Archive for the ‘Paying for nonrival goods’ Category

February 17th, 2008

Rothkos aren’t the bargain they were a year ago.

August 8th, 2007

The New York Times appears to be about to stop charging for its opinion articles and archive searches (I only have unsourced assertions and suspicions to support this, but the noise is consistent). Several bloggers are cheering. I am not, and they are wrong. I’m happy to get anything I can for free, but this [...]

July 28th, 2007

Why is there no civilian counterpart to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency?

May 26th, 2006

The “generous soul” Mark thanks is, of course, generous not only with his nights staying up over a hot scanner, but also with Watterson’s and Andrews-McMeel’s property. The page he links to is a cultural treasure, a crime, and also a pithy lesson in what’s wrong both practically and morally with our current intellectual property [...]

December 29th, 2005

Last fall, I discussed the future of digital media, especially music, and argued for a system in which digital media is free to users, but artists and producers are paid for it with public funds distributed by observing use. The basic idea, articulated in Terry Fisher’s and Lawrence Lessig’s recent books is that a royalty [...]

September 16th, 2005

Earlier this week I attended the Future of Music annual “Policy Summit“, a conference of artists, recording industry execs, intellectual property lawyers, and academics. They gather to predict, view with alarm, recommend, and debate large questions of public and private rights and patrimony such as Lawrence Lessig discusses (for my view on his work, look [...]

November 2nd, 2003

Michael O’Hare offers what seems to me one convincing answer to the question of how to pay for recorded music, now that file-sharing is driving the existing system into the ground. (This responds, among other things, to Eugene Volokh’s objection to Paul Boutin’s suggestion of a tax on data transfer capacity and payments to the [...]

September 22nd, 2002

Brad DeLong wonders, reasonably, why people hate drug companies so much. He cites a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll showing the industry with a favorable/unfavorable ratio of 21%/54%, which probably puts it in a tie with Gary Condit. After all, despite the companies’ marketing shenanigans and apparently excessive rates of return, their products do in [...]