By Steven Tjoe
On Thursday March 13, the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s (DMCA) notice and takedown system. Among the witnesses testifying at the hearing was CPIP Fellow Professor Sean O’Connor (Washington University School of Law), who offered his insights on Section 512 from his unique position as a law professor, former musician, and counsel to web businesses. Read more
CPIP’s Mark Schultz authored an excellent essay today in TechPolicyDaily.com advocating intellectual property as a source of personal and economic freedom. The essay, “A Free Market Perspective on Intellectual Property Rights,” describes parallels between physical property and intellectual property and dispels several denigrating myths about intellectual property’s role in a free market. Read more
[Cross posted at Truth on the Market]
Today’s public policy debates frame copyright policy solely in terms of a “trade off” between the benefits of incentivizing new works and the social deadweight losses imposed by the access restrictions imposed by these (temporary) “monopolies.” Read more
Note: This post was cross-posted at the CATO Unbound on 2/1/2013. The January 2013 issue of CATO Unbound feature a debate on copyright reform, Opportunities for Copyright Reform This post responds to the discussion in that issue, but it also stands alone as a critique of copyright reform proposals that favor to consider the importance of creators. Read more
[Cross Posted to Truth on the Market on December 12, 2012]
In Part One, I addressed the argument by some libertarians that so-called “traditional property rights in land” are based in inductive, ground-up “common law court decisions,” but that intellectual property (IP) rights are top-down, artificial statutory entitlements. Read more
[Cross Posted to Truth on the Market on December 7, 2012]
In libertarian critiques of intellectual property (IP) rights, such as copyrights and patents, it’s common to the hear the claim that “traditional property rights in land” is based in inductive, ground-up “common law court decisions,” but that IP rights are top-down, artificial statutory entitlements. Read more
Note: This post was cross-posted at the CATO Unbound on 1/14/2013. The January 2013 issue of CATO Unbound feature a debate on copyright reform, Opportunities for Copyright Reform This post responds to the discussion in that issue, but it also stands alone as a critique of copyright reform proposals that fail to understand how copyright’s nature as a property right allows for tremendous flexibility via private ordering
Derek Khanna’s lead essay, as well as his memo for the Republican Study Committee, urge libertarians and conservatives to rally around copyright reform as both good policy and good politics. Read more
Cross-posted to the Copyright Alliance Blog
A few days ago, the Republican Study Committee signaled, and then retreated from, a vast change in the GOP’s attitude toward copyright. It released and then retracted a now infamous policy brief entitled “Three Myths about Copyright Law and Where to Start to Fix It. Read more
