
The Knowledge Ecology
Andrés Bucio of the School of Environmental Sciences at University of East Anglia has been contrasting environmental policy (not enough property) with IP policy (too much property). He's started the Intellectual Footprint blog on the topic.
[Posted at 05/06/2009 11:32 AM by David K. Levine on Blogroll comments(0)]
Against Monopoly
Sorry, we have been deficient in updating our blogroll. The Von Mises institute is a libertarian think tank in east Alabama. They do research and publishing - check out Stephan's book Against Intellectual Property - only six bucks. The also have a blog Mises Blog on libertarian issues, including IP. Plus they are doing a special on Michele's and my book - probably later this week.
[Posted at 01/12/2009 12:23 PM by David K. Levine on Blogroll comments(0)]
Modesty
Crosbie Fitch has been posting interesting comments here for a while, but talk about not blowing your own horn. He hasn't mentioned that he also posts regularly at Digital Productions on IP issues. Check it out.
[Posted at 07/23/2008 09:27 AM by David K. Levine on Blogroll comments(1)]
Patent trolls increasingly exposed
We have all been painfully aware of patent trolls, those monopolists who exploit their possession of patents, often of questionable validity, to extract money from users who find it more attractive to pay off the "owner" than to challenge him in court. They now have their own website providing a running record of the damage they impose. Trolltracker link.
Great news. Have a look.
[Posted at 12/08/2007 08:02 PM by John Bennett on Blogroll comments(0)]
Slaving the Slavers
We'll get to slavery at the end of this post. I want to highlight some of the good guys for a change. The Open Knowledge Foundation - well the name pretty much describes it. It came to my attention through Rufus Pollock, who is a Ph.D student at Cambridge (England) doing research on cumulative innovation. Rufus has been active in Europe with several important organizations: the FFII, the major grass-roots organization lobbying against software patents in the EU - we've dodged the bullet on that one so far, as well as being involved with the UK Creative Commons.
So what does this have to do with slavery? You may recall that while not as pernicious as slavery, the mind-control aspect of intellectual property has many of the same problems as slavery - a form of property that has always been opposed by economists. One of the most interesting posts on the Open Knowledge Foundation website is the post about data on the slave trade: which is itself enslaved in chains of intellectual property.
[Posted at 06/06/2007 07:29 AM by David K. Levine on Blogroll comments(0)]
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