The Works of Leonard E. Read - Jeffrey A. Tucker - Mises Institute

The Works of Leonard E. Read - Jeffrey A. Tucker - Mises Institute: "Pick up any book or publication from FEE before the 1990s. You will see a remarkable and visionary sentence on the copyright page:

Permission to reprint granted without special request.
This one sentence is what made it happen. Any newspaper could print a column. Any publisher could include an essay. Indeed, he invited any publisher to take any FEE book and publish it and sell it, owing no royalties and asking no permissions.

'He was an evangelist spreading the news. He wanted to be pirated so that he could see that he was making a difference.'

The publisher was not even asked to acknowledge its source! So, in this sense, he was even more radical than the�Creative Commons attribution license. A FEE book was copyrighted solely so that someone else couldn't copyright it, and then maximum permissions were granted. In effect, Read was putting all of the scholarship of FEE in the public domain as soon as it was published.

This saved on the grueling bureaucratic struggle involved in granting permissions and keeping up with the permissions granted. Asking no fees or royalties meant saving on accounting bureaucracy as well."