IP Rights

Yesterday I was leafing through my new issue of IP Law & Business at the office and was happy to see some coverage of a CopyNight gathering in New York city. It's unusual for an industry magazine to acknowledge the existence of another side of the debate about intellectual property rights and the public domain.

Unfortunately, the article's author (or editor?) chose to run only one quote from an attendee regarding technologies like Grokster:

"Why can't it be like in headshops? ... You know, you can sell a bong but like not explicitly for weed."

No bias there, hmm?

The rest of the article was somewhat more balanced, exploring the parallels of the free-culture movement to environmentalism. But it didn't really delve into any of the really interesting strands in the current debate over technologies that enable widespread duplication and sharing of copyrighted materials.

If you want to better understand the contours of the debate over IP rights, avoid IP Law & Business and check out Timothy Sandefur's article from yesterday instead.