Bastiat's Window

In the AI+internet Era, can plagiarism remain a meaningful concept, and will its prohibition be enforceable? Quote from Jorge Luis Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (1940). Graphic by Graboyes+ChatGPT. Please subscribe subscribe to Bastiat’s Window and/or suggest it to a couple of friends. Artificial intelligence (AI) and the internet scramble age-old definitions of and ethical rules surrounding authorship, intellectual property, and plagiarism.

NOTE: Earlier this month, I attended an event titled “Thomas Paine Would Have Had a Substack” (discussed at this link). The event was co-sponsored by the history and civics newsletter, InPursuit (which I highly recommend), and by Substack where InPursuit is published. Afterward, another attendee and I briefly discussed the Tuskegee Experiment, and I mentioned that I had written on the topic back in 2022. At that time, Bastiat’s Window was brand-new and had few readers.

Paid subscriptions ($50/year or $5/month) really help, but we love free subscribers, too. Substack (Bastiat’s Window in particular) is loaded with intelligent, talkative, thoughtful commenters. My recent tariff pieces (“Tired of Winning, Apparently” and “Real-World Trade-Deficit Math-Magic,”) and one older one (“The Gulf of Trump”) elicited tens of thousands of page views, hundreds of comments, and dozens of emails.

NOTE: Bastiat’s Window makes no political endorsements. Even in private, I don’t tell others how to vote. As I’ve written, I understand why decent, intelligent well-informed, people would vote for (A) Trump, (B) Harris, or (C) neither. I’ve expressed dissatisfaction with recent presidential choices. On policy, I’m iconoclastic—libertarian-ish on economics, conservative on foreign policy and defense, liberal on a sprinkling of issues.