Category: Economics
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Insurance as Commons, Campaigns as Mutiny: Reflections on #NicsFight
It’s been a very very busy 10 days since the NicsFight campaign kicked off. For those of you who don’t know, my very good friend Nic died in October from cancer; his insurance company (Friends Life) have been refusing to pay out on a critical illness policy which would transform the lives of the widow…
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Gimme the Loot : Pirates at the Jacobin
Really nice article by Gavin Mueller over at the Jacobin – a magazine of culture and polemic -asking if piracy has been a ‘radical force.’ Once the heroes of nations, pirates went from being state-sponsored champions to tolerated annoyances to the basest sort of criminals. Henry Morgan was knighted after plundering Panama in 1674; fifty years…
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Paula Le DieuA Brief History of Copyright | Do Lectures
Really nice video here (thanks to Luke Sital Singh for pushing it my way) from the Do Lectures weekend in 2011, at which the Director of Digital content at the British Film Institute, Paula Ledieu, gives a short history of copyright, what’s gone wrong with it, and how it needs to be fixed. This…
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Pirates as Proto-Marxists, and Why This Shouldn’t Give You a ‘Red Alert’
As I build up to coming over the US to speak about Mutiny in about a month’s time – details to follow soon – I’m going to be blogging a bit more about the book, and the wide themes that it covers. Reading Tad Delay’s blog today though, inspired me to mention a perspective on…
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A Very Modern Decathlon: Who Would Win the ‘Whole Person’ Olympic Gold?
One of the things I liked about Tom Wolfe’s novel I Am Charlotte Simmons is the journey that one of the main characters, Jojo, takes, from ‘dumb college jock’ to athletic student of philosophy. It’s an arc that’s not that uncommon: the pursuit of excellence in sport requires careful reflection on the self; top…
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The End of ACTA – European Parliament Seeing Sense on Copyright / DRM
Good news today: the European Parliament has voted down the proposed Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) – an act which has some parallels with the SOPA / PIPA legislation that was proposed in the US. ACTA sought to tighten up rules on intellectual property, but proposed to do so in ways that would have been highly…