The email notification system is still active only for the "blog authors" listed on the masthead. If there is demand, once we have it working I can extend it to commentators as well. Two improvements. The notification email should now have a link to the thread that received the comment. Second...following suggestions from Crosbie, the code for email notifications is either ending your email address with *, or you can end it with ! which means not to reveal your email address to the public at large.

In response to requests I've made some improvements on how the blog works. You can click the title "Against Monopoly" to get back the front page and the titles of posts now have the permalink (also available as always at the bottom of the post).

For authors - there is a new feature that enables you to receive email notification when you receive comments on your posts. Just make sure that your that for each post you set the public email address to your real email address and put an asterisk after your email address. So, for example, in the email field I put

david@dklevine.com

nothing will happen, while if I put

david@dklevine.com*

then for that post I will receive email notification of any comment that is submitted to that post.

Tim Lee has a post on Freedom to Tinker that may be of special interest to economists. He suggests that Wikipedia may be a public good subject to a free-riding benefit rather than cost. That is with standard public goods, we think of free-riders as people who good institutions would make into contributors. Tim suggests that for certain kinds of projects increasing the number of free-riders (the audience size) is good, because it also increases the number of contributors. Wikipedia for all its faults is interesting, because unlike say the free-software movement, it is driven entirely by volunteers. Maybe someone who knows more about Wikipedia than me can answer the question of whether these volunteers are anonymous, or whether the are working in hopes of recognition.

Actually it was out a while ago, sorry for the delayed notice. You can find it here.

The new movie, Flash of Genius, from its previews, looks awful--glorifying intermittent windshield wiper inventor Robert Kearns's use of the patent system to shake down the auto industry for $30M.

After all, it was already well known that existing windshield wipers were problematic--for example, "the blades often scraped across a windshield that was nearly dry. The resultant friction made an annoying sound and tore up the blades' edges." The solution was also obvious: "A solution that occurred to a number of inventors was an intermittent system one that would wipe, pause for a few seconds, then wipe again."

In 1963, Kearns came up with one way to do this, patented it, and eventually sued Ford and Chrysler for using a similar design. "Ford's legal team argued that Kearns's patents were overly broad and therefore invalid. As Ted Daykin, a former Ford engineer, told The New Yorker in a 1993 article, 'An electronic timing device was an obvious thing to try next. How can you patent something that is in the natural evolution of technology?' The intermittent wiper, according to Daykin, was really the work of dozens of anonymous engineers at Ford, Trico, and other firms." Kearns won anyway--"$10.2 million from Ford in 1990 and $18.7 million from Chrysler in 1995, though both juries determined that the companies had not intentionally infringed on his patents."

This movie is sure to annoy. It's no wonder Hollywood likes it: it's pro-IP and anti-capitalism. But Randians have a dilemma--it pits one hero (innovator, patent holder) against another (industry)!

Update: GREAT comment on this at TechDirt.

In Against Intellectual Monopoly, Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine point out that the great rise in American agricultural productivity after 1930 took place when patents were not granted on plant life, especially in the case of corn. Corn varieties were patented only starting in 1974, almost half a century after the great ag productivity boom began (pp. 55-56). They state that better hybrid strains were the primary driver in the farm belt's boom.

The economic historian John Gordon Steele points to another factor in what he calls "The High Price of Farm Productivity" (scroll down a bit): Henry Ford's introduction of the Fordson tractor, which by 1922 cost less then a team of good horses. By 1930 the only farmers using horses were the Amish.

In 1900, a third of U.S. cropland was used for fodder crops; by 1930 it was used mainly for making human food. I don't know which affect was more important, but surely they both were influential.

Here is John Gordon Steele's economic history of America, An Empire of Wealth.

Stephanie Meyer's best selling Twilight Series has become "the first social networking best seller."

Her readers have created a new Twilight world on the web, which has served as an alternative marketing tool for her books. Sales of other books such as Freakonomics and The Last Lecture have benefitted the same way.

Unlike the billionaire fiction writer J.K. Rowling, who sued a young French writer of a Harry Potter Lexicon for copyright "infringement," Stephanie Meyer has basked in the glow of the Twilight Lexicon, created by her fan Lori Joffs. Ms. Meyer's main problem now is that she's too busy to keep up with all the Twilight-related stuff, and too busy (and grateful) to sue anyone.

Fan fiction continues to spawn new genres. So it's not surprising that the copyright lawyer Rebecca Tushnet wants to bring it out of the shadows and make it part of "fair use." Ms. Tushnet, although I'm sure you're well intentioned, please don't do it. If you want to do something useful, join the abolitionists and argue against copyright.

And note that Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry ignored fan fiction, and the Star Trek fan base (and his income) grew by leaps and bounds.

The Economist (July 19) has two articles on "piracy" and innovation, "Look for the Silver Lining", p. 23, and "Thanks, Me Hearties", p. 74.

Both articles note that record companies are using stats about file-sharing network traffic to learn where new singers are most popular, so they can target their marketing and advertising more effectively. TV programmers can do the same thing.

"Silver Lining" cites Bill Gates' point that "piracy" enables Microsoft to compete more effectively against open source software such as Linux.

It also mentions Matt Mason's book The Pirate's Dilemma, where he mentions a Japanese designer who removed the "whoosh" mark from Nike's Air Force trainers, slapped on his own design, and sold them for a premium price under his own brand. Instead of suing him, Nike saw an opportunity and invested in his firm, then started its own premium remix brand.

Matt Mason says the copied should innovate anew by copying the "pirates" path. Imitation can indeed be a form of innovation, as Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine show in Against Intellectual Monopoly.

Here is Matt Mason speaking about the pirate's dilemma; here is a blog related to his book: "The Pirate's Dilemma".

One of the big issues with copyright is that it stifles innovation. I was reminded of this again yesterday, when I saw a play, The Mystery of Irma Vep link here. It was written by Charles Ludlam who, the program notes observe, "Upon realizing that his teachers, and the commercial theater, wanted him to subscribe to the Stanislavskian method of behaving in a 'civilized manner in a room, not to do anything extraordinary,' Ludlam and a group of like-minded artists founded The Ridiculous Theatrical Company.... He quickly became famous for gleefully ransacking other genres and works.... Everything was fair game,... drawing on great works of literature as well as movies, plays, television ads, songs, comic books, or 'something shouted in the street' for all twenty-nine of his plays." Irma is a marvel of casting and direction, with two men playing all seven parts, including those of three women. Imagine the rapid fire costume changes, since both actors had to be onstage together most of the time.

The audience laughed their heads off. What a loss if copyright had interfered.

Paul Krugman has a good column today in the New York Times about how technology is undermining the monopoly formerly known as intellectual property. He uses the example of the Amazon Kindle and notes the parallel between digital downloads of books and music. In noting that Charles Dickens made money from book tours, he overlooks the fact that Dickens was front and center in the copyright monopolists' battle against the "pirates." He also might have noted that, contrary to legend, Dickens was paid royalties by three American publishers, including Harper & Brothers.

As he puts it, "in the long run we are all the Grateful Dead"--even if the Dead did sue Wolfgang's Vault for copyright infringement.

Here is the article.