Frank Pasquale

I’ve recently been browsing Hans Abbing’s fascinating work Why Are Artists Poor?–which has exactly one reference to copyright in its… Read More »Expansive Copyright Licensing Claims as Inefficient Welfare

Again apropos of Mike’s earlier post on warning students of the lasting consequences of bad behavior, here’s RIAA’s latest anti-downloading… Read More »Be Very Afraid

Editor & Publisher has a good piece on blogs & the law, covering some recent developments at big media outlets… Read More »Good Article on Blogs and the Law

Larry Solum has brought up the always-interesting egalitarian literature in response to my first post on egalitarian copyright. Solum mentions that

[T]here is an important theoretical debate among egalitarians about the question whether egalitarian principles of distributive justice are properly applied to anything other than the basic structure. Correspondingly, there is a question whether the solution to inequality should be targeted at particular contexts, copyright, contract, etc., or whether the solution is a fair distribution of wealth and income.

This debate is an important one…and I am perhaps being too quick to assume there is such a thing as an “egalitarian” approach. Certainly G.A. Cohen’s work served as a challenge to those Rawlsians who concentrate on the “basic structure,” and they are responding. I find myself on Cohen’s side of that debate (though I am aligned with Sen on the larger question of the “currency of egalitarian justice.” )

But I have to think that there is a common use of “egalitarian” that we can all understand–a sense of helping those at the bottom lead fuller lives, and reducing objectionable forms of power exercised by those “at the top” (such as undisclosed “queue-jumping” or purchase of political power). Read More »Multiple Egalitarianisms: Roadblock or Detour?