EconTech

I’ve long thought that licensed ‘purchased’ materials is an asinine business plan that some day some hero will come through and shatter. Much of our cultural history has been created through sharing and reshaping. Now that the technology has come along to do it, companies and governments are attempting to create technological and legal barriers [...]

I am a fan of reading occasional economic histories. They are amazingly fascinating (really, just fascinating, but even I would expect them to be boring, yet they are not, thus the amazing). However, not a whole lot has been produced as of late. Nevertheless, there is talk that there will be a resurgence in economic [...]

Remember: IANAL
In various policy circles, there is a rather common idea that regulators, after working so long with the regulated, begin to cooperate with them instead of properly regulating them. I think if you look, you will see a lot of this behavior wrt brand name versus generic drug manufacturers and the FDA. Warning, contains [...]

I would contend that this is an excellent[1] way of solving the ‘languishing value’ of out-of-print but socially valuable material problem. The objection “If I have something in my house with sentimental value - a real piece of property worth something to me but worth nothing to anyone else - people shouldn’t be [...]

That is how the question is posed, but I want to analyze the data from a slightly different angle. What are the marginal benefits of the new machine over the old one? I suspect not particularly great. What happens to the old machine? I have no idea, but the answer to this question is of [...]

An interesting discussion of the relation between traditional servitudes (e.g. land use restrictions on purchasers of property) and software licenses, aka the ‘new servitudes.’ The first post can be found here. I won’t comment on most of the posts. Randy Picker makes a curious claim: 
Consumers as a group can be better off if we make [...]