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“There is an old economics joke about the impossibility of finding a twenty-dollar bill lying on a sidewalk. In an efficient market, the money would already have been picked up. (Do not wait for a punch line.)”
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“When someone takes your car, they have the car and you do not. When, because of some new technology, someone is able to get access to the MP3 file of your new song, they have the file and so do you. You did not lose the song. What you may have lost is the opportunity to sell the song to that person or to the people with whom they “share” the file.”
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“In certain situations, though, competition will not work: if the dinosaurs are a cartel strong enough to squelch competition; if they have enlisted the state to make the threatening technology illegal, describing it as a predatory encroachment on the “rights” of the old guard rather than aggressive competition; if ingrained prejudices are simply so strong that the potential business benefits take years to become apparent; or if the market has “locked in” on a dominant standard—a technology or an operating system, say—to which new market entrants do not have legal access. In those situations, markets cannot be counted on to self-correct. Unfortunately, and this is a key point, intellectual property policy frequently deals with controversies in which all of these conditions hold true. Let me repeat this point, because it is one of the most important ones in this book. To a political scientist or market analyst, the conditions I have just described sound like a rarely seen perfect storm of legislative and market dysfunction. To an intellectual property scholar, they sound like business as usual.”
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“You do know what the campaign against you is all about, don’t you? Your uncompromising attitude makes people feel pathetic. Your very existence reminds them just how much they’ve sold out,”
― The Girl in the Spider's Web
― The Girl in the Spider's Web
“I want to convince you that intellectual property is important, that it is something that any informed citizen needs to know a little about, in the same way that any informed citizen needs to know at least something about the environment, or civil rights, or the way the economy works. I will try my best to be fair, to explain the issues and give both sides of the argument. Still, you should know that this is more than mere description. In the pages that follow, I try to show that current intellectual property policy is overwhelmingly and tragically bad in ways that everyone, and not just lawyers or economists, should care about. We are making bad decisions that will have a negative effect on our culture, our kids’ schools, and our communications networks; on free speech, medicine, and scientific research. We are wasting some of the promise of the Internet, running the risk of ruining an amazing system of scientific innovation, carving out an intellectual property exemption to the First Amendment. I do not write this as an enemy of intellectual property, a dot-communist ready to end all property rights; in fact, I am a fan. It is precisely because I am a fan that I am so alarmed about the direction we are taking.”
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Jon’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Jon’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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