A Little Copyright-Related Peevishness About An Important Economic Study
THE ECONOMIC COSTS OF THE IRAQ WAR:AN APPRAISAL THREE YEARS AFTER THE BEGINNING OF THE CONFLICT, by economists Linda Bilmes and Joseph E. Stiglitz is an important work, and is receiving lots of attention (see e.g. this, this and this). It troubles me, however, that the web version contains this "warning" in the upper left-hand corner: NOT TO BE QUOTED WITHOUT THE PERMISSION OF THE AUTHORS.
That is not a copyright notice. It doesn't assert a copyright, and it doesn't accurately articulate copyright law. It is simply some kind of weird and disturbing admonition of prohibition. It's unenforceable too, if you look at all the commentators who are excerpting the paper madly in the media and across the blogosphere. Being a copyright subversive, I can't resist dropping a block quote supercopied and republished without even the barest hint of permission by Bilmes and Stiglitz:
"A true costing of the war would focus, of course, on the incremental cost; to the extent that the actual War substitutes for expensive “war games,” the incremental cost is less than the actual money spent. In our analysis we have subtracted the direct savings, such as policing the “no-fly” zone in Iraq, from the cost of the war.
"This paper attempts to provide a more complete reckoning of the costs of the Iraq War than have previously been provided, using standard economic and accounting/budgetary frameworks. Of course, a final tally will have to wait the end, and even the President has made it clear that there is no clear end in sight. And even then, it will be years before we can be sure about whether our estimates of future costs—increased costs of recruiting or payments for disability or the health care costs of the injured veterans—were accurate."
Now I've done it. Sure hope Siva and Melissa won't mind looting their daughter's college fund to bail me out of Copyright Prison.