"Copyright laws historically exist to restrict the monopoly power of copyright holders ... Over time these consumer rights have been whittled away " Why Napster is Right
Initiative

Amendment

GPL

Scenarios

Open Texts

   Elsewhere on this site David Levine and I have commented on the ill effects of current copyright laws. This is particularly the case in the textbook market, where rent seeking opportunities generated by a government enforced monopoly has led to the proliferation of proprietary, yet essentially identical, textbooks.

In the case of the market for economics textbooks, we as academic economists can take action. For some years, dvi and pdf files containing notes for my lectures have been available on this site. It is now my intention to release the word processing documents from which those dvi or pdf files were generated on this site under (amended) terms of the GNU General Public License. This means that anyone can modify the content, provided they make their modifications available under the same licensing agreement and give appropriate and fair credit for the source and the author(s) of the original material. By doing this, and by editing those notes and other course material over time, and with your assistance, it is my hope that we can produce a textbook, or textbooks and course material that will not only be freely available and customizable, but that will be superior to anything available on the commercial market.

At the moment I am organizing the course material into a form suitable for release which I expect to take a few months. In cohoperation with David Levine, I am also drafting an amendment to the GPL to cover issues particular to texts and documents. Comments on this draft are most welcome.

I invite you to join me in this initiative.