Comments (9)

• Eric

  Not only is the wireless connection too slow, but that horrible Microsoft has improved their software again FORCING us all to have to change.

  Down with the monopolist capitalist pigs!

  Published: October 26, 2009 10:08 AM

• Daniel Coleman

  I have to thank Mr. Tucker for this inspirational speech / article. The history of ideas in publishing is exhilarating to learn about, and the fact that the Mises Institute has caught on to the reality that ideas are infinitely reproducible is reason to be optimistic for the future. The dinosaurs will go extinct, whereas liberty-minded scholars and their books have only begun to flourish.

  Published: October 26, 2009 10:42 AM

• Stephen W. Carson

  "laws that have pretty well doomed a half century of scholarship to ruin"

  A perhaps cynical comment on this... At least in economics, if the work of the Austrian school from the last half century survives (due to the efforts of Mises.org, etc.) and the work of the Keynesians et al. doesn't I'm having trouble seeing this as a tragedy.

  Published: October 26, 2009 11:19 AM

• Don S.

  Rousing speech, Mr Tucker. You, yourself, will no doubt go down as one of the foremost extenders of knowledge and liberty of our time. It cannot be glossed over how much you and the institute have done.

  Published: October 26, 2009 11:28 AM

• Jeffrey Tucker

  I'm just copying the ideas of Stephan Kinsella, who copied them from Hoppe, who copied them from Rothbard, who copied them from Benjamin Tucker, who got them from someone too. The motivation is copied from Mises, Hayek, and Menger. The means and method are copied from Google and the Gutenberg Project and the first printers, who got their ideas from the monks of Spain, who got their ideas from the ancients and so. And the material itself is completely unoriginal.

  Thus are we all wholly dependent in the best possible way.

  Published: October 26, 2009 11:43 AM

• EotS

  Another aspect of the Internet revolution that I think about quite often is the difficulty it presents for the State to control information.

  One of the first initiatives of a totalitarian regime is to destroy information and knowledge that is not compatible with their propaganda.

  Imagine the difficulty Hitler would have had, for example, if 90% of the individuals had access to Internet media.

  Short of flat-out shutting the Internet down, the State cannot accomplish their stranglehold on information. Any attempt short of that will never succeed.

  Also, it is fundamental that the Internet changes the *rate* of change, which (if we were to take the life cycle of the formation of a State to it's implosion as a pattern to continue into the foreseeable future) would mean that that life cycle would be greatly accelerated.

  The US empire has lasted a little over 200 years. Succeeding ones, if they are to exist, will survive only a fraction of that.

  Published: October 26, 2009 12:03 PM

• Michael A. Clem

  Excellent historical perspective. Yes, we forget that the whole purpose of the publishing industry is to make copies of what an author wrote, with the only distinctions being the quality and source of those copies. What advantage is there for an author to be limited to one publisher?

  Published: October 26, 2009 2:51 PM

• Rick Shepherd

  In the United States Constitution, in Section 8 of Article 1, it specifies that among the powers of Congress is included the power to "Promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."

  Our understanding of this was that for a "limited time" the author gets the exclusive rights, so that they can be properly compensated for their work, and that it is only for a limited time, so that long-term, all members of society at large can benefit from the genius of the author.

  Any thoughts on that in relation to your excellent article?

  Published: October 27, 2009 11:10 PM

• P.M.Lawrence

  "...the early scribes chose parchment over papyrus. Papyrus was less expensive, but parchment was seen as more durable and therefore the scribes' work would be preserved."

  Not so. Parchment was more widely available in many areas (and so, less expensive there), and after the collapse of long distance trade in the Dark Ages it became the only option.

  "The work of a scribe was largely unchanged from the beginning of recorded history to the middle of the 15th century".

  Also incorrect. The tools and materials they prepared and used evolved (pens, inks - as well as parchment and then paper instead of papyrus), and the functions they carried out changed too as their client bases changed from central palaces and wealthy people to religious needs and serving feudal monarchies and aristocracies, not to mention a transition away from using educated slaves to using clergy as the supplies of each changed.

  Later, Jeffrey Tucker wrote "...we all wholly dependent in the best possible way".

  No, not always the best. Sometimes this approach led to poor quality control, so errors got perpetuated, added to and transmitted. This sometimes had fatal effects, e.g. shipwrecks caused by faulty navigation tables. How could you tell if a copy had had this happen? It would say on the cover that it was a true copy, made and checked by the original publisher.

  Published: November 21, 2009 4:55 AM