Three Quasi-Fallacies in the Conventional Understanding of Intellectual Property — In this forthcoming article, Jonathan Barnett argues that, contrary to the prevailing IP skepticism in academia, “reducing IP rights can increase costs for users while raising entry barriers for firms that adopt weakly integrated and other unbundled business models for implementing the innovation and commercialization process. The result is perverse: weaker IP rights raise entry costs, increase concentration and ultimately raise prices, limit output or otherwise distort innovation investments.”
If You Don’t Click on This Story, I Don’t Get Paid — A thought-provoking look at freelance writing in 2015. “’The people who make money off the internet are Facebook, Google, and Twitter and their billionaire executives,’ David Samuels, a contributing editor at Harper’s and frequent contributor to the New Yorker, said. ‘They are fantastically rich because they ate this whole world. Everybody in this world of internet publications is essentially providing content for them one way or another for free. If that’s your job, you’re very very nervous every day about the one little misstep that’s completely meaningless to Facebook, Google, or Twitter but might be the difference between life and death for you and for your publication.'”
How Unethical Hosts Fake DMCA Compliance — Jonathan Bailey has a practical guide for dealing with sites using tactics to make it seem like they are complying with DMCA notices without actually removing infringing material.
Recorded Music is the MOST Valuable — David Newhoff has a fascinating piece on the importance of recorded music and how the public loses out if artists are told to stick to live performances because the market for recorded music has eroded. “When recorded works themselves cease to be a commodity (i.e. they’re made for the purpose of selling something else), they cease to be the basis for investment, and this can limit the range of creators’ options to collaborate and produce a richer universe of sounds.”