Agoraphilia

Jeanne Hoffman, of Kosmos Online, a project sponsored by the friendly folks at the Institute for Humane Studies, recently recorded a podca...

Toy Story 3 offers many pleasures and not a little wisdom. I absorbed them with a shocking output of tears, both the laughing kind and oth...

The grandly-named Public Domain Archive, evidently a production of Osaka-based Digirock, Inc., offers a few MP3s of classical music and his...

Thanks to comments on my earlier post, Copyright Duration and the Mickey Mouse Curve, I've been encouraged to reflect on what would hap...

As part of a revise-and-resubmit process, I've been spending much of my summer upgrading my draft book, Intellectual Privilege: A Liber...

We don't yet have flying cars, much less jet packs. I like our Roomba, but domestic robots still have far to go before they can whip up...

Entrepreneurs rock! You wouldn't guess it, though, to listen to rock music. (Marc Knopfler's, Boom, Like That, says something ab...

Law schools don't seem to care very much about staking out original names. Consider two Orange County law schools: Irvine University C...

I regret to report the end of William F. Patry's Copyright Blog. Patry, author of a superb multi-volume treatise on copyright law and...

Cato Unbound today published my reaction to Rasmus Fleisher's lead essay on the future of copyright. My essay, titled Towards a Copyri...

Just posted on SSRN: The Specter of Copyism v. Blockheaded Authors: How User-Generated Content Affects Copyright Policy. Here's the a...

[ NB: Updated; please see concluding paragraphs.] As a matter of policy, we should favor love. It generates many private and public benefi...

Two sharply contrasting views dominate the debate over copyright policy. On the one hand—the left one, we might say—copyrights represent me...

[I earlier explained why copyrights do not qualify as natural rights under Locke's theory of property. Here, I explain why the same ho...

[My forthcoming book spends a lot of time contrasting copyright with the common law. I thus thought that I should say at least a little abo...

All copyrighted works originate as ideas, born when authors choose how to express themselves. The slightest exercise of discretion will suf...

Works of authorship originate in private, safely kept under common law protections. Once published, however, expressive works become data f...

While rightly shuddering at specter of copyism, we should also recognize that the unauthorized use of copyrighted works can, if it does not ...

On the standard economic view of copyrights, as on the economic view of other monopolies, average revenue equals demand. Those two measure...

Creating a work can cost authors a lot, whereas copying a work costs others very little. Absent copyright, then, authors might find it disc...