Mark Lemley, Property, Intellectual Property, and Free Riding, a preprint. Excerpt: "In this article, I suggest that the effort to permit inventors to capture the full social value of their invention - and the rhetoric of free riding in intellectual property more generally - are fundamentally misguided. In no other area of the economy do we permit the full internalization of social benefits. Competitive markets work not because producers capture the full social value of their output - they don't, except at the margin - but because they permit producers to make enough money to cover their costs, including a reasonable return on fixed-cost investment. Even real property doesn't give property owners the right to control social value....The goal of eliminating free riding, then, is ill-suited to the unique characteristics of intellectual property. Efforts to permit intellectual property owners to fully internalize the benefits of their creativity will inevitably get the balance wrong."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 9/28/2004 09:55:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
