Two Kinds of Income Inequality

Income inequality is back in the news, propelled by an Oxfam International report and President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address. The question is whether government needs to do something about this — or whether government needs to undo many things.

Measuring income inequality is no simple thing, which is one source of disagreement between those who think inequality is a problem and those who think it isn’t. But it is possible to cut through the underbrush and make some points clear.

We can identify two kinds of economic inequality, and let’s keep this in mind as we contemplate what, if anything, government ought to do.

Read it here.

TGIF: Monopoly and Aggression

The concepts monopoly and aggression are intimately related, like lock and key, or mother and son. You cannot fully understand the first without understanding the second.

Read it here.

TGIF: Ownership and Ideas

Like many libertarians, I’ve learned a lot from Murray Rothbard on a wide variety of subjects. Of course, no one gets everything right, especially someone as intellectually ambitious, multidisciplinary, and prolific as Rothbard. Nevertheless, reading the work of the man who left such a mark on the modern libertarian movement is as profitable as it is pleasurable. 

While rereading For a New Liberty (first published in 1973) recently, I confess I was puzzled, which is not the frame of mind Rothbard normally leaves me in. In deriving property rights, he used the example of a “sculptor fashioning a work of art out of clay and other materials.”

Read TGIF here.

TGIF: Rights Violations Aren't the Only Bads

The erroneous belief that only conduct for which a coercive response is appropriate — that is, rights violations — may be condemned leads too easily to the corollary error that if some conduct is deserving of condemnation, it must somehow be a rights violation. The initiation of force is not the only bad thing in the world.

The rest is here.

IP's Purpose Is to Encourage Innovation? Ha!

See this.

Kinsella, Tucker, and Me on IP and Obamacare

Here's the video of my Liberty Talk with Stephan Kinsella and Jeff Tucker. I thoroughly enjoyed this.

 

Aaron Swartz, RIP

I highly commend Glenn Greenwald's article about Aaron Swartz, the young genius and passionate champion of Internet freedom, who recently committed suicide after being targeted by a Javert-like federal prosecutor. Swartz's story is a sad commentary on the American justice [!] system.

Contra-IP

My article "Patent Nonsense" was published in The American Conservative and posted online.

TGIF: Slave Labor and Intellectual Property

In a recent discussion about copyright, my interlocutor suggested that the unauthorized publishing of a book in effect makes a slave of the author because the publisher profits off the author’s labor without consent. But that begs the question by assuming what is in dispute, namely that the publisher took something that belongs to the author. But what?

The rest of TGIF: Slave Labor and Intellectual Property is here.

What Intellectual Property Has Wrought

Want to know the cost of bogus intellectual property rights? Read "A Trove of Historic Jazz Recordings has Found a Home in Harlem, But You Can’t Hear Them."

An amazing collection of historic live jazz recordings is in the possession of the National Jazz Museum in Harlem, but we might never hear them. Why?

"The potential copyright liability that could attach to redistribution of these recordings is so large—and, more importantly, so uncertain—that there may never be a public distribution of the recordings," wrote David G. Post, a law professor at Temple University in Philadelphia, on the Volokh Conspiracy blog. "Tracking down all the parties who may have a copyright interest in these performances, and therefore an entitlement to royalty payments (or to enjoining their distribution), is a monumental—and quite possibly an impossible—task."

Have We Won?

Cheryl found this sign (click to enlarge) at a store called Intellectual Property in downtown Austin. She couldn't resist.

The sign says, "Store Closing." Write your own caption.

Kindle DRM Cracked

A blow for freedom...

From BBC News:

Hacker cracks Kindle's copyright

An Israeli hacker claims to have broken the copyright protection on Amazon's Kindle e-reader, reports say.

The hack will allow the ebooks stored on the reader to be transferred as pdf files to any other device.

The hacker, known as Labba, responded to a challenge posted on Israeli hacking forum, hacking.org.

It is the latest in a series of Digital Rights Management hacks, the most famous being the reverse engineering of iTunes.

The Kindle e-book reader has been very successful since it was launched in the US in 2007.

Amazon hopes to have sold a million devices by the end of the year.

It leaves it to individual publishers whether they want to apply DRM but books in its main proprietary format .azw, cannot be transferred to other devices.

It did not immediately respond to the news but it is likely it will attempt to patch its DRM software.

DRM has long divided opinion. While rights holders regard it as a crucial tool to protect copyright, consumers tend to hate it because it limits what can be done with content.

"DRM is not an effective way of preventing copying nor is it a good way of making sales. There isn't a customer out there saying 'what I need is an electronic book that does less," novelist and co-editor of the Boing Boing blog Cory Doctorow told the BBC when the Kindle was launched.

As soon as a new DRM system is active, hackers begin to try and break it.

Most famously Jon Lech Johansen, known as DVD Jon, cracked the copy protection on DVDs in 1999.

He went on to break the copyright protection on iTunes, leading Apple to offer DRM-free music.

DVD Jon now runs a company with an application to take the pain out of moving different types of content between devices.

Patents: End Them. Don't Mend Them

Freeman authors David Levine and Michele Boldrin call for an end to patents in this Christian Science Monitor article. A taste:

[I]ntellectual property does not increase innovation and creation. Extending IP rights may modestly boost the incentive for innovation, but this positive effect is wiped away by the negative effect of creating monopolies. There is simply no evidence that strengthening patent regimes increases innovation or economic productivity. In fact, some evidence shows that increased protection even decreases innovation. The main finding is that making it easier to get patents increases … patenting!

Amazon Promises Not to Trespass and Steal Again

Here's what Amazon has to say about its trespass against Kindle owners and its forced "buy-back" of copies of 1984 and Animal Farm:

These books were added to our catalog using our self-service platform by a third-party who did not have the rights to the books. When we were notified of this by the rights holder, we removed the illegal copies from our systems and from customers’ devices, and refunded customers. We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers’ devices in these circumstances.

"[I]n the future we will not remove books from customers' device in these circumstances." We have them on the record now. Let's see what happens.

HT: Peter Kafka.

Books Vanishing from Kindles

David Pogue of the New York Times reports:

This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid -- for thought they owned.

But no, apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by this author from people's Kindles and credited their accounts for the price.

This is ugly for all kinds of reasons. Amazon says that this sort of thing is "rare," but that it can happen at all is unsettling; we've been taught to believe that e-books are, you know, just like books, only better. Already, we've learned that they're not really like books, in that once we're finished reading them, we can't resell or even donate them. But now we learn that all sales may not even be final.

As one of my readers noted, it's like Barnes & Noble sneaking into our homes in the middle of the night, taking some books that we've been reading off our nightstands, and leaving us a check on the coffee table.

You want to know the best part? The juicy, plump, dripping irony?

The author who was the victim of this Big Brotherish plot was none other than George Orwell. And the books were "1984" and "Animal Farm."

Scary.

Novelist Gagged by Judge

The U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, two weeks ago issued a preliminary but indefinite injunction against publishing, distributing, or advertising of an "unauthorized sequel" to J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye titled 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye. The text of the preliminary injunction against Frederik Colting, writing as John David California, is here.

Everything hinges on whether California's book is deemed a parody. If so, it can go ahead. If not, it goes to the shredder. Seems like an odd task for a judge or jury.

Thus another demonstration that so-called intellectual property requires the suppression of freedom. Despite our proclaimed belief in freedom and the First Amendment, as things now stand you may not publish a novel about someone who seems to be the Holden Caulfield from Catcher in the Rye. (The name does not appear in California's book.) Why? Because Salinger claims to "own" Holden Caulfield. Whatever the heck that means.

"Kindle's DRM Rears Its Ugly Head"

Dan Cohen had a frustrating time with his Kindle and iPhone relating to DRM. He tells about it here and here.

The "bottom line":

You are able to redownload your books an unlimited number of times to any specific device.

Any one time the books can be on a finite number of devices. In most cases that means you can have the same book on six different devices.

Unfortunately the publishers decide how many licenses, that is devices, a book can be on at any one time. While most of the time that will be five or six different devices there will be times when it's only one device.

At the present time there is no way to know how many devices can be licensed prior to buying the book. [Emphasis added.]

I guess we shouldn't be surprised.

Cross-posted at Against Monopoly.

Against Intellectual Monoply

I've neglected to note--and praise--the publication of Against Intellectual Monopoly, a multidisciplinary case against patents and copyrights by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine, two pro-market, pro-property economists. If you are interested in the subject, this is the book to read.

Make sure, also, to read their recent Freeman article, co-written with Alessandro Nuvolari, on how the steam-engine patents delayed rather than encouraged innovation.

The Slippery Slope of Intellectual "Property" Law

"[T]he [recording] industry maintains that it is illegal for someone who has legally purchased a CD to transfer that music into his computer.

"The industry's lawyer in the case, Ira Schwartz, argues in a brief filed earlier this month that the MP3 files [Jeffrey] Howell [of Scottsdale, Ariz.] made on his computer from legally bought CDs are 'unauthorized copies' of copyrighted recordings."

--Washington Post, Dec. 30, 2007

Hat tip: Jacob Hornberger

Cross-posted at Liberty & Power.