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Intellectual Property and Waste

Intellectual property has some upsides, but it also has serious downsides. Unfortunately, since those downsides usually take the form of invisible “deadweight loss” discussion of intellectual property issues tends to neglect them. But IOZ offers us a striking concrete physical manifestation of the waste involved as Stephanie Clifford of the New York Times reports on the government of Australia destroying perfectly good apparel on the grounds that it’s counterfeit:

There are plenty of people in the world who could use a pair of boots.

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