The Techdirt post Court Rejects Online Terms Of Service That Reserve The Right To Change At Any Time spurred me to post a comment about this, collecting some of the thoughts I’ve had about such matters for a long time. As I note there, my own theory of contract is presented in my article A Theory of Contracts: Binding Promises, Title Transfer, and
A Baltimore startup with less than 5 employees, WhoGlue , is suing Facebook for patent infringement, based on a patent it previously--unsuccessfully--tried to unload at a patent auction. The patent, no. 7,246,164 , is for a “Distributed personal relationship information management system and method”. In essence, they claim that Facebook infringes
I previously noted that NTP used the patent system to wring over $600M out of RIM, the manufacturer of the Blackberry smartphone. As noted by Mike Masnick , now RIM has coughed up another quarter billion dollars to another company, Visto (”coincidentally” a licensee of NTP). A quarter billion dollars--everyone yawns. Masnick asks, why did NTP have
I posted the following comment to Cory Doctorow’s BoingBoing post Competition and Google Book Search : Cory, Google is not perfect but the attacks on them for attempting this seem to me to be demonizing the wrong party. The problem is copyright law–a state legal system. The state is, as usual, to blame. Why some people are trusting the same state
My attention was recently called to Tibor Machan’s paper “Self-Ownership and the Lockean Proviso” ( working paper version ), which will be in his book The Promise of Liberty (Lexington, 2009). As noted in the Abstract , the paper argues as follows: Locke’s defense of private property rights includes what is called a proviso--”the Lockean
Sheldon Richman has a great “TGIF” [”The Goal Is Freedom,” but released on a Friday--get it?] column out today, Intellectual ‘Property’ Versus Real Property: What Are Copyrights and what do they mean for Liberty? . For a very short column, it’s packed with great insights. Admirably, Richman focuses on justice rather than more utilitarian concerns
On GMO patent infestation , Kent Hastings comments on my IP views and those of J. Neil Schulman. Schulman responded: My article “Informational Property: Logorights” begins by specifically disclaiming any state grants of monopoly. The concept stands or falls on its natural-property-rights arguments. Neither Samuel Edward Konkin III or Stephan
I previously posted “ On J. Neil Schulman’s Logorights “; Schulman and I recently had an interesting exchange in the comments section of the cross-post on my blog. The original post and the exchange are appended below. On GMO patent infestation , Kent Hastings comments on my IP views and those of J. Neil Schulman. Schulman responded: My article
Defenders of patents commonly say they are against innovators’ ideas being “stolen” or “plagiarized.” This implies that patents simply permit an innovator to sue those who copy his idea. This position betrays either disingenuity or ignorance about patent law. Let me explain. Under copyright law , someone who independently creates an original work
In Killing Slaughterhouse ( Reason Online ), Brian Doherty provides a superb, concise overview of the legal and libertarian issues regarding an upcoming Supreme Court, McDonald v. Chicago , about whether the Second Amendment should be “incorporated” into the Fourteenth Amendment so that it applies to the states, and related issues such as the
What is the Mises Institute?
The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.
Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.