Random House is claiming to own exclusive digital rights to books published in print decades ago. The old author’s contract specified print rights – which is bad enough. Now Random House claim that this applies to digital rights: so if you wrote a book twenty years ago, you do not enjoy the legal right to blog so much as a chapter of your own work, much less reuse it or publish it with some other publisher. Yes, your own work, words of the infinitely reproduceable sort or “owned” by a private monopoly even without contract. This is quite simply a violation of human rights, and authors have every reason to be outraged at the claim. This IP stuff gives capitalism as very bad name.
Source link: http://archive.mises.org/11241/speaking-of-human-rights-violations/
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Jeffrey:
You are going to love this one. Patents = Innovation!
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Recessions-latest-victim-US-cnnm-2629088675.html;_ylt=Aq_KJ9Afdi9O.0XZX2FN1Hi7YWsA;_ylu=X3oDMTFhdXRzNmJrBHBvcwMyBHNlYwNzcGVjaWFsRmVhdHVyZXMEc2xrA3JlY2Vzc2lvbnNsYQ–?x=0
Contributing to the decline in US patent filings and the increase in filings elsewhere may be the deteriorating business environment created as an unintended consequence of the increasing interventionist mindset, a decline in the rule of law, debasement of the currency and the ongoing encroachment of individual liberties. Just what Mises would have predicted.
ip is lantana in the garden of ideas.
Most authors fight ugly fights against their publisher. Royalties are often being held back. The abusive privilege of – partly at least – copyright, made it often possible for large corporations in Europe but especially so in the USA to strip the righteous owner from original exploitation rights (whoever that is) for its own sake.
However this doesn’t seem to be inherent to IP.
In the same way you could say that Government grants privileges to many sorts of corporatism for instance, granting fractional reserve to the banking industry – in the name of growth and “innovation” (I don’t think it’s a coincidence, that the same word is being used for characterizing that holy goal of easy credit!).
Of course you can suppress copyright or FRB altogether but it probably is “easier” to return to some sort of Gold standard, or just strip the publishers from exclusivity rights – ultimately leaving them with the author (in a way european IP laws are closer to that concept)… I believe many excesses would thus be curbed.
to artisan:
are you suggesting that authors be unable to cede rights to royalties to publishers via contract? i don’t understand what you’re suggesting.
No, I suggest that publishers should not be able to put a valid exclusivity clause in their contract with authors, on ground that they would take away some of the authors free will. A bit like a man cannot sell his working power “forever” to an employer.
An author should always be able to publish his book with another publisher if he’s not satisfied with the marketing strategy with no penalty attached, if it’s his original work.
I’m aware that many anti IP libertarians would dismiss this on other ideological grounds, but like I said, it seems to me it would be a very efficient (and possibly much more popular) political agenda to remove some of the excessive lobbying power from the publishing corporations, against which anti IP advocates fight in the first place.
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