I am pleased to announce the completion and immediate availability of a manifesto for the copyright abolitionist, as well as a more academic companion paper going into detail on some of the claims made in the manifesto, A Social Utility Model of Intellectual Property Enforcement. These may both be found on the new Writings page, which will hopefully grow as more thoughts from the blog coalesce into broader, more rigorous, and more polished form. These may be regarded as finished products, where the blog is for working out nascent thoughts.
Let me know if you find typos, factual errors, logical errata, or just things to improve upon. These will then be incorporated into future editions.
Download the Manifesto » (PDF, 191k)
Download A Social Utility Model of Intellectual Property Enforcement » (PDF, 256k)
The new Writings section has also bumped ResEdit Pro off the downloads page. Classic was already long in the tooth when I abandoned it in 2006, and 4 years later, there was no reason to keep it except for historical interest. If you’re still dying to have it for whatever reason, let me know and I can send it.
8 Responses
Jan 25 at 10:58 pm
dang cam. these are all really good points. i never thought about information being treated as a service versus a commodity. i also never thought about how if the the marginal cost to produce a copy is virtually 0, the marginal rev should be 0. and im an econ major -_- ;
I need to think more about it, especially some of the moral aspects, but I really like the arguments you make here. That’s like a whole thesis paper and you did it just for fun!
Jan 25 at 11:58 pm
Thanks! Though I actually did use the latter as a term paper for 520, hahah.
Jan 26 at 12:20 am
haha, i was going to say – if i were you i would find anyway possible to use one of them for a class. what did your prof think?
Jan 26 at 1:07 am
It was a final paper so I unfortunately didn’t get any feedback on the final. But he liked the idea, and I did well in the class, so it must have been at least ok.
Jan 26 at 12:15 pm
nice.
do you think it will still be possible to have movies such as avatar or anything with outrageous budgets without copyright laws?
and what do you think about patents and inventors? should they still be protected?
Jan 26 at 3:49 pm
I think movies like Avatar are at this point like the olympic victories of the Communist countries – they’re nice to have, but not worth the cost associated in market terms. The central government poured resources into intense athletic training while everyone else was starving. Not quite as dramatic, but same principle – copyright enables them to do something they wouldn’t have otherwise been able to, but at a pretty big cost. Of course, production costs will no doubt continue to fall, so I’m certain that there would continue to be things like that farther in the future.
As for patents, the case is a bit less clear. The maximum of the total utility curve is very close to zero protection for copyrights, just because it’s not hard to monetize creative output in other ways and it’s a lot easier to overdo protections than underdo them. For patents, the maximum is probably farther away, so there’s a better case that “best guess at the optimum” might actually be better than zero protection.
Alternatively, there may not even be a qualitative distinction between patents and copyrights that holds water. In short, I’m still thinking about that one.
Jan 26 at 6:32 pm
I read your treatise and forwarded to a friend who is a successful copyright lawyer in Atlanta (He also teaches at Emory). Hopefully he will give us a response!
Jan 31 at 12:25 am
Awesome, let me know what he thinks when he gets back to you!