The Cato Institute will be exploring the vigorous debate about copyright and intellectual property in a book forum at 12 noon on October 10th, featuring Robert Laughlin (author of The Crime of Reason: And the Closing of the Scientific Mind) and Thomas Sydnor, Senior Fellow and Director of the Center for the Study of Digital Property at the Progress & Freedom Foundation. The event is free of charge and you're encouraged to attend or watch the event live online. Cato's Jim Harper has written about the event here and here.
Of course, Arts+Labs falls on the side of those who believe that artists have a right to be compensated for their work. It is an important part of our mission "to ensure that artists and innovators can easily and effectively share their creativity through new distribution channels online, secure in the confidence that their rights will be respected and their ingenuity rewarded."
With that in mind, I offer this, from Thomas Sydnor, on the importance of protecting the rights of the creators...
Property rights ensure that the relative value of these activities to others can be assessed and revised through a decentralized process of consensual agreements and mutually beneficial exchanges. Consequently, if one person makes the risky investments needed to create a socially valuable resource--like a sound recording--governments should not let others appropriate that resource for their own gain just by showing that the creator might also derive some incidental benefit.
You can hear both sides at the Cato Institute Book Forum at noon on October 10th.
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