This is coming a bit late, since I’ve already made a few posts (automated and not), but welcome to my new website with an integrated and self-hosted blog. I’ve switched to using WordPress as my publishing platform as you can probably tell. I’m still in the process of transferring content over and updating the website. All posts and comments from my old blog have been copied over to my new one. I recently set up Feedburner for it and I’m not sure if it’s kicked in yet or working properly so please let me know if you have any problems and keep in mind that the rss feed may change in the near future. You should be able to subscribe to a variety of feeds one way or another, from the general website/blog and comment feeds to individual post comments to individual post categories and tags. If you have any comments, suggestions, criticisms about or technical difficulties with the new format, please post them here.
Cory Doctorow recently announced an experiment to prove that giving away free ebooks works. Michael Stackpole responded with a deconstruction of Cory’s experiment. He makes a number of good points about the experiment, though I think he comes off unnecessarily harsh on Cory personally. And one gets the impression that he feels threatened by the growing anti-IP movement. He has his own (antiquated) business model and bottom-line to protect after all, though I applaud him for being a pioneer in experimenting with ebooks and podcasting. One remark of his in particular, in his second blogpost on Cory’s experiment (“What is Cory Doing Right?“), cuts right to the heart of the matter. I left a comment on his blogpost in response but for whatever reason it hasn’t appeared yet and might never appear [Update: must have been stuck in moderator limbo, it finally appeared] , so I’m reproducing it below:
“For some reason folks think it’s okay to say to a creator of intellectual property that the product of our labors should be free; yet they never convincingly press that argument at a farmer’s market.”
This is because intellectual property is not legitimate property, whereas a farmer’s produce is. You might check out the following:
- Stephan Kinsella, “The Case Against IP: A Concise Guide,” Mises Daily (Sept. 4, 2009).
- Stephan Kinsella, Against Intellectual Property, Mises Institute (2008).
- Roderick T. Long, “The Libertarian Case Against Intellectual Property Rights,” Formulations Vol. 3, No. 1 (Autumn 1995).
- Michelle Boldrin and David K. Levine, Against Intellectual Monopoly, Cambridge University Press (2008).
Due to human error, fiddling with settings for the Twitter Tools plugin, this post actually contains my tweets for the past two weeks (in chronological order from oldest to most recent).
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Political Science PhD
