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Copyrights?

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jaredsmith Posted: Wed, Jun 9 2010 5:51 PM

If free market anarchists are against IP laws than why does the LMV institute place copyrights on online books?

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It took a while for libertarians to catch on to the anti-IP movement, so if you are talking about old books that is why. If you are talking about recent work using CC 3.0 share-alike licensing, this explains.

Often we opponents of socialistic, legislatively-created, utilitarian-based, property-redistributing, artificial, arbitrary, inconsistent, irrational, innovation-hampering, monopolistic, anti-competitive, and wealth-destroying intellectual property laws are accused of hypocrisy when we “copyright” our articles and books.

I’ve pointed out to such people innumerable times, to little avail, that copyright is a noun, not a verb–that you don’t “copyright” something–you have a copyright in your original works of authorship as soon as you write them, automatically, courtesy of federal law. No copyright notice is required. No copyright registration is required. You have the right, whether you like it or not.

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I think someone answered this one. The gist is that if you don't put any copyright, someone else can take over and copyright what you wrote for himself. Yeah, I know. Great legal system.

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All copyright notices on Mises.org are placed there due other parties holding the rights. You will notice that the tags Mises.org places on its own articles and content are all in the Creative Commons legal structure and thus are very much open source. That is the case with all content on the site, if you have any specific cases that do not follow this framework than be sure to show us and I will quickly join you in pointing out the hypocrisy!

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All copyright notices on Mises.org are placed there due other parties holding the rights.

Maybe in some cases, but I think a lot of them are just because the book was printed a long time ago when the theory against IP hadn't developed.

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So, if (hypothetically) someone were to, say, download all the PDFs of LVMI books, print out a bunch of copies, bind them cheaply, and sell them for cost plus the going rate of profit, would/could anything happen to them?

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They would have lots of books! They would probably get outcompeted by LvMI, though I think there could be a market for very high quality, letterpressed versions of things like Human Action.

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So LMV places copyrights on books and whatnot bec. they do not want others to be able to place copyrights on their work? But they are much less concerned with people printing off their copyrighted works (and possibly selling them for profits)?

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Reading comprehension FTW!

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Yes, jaredsmith, they have to copyright (and place the documents in the creative commons, which allows anyone to use and distribute the works) in order to prevent someone from claiming the works and putting them in a dark vault somewhere; taking them out only when bashing others with royalty requests.

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