Intellectual Property laws are faith-based initiatives

Finished listening to a great interview of James Boyle on episode 73 of the Spark podcast.  The episode examines copyright, the public domain and remix culture, and was one of their best, IMHO.  The title of the post is a paraphrase of something James Boyle says right at the 15-minute mark where he's lamenting how US law continues to extend the length of copyright based on, um, no hard evidence that it helps anyone.  Lots of good stuff in the episode, which you can listen to right on the webpage.  Give it a listen.

If any of it interests you, then you can go check out the following:

• James Boyle's book, The Public Domain, available for free or purchase.
• Ian Kerr's book, Lessons from the Identity Trail, available for free or purchase.
• The TorrentBoy project, the world’s first open source franchise.

Off to find a PDF to epub converter.