Comments on: How “Intellectual Property” Impedes Competition

By: The Electric Leaf’s True Believers Won’t Leave Well Enough Alone | The Freeman | Ideas On Liberty

Thu, 20 Oct 2011 13:03:12 +0000

[...] “How ‘Intellectual Property’ Impedes Competition” by Kevin Carson [...]

By: Cat-v: “The ‘intellectual property’ oxymoron”

Cat-v: “The ‘intellectual property’ oxymoron” — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 15:21:14 +0000

[...] How “Intellectual Property” Impedes Competition. [...]

By: Friday 110304 | Potomac CrossFit

Friday 110304 | Potomac CrossFit — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 01:30:14 +0000

[...] Man in Pakistan Al Anbar Awakening, Iraqi Perspectives How Intellectual Property Impedes Competition Bye, Bye American Shipping Lines [...]

By: Daniel Shapiro

Daniel Shapiro — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 02:16:54 +0000

“Any consideration of “intellectual property rights” must start from the understanding that such “rights” undermine genuine property rights and hence are illegitimate in terms of libertarian principle. Real, tangible property rights result from natural scarcity and follow as a matter of course from the attempt to maintain occupancy of physical property that cannot be possessed by more than one person at a time.”

Intellectual property is the source of all tangible property. This is where I part company with the libertarians. The problem is not intellectual property it is the coercive and irrational legal/patent system. Check your premises and reality!

By: This Is Free Trade? | The Freeman | Ideas On Liberty

This Is Free Trade? | The Freeman | Ideas On Liberty — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 20:31:35 +0000

[...] “How ‘Intellectual Property’ Impedes Competition” by Kevin Carson [...]

By: Kevin Carson on “IP,” Artificial Scarcity « Dr. Q's Thoughts

Kevin Carson on “IP,” Artificial Scarcity « Dr. Q's Thoughts — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 19:57:55 +0000

[...] Q Kevin Carson, who has been critical of “IP” in the past (see, for instance here and here) posted two interesting discussions about “IP” to the P2P Foundation blog over the past [...]

By: Brandon

Brandon — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 01:24:31 +0000

E.W. Childers, actually giving away the ebook version for free substantially increases hard copy sales, for two reasons.
One, the media is distinctly different. Electronic is not the same as dead-tree, even if the words are the same.
Two, the ebook version serves as advertising for the hard copy version, because being on the web creates greater exposure than otherwise would have happened. This strikes me as especially true of unknown authors and their works.
The article here:
http://techdirt.com/articles/20080228/175453383.shtml
talks about some of these points.

By: E. W. Childers

E. W. Childers — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 08:57:15 +0000

Thanks for your reply. I’ll be sure to look into Doctorow’s study.

By: Kevin Carson

Kevin Carson — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 17:42:59 +0000

E.W. Childers. I make money off my book, which I explicitly placed in the public domain, because the revenue stream isn’t worth the transaction costs of setting up a competing infrastructure for printing and distribution in order to undercut BookSurge’s price. The larger the sales and gross revenue, the more you’d have to lower the margin for each book in order to keep it from becoming a lucrative target for knockoff artists, of course. And I think it’s likely that some such point exists within which the royalties afford a modest revenue to the author without being a lucrative target for knockoffs. For the biggest blockbuster authors like Stephen King, the margin might be only twenty cents per book, but with their total sales that would still afford them a comfortable upper-middle class income.

I recently found that both my books’ pdfs were available for download at TPB. This significantly reduces my sale of pdfs, of course, leaving only people who don’t want to fool with bittorrent. But I still think a person who has a free pdf to scan through will be more likely to buy a print version he can read in a more convenient setting. Cory Doctorow cited a study (can’t remember the details) finding that, for all but the biggest blockbuster artists, the advertising from free ebooks and downloads created more revenue than was lost.

By: E. W. Childers

E. W. Childers — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 10:28:07 +0000

I guess my question is how does the author of a book make money without copyright? No one is going to pay them to read the thing aloud. Electronic distribution by anybody who wants to would appear to destroy a lot, but maybe not all, economic incentive to write, say, a novel.

Don’t take that to mean that I support the current publishing model, it’s quite creaky imo.