Tucker closes this compendium with a number of reviews of books and movies. The depth of his comprehension is sometimes astounding; he can remember more from watching a movie once than many can from watching it ten times, and his book summaries are so excellent that he might want to watch out for the IP police. FULL ARTICLE by Michael Lawrence
Source link: http://archive.mises.org/14446/literary-intoxication-tuckers-bourbon-for-breakfast/
Literary Intoxication: Tucker’s Bourbon for Breakfast
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Nice review of a great book.
A small mistake: Boldrin and Levin’s book is “Against Intellectual Monopoly”.
http://mises.org/store/Against-Intellectual-Monopoly-P552.aspx
http://www.micheleboldrin.com/research/aim.html
He says Copyrights are evil and the lack of copyrights increase sales, then he goes and copyrights his book. Come on, man! If you practised what you preached more people would believe you!
The book is free to download in PDF format; I do not think that makes his statements hypocritical in any sense.
you have to copyright or patent your work, even if you intend to distribute it freely, to keep someone else from obtaining the IP protection and prohibiting you from doing anything with it.
By marking the book copyright and making clear that the book can be copied freely, Tucker communicates that he is the person who’s legally able to give the world permission to copy the book. What good would a grant of permission be if he didn’t own the copyright (whether he likes it or not) in the first place?
Frank,
Are you making the point that the present situation is a proof for why copyright must exist?
Note that if no one had the legal ability to prevent Jeff Tucker from distributing the book, he wouldn’t need to “communicate[] that he is the person who’s legally able to give the world permission to copy the book.”
No, that’s not my point at all. My point is the same as Kinsella’s below: as it stands, the law sticks you with the copyright whether you like it or not. If you hate IP, as Tucker does (and as I do), you want to give the world permission to copy your stuff. The only way to achieve that is to announce (1) that you are the legal copyright holder and (2) that you give the world permission to copy your book. That’s exactly what Tucker does by combining a copyright notice with the Creative Commons license. Under the regime we have now, it’s not merely acceptable, it’s necessary to achieve the anti-IP result.
JEff didn’t “copyright” his book. the state gives him a copyright automatically. He cannot get rid of it. All he can do is admit he has it, and then license it to people for free. More than this could not be asked of him.
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