ip category archive

A Silly Post Brought to You by the Letters E and F

My daughter has a set of Sea & Learn Bath Shapes that are very entertaining for her and me and the wife alike. (The wife might not want to admit that. But for me I can say that they engage my brain more than a typical work-related meeting.)

I happened to notice that the “e” looks very Microsoft Internet Explorerish. It’s a small letter. It’s blue. So I looked around for the “f” and found that by an amazing coincidence, it is Firefox red!

(Ok, so the Firefox logo is predominantly orange and this is mostly red. Just play along, ok? The stars are orange. Take it or leave it.)

How about that? The forces of good and evil arrayed against each …

Stephan Kinsella, ‘Against Intellectual Property’

For today’s lecture, some libertarian thoughts on the problem of intellectual property from Stephan Kinsella.

I’m regularly exposed to libertarian ideas at places like Marginal Revolution and EconLog. I like a lot of the ideas, but I wouldn’t describe myself as libertarian.

Kinsella wrote a paper called “Against Intellectual Property.” I’m slowly making my way through it. TV and the Internet have reduced my attention span down to a nub, so I often find it challenging to digest scholarly pieces like this. Especially when the footnotes consume on average half of the page.

In “Against Intellectual Property,” he talks about the first-possessor rule of property ownership. Since I can’t be bothered …

5 Ways to Save on Your Monthly Software Rental Bill in the Year 2056

Originally published in Free Software Magazine, 9 October 2006. This one made it to the technology front page on digg (and maybe briefly on the “all” front page also) and has received almost 350 diggs to date, resulting in almost 9000 reads at FSM. It seems like I say “quite a thrill” too much here, but it was rewarding to have so much interest and discussion both at digg and at FSM.
(Here’s a post with a few more comments and some stats about the article and resulting traffic to movingtofreedom.org. One more time: Thanks, everyone!)

Software bills got you down? Here at Intellectual Property Magazine (championing intellectual …

Ralph Waldo Emerson

“I was simmering, simmering, simmering. Emerson brought me to a boil.”– Walt Whitman
A while back, a coworker lent me a book called Self-Reliance, “The Wisdom of Ralph Waldo Emerson as Inspiration for Daily Living.” Edited and introduced by Richard Whelan, who says that he loves Emerson’s essays and has read them many times over the years but found eventually he could get the same and even better experience by just reading the many sections he had underlined over the years. He writes:

I came to think of the essays as gardens in which the underlined passages were magnificent flowers — and all the rest a rampant and choking growth of nineteenth-century rhetorical weeds and vines that were best rooted out and cut back. It was then

…