[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]

I’ve been to Indianapolis twice recently: last month for a Liberty Fund conference on Zora Neale Hurston, and last weekend for another Liberty Fund conference, this one on Landes and Posner’s Economic Structure of Intellectual Property Law, and held at Liberty Fund’s own offices (and incidentally the first Liberty Fund conference I’ve been to where as many as a third of the participants were nonwhite – a nice change from the usual complexion, pun intended).

As I’ve mentioned before, nearly a third of Liberty & Power’s bloggers were at the first conference. I’ve now gotten the photos developed; these aren’t the highest-quality scans, but they’ll have to do:

L to R: Keith Halderman, Mark Brady, me, David Beito, Jonathan Bean, Wendy McElroy

ditto

Just the anarchists (other than me): Mark Brady, Wendy McElroy, David Beito

As for the second conference, a few random notes:

When I mentioned that although the early Tarzan books are out of copyright, they’re still restricted because ERB’s estate holds the trademark to the characters, Tom Bell (check out his online book Intellectual Privilege: Copyright, Common Law, and the Common Good) mentioned that he thought a recent case involving Daystar Technologies rules out using trademark to protect copyright – in which case the ERB business model may be in serious trouble. Anyone else with IP expertise (Stephan?) have any comments?

Milton Thompson (who happens to be the lawyer-agent for Star Trek’s Avery Brooks) mentioned that the performers he works with are less and less interested in controlling copyright and are relying less and less on IP in their business models.

I was delighted to learn that Liberty Fund will be publishing a new translation (by Dennis O’Keefe, translator of Constant’s Principles of Politics) of Molinari’s Soirées. (Though this isn’t necessarily a reason to abandon my own translation-in-progress – if the term “progress“ really applies to a project that hasn’t been updated since 2003 – since it would also be nice to have a version available without copyright restrictions.)