Economic
and Game Theory
Intellectual Property Page
by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine
Dmitry Sklyarov
First victim of the copyright absolutists
Dismayed by the effort to stifle technology and innovation under the guise of protecting intellectual property? Read on.
An interview on intellectual property:
With James Corbett of the corbettreport
[Posted at 07/17/2019 07:34 AM by David K. Levine 
]
SSRN:
For economists concerned about Elsevier taking over SSRN and wishing to archive their papers in a repository that is indexed by RePEc (and hence Google): you may not be aware that RePEc has an archiving service the Munich Personal RePEc Archive.
[Posted at 05/17/2016 11:52 PM by David K. Levine ]
NPR on Patents:
An NPR program on patents based on an interview with Michele and me.
[Posted at 07/31/2014 04:05 AM by David K. Levine ]
The Economics Book Festival in Trento:
[Posted at 06/08/2010 06:13 AM by David K. Levine ]
Against Intellectual Monopoly:
Michele's and my book about copyrights and patents from Cambridge University Press is out. You can order it on Amazon or the publisher Cambridge University Press It will remain available online. We argue that the only solution to the problem of intellectual monopoly is to get rid of it entirely.
[Posted at 07/11/2008 02:20 PM by David K. Levine ]
Free the journals
Free the textbooks
- The initiative and license.
- Course notes released under the open text license.
- Merlot: on online multi-media learning cooperative.
- opentextbookproject: project to develop copylefted texts; currently just a webpage
- OpenMind Publishing: commercial publishing organization that allows you to modify their texts for your own classes, has some obscure connection to the Open Text Project
Free the software
- Open source and public domain software available on this site.
- Free Software Foundation: the granddaddy of efforts to free the software.
Other online stuff of note
- Wikipedia: "The Free Encyclopedia" and ambitious and well linked project to develop on online encylopedia. Be warned - this is one of the slowest websites I've every encountered.
- The Wayback Machine: a remarkable creation - an indexed collection of snapshots of the entire web starting in 1996. Run by a non-profit corporation specifically formed to archive the web, and funded by several major foundations and individual contributions.
Working to preserve online freedom
- Electronic Freedom Foundation: "civil liberties organization working to protect rights in the digital world"
- Dave Touretzky's Page: the copyright police haven't managed to intimidate everyone just yet. See also his Adobe page.
- Chilling Effects: a project by the EFF (see above) and the Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley and University of San Francisco Law Schools to analyze "cease and desist" letters often sent by lawyers in an effort to intimidate individuals and organizations into removing material from the web. Note that in addition to consulting with this website, you may wish to take other actions such as filing a complaint with a bar association against lawyers who attempt to blackmail you under cover of law.
- IPWatchdog.com: "When I first started the Obscure Patent of the Week back on January 31, 2003, I really wondered whether I would be able to come up with a different one every week. Having done this now for almost 5 months I can say with confidence that I will never run out of obscure patents to report. I suspect I could even do an Obscure Patent of the Day and never run out of craziness eminanting from the Patent Office"
The white (as in hat) market
- baen.com: A small-scale publisher of science fiction, and the only successful commercial ebook publisher; also the only ebook publisher that publishes without encryption. Funny how people don't mind spending money for a good product.
- fictionwise.com: Publishes some encrypted and some unencrypted ebooks. The only ebook publisher to have any success besides Baen...I checked their list of the 25 best selling titles over the last 6 months on May 27, 2002. None of the best-sellers were encrypted. Apparently encryption serves the purpose of protecting intellectual property...as would book burning.
- Almost all daily comic strips now publish in real-time for free, supported by advertising. Strangely they don't encrypt their material, and there is no widespread piracy...Search the name of your favorite strip on google.
- Most major newspapers and television networks also publish the news in real-time for free, supported by advertising. Rather than encrypt the content you are encouraged to email a copy to a friend.
The grey market
- gnutella network: music, ebooks, software and even some video. Several software clients are available - limewire is among the best.
- www.musiccity.com: center of the Morpheus peer-to-peer network. Similar to gnutella, but quickly becoming more popular.
- videolan: "a project of students from the École Centrale Paris" in which they attempt to free the DVDs.
- need a key to unlock a defunct software program? Try gnutella, or, keeping in mind that "warez" is the common term for "illegal" software, go to google and try a search string like "shareware key warez".
- need to backup an encrypted document? try here.
- lost a password? try here.