I. Introduction Some prefer iPhones. Others prefer Android. These are the two standards left standing for what only old guys call smartphones. 'Standards wars' like this have arisen throughout history. No doubt readers can provide examples back to the ancient world, but the sw...
Continue reading →
[caption id="attachment_34804" align="alignleft" width="1920"] Thanks to @followbenwhite for making this photo available freely on @unsplash đ[/caption] Troppodillians will know that I organise a discount Crikey subscription every year. But this year I'm also supporting Inkl ,...
Continue reading →
News Corp is telling us what Google should really pay for linking to its sites. It's telling us in code â HTML code. And the answer is ... $0.00. What is an Internet link worth to the linker? For most of the Internet's life, this question has been pointless. On the Internet, l...
Continue reading →
The US political establishment is now firmly of the belief that the US is still the worldâs dominant superpower, and that they could easily win a cold-war confrontation with China , just like it overwhelmed the Soviet Union with economic firepower. I think the Americans are ba...
Continue reading →
In the engine room of nation states, ie the tax departments, the coming battle with platform providers is taking shape. Uber, airbnb, facebook, linkedin, ebay, jobseek, and a myriad of specialised platform providers facilitate micro-trades that are largely untaxed by the autho...
Continue reading →
Posted in Politics - national, Politics - international, IT and Internet, Economics and public policy, regulation, Political theory, Law, Information, Intellectual Monopoly Privileges, Innovation, Social, Intellectual Property, Public and Private Goods, Death and taxes, Employment
One of the privileges of access to what we cool kids call the "back end" of Troppo is that when I write a long, long comment , in an old thread that has taken a new direction, I can make it the start of a new thread. As I'm doing here. Note that the comment originally arose fr...
Continue reading →
I'm no fan of moral rights, but there you are. Artists are, so perhaps I should change my tune. The Valuation of Moral Rights: A Field Experiment By: Stefan Bechtold (ETH ZĂźrich) ; Christoph Engel (Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods) U.S. intellectual proper...
Continue reading →
Well I've been going on and on about it , but here's an academic paper contrasting the free rider problem and opportunity. Knowledge Properties and Economic Policy: A New Look By Antonelli, Cristiano (University of Turin) This paper explores the full range of effects of knowle...
Continue reading →
I gave a talk at the Lowy Institute last Wednesday to which I initially gave a long-winded title "Intellectual Property- Economics, Diplomacy and Australiaâs strategic interests" but managed to get more cut-through under the pressure of Twitters 140 character limit "DFAT goes...
Continue reading →
This is a reworking of an earlier post - but reworked with Chief Innovation Officer of The Australian Centre for Social Innovation (TACSI), Chris Vanstone, there's quite a bit of new content for those who are interested. Cross posted at The Mandarin . There's also the intervie...
Continue reading →
From a quick squiz at their report, the PC seems to have done an excellent job on the question of IP. It didn't put too much effort distorting its recommendations to somehow second guess what was politically palatable and just set out the appropriate principles and their upsho...
Continue reading →
[caption id="attachment_26524" align="alignright" width="140"] IPKats love a tweet[/caption] The lecture will be delivered (in Melbourne Sydney and Brisbane) by Jeremy Phillips. Jeremy (or more exactly a fictional and " notorious " cat: the IPKat) has three times, been named a...
Continue reading →
Australia's Artists Resale Royalty (ARR ) scheme has so far cost taxpayers $2.2 million in direct support. And over many years the publicly funded lobbyists for this scheme, headed up by the National Association for the Visual Arts Ltd, have additionally spent a lot of public...
Continue reading →
In my last post on Troppo I raised this question: ...whoâs actually running [Australiaâs] foreign policy these days? Is it Julie Bishop, as Minister for Foreign Affairs, is it Scott Morrison as Minister for Immigration or is it some other bugger? The answer, it turns out, is â...
Continue reading →
In his introduction to his translation of the Analects of Confucius, Pierre Ryckmans likened that 'literary classic' to a coat hook that has over the centuries acquired so many layers of coats that it can no longer be seen-has become so big that it completely obscures the corr...
Continue reading →
Jon Altman is a Professor at the ANU Center for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research. His submission to the review is long and deeply grounded in long-term, first-hand knowledge of the indigenous art sector and remote area indigenous affairs more generally. It is a must read ....
Continue reading →
Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) is one of our more rapacious copyright maximalist organisations. It is a nice illustration of why things that sound like nice ideas don't always work out. CAL was dreamt up when it was thought that photocopiers might damage incentives to publish,...
Continue reading →
I wrote a good while ago about the economics of doing well by doing good on the internet and when I received a curious email from someone with whom I was conducting a correspondence I decided to write the column below. I've just tried to find it on Google, and it seems I didn'...
Continue reading →
Herewith the column of two reports for the Australian Digital Alliance on copyright exceptions. Sounds abstruse but it's quite engaging methinks. On December 17, 1903, after years of tinkering with his brother Wilbur, Orville Wright took to the skies at Kitty Hawk, North Carol...
Continue reading →
http://www.youtube.com/v/zmaF7Pys7OI I looked up an old post of mine tonight - and happened upon this post which had the video above embedded in it. It refused to play because NineMSM has asserted its copyright in the clip. Well it's true. NineMSN has copyright in the clip. Bu...
Continue reading →
Here's my column from today's SMH, Age and Brisbane Times. WHAT are Australia's strategic interests when negotiating with other countries on the extent of intellectual property (IP) rights - for instance, the duration and strength of patents and copyright? It's no Mickey Mouse...
Continue reading →
The reason that you can't get many books back to the 1920s and then suddenly can? Copyright. Someone owns the copyright in the US if the book came out after 1923. Economics 101 teaches that the existence of the property right should enhance the availability of books. After all...
Continue reading →
