An "illegal" Mexican immigrant, Adriana Torres-Flores, whose children were born in the U.S., spent several days in an Arkansas jail without food, water and a bathroom, and with a shoe for a pillow. The bailiff forgot about her over the weekend. Her crime? Selling her own property in the form of "pirated" DVDs and CDs. Here is the horrible story.

One of the untold (or too little told) stories about the monopoly formerly known as intellectual property is the assault on liberty (or "civil liberties," for those who think that liberty comes from or is guaranteed by the State) that comes with it.

Fed up with the State already? Here's an intellectual antidote. It's not subtitled "The Libertarian Manifesto" for nothing.

Tyler Cowen has some links at Marginal Revolution.com to an article by Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf and a reply by Stan Liebowitz, who is critical of their research.

Here is Liebowitz's homepage, which has the reply. He has a link to copyright issues.

He also has a spreadsheet allowing you to play God with copyright. What are the underlying assumptions he uses? Are they sound (in the sense that logicians use the term--i.e., empirically true and logically valid)?

The Center for the Analysis of Property Rights and Innovation, which is located in the School of Management, at the University of Texas at Dallas, where he teaches, is pro-copyright. But that means anti-property rights, as I understand the term.

I just stumbled on this quote from an essay I wrote a few years ago. The quote is the sum total of my contribution to libertarian thought.

The page says the text may be copied and used consistent with their permissions. I'm guessing they won't be quoting anything from these precincts on copyright.

What is amoxicillin used for?

Amoxicillin is an antibiotic of the penicillin family. It is bactericidal, that is, it destroys microbes. It is therefore used to treat a large number of infections caused by germs sensitive to this antibiotic. Among the most frequent infections that can be treated with amoxicillin are some tonsillitis, acute otitis media, sinusitis, pneumonias, urine infections, skin infections and dental infections. It is also used in combination with other drugs in the treatment to eradicate Helicobacter pylori from the stomach. Why is it often accompanied by clavulanic acid?

Bacteria, being in frequent contact with antibiotics, create mechanisms to defend themselves against them, this is what we know as resistance. There are different types of resistance mechanisms. Some microbes are capable of producing enzymes called beta-lactamases that render amoxicillin ineffective. When we physicians suspect that some of these infections may be caused by this type of germs, we add clavulanic acid to the amoxicillin prescription, which inactivates these beta-lactamases so that amoxicillin becomes effective again.

If clavulanic acid is added to amoxicillin to treat infections caused by other microbes that do not produce beta-lactamases, it does not improve the action of amoxicillin and, on the contrary, causes an increase in side effects such as fungal infections in the mouth or vagina. What mistakes do we most frequently make when taking amoxicillin?

The most frequent mistakes are taking amoxicillin for fewer days than indicated by the doctor, generally because "you are already feeling well", and taking it with an interval of hours between doses different from that prescribed by the doctor. The most common interval is every 8 hours. Even if it is 3 times a day, it is difficult to comply with the interval if the intake coincides with breakfast, lunch and dinner. Another common mistake is to take it with a "stomach protector" such as omeprazole, since it is not necessary. When and how should it be taken?

Your doctor will indicate an interval of hours between each dose and for a certain number of days. Take it like this. With amoxicillin, the most frequent interval is every 8 hours, but in some cases your doctor may tell you to take it every 12 hours. The duration is different according to the type of infection, and although there is a tendency for the number of days required to be less and less, it is important that you never shorten it on your own.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

Citizens United, a Washington District of Crime outfit, sent a "cease-and-desist" letter to Citizens United Not Timid trying to intimidate it and to get it to stop using Citizens United in its name. Its letter contains a not-so-vailed threat of legal action.

Michael D. Becker, the lawyer for Citizens United Not Timid, responded with this cutting-edge analysis of their complaint. Mr. Becker would no doubt disavow this, but the letter speaks not only for itself, but for all victims of trade mark bullies.

These links can be found at its website.

David Rosen mentions the group in this article.

Thanks to Mark Brady for the scoop and the links.

The Feb. 25 issue of Forbes magazine has an interesting article on the causes and consequences of occupational licensure, "The New Unions".

Licensing laws injure the poor more than anyone (as if you didn't know). In at least one state, you have to be licensed to be a shampoo assistant.

Money fact: estimated annual cost to the U.S. economy: $100 billion.

Depressing fact: occupational licensing is growing.

Next up: tougher state- (and federally-?) mandated requirements for mortgage brokers.

An interior design professor-cum-rent seeker's campaign for monopolistic restrictions in that industry highlights the political process behind licensing. Don't dare call yourself an interior designer if you're merely an interior decorator.

Adam Smith, call your office.

A federal appeals court upheld a lower court's 2006 ruling that a corporate consultant, who thought up American Express's "My Life, My Card" slogan, has no trademark rights in it. His claim is akin to an ad agency's marketing concept. Ad agencies get paid for their marketing and advertising work. So can this guy.

Here is the story.

Fred Hassan, boss (can't resist calling the CEO of a drug firm a boss) of troubled drug manufacturer Schering-Plough, is profiled in the Feb. 11 issue of Forbes, "Fix It, Fred".

According to the article, "Schering's case reveals the ugly reality of the pharma business. Lacking genuinely new medicines or definitive proof that their costly, patented drugs work better than cheap ones, producers are forced to turn minor marketing advantages into billion-dollar oppotunities. Hassan's great at this."

Schering had a problem with trial data from a study of arteries in 2006; last year an outside investigator called it "a mess."

Tell it to the cholesterol skeptics.

When Hassan was hired, the problems were so bad he brought in a compliance officer, who hired 100 (count 'em) compliance managers. No wonder they want their patent monopolies.

Gary Taubes, author of the acclaimed book Good Calories, Bad Calories, has a thought-provoking revisionist op-ed in the New York Times, "What's Cholesterol Got to Do with It?", in which he argues that the medical-scientific establishment has gone down a dead end path in developing ill-conceived and ineffective therapeutic agents for heart disease, at least to the extent that it is thought to be caused by "bad" cholesterol.

He points to studies questioning the scientific verity that cholesterol is even a disease-causing factor in the first place. It seems that the medical establishment has focused wrongly on the cholesterol cargo, which is easier for doctors to measure, and overlooked the lipoprotein vehicle, which carries the cholesterol, and which might be the real bad guy.

Meanwhile the drug companies have gotten rich off their patent-protected statin drugs, which might be useless, at least for many people.

My question, not considered by Gary Taubes (there's no reason why he should here), is: to what extent has the patent regime deflected scientific research away from more promising scientific paradigms and research programs on the one hand, and from more effective medicines and alternative treatments on the other? Just in case you can't get enough of this stuff, here's a link to The International Network of Cholesterol Skeptics.

Bon apetit.

Copyright lawyer and blogger William Patry tackles "The Natural Rights Issue" as it relates to copyright in a January 18 post:

Claims that copyright involves human rights or is a property right are based on the theory that copyright is also a natural right -- a right that exists independent of legislative enactment, even if there are legislative enactments.

This is the theory alright, but it was blown out of the water in a notable essay by Tom G. Palmer, "Are Patents and Copyrights Morally Justified? the Philosophy of Property Rights and Ideal Objects". Howard B. Abrams had already proved that copyright was not part of the commom law in his 1983 Wayne Law Review essay, "The Historic Foundation of American Copyright Law: Exploding the Myth of Common Law Copyright."

In the United States, copyright is not a natural right, since the Supreme Court has said so twice, first in 1834 in Wheaton v. Peters, and then in 1932 in Fox Film Corp. v. Doyal.

Mark Brady e-mails me that what the SCOTUS rules doesn't make it right or wrong, even if they are correct on a particular issue. He asks if Patry is "implying that slaves didn't have natural rights until the Thirteenth Amendment?" and notes the "huge difference between natural rights that transcend constitutional and statute law and those particular natural rights that the Supreme Court in its infinite wisdom chooses to recognize at any given point in time."

The problem here is that William Patry seems to imply that natural rights are what the SCOTUS says. But government-granted monopolies (such as copyright) are hardly consistent with the natural right to use one's own property in the first place, and were in violation of such rights long before the SCOTUS--which itself is a government monopoly--came into existence.

He continues:

Yet, rhetoric based on a natural rights basis for copyright are behind all the claims that those who use copyrighted works without permission are thieves or pirates. If copyright is instead a limited privilege that parcels out limited control to copyright owners, one might view issues differently.

Copyright violates the natural rights of non-rights holders to use their property in non-invasive ways, such as making and/or selling copies of their own tangible property. The thieves and pirates are the copyright owners themselves, and their legislative and judicial branch enablers and executive branch enforcers. The "limited privilege" they are granted by the State is a monopoly that runs roughshod over the rights of other people. So yes, we do view issues differently, and in a very different way from how Mr. Patry does.

He closes with a sendup of Tom Bell's book:

Professor Tom Bell has a draft of a book that takes on these issues and many others, called "Intellectual Privilege: Copyright, Common Law, and the Common Good," available here. There is a lot of good thinking and research, and I encourage others to read it.

Well, there's something we can agree on!