Intellectual property, despite the name, doesn’t quite work like regular property. A look at intellectual property markets highlight problems with a pure free-market approach that aren’t necessarily visible with other markets.
Jun 252010
Purchasing books on the Kindle has always struck me as a bit of a Faustian bargain: once you enter the Kindle ecosystem and purchase some books, those books are forever locked to Amazon’s e-reader. Now Amazon has made it easier for small-scale publishers and authors to opt-out.
Dec 122009
That publishers and authors (or their estates) should be arguing over rights to production electronic editions is no surprise. This sort of dispute is a standard part of contract law, and comes up anytime a new market not anticipated in a contract opens up. Can traditional publishers fend off this move through litigation and forceful contract negotiations? Or will we see increasing alternatives to traditional publishers in the e-book realm?
Worth reading and considering is a new draft article by Professor Steven Shavell that proposes abolishing copyright on academic works.
Jul 102009
A recurring theme for me is the difficulty of keeping markets “open,” in the sense of empowering customers and users with information and choice, while still permitting businesses to grow and innovate.
Jul 042009
Brett Trout has a useful introduction to “fair use” up on BlawgIT. The goal is to help you “spot the issues” and avoid some common urban legends. Recommended.
Jun 292009
Michael Nielsen wrote a stellar piece dealing with disruptive changes that doom old business models: newspapers and science publishers, to mention his examples. He does a particularly good job at explaining how this could happen even without anyone doing anything wrong or stupid.
Judge Posner recently suggested that copyright law might need to be expanded to protect the news industry, including barring linking to copyrighted content or paraphrasing it.
Jun 242009
Especially important to everyone in Canada – but important to everyone, since copyright and IP are increasingly international issues due to attempts at harmonization (WIPO, for example) – comes this expose by Michael Geist on the undue influence pro-copyright lobbyist organizations have had on Canadian policy documents.
The television industry is where newspapers were 10 years ago – in denial that they need to change their business model. They have tried, on occasion, to argue that skipping commercials is “stealing” and similar types of arguments. They are, as Henry points out, still making money – so they can afford to ignore the changes. I predict that, as inevitable as the death of their current business is, their attempt to legislate content protections is as inevitable.
Jun 062009
Image via CrunchBase
Speaking in the context of technology, Michael Crandell at GigaOM writes:
Take yourself back for a moment to 1990, to the era of dueling operating systems: OS/2 and Windows. At the time, many people still used MS-DOS, and Windows was new (and klunky). Microsoft had cooperated with IBM to create OS/2 to overcome the [...]
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