Information Feudalism

Your post got me to digging out some old word files, till I found this. When I was a fair bit younger I wrote the piece below on the conceptual link between libertarianism and feudalism for a student zine, since then I’ve shown it to libertarians on occasion, their response is usually apoplectic, though a handful have actually bitten the bullet, or perhaps the entire ammo clip in this case:

Once upon a time, in a land far, far away from what is actually possible, the government surrendered its right to taxation except that required to maintain a very minimal state, with an army, a police force, a judicial system, a mint and one or two other things. At the very same time that government removed restrictions on contracts, allowing for more or less all contractual conditions.

Bob the rich man had always wanted to be a lord, it looked like such fun! He bought 2000 square kilometres of land at incredibly generous prices; he even offered to let the inhabitants keep their land, so long as they signed a contract granting him a tithe of their income. Not all inhabitants accept of course, but almost all of them who did not accept to remain as his tenants sold him their land anyway, feeling a little uneasy about the idea of remaining.

Time passed and Bob got to thinking. Wouldn’t it be a wonderful thing if the community could resolve its own grievances through a series of courts allowed to deal with petty matters? Bob made signing certain authorities over to these courts a requirement of renewing tenancy. The courts handled petty torts and perhaps even some very minor criminal matters. For the most part people accepted this, the government seemed very far away and distant, a minimal thing attended to only in oft forgotten elections, because the government had given up much of its power no one bothered to talk about it any more, on the other hand the local courts were near and the magistrates all neighbours and trusted residents of Bobland and the laws proposed reasonable. A handful of people left of course.

Time passed and each successive year these courts grew in power, they were mostly reasonable and convenient. Perhaps generations started to pass to, and the idea that a system of private courts was absurd leeched from the people’s minds. During the reign of Bob the III a very elementary system whereby certain people in need could be given loans at little interest was introduced, since this petit system of welfare was found to actually increase productivity. During the reign of Bob the IV it was declared that certain precepts of Boblandian Christianity had to be obeyed, on pain of expulsion from the land, a difficult fate since the money from the initial sale of land to Bob three generations ago had mostly been frittered away or reclaimed in taxes; to be expelled was to go probably alone and with perhaps very little property into the lands outside Bobland.

Over successive generations new conditions of tenancy were introduced, a portion money earned through sales had to be given to Bob . The residents of Bobland were required to give over their voting rights in the governmental elections. By this time there were of course many lands like Bobland, Garyland, Jasonland and Samland (1). The state made an effort to regulate everyone, but on occasion there were small border skirmishes between the great estates, these were deplored recognised as inevitable. Bobland, for its part, never behaved aggressively towards its neighbours but was required to defend itself on a few occasions.

And everyone was free, gloriously free, unrestrained by any power mad nanny state.

I put it to you that the state of minarchia described never did anything against the rules of libertarianism, nor did Bob or any of his successors. Neither the state or Bobland ever initiated coercion or failed to keep their end of a contract and yet, feudalism resulted. The natural outcome of America libertarianism is feudalism through tenancy, thus libertarianism does not result in liberty. Actual liberty requires restrictions on the power of individuals and corporate bodies, and whether or not you call these corporate bodies’ states, or these individuals rulers, is irrelevant. There will always be rules governing our lives; the only difference is that American style libertarians would functionally delegate these powers to “private” bodies, who would, in time, effectively constitute a new public sphere. Freedom is not slavery and libertarianism is not liberty. To put it in the terms of political philosophy, if you strip away all positive rights it soon becomes clear just how thin the so called “negative” rights are.

(1)- It is not a coincidence that all these names are male names.

Great post until you ruined it with:

(1)- It is not a coincidence that all these names are male names.

Obviously you never heard of Margaret Thatcher.

Obviously you never heard of Margaret Thatcher.

It’s clear that our society is fundamentally patriarchal in nature (a situation which I abhor, by the way, and can attribute only to the application of overwhelming and brutal force over uncounted centuries), and Thatcher is (and hopefully soon will no longer be) a ruthless twit who managed to claw her way to the top by following their rules and thanks to the gradual relaxing of some of the sexual restrictions in that society. There’s little question in my mind that, were we to devolve back into the feudal mire described above, women — with the occasional exceptions, as there always have been — would once again find themselves at the bottom of the heap.

Or, as Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle note in Lucifer’s Hammer, women’s liberation survives for about 30 seconds after Hammerfall.

There’s no reason society has to be that way, and many societies, current and past, have been ordered differently. Perhaps if civilisation falls after a century or two of full equality, sexual freedom, and the extinction of organised religion, power in the feudal hierarchy could be more evenly distributed among the sexes — or perhaps we could avoid the whole feudal thing altogether.

But to complain that IP protection does not deliver a free market is rather missing the point.

But same is the case with most of the other kinds of property; land, for example:

“The first person who, having fenced off a plot of ground, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him was the true founder of civil society” (Rousseau 1753)

What is the libertarianism/propertarianism all about, then?

But I think it might actually be possible to sidestep it by coming up with something like ‘information feudalism’ or ‘cyberfeudalism’ as a catchy term for IP rent-seeking or patent trolling

http://www.amazon.com/Information-Feudalism-Peter-Drahos/dp/1565848047

I’d actually like to go back to the anti-monopoly position that people always cite from Macaulay:

http://www.famous-speeches-and-speech-topics.info/famous-speeches/thomas-babington-macaulay-speech-copyright-law.htm

Tim’s position – that we have to mess with the market a bit in order to reward innovation, but that this is a bad thing in itself, used to be the default. I reckon linking the idea of IP to the commons, as Larry Lessig likes to do, is a huge rhetorical blunder. It suggests that to worry about IP rights you have to be worried about property rights generally. Most people don’t think property is bad thing per se. But no-one – left, right or otherwise – is in favour of monopoly for its own sake. Boldrin and Levine seem to have realised this, but they never get much press:

http://www.againstmonopoly.org/

I wonder if someone with good funding could mount a campaign in favor of the idea that non-creative managerial types should never have more than licensed rights to use others’ IP, never be able to refer to themselves as the originators of others’ IP, and only ever able to exercise their licensed rights for fixed and limited times.

I’m pretty that this will be met with a slew of better funded people – all of them talking about how this will actually harm artists by ensuring that non-creative managerial types have less incentive to buy or commission work, now that they can’t exploit its full value. They might even draw little diagrams talking about the dead-weight losses that this sort of “needless government regulation” and “protectionism” has caused. And all the while they’ll be conveniently omitting the fact that the whole thing is an exercise in regulation and protectionism. What really should be a non-ideological point gets turned into another left v right battle.

Bruce: that more closely resembles the French-style droit moral system.

The problem with the IP system is that, for it to work, people have to be prevented from enjoying the benefits of a particular piece of IP without the permission of the rightsholder(s). This can lead to all sorts of deadweight loss (qv copy protection wars, most recently on the PS3).

What Bruce Baugh and Pete said (especially about Lessig’s idiosyncratic focus), but additionally: what we have now isn’t actually IP protection in the sense most people think of it. We don’t respect the rights of authors. There’s story upon story about screenwriters who arguably had ideas taken by Hollywood producers who laughed at the idea a lawsuit would even be possible. Rock bands have similar stories. Notice how Yglesias snarks at the very idea that Newton should have spoken up about his belief that Leibniz borrowed. The appropriate parallel is actually the idea that Cambridge University (or the Royal Society) should have asserted the patent.

Yes, we have IP protection for the estates of dead authors (though we also have IP protection for the estates of people who had other authors’ IP in their possession at the time of their own death, in a few strange seeming cases), and that is a pain for scholars. I’d consider IP protection for journal publishers who extracted copyright protection from authors in the category from my first paragraph.

And the issues for software are completely different, of course (as Yglesias, to his credit, gestures at with his mention of the shifting patent rules).

Reversing the idea that property rights equal freedom would seem to require reversing four hundred years of Anglo-American intellectual history. (Whig history, no doubt, but what other kind is there?) Such an intellectual revolution seems like a bit of overkill when the only identified problem is supra-optimal levels of IP protection.

Although overcoming the idea that property rights equal freedom is probably impossible, there exists widespread acceptance of the idea–an idea with respectable common law antecedents–that property rights can be modified by government action. Any successful campaign to modify IP law is more likely to be framed in that mode than a radical anti-propertarian mode.

“Although overcoming the idea that property rights equal freedom is probably impossible, there exists widespread acceptance of the idea—an idea with respectable common law antecedents—that property rights can be modified by government action.”

Well of course, something that has been created by government action can also be modified by government action. Framing the debate in these terms is conceding the other side’s premise.

It’s not just that IP law is too strong, though it is. It’s also that it makes it easy for the wrong people to get too-strong claims. The people getting richest on IP should at least be writers and artists and photographers and composers and such, and clearly this isn’t the case.
For my taste, this is too close to arguing that only cool people we like should get benefits from IP, not boring people in suits. Technological inventions or Hollywood movies are produced by mass collaborations of people, most of whom are not directly involved in the creation of new things, but still necessary as support. Why should we restrict the benefits to some set of true creators, instead of awarding the relevant rights to the organization as a whole?

Also, are you sure the individuals who profit most from IP are not writers and artists? JK Rowlings or Paul McCartney are among the richest people in the world.

Y81: “Reversing the idea that property rights equal freedom would seem to require reversing four hundred years of Anglo-American intellectual history.” Not really. We’re talking about trends that are decades, not centuries, old. The existing framework of functionally eternal rights for corporate IP holders is another of the features emerging out of the attack on the Great Compression; it’s not’s something that, for instance, my mother grew up being taught in the 1930s.

The only principled reason to oppose IP, in fact, is the libertarian advocacy of property rights.

It simply could not be that other-than-libertarians have principles.

Zamfir @ 28
There are hundreds and sometimes thousands of people working on films, doing creative work–enormous amounts of money is spent on making things for movie sets that will be thrown out afterwards–but most of them earn barely a living wage and will quit the business by the time they’re thirty. Then there are people who make a good enough living to get themselves into the elite (able to afford monthly facials, household help, private schools, and so on) by directing staffs of creative people, selecting stories and changing films to meet a certain commercial criterion. I don’t begrudge them their high salaries, but what they do and what their staffs do is not the same as what an indie filmmaker or a novelist does, and an IP law that works only to their benefit is not doing what the law was intended to do.

Additionally, the arguments made by Hollywood lawyers, around the time the current DVD and MP3 technologies were shaking out, unilaterally assert rights for the entertainment industry far beyond what seems to make sense.

Kinsella is associated with the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and more particularly a follower of Hans Herman Hoppe & Murray Rothbard, among the most propertarian of libertarians. Hoppe even founded a group called “Property & Freedom” or something like that and defends monarchy as superior to democracy.

Zamfir: ‘scool. Certainly there are people out there saying what you saw in my earlier comments; I’m not one of them, that’s all. :)

I don’t think that IP law is any more unpleasantly tilted toward corporate interests than a lot of other stuff. It affects me and a bunch of people I know more directly, and maybe it’s a little more blatantly obvious, and it (probably deceptively) seems kind of self-contained and isolatable in ways that other problems with corporations aren’t.

Stephan: Of course people like your patrons got us into this mess, with exactly the confidence and devotion to capitalism you show here. For me, on the other hand, the history of IP and its abuse have a lot to do with breaking me of any interest in preserving capitalism as such, or feeling that IP law as we have it is anything but a manifestation of capitalism working exactly as actually existing capitalists have wanted it to for a long time now. That is, you’re part of the problem, or at least your arguments are.

Bloix: Hey, do you happen to know of any good etymological histories for this stuff? I know vaguely about the evolution you describe but not details.

“Use of land is rivalrous and excludable.”
“Use of land is rivalrous but it’s not excludable”

It’s not necessarily rival either. A public beach can be used by many people simultaneously without taking away from its value. You might say that I am preventing others from using the particular 5 square feet covered by my towel but then, I am also preventing others to breath the particular molecules of air that I am breathing right now. Still we don’t call air a rival good.

For most of human history, land was not private property and most of its use was neither rival nor excludable.

John Holbo @ 40: Well, only if you consider the profit motive to be a form of neurosis, which it might be.

I think the complaint in question is perceived as being made because of pride, a level of amour propre that is seen as ridiculous in a person with so little in the way monetary and legal resources. Put another way, the person who’s motivated by profit in this situation is the Hollywood producer and his corporate studio. The guy complaining doesn’t try to maximize profit; he’s a writer, for pete’s sake. The neurosis is complaining about the way of the world, the fact that the powerful are powerful, that time and chance happeneth, a fait accompli

I understand some of the economic distinctions between intellectual property and just plain old dumb property (chattels, realty, choses in action, and treat licenses as you please.) But I really don’t understand other distinctions.

There is no such thing as prepolitical property. It’s all a legal construct. There is such a thing as tangible property (and we can leave to the side the question of whether realty is tangible property. But IP is not the only kind of intangible property, and there doesn’t seem to be much problem with plain old dumb property that is intangible (e.g., securities.) And furthermore, much of the law of tangible property is pretty obviously a political construct: nonpossessory security interests, confusion of goods, etc.

Now I will grant you that there is such a thing as property in places where there is no law: e.g., Primo Levi’s discussion of the economics of concentration camps. But this just changes the topic from law to social constructivism mixed with some brain wiring. There is nothing “natural” about social construction, and the constraining brain wiring belongs more to the province of psychology than political theory.

Where am I going? When you are talking about appropriate property rights, all you are doing is evaluating law or social conventions in terms of something else. The “something else” can only be economics or psychology. Except for the psychology, there is nothing “natural” about the concept of property. The rest is social/legal conventions, all the way down. And this applies to differently to intellectual property than it does to dumb property.

Bruce, always remember, if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the precipitate.

“Use of land is rivalrous but it’s not excludable without an elaborate legal system of land title and registry and a dense web of state actors and state-licensed actors who are granted a monopoly on the use of force.”

That applies to all forms of property, I think. When economists refer to “excludable,” they mean only that it is physically possible for the state to exclude some people at the behest of others, as is possible in the case of land but not so much in the case of sunlight (or street lighting). They don’t mean that exclusion happens automatically, as a result of the laws of physics.

“I think the idea that intellectual property is property is too entrenched, at this point, for this to be an effective rhetorical strategy. ”

This isn’t really true. The term “intellectual property” has just gotten popular recently. It really happened in the 1990s:

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=intellectual+property&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3

y81:

When economists refer to “excludable,” they mean only that it is physically possible for the state to exclude some people at the behest of others, as is possible in the case of land but not so much in the case of sunlight (or street lighting). They don’t mean that exclusion happens automatically, as a result of the laws of physics.

Ok but land is at least a border line case. The larger the land area in question, the more difficult it is to make it exclusive. Besides, intellectual property can also be excludable, via built-in copy protections. They can be circumvented, but so can a fence.

I’ve decided to republish that parable.

I think I’ll call it the road to serfdom.

“Deeply unconvinced there. Try wandering through some field that a dog thinks belongs to him. You’ll certainly find that there will be an attempt to exclude. Same with hunter gatherer tribes, no?”

But is it, in the case of hunter gatherer tribes, private property? A tribe could be seen as a kind of proto-state. And it’s the same way with state-owned property today. States surely attempt to exclude other states (and private actors) from their properties.

“So the premise is that information is a public good and thus will be insufficiently produced by markets? ”

I think you’re playing there with two different meanings of “information”.

There’s information in that Hayek sense, what do people want and how do they want it. And markets are great processors (providers if you like) of that information. Or data into information if you like.

But there’s another meaning of information: “this is how you make a transistor”.

I’m all for the freedom of that first type and can see the public goods issues with the second. But they are distinct, aren’t they?

“But is it, in the case of hunter gatherer tribes, private property? A tribe could be seen as a kind of proto-state. ”

Fair enough: but that wasn’t really the distinction I was thinking about. It was between private property and terra nullius perhaps. Between property that can be used by one person, or member of whatever the in group is, and property that can be used by anyone at all who just pitches up.

Worstall:

“Deeply unconvinced there. Try wandering through some field that a dog thinks belongs to him. You’ll certainly find that there will be an attempt to exclude. Same with hunter gatherer tribes, no?” … “Fair enough: but that wasn’t really the distinction I was thinking about. It was between private property and terra nullius perhaps.”

Hunter gatherer tribes are the worst example you could come up. I’m not denying that some form of territoriality, attempts by a group to exclude other groups from using certain land-based resources, may exist but that’s a far cry from propertarian ideas about land ownership. “Between private property and terra nullius” there are countless other possible arrangements. And a resource commonly used by members of a group to the exclusion of other groups is emphatically NOT private property.

I think you’re playing there with two different meanings of “information”.

I’m all for the freedom of that first type and can see the public goods issues with the second. But they are distinct, aren’t they?

Now there’s a deep philosophical question. Ask John. But whatever he reckons, my worry would be that this sort of distinction gets very blurry at the margins. Obviously we can draw a distinction between a patented drug and the price it sells at. Still, there have been some pretty worrying developments over the last 20 years or so:

1) As a general point, how something is made is very likely to have some impact on whether I want to buy it or not. This might not be a problem for patented products like transistors, but it is a problem for copyright: “How do I know if I want to buy the book if you won’t let me read it?” “How do I know if this code’s any good if I can’t get someone to inspect it?” etc. etc. This makes markets for copyrighted goods really problematic. Quick example: the whole Google Book Search kerfuffle was a dispute about whether it was legal for unlicensed third parties to scan books, not for the sake of providing a substitute, but just to tell people that they existed and what they contained. There’s an argument that US copyright law doesn’t allow that sort of use. European law almost certainly doesn’t.

2) Bianca (@ 23) mentioned algorithmic and business method patents. The fact that there’s so much many of these in financial services these days blurs the “making a transistor” and “processing prices” distinction in interesting ways.. The State Street decision was sort of a high watermark for this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Street_Bank_v._Signature_Financial_Group

A system of law that can let someone hold exclusive rights over “the transformation of data, representing discrete dollar amounts, by a machine through a series of mathematical calculations into a final share price” has to ask itself some serious questions about what the market is meant to be doing.

3) Used to be that trademarks were only infringed if I was trying to fool your customers into buying your goods when in fact they were buying mine. These days, the US and Europe recognise what are called “anti-dilution rights”, which stop me from even associating my goods with yours if there’s a worry that it would tarnish your brand. The law’s taken the step into protecting the fact that people want your goods, rather than just ensuring that it’s yours they’re buying.

4) I also seem to remember some story about a shop owner stopping people from using his prices for comparison purposes, because they were his “intellectual property.” Obviously he was wrong, but with the EU recognising database rights these days, you can imagine potential for that sort of abuse at a more sophisticated level.

Also, Tim Wu makes a slightly different Hayekian case against strong IP rights here:

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=726561

The core idea is that IP licensing is a re-run of the socialist calculation problem – if you have one party deciding how information may or may not be used, that information is likely to be used inefficiently.

“The distinction between property from which every person but one is excluded, and property from which every person not a member of a small group is excluded, is not particularly meaningful to the everyperson excluded.”

This reasoning is incredibly shallow. The term ‘property’ has a specific meaning and it is not the same as ‘territoriality’ or ‘resource competition’. Propertarians are arguing that the specific legal institution we today call “property” has existed forever and is rooted in human nature or natural law or whatever fairy tale they come up with. That is historically wrong.

If you really don’t understand what this is about, as an illustration, consider that the natives of North America had no concept of land ownership and simply did not comprehend that legal construct when Europeans soon after their arrival claimed that certain pieces of paper gave them something called legal property rights over land and resources that the natives had used and controlled (without thinking in terms of property ownership) for centuries. Consider also that while said natives did have concepts of territoriality and did carry out violent inter-group conflicts based on resource competition, they were remarkably tolerant – too tolerant for their own good, to be sure – toward European settlers. The propertarian myth doesn’t hold water.

Cut me some slack here. There is evidently a long-running economic-slash-philosophical debate, of which I do not know the history or the premises. I didn’t read the book about the proprietarian myth, nor did I see the movie. But I claim the non-specialist’s privilege of yapping when an expert says something that seems to me to contradict mere common sense.

I am well aware that the concept that a hunk of land belongs to one person and all others are excluded is not universal. In the rural Italy, as recently as WWII, family A might have the right to cut wood and make charcoal on a particular mountainside, while Family B got to forage its pigs there, and family C got to pick the mushrooms. All of this was a matter of custom and community memory, not of written documents. But if a stranger came in and started cutting down trees, it would quickly be brought home to him that he was infringing on the rights of family A. I don’t know what you would call that if not a system of property rights.

I also don’t see how a system like that survives where there are crops. No one is going to plant a field with wheat except on in the confident expectation that nobody else is allowed to, say, bring in his herd of cattle and turn them loose in the ripening crop. There are two ways of achieving that level of confidence: You can provide yourself with better weaponry with the other person, or you can set up a central authority that will recognize your investment in the crop and protect it. Again, that sounds like a property right to me. (And the native cultures of the southeastern US practiced intense agriculture — not the slash-and-burn kind, either. I don’t know, but I bet they recognized something we would call property. Though it may be that everything belonged to the big chief — they certainly had big chiefs.)

I’m starting to get irritated now. What is the cultural bias you think I have?

roac, you’re confusing *rights* in general, with property rights. That set of italian natives aren’t having a discussion the way you think they are having. Rights to the resources =/ rights to land, and certainly not in the abstract monarchical hierarchy sense. Piglet mentioned US aboriginals for a danged reason, and you have very little basis to be irritated.

Now, piglet can be angry piglet, but usually, I don’t waste time being angry or dismissive. However, I was bored.

Jesus, now the namecalling stars in earnest. before I was just culturally biased, now I’m a dumbass. Do you people think you are talking to a fucking libertarian? What on earth have I said to make you think that?

All I am saying is that I can’t imagine a human society in which every physical object or piece of land is open to use at any time by any person who comes along. (If you have a convincing counterexample, trot it out, I am ready to be convinced I’m mistaken.) If the society recognizes that one person or group of persons can use the object to the exclusion of someone else, then, to my thinking, that is a property right, broadly speaking. I didn’t know that use of the term in certain circles is equivalent to saying Fuck at a Mormon ladies’ sewing circle. I’ll be careful not to use it in the future.

I am aware that some people think that there is something called a P*R*O*P*E*R*T*Y R*I*G*H*T which Proceedeth from the Father and the Son and justifies overthrow of any government that infringes on it. I do not think any such thing, and they don’t teach any such thing in law school either. Rights are a matter of social convention and subject to constant revision and adjustment for the good of society. (Our present system is, IMO, a pretty good one, but is increasingly under siege by the plutocratic interests and requires constant defense in the political and legal arenas.)

Incidentally, a quick Googling of “Mound Builder culture social organization” produces this:

Analysis of mortuary remains suggests Middle and Late Woodland communities were characterized by a system of social rank: Particular kin groups are believed to have had high social prestige, differential access to rare commodities, and control over positions of political leadership.

“Jesus, now the namecalling stars in earnest. before I was just culturally biased, now I’m a dumbass.”

To tone this down a little bit, “culturally biased” is actually not name-calling. It is quite normal to have cultural biases and it requires quite a bit of effort to overcome them (to the extent that that is even possible). Having said that, if you are really interested in the questions and issues you raise, you should probably do some reading of your own.

No one is going to plant a field with wheat except on in the confident expectation that nobody else is allowed to, say, bring in his herd of cattle and turn them loose in the ripening crop. There are two ways of achieving that level of confidence: You can provide yourself with better weaponry with the other person, or you can set up a central authority that will recognize your investment in the crop and protect it.

You left out… cooperation! If everyone else in the tribe expects to *share* in your harvest when it comes, then they all have the same interest you do in not ruining it, and even in helping you improve it (at which point it is more accurate to describe it as “our” harvest). So you don’t have to coerce them to find another pasture, they’ll do it voluntarily.

The assumption that society is a war of all against all is precisely what leads to the assumption that you have to fight others to keep them out of “your” property in order to be able to use it for anything long-term. But it’s not a universal assumption.

The exclusiveness of property is not just about keeping someone else from taking food and throwing it in the mud — it’s also about keeping someone else from taking food and *eating it*, even when they are as hungry as you are or even hungrier. It’s the belief that the latter is sometimes morally right (or at least permissible) that distinguishes a property-using system of morality from a non-property-using system.

P.S. Of course the tribe has to prevent its own members from stupidly or spitefully damaging its interests, which may involve something that could be described as a central authority, in the event that social persuasion is inadequate. But it still wouldn’t be recognizing or enforcing anything that could reasonably be described as an individual property right.

I highly recommend Lewis Hyde’s Common as Air. He’s brilliant on the subject of the Commons, intellectual property, patents and copyright. He focuses on 18th century America views, but brings this all up to date as well. I learned a great deal about the history of patents and copyright from his book, and the changes in recent decades. It was not that long ago that scientists felt they could not patent “discoveries.” If they uncovered a fact of nature, a physical law, they believed this was something that should go into the public domain as a part of our cultural inheritance. It was considered wrong to monopolize and privatize these things. Today, however, private companies try to patent discoveries of natural facts all the time, which reduces the “freedom” and “liberty” of further widespread research and development, as one company can ration knowledge on this or that particular thing. Hyde talks about the Human Genome Project, and the clash between public sector scientists and private venture capitalists who have patented discoveries of nature, often by basically stealing public sector research. They can then call the shots on a whole range of further study, and raise the price of the deal in the bargain.

Hyde also discusses Bob Dylan’s musical influences, and shows how eclectic he was in “sampling” old folk songs, blues, etc. etc. when he first started out. With the changes in copyright laws, Dylan may not have been able to be Dylan had he come on the scene in the 90s, rather than the 60s.

A fascinating, well-researched and well-written book.

This false choice makes even less sense when applied to the ownership of land. Absolute ownership by either the state or private interests is, in most parts of the world, a recent invention. Even after the Norman Conquest, when William I asserted a narrower concept of property than any previous English king had done, the common people retained rights over land which others owned. Their rights of usufruct, of grazing, pannage, estovers, turbary and piscary survived for many centuries before being terminated: first informally, later in wholesale acts of enclosure. Even today – as you can see from the pressure which forced the last government to recognise our rights to roam in the countryside, and the outcry with which its deregulation of the planning laws was met – we retain the sense that land is not like other property. Though it might be privately owned, the public retains an interest in it and certain rights over it.