Libraries, Liberty, and The Onion Router

I like libraries. The idea of a place where anyone can read anything is a fantastic innovation in human history.

I've written about libraries before.

Since Hypatia, and possibly before, libraries were not about just books, they are places where both learning and teaching occur. Young or old, rich or poor, the idea of welcoming everyone is inherently revolutionary.

Librarians are cool, too. If you think Google is good, go talk to a librarian. They know how to find stuff!

Copyright and the Great Library at Alexandria

Updated 20180819! See bottom!

The Duke University Center for the Study of the Public Domain has published their annual list of "What Would Have Entered The Public Domain" for 2015. TechDirt has a good digest of the list as well.

Edit: Here is the list for Jan 1, 2016.

None of that is going to happen.

When considering the government granted monopoly that is Copyright, it is important to keep in mind that the original reasoning and justification used for legislating Copyright in these United States, was to create a modern Library of Alexandria.

NeoCash Radio and The First Crypto War

NeoCash Radio has put up the short talk we had concerning the "First Crypto War", being, in my opinion, the time period from when Phil Zimmerman wrote PGP, to when the International Trafficking In Arms Regulations on the export of strong encryption were repealed.

I recommend my earlier post, "When The Net Was Young", if you haven't read it.

Spoiler: Geeks vs. NSA, Geeks won the battle, the war continues.

But there are elements to the story that I was not able to get into on the air, so I will spend a little while creating this blog post with links and additional materials concerning my comments in the radio show

The guys over at NeoCash Radio had me on for their show #77, talking about Bitcoin and all the rest of it.

Thank you, Daren and JJ, for the opportunity, and I look forward to our talk on the First Crypto War when that comes out.

Curt-

Doug Engelbart

I just learned that Doug Engelbart died yesterday.

So few people know that the way they work with their computers came to him in a flurry of creation while driving to work one day.

Software Patents and "Rent Seeking"

"Rent Seeking" is a term in economics used to denote the effort of those with "political" power, that is, the ability to leverage the violence of the state, to use that leverage for personal gain.

Inspired by the recent Mises.org article on the subject, I'd like to give my own perspective on the issue.

While most of us think of "rent" only as paying one's landlord for the use of their property, this common use of the term is not as far from the more technical "economic" term as it seems at first. Let it stew for a while, see if it doesn't make sense.