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The landmark economic book that argue against "intellectual property" AKA intellectual monopoly is now available in print form. The economists David K. Levine and Michele Boldrin challenges conventional wisdom about patent and copyright and argue that we are better off without them. Of course, this book wouldn't be complete without praise of free software. :)
"It is common to argue that intellectual property in the form of copyright and patent is necessary for the innovation and creation of ideas and inventions such as machines, drugs, computer software, books, music, literature and movies. In fact intellectual property is a government grant of a costly and dangerous private monopoly over ideas. We show through theory and example that intellectual monopoly is not necessary for innovation and as a practical matter is damaging to growth, prosperity and liberty."
It is an economic book that build a devastating case against patent and copyright laws.
Notes: It seem that book marks the GPL and other free software license as the exception and is something that they see as beneficial. It is something if possible they want to see preserved.
Its days are numbered and the downfall of the Wintel monopoly has been forecast for some time. Intel has indeed lost significant ground to ARM chips, and Microsoft faces equally annoying competition from the likes of Google's Android, which is climbing onboard practically every computer that isn't a desktop PC or server.
Firefox 3 is almost here. The latest version is now at release candidate two and, in a word, it’s great. It strikes me that we forget, even as many of us look forward to this great open-source browser just what hurdles Firefox had to overcome. Four years ago, Internet Explorer, thanks to Microsoft’s monopoly owned the Web browser market.
A lot of the past discussions on this site involved the question of idea ownership, mostly as part of the overall discourse on Free Software. I've usually been the one to state that ideas cannot be owned or at the very least fall under some sort of collective ownership. Today, however, I believe I was wrong.
On his latest post titled “Foresight Linux is dead?“, Thilo Pfennigs rightly asks the question that many of the current Foresight Linux users may be asking themselves. With the current stable release dated as of May 2009 and no explicit roadmap stating when the next release will be published, is it really safe to say that Foresight Linux is indeed dead?
JPEG is a very old lossy image format. By today’s standards, it’s awful compression-wise: practically every video format since the days of MPEG-2 has been able to tie or beat JPEG at its own game. The reasons people haven’t switched to something more modern practically always boil down to a simple one -- it’s just not worth the hassle.
A lot of people at the moment are immensely intrigued by Google Chrome OS. I won't hide that I am one of them. Google promises a much needed shift in the way small computers work. Problems like software updates, backups, installation, maintenance, viruses, have plagued the world for too long: a shift is way overdue.