Against Monopoly
Very nice list by Techdirt’s Mike Masnick:

Techdirt Book Reading List 2009

from the food-for-thought dept

A couple years ago, after completing my series of posts on the economics of ideas and infinite goods, I wrote up a reading list of books that were useful in thinking about all of this. With our recent launch of a book version of that series, called Approaching Infinity, I updated that list with a bunch of more recent books (basically, the books sitting on my desk again…), and wanted to share them here. For this post, I’m only writing up short reviews, but plan to revisit some of these books with much more detailed reviews, in the future. Not surprisingly, we’ll kick it off with four of the books that I feel are the most important for anyone to read if they’re interested in these things. Together, they make up the four books that you can get together (all signed by their authors!) in the Techdirt Book Club package.

The Essentials:

• Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars by William Patry

  Patry, long established as one of the foremost experts on copyright law, has written an outstanding text that discusses how copyright law has been twisted and abused by corporate interests who don’t use it for its intended purpose (to promote the progress of creative works) but as a tool to prop up an outdated business model. On top of this, he explores the misleading and inflammatory language used by those seeking to abuse copyright law in this manner. Highly engaging and a must read for anyone who’s worried about the state of copyright today. Oh, and as a bonus, Patry has started blogging again in support of the book, after he gave up on blogging a couple years ago.

• The Public Domain by James Boyle

  Law professor James Boyle has been one of the foremost critics of the undue expansion of copyright law over the years, fighting against things like the DMCA and the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act. Over the years, he’s noticed a troubling trend among some to question why the public domain is even needed so he wrote an entire book to explain why. It’s filled with story after story that highlights both the importance of the public domain and how overly aggressive copyright laws have held back the public domain and the creativity that it previously allowed. As a highlight, don’t miss the incredible chapter on the birth of soul music by Ray Charles. If today’s copyright regime had been in force at the time, we might not have had soul music at all. Think of all the great music we may be missing today thanks to current copyright laws.

• Against Intellectual Monopoly
  by David Levine and Michele Boldrin

  This book was on the list two years ago, but that was an earlier digital-only draft, as opposed to the full hardcover version now available. Levine and Boldrin are two well-known economists who began investigating the impacts of intellectual property, and were eventually quite disturbed by what they found. That is, they could find no evidence that either copyrights or patents actually achieved their stated …

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