Because copyrights allow for monopolies over "derivative works", a single producing entity often ties up the rights to copyrighted books at any given time. No direct competition is allowed to see who can produce the best adaptation (unless the underlying work is in the public domain).

With that in mind, I had to chuckle to myself when I read the news that the producer of Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" has started shooting the project with a mere $5-million budget and a crew that likely ensures a quiet direct-to-video release (if that).

http://www.comingsoon.net/news/movienews.php?id=67024

http://www.slashfilm.com/2010/06/14/atlas-shrugged-is-filming-one-tree-hills-paul-johansson-starring-and-directing/

The producer was forced to rush this thing into production now - otherwise he would lose the rights altogether after tying them up for nearly 20 years.

I recently attended at the Fifth Annual Meeting of the Property and Freedom Society in Bodrum, Turkey (see my Bodrum Days and Nights: The Fifth Annual Meeting of the Property and Freedom Society: A Partial Report). I delivered a speech entitled "Ideas are Free: The Case Against Intellectual Property." The speech following mine was by one Terence Kealey, a biochemist at the University of Buckingham and author of Sex, Science and Profits and The Economic Laws of Scientific Research. Kealey is a fantastic speaker and his fascinating, riveting talk, "Science is a Private Good - Or: Why Government Science is Wasteful" (video; audio), perfectly complemented my anti-IP talk-in fact his book Sex, Science and Profits has a chapter calling for the abolition of patents. (The other PFS speeches (see the Program) are being uploaded and will be linked here.)

Earlier this month, I spoke at the Fifth Annual Meeting of the Property and Freedom Society in Bodrum, Turkey (see my Bodrum Days and Nights: The Fifth Annual Meeting of the Property and Freedom Society: A Partial Report). My topic was "Ideas are Free: The Case Against Intellectual Property," though a better title might be something like "Ideas Are Not Property: The Libertarian IP Mistake and the Structure of Human Action." It is now available in audio and video. The other speeches (see the Program) are being uploaded and will be linked here.

PFS 2010 - Stephan Kinsella, Ideas are Free: The Case Against Intellectual Property Rights from Sean Gabb on Vimeo.

Warner Pulls The Plug On 'We Con The World'.

Read about it here:

http://pajamasmedia.com/eddriscoll/2010/06/12/warner-pulls-the-plug-on-we-con-the-world/

What happens when he goes to the movies?

The Supreme Court issued a number of decisions today - but still no Bilski patent decision.

The patent lawyer community is getting nervous:

http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2010/06/bilski-watch-timing-of-supreme-court-decisions.html

They are probably right to be. A delay this long in the decision most likely means that the Court is waiting until the end of the term to release it - which they traditionally do for what the Justices consider to be their most important and/or far reaching decisions of the year.

It may also be the case that there are either important dissents or concurring opinions on the case, thus prompting a delay with back and forth rewrites and revisions to the final decisions. (Though one should recall that at oral arguments, the Justices seemed universally critical to the idea of broad-based business method patents.)

The decision has to come down by July 28th at the latest, when the court has its final decision release day of the current term.

Three weeks and counting...

Not to speak of being essential for start-up firms that wanted support from venture capitalists.

A new blog on Gaming with Free Software by Shirish from India. He also draws our attention to copysouth.org - addressing some of the same issues we consider here.

I have been meaning to post about some remarkable research by Eckhard Hoeffner for a while, but only now have time to do partial justice to it. Eckhard identified a nearly perfect natural experiment about the impact of copyright:

In 1815 the German confederation consisted of 39 states with no effective copyright. At that time Great Britain was a monolithic state in which the well enforced copyright had just been extended to 28 years or the life of the author. Germany was a bit larger in population about 27 million against 17 million, but population in England was growing much more rapidly, was concentrated in urban areas and England was a much richer nation. So many more titles were produced in England obviously with all that extra incentive from copyright.

A picture speaks louder than words

Eckhard goes on to analyze how authors fared with and without copyright. The bottom line: the journeyman author - those who produce most of the books - did better without copyright. The big guys at the top? They did better with copyright.

For all the details you can find Eckhard's slides here, and I am sure more is to come.