Comments on: Adam Smith 2.0: Emergent Public Goods, Intellectual Property and the Rhetoric of Remix

By: Erasmus

Erasmus — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 11:22:16 +0000

Agree extended copyright terms are excessive, a move beyond containing free riders into the realm of suffocating the knowledge community. The current “Olympics” experience, the recent “Land down under case” and the usual ongoing software disputes are dysfunctional and tend to abuse. Much infringement at a user level is only a potential misdemeanour befitting at best a peppercorn rent. I say potential misdemeanour because origin if title in many copyright materials is nebulous and put to the test, IP owners would often struggle to prove a clear unimpeachable title in the IP that they seek to wield like a club. Shorter terms linked to a realistic commercial horizon are better. And larger carve outs for private/personal use. And relief from abuse like Olympics on a Greek cafe, an evidentiary burden which obliges rights owners to demonstrate unimpeded title in their work before they chase their remedies against pensioners and students, years after anyone who could verify ownership has passed!

By: Businessman

Businessman — Sat, 03 Mar 2012 13:01:16 +0000

[Slide 19] I think that copyright terms of 75 years or more is excessive. With many people cant pay their access to the culture.

It is curious as Adam Smith consider only a 14 years term.

By: French

French — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 20:33:25 +0000

Very nice article however I’m disapointed nobody actually talked about what is for me the only true public good… earth. Indeed earth is part of our economy and can be considered a good but I can’t see how to deal with its specificities and would have loved to hear an analogy with wath smith wrote 300 years ago and especially the invisible hand supposed to regulate the market.
Unfortunately I think the supposed regulation will come to late to hinder the earth market.

By: Francois Xavier

Francois Xavier — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 20:30:43 +0000

Good !

By: Rémi FRANCOIS

Rémi FRANCOIS — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 18:26:47 +0000

Quel con.

By: Francois Xavier

Francois Xavier — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 18:24:51 +0000

Unfortunately I think the supposed regulation will come to late to hinder the earth market.

By: Et tu, KK? (aka, No, Kevin, this is not “socialism”) |

Et tu, KK? (aka, No, Kevin, this is not “socialism”) | — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 23:07:12 +0000

[...] Gruen is an economist with the consulting group, Lateral Economics. His paper (PDF) (blog entry) was titled “Adam Smith 2.0: Emergent Public Goods, Intellectual Property and the Rhetoric of [...]

By: Club Troppo » Adam Smith and Web 2.0

Club Troppo » Adam Smith and Web 2.0 — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 11:30:20 +0000

[...] in today’s SMH and Age. There’s also a longer more academic piece on the material below here. HISTORY plays tricks on us. The real internet revolution picked up after the internet bubble had [...]

By: Club Troppo » The life you could be leading: the threats and extraordinary possibilities of Web 2.0

Mon, 04 Oct 2010 00:11:04 +0000

[...] But something paradoxical has been happening, and to explain what it is, I want to introduce you to a simple, but slightly technical economic idea. That idea is the public good. [...]

By: Et tu, KK? (aka, No, Kevin, this is not "socialism") | Bildschirmzeitung – DAS Portal

Sat, 12 Jun 2010 22:17:07 +0000

By: Essex

Essex — Mon, 31 May 2010 19:30:06 +0000

I think there are many problems ahead, whilst commercialism will drive some sectors with ever more protection on IP such as music the boundaries are at the same time getting further blurred in other areas due to a combination of ‘grey law’ that varies according to localisation which also is complicated due to the remote delivery, IE a server in the US offering information to UK public domain.

To the general public there seems to be no real urgency for standardisation for laws on IP with respect to the Internet other than for high profile industry and this will further erode an ‘acceptd’ voluntary code, you also have the latest news that Google has tracked and recorded Wi-Fi information as it passed every house in the UK for its notorious ‘Street View’ service and this as an example really sent shockwaves about privacy and the law regarding what is acceptable with rspect to the Internet in general.

It is very difficult to get any progress with Google unless you are a large corporate body so smaller seemingly less important breaches of IP go unpunished and unpunishable.

Its going to be a long haul indeed.

By: Welcome to the Government 2.0 Taskforce | Government 2.0 Taskforce

Welcome to the Government 2.0 Taskforce | Government 2.0 Taskforce — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 04:49:36 +0000

[...] to the early 1990s (depending on how you define terms).

By: Nicholas Gruen

Nicholas Gruen — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 07:53:45 +0000

Nice to see that emergent public goods getting an airing more widely, here and here.

By: Jacques Chester

Jacques Chester — Fri, 29 May 2009 06:50:18 +0000

But as dd says, every profession has its blind spots, including mine.

By: Jacques Chester

Jacques Chester — Fri, 29 May 2009 06:48:39 +0000

When all you have is a casebook, everything looks like a actionable suit.

By: derrida derider

derrida derider — Fri, 29 May 2009 03:17:04 +0000

Yep, all professions have their blind spots. And a common one for lawyers is an obsession with the process of the law at the expense of its purpose.

By: MikeM

MikeM — Fri, 29 May 2009 00:37:49 +0000

I assume that the lawyers were obsessing about things like how to fix the free-rider problem at a time when increasing numbers of people are realising that often it doesn’t need fixing. The important question is not whether there are free-riders but whether firstly, their activity is sufficient to imperil creation of IP and secondly, even if it might, whether the cost of extracting revenue from them will outweigh the benefit. Then thirdly, if there is a problem, whether innovation can solve it.

No lawyer would have ever thought of addressing the music piracy problem by inventing the iTunes music store. Obviously, it doesn’t stop piracy but by making music conveniently available at an attractive price, income is generated far beyond what the music industry could achieve by suing its customers.

By: Nicholas Gruen

Nicholas Gruen — Thu, 28 May 2009 13:35:46 +0000

The footnotes don’t seem to have worked too well – there are a bunch of footnotes in the pdf text, but the article in html above was created by saving a word file as an html file in Word. Not too flash I’m afraid. But the best I can manage at present as I’m quite busy.