Author Archives: Timothy B Lee

I’m at Students for Free Culture’s annual conference. As I said a couple of weeks ago, I think the growth and enthusiasm of the free culture movement is really exciting. When I was an undergrad at the University of Minnesota, … Continue reading →

I’ve said before that if you want to understand the limitations of hierarchical organization, a good place to start is with the world’s most powerful hierarchical institution: the US military. And to study the military’s flaws, the obvious place to … Continue reading →

During November, I did a series of posts examining some of the systematic weaknesses of top-down social structures. This month I’ll be returning to that theme, and I thought I’d start by summarizing the key points I made in my … Continue reading →

George Packer laments the fact that Twitter is replacing books. I suspect he’s overstating his case—there are still lots of books being written and read, but Matt Yglesias gets to the more fundamental point: Despite his protestations to the contrary, … Continue reading →

The Economist has a good write-up of the sorry state of the patent system and the Supreme Court’s impending Bilski decision: Another field where patenting is pursued aggressively is semiconductors. But it is done there not so much to make … Continue reading →

A brilliant meditation by Julian Sanchez on the evolution of bottom-up remix culture:

I’ve beaten the “economics of e-books” horse to within an inch of its life, so I’ll make one more point and then leave the poor horse alone. One point that tends to be missed when people worry about how writers … Continue reading →

When you predict that the price of a particular kind of content will go to zero, a lot of people assume that means that the producers of that content will be unable to feed their families. Yet the world is … Continue reading →

Virginia Postrel makes the case for cheap e-books: The common intuition is that e-books should be cheap because they aren’t physical–no printing, no shipping. Ah, say contrarians, printing and shipping make up only a tiny fraction of a book’s costs. … Continue reading →

Over at the America’s Future Foundation website, Sonny Bunch responds with indignation to Matt Yglesias’s argument about the inevitability of free music. He starts by quoting the following excerpt from Matt’s post: It is, of course, possible that at some … Continue reading →