The Award for protesters in China

One in year jail for 79 year old illiterate lady- and electricity was also cut from her apartment.

Meanwhile Chinese youth embrace Communism;

Ownership Congestion? Tragedy of Anticommons?

A former World Banker;

Well, I’ve been finding ownership puzzles in a host of disparate places, like waiting around in airports and wondering why we don’t build more runways. Just 25 new runways at our busiest airports would solve most air travel delays. Why don’t we build them? In Europe, for instance, I started thinking about why cell phones work so much better there than here. The answer, in part, is that over 90 percent of our prime spectrum is dead air. Talking to research scientists I asked why we have so many pharmaceutical patents today but so few new drugs that actually help people. My students clued me in to another puzzle: why has African-American farm ownership dropped 98 percent in the last century? And why are so many old television shows, like China Beach and WKRP in Cincinnati, still not available on DVD? Turns out, all of these problems are really the same problem. Private ownership usually creates wealth. But too much ownership has the opposite effect – it creates gridlock. Once people see this free market paradox, once we have a shared language for gridlock, we can begin to talk about it and then to fix it...

A drug company executive tells me he may have a better Alzheimer’s treatment. But to get FDA approval and bring it to market, he has to license dozens and dozens of patents relevant to testing for safety and side effects. So negotiations fail and the Alzheimer’s drug sits on a shelf, even though my informant is confident it could save countless lives and earn billions of dollars.

Very few people or organizations are speaking out against this – against the underuse of property rights. Whom do you lobby for drugs that don’t yet exist or for cures that people can’t yet see? Gridlock, that is, resource underuse, is invisible in comparison with overuse – everyone can see the dramatic results of fisheries being depleted or air being polluted. But with wasteful underuse, the effects are almost always hidden. So when drugs, wireless services, DVDs, and runways go missing, we don’t really have champions ready to set it right. The flip side of gridlock is that it’s one of the great entrepreneurial and political opportunities of our era....

The Gridlock Economy: How Too Much Ownership Wrecks Markets, Stops Innovation, and Costs Lives, Michael Heller

Related;
The legal framework for private sector development in a transitional economy : the case of Poland

The Liberal Commons

Can Patents Deter Innovation? The Anticommons in Biomedical Research

Eminent Domain and the New York Times

Symmetric Tragedies: Commons and Anticommons
James M. Buchanan and Yong J. Yoon

Branding

Brand Names Before the Industrial Revolution;

In medieval Europe, manufacturers sold durable goods to anonymous consumers in distant markets, this essay argues, by making products with conspicuous characteristics. Examples of these unique, observable traits included cloth of distinctive colors, fabric with unmistakable weaves, and pewter that resonated at a particular pitch. These attributes identified merchandise because consumers could observe them readily, but counterfeiters could copy them only at great cost, if at all. Conspicuous characteristics fulfilled many of the functions that patents, trademarks, and brand names do today. The words that referred to products with conspicuous characteristics served as brand names in the Middle Ages. Data drawn from an array of industries corroborates this conjecture. The abundance of evidence suggests that conspicuous characteristics played a key role in the expansion of manufacturing before the Industrial Revolution.

Related;

No Mystery about Property Rights

International Property Rights Index

Saudi Women- Property of Men

"Women in Saudi Arabia are not allowed to enter government offices"

The Enclosures in Brittain

In the early 19th century, the Northamptonshire poet John Clare took a good look at the countryside and didn’t like what he saw. He wrote:

"Fence meeting fence in owners little bounds
Of field and meadow, large as garden-grounds,
In little parcels little minds to please,
With men and flocks imprisoned, ill at ease."

He was referring to the effects of the Enclosures – literally the fencing in of land to stop others from using it. This apparently simple act has been hugely controversial. For some Enclosure underpinned the economic and agricultural development of Modern Britain. For others it was an act of theft – the turning of common land into private property that impoverished the many for the sake of the few.

But what really happened during the era of 18th and 19th century enclosures? Who gained, who lost and what role did Enclosures play in the agricultural and industrial transformation of this country?

Listen to the podcast from BBC.

References;

E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common (The Merlin Press, 1991)

Christopher A. Whatley, Scottish Society, 1707-1830 (Manchester University Press, 2000)

Paul Langford, Public Life and the Propertied Englishman 1689-1798 (OUP, 1991)

Murray G. H. Pittock, Inventing and Resisting Britain: Cultural Identities in Britain and Ireland, 1685-1789 (London: Routledge, 1997)

R. C. Allen, Enclosure and the Yeoman: The Agricultural Development of the South Midlands, 1450-1850 (Oxford, 1992)

M. E. Turner, Enclosures in Britain, 1750-1830 (London, 1984)

J. Neeson, Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700-1820 (Cambridge University Press, 1993)

G. E. Mingay, Parliamentary Enclosure in England (London, Longman 1997)

Susanna Wade Martins, Farmers, Landlords and Landscapes: Rural Britain, 1720-1870 (Windgather Press, 2004)

Playboy and Economics Demystified for Free?

AbBooka- can't guarantee anything.

Big Apple vs Apple

It’s Like Comparing Apples to Apples;

When word came out on Thursday about Apple’s legal challenge to the seemingly innocuous GreenNYC logo, claiming that the looped green apple would cause “consumer confusion resulting in damage and injury” to Apple, and will “cause dilution of the distinctiveness” of Apple’s trademark, the first thought around City Room was: They’ve got to be kidding.

Italy Reforms

It's Old Insolvency Regime

Lake with the longest name

Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg

More about the lake;

There is more consensus on the meaning of Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg, but it turns out the consensus is wrong. In the 1920's, a reporter for The Webster Times, Lawrence J. Daly, wrote that it was a Nipmuck Indian word meaning "You fish on your side, I fish on my side and nobody fishes in the middle." That stuck even though Mr. Daly confessed repeatedly that he had made the whole thing up.

The real meaning, said Paul Macek, a historian in Webster, a community of about 17,000 just northwest of where Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts intersect, is "English knifemen and Nipmuck Indians at the boundary or neutral fishing place."

Carnival of Podcasts

Eichengreen Says Dollar Decline Is `No Longer Orderly'

Jack Malvey of Lehman Sees `Many Opportunities' in Bonds

Goldman of Asteri Expects More U.S. Bank Failures

Lewis of Deutsche Bank Sees Growth in Corn, Soy, Cotton

Crescenzi Sees Opportunities in Muni, Corporate Bonds

"Health Care Information Technology and Financing’s Next Frontier: The Potential of Medical Banking"

Taiwan a contested History

Islam: From Heretics to Believers
Riaz Hassan has surveyed seven Muslim-majority countries on many issues including honour killing, blasphemy and jihad. He believes major changes in the Muslim world can only occur with intellectual commitment and activism. Edip Yuksel is a self-described progressive activist and founder of the Islamic Reform organisation, which promotes a modern and feminist reading of the Qur'an, as well as the rejection of much that Muslims regard as sacred.

Beyond Religion & Beyond God

The Year of Festivals: Lent and Purim
In the lead up to Easter, Christians embark on Lent, a 40 day period of self denial, prayer and reflection, symbolising the time that Jesus spent in the desert, where his faith was tested. For Jews, The Book of Esther is celebrated in the raucous festival of Purim where donning masks and poking fun at rabbis is allowed. But there is a serious side too

Mark A Siegel on Islam, Democracy and the West

Tariq Ramadan
He has been banned from entering the United States, he's advised Scotland Yard, the British government and the previous Australian government. What did Oxford based Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan have to say to an international audience in Brisbane this past week? He was keynote speaker at a conference sponsored by the Queensland government, Griffith University and the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils. Its theme: The Challenges and Opportunities of Islam in the West: The Case of Australia.

Rajput and Mughal Miniatures

The Gods of Freud

Energy - what are the choices?

Voting in America

How we know when enough is enough

The Logic of Life

Thinking Like a Social Scientist: a lecture by Professor John Sidel

A Counter-narrative: Islam and the first Europe
Professor Lewis will argue that the 732CE Battle of Poitiers and the 778CE debacle at Roncevaux are pivotal moments in the creation of an economically retarded, balkanised, and fratricidal Europe, which, by defining itself in opposition to Islam in al-Andalus, made virtues out of hereditary aristocracy, persecutory religious intolerance, cultural particularism, and perpetual war.

Modern Erotics and the Quest for Intimacy

Patent Failure - James Bessen

STW: Susan Pinker, Simon Russell Beale, Marina Warner, Clay Shirky
Susan Pinker on The Sexual Paradox; Simon Russell Beale on his TV series Sacred Music; Marina Warner on the impact of The Arabian Nights on the Western imagination and Clay Shirky on how the internet is allowing people to take on traditional organisations - and win.

Science and Islam

How the tiny Pacific island of Nauru squandered its vast fortune

Innovation
Peter Day looks at the role of innovation in business and how good ideas shape the future of technology. His guest is Sophie Vandebroek, chief technology officer at Xerox, the company we traditionally associate with the photocopier – who are also spearheading developments in many other areas including ‘smart document technology’. Sophie will be telling us about innovation, past, present and future at Xerox and how to create an environment where ideas can really flourish.

*Note: A lot of the podcasts are available for limited time, so download now.

Jason Rose vs The Economist magazine

Financial magazine The Economist has failed in its attempt to gain control of the internet address theeconomist.com.

The address was not transferred to it because the owner claimed that he had never heard of the magazine when he registered the name.

The site simply carries a picture of Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the US Federal Reserve, and a note calling him "the economist of the century".

The Economist took a case under the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO)'s dispute resolution service. Under WIPO rules a domain name can only be transferred if the name is identical or confusingly similar to a trade or service mark owned by the body trying to gain control of the address; if the person holding the address has no rights in it, and if the address was registered and used in bad faith.

Anyone hoping to gain control of a domain must prove all three of these elements in order to be handed the address. The Economist failed to show that the address owner Jason Rose registered the domain name in bad faith.

Rose claimed that he had never heard of The Economist in 1996. The Economist disputed this, claiming it would be almost impossible for someone interested in current affairs and economics not to know the magazine, but WIPO panelist Sir Ian Barker, a QC, said that he had to be believed.

Barker said that the claim was hard to believe, but that the WIPO system was not designed for ruling on such questions of fact.

"The panel cannot find bad faith registration proved on the balance of probabilities," he wrote in his judgment. "Despite the panel’s misgivings about the credibility of his claim, this proceeding under the policy is not the proper forum for testing its validity more than 11 years after the domain name was registered."

"The only way that Mr Rose’s assertions can be tested is in litigation where a judge would have proper opportunity of assessing the quality of this evidence. A proceeding under the policy is not the proper forum for determining such a belated issue of fact," he said.

-Claimed ignorance foils Economist domain case

Property Rights and Development

Informal (unregistered) property in Egypt, according to De Soto, is valued at $241 billion – an amount comparable to 55 times the foreign direct investment that the country received over the last 200 years (including Suez Canal and Aswan Dam), or 30 times the size of the Cairo stock exchange. This, of course, is according to De Soto.

Currently, De Soto travels the world, including Egypt, advising governments on how to facilitate property registration processes. He says that more properties will be registered formally when the property registration process is easier – thus giving opportunity for more domestic investment to appear in correlation with greater access to finance (using the registered property as collateral).

Erica Field, a scholar on Harvard’s economic faculty has released a pilot study looking at this supposed correlation. She found that, in the homeland of De Soto – Peru, property rights do not necessarily lead to further access to credit. In situations of poverty, the relationship between property rights and credit access as proposed by De Soto is not certain because of other significant barriers to lending such as education, age, employment status, lending behavior, and credit rationing. Her main results show that property rights, alone, do not enhance investment behavior or even access to credit.

Field’s research, however, has certain limitations. For instance, she applied it in one country only. Evidence from different countries may lead to different conclusions. On the other hand, supporting De Soto’s argument might require a global empirical dataset that could at least show that simpler property registration processes are associated with less informal capital.

-Cashing In on Property Rights

Authors Guild vs Google

A lecture on Intellectual Property & Search: Jason Schultz