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Call for Papers for a Volume of the Yearbook of Knowledge and Society. Deadline: May 1, 2024

 New post over at grumpy-economist.com substack

Europe needs to see itself through the eyes of the millions of Europeans with intellectual disabilities—and act accordingly.

Elias Neibart (Harvard University, Harvard Law School) has posted Originalism as Intellectual History (Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy: Per Curiam, No. 1, 2022) on SSRN. Here is the abstract: If the majority opinions in Dobbs and Bruen taught...

One of our unfashionable ideas is that we shouldn't worry overmuch about intellectual property in poor places. Yes, IP like patents and copyrights is vital for some solution is necessary to that public goods problem. If anyone and everyone can just copy then little profit can be made therefore no one invests in the initial creation. When a new drug can cost $2 billion that's a problem that has to be solved. But this has also led to an insistence, in some quarters, that everywhere should have to obey those same IP rules. And, well, no. Truly poor places have, by definition, no money. So, if they have to obey all the IP laws they'll not buy any of the IP. The impact of IP laws on the revenue of those who developed the IP is zero. If those same poor people then steal the IP instead the impact upon development incentives is also zero. But, clearly, the poor people are made better off. This is a Pareto improvement and therefore we should do that. It makes absolutely no difference to those incentives and people still become better off. But we then get to that problem of when's the dividing line between poor and steal and rich and pay? Chinese authorities have targeted a major online sales platform accused of supplying counterfeit goods, raiding warehouses holding millions of packages destined for overseas buyers.Earlier this month police raided the Hangzhou office and several warehouses of Pandabuy after reported legal action by 16 brands over copyright infringement. More than 200 public security branch officers, 50 private sector investigators and local police were involved, according to reports.This is not an exact claim but a general one. This is something that can be left to the market. Everyone has the same nominal rules, obviously. But they require enforcement by those domestic authorities to be effective. When will those domestic authorities enforce? When that place is creating IP that it would like other countries to also enforce rights to. Which is a useful definition of being richer rather than poorer too - a place that is creating IP is going to be richer than a place which is not. As we say, not an exact rule but a useful general guide we think. Mutual recognition of intellectual property will come when places are rich enough to be creating IP they want protected. A place that is poorer than that likely doesn't have any money to buy IP anyway. Yes, obviously grey areas at that interface and dividing line but still, we insist, a useful guide.Yes, this does mean we're rather against TRIPS. Oh well, if that's where logic leads us….

In this blogpost, Yusuf Serunkuma slams the cowardice of intellectuals today, who display self-censorship and contentment with the status quo, in contrast with an earlier generation of activists and subaltern scholars. Serunkuma argues that this did not happen overnight, rather it has taken years of manufacturing conformity and consent.
The post The roots of cowardice of today's subaltern intellectuals first appeared on ROAPE.
The post The roots of cowardice of today's subaltern intellectuals appeared first on ROAPE.

By Randolph L Bruno (University College London), Riccardo Crescenzi (London School of Economics), Saul Estrin (London School of Economics) and Sergio Petralia (Utrecht University)   Multinational enterprises (MNEs) locate their R&D activities around the world and their performance as innovators depends on this internal geography. But we also expect to see a link between their invention capabilities and how … Continued

This approach to doing so poses serious academic freedom problems

Amy Price reflects on how the Intellectual Property Office UK (IPO) has made accessibility a priority by setting up a champions network and creating a supportive accessible environment.

The Supreme Court delivered unanimous opinions on intellectual property rights, reaffirming the importance of IP basics.
The post Supreme Court's Latest Intellectual Property Rulings Return to Basics appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

There are ways to make drugs more affordable, but removing or reducing intellectual property to do so is without legal precedent and will reduce investment in the academic centers and biotechnology companies in the US that have led advances in healthcare treatments.
The post Intellectual Property and Emergencies: Policy for Medicines and Vaccines appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

In this latest volume, Joseph Mackay offers a novel approach to understanding counterinsurgency. From its historical roots to the contemporary, this is a thorough-going intellectual history of the concept.

The ending of the original The Blob I have a distinct memory of watching the original The Blob on a Saturday afternoon movie. I watched a lot of Saturday afternoon movies, Godzilla, all of the Universal monsters, and various giant ants, crabs, and praying mantis. The Blob stood out because it was actually frightening in a way that a giant monster crushing a city was not, and because its ending, in which a frozen blob was dropped someplace north of the Arctic Circle was followed by a giant question mark hovering over the sky, lingered in my mind. At the time it seemed like the perfect way to end a horror movie, with the horror still intact. I must admit as well that Steve McQueen's last line, "As long as the Arctic stays cold," sounds much more ominous these days.  
It is perhaps because of this fondness for the original that I rewatched the eighties remake as part of the Criterion Channel's 80s Horror collection (parenthetically I want to throw out a few words of praise for the Criterion Channel in general and for their ability to do a great job with Halloween programing. While the collection only has a few horror movies, including, for some reason, the original Blob, the channel has branched out to include some classics, like Wolfen, some forgotten gems, like The Hidden, and some oddballs that would not show up anyplace else). The remake is uneven, but not terrible. Perhaps its best innovation is to update the original film's social conflict. The original was framed in the conflict between the small town authority figures and the kids (who were portrayed by actors well into their twenties when the film was made). This is preserved in the figure of Kevin Dillon, who, for some reason, wears the "Puffy shirt" that Seinfeld would make famous. The remake expands the social conflict to include a government agency whose attempt to contain the blob is couched in cold war paranoia in which every alien is a potential bioweapon. Its real improvement, however, in how it updates the question mark that lingers over the original with a scene featuring the town's preacher. He has witnessed the blob's attack on the small town and concludes that it is a harbinger of the apocalypse, that he sees himself tasked to complete. Upon rewatching I realized that what I liked about this ending is its fundamental incompleteness. There was no sequel to this particular version of the blob. The ending just hovers as a question mark. I wish more films were allowed to end on the question. The original Halloween has one of the best endings of modern horror. Its ending makes the film feel like one of the stories told around a campfire about "escaped lunatics." When I was growing up "escaped lunatic" stories were what we told camping, not ghost stories, and they always ended with some twist about the scratching of a car roof, or who was licking a hand, all guaranteed to make it hard to sleep. Halloween's ending, "he looked over the balcony and the body wasn't there" always seemed to be one such ending, which is why the film almost feels more like a rendition of a kind of urban legend or folk tale. Of course this ending has been turned into multiple sequels that have expanded on Michael Myers ability to survive bullets, fire, stabbings, etc., As I watched the most recent film in the long line of sequels, Halloween Ends I kept thinking that it would be better if the whole series had ended with just the shot of the imprint in the shape of the body in grass (or gone in the direction Carpenter wanted, with a different Halloween film each year, as in the underrated Season of the Witch).. All of the original movies of the eighties and seventies that were serialized into sequels, reboots, and, in the language of the new Scream film, requels (reboot and sequel, like the new Halloween films that simultaneously follow existing films and restart the sequence, often cutting films out of the canon), Halloween, Friday the 13th, and A Nightmare on Elm Street, ended on a question mark, on a scene in which the seemingly dead killer or monster comes back in one last jump scare. In the parlance of the times, they left it open for a sequel, but now, everything is open for a sequel. Any character that does not die can return, and even those who do can return, somehow. The endings of the originals almost function as frightening short films in their own right, albeit, ones dominated by jump scares. It is worth noting how much they "hold up" even as many of the sequels and prequels they gave rise to fade into well deserved obscurity. All of those sequels, which expand upon and then reduce the mythology of the characters, add up to so much less than endings which made them possible. The question mark, incompleteness, is as much a part of the narrative as what we see on the screen. Contemporary intellectual property driven film production, however, abhors a vacuum. Everything that is not explicitly resolved must be made and remade until there is nothing left to extract from it. A lot of the frustration and boredom that many people feel about contemporary film and television stems from the tension between narrative, which demands closure as well as incompleteness, and the extraction of value which works against both. It is not enough to see that a character lives, the sequel must be made, just like it is not enough to learn that spies found the plans for the Death Star, we must see their story, and their back story. Narratives are finite by definition, but commodity production is a bad infinity. 

How Vietnam, Watergate, and stagflation supercharged the libertarian movement.

As bad as our policy discussion is today, it's not as bad as the collectivist, centralist, and even dictatorial ideas that dominated the intellectual climate of the Depression years.