[An MP3 audio file of this article, narrated by Keith Hocker, is available for download.]

Property rights as they are circumscribed by laws and protected by courts and the police are the outgrowth of an age-long evolution. The history of these ages is the record of struggles aiming at the abolition of private property. Again and again despots and popular movements have tried to restrict the rights of private property or to abolish it altogether. These endeavors, it is true, failed. But they have left traces in the ideas determining the legal form and definition of property. The legal concepts of property do not fully take account of the social function of private property.

I recently learned of an interesting thesis by Professor Ross Emmett of James Madison College @ MSU about the nature of innovation. He’s working on book entitled “Innovation As an Act of Love: and Why it Matters for Fostering an Innovative Society.” You can find a quick overview of his argument in his TEDx Lansing talk (see below) and some of the pieces of the argument on his website. He tells me he’ll use some of my and others’ anti-IP arguments in his book.

I had known that copyright killed music in Britain in the 18th and 19th century and that the absence of copyright laws in Germany had encouraged its remarkable artistic culture. I had not known that the same is true of books generally. But this article details remarkable new research showing that this was indeed the case.

In Reducing the Cost of IP Law, I argued that one improvement to the patent system (short of abolition) would be to eliminate injunctions and provie for a compulsory licensing system. As I noted there, the compulsory licensing approach is not new. Some countries impose compulsory licensing on patentees who do not adequately “work” the patent. I discussed provisions in US patent law that do permit compulsory licenses already in some situations.

The recent decision by the Federal Reserve to keep its balance sheet stuffed to bursting with whatever the Wall Street banks decide to throw onto it came as no surprise and crushed any hope that the Fed would tone down its policy of quantitative easing (QE) — or credit easing (CE), as Mr. Bernanke prefers to call it. With the US economy stalled despite the trillions of “stimulus” funds larded out to the politically connected, the people who helm the Federal Reserve likely felt they had no other choice.