The unbearable selectiveness of hackery

18 June 2006, 2021 EDT

The latest NRO fund-raising gimmick:

Since this Trek-ban backlash seems to be motivating many Corner readers to give, I’m upping the ante. If the Trek-o-Meter hits $20,000 by the end of the weekend, NRO will launch a line of Trek-inspired merchandise.

Jonah Goldberg on intellectual property:

As I am in the intellectual property business, I’m a pretty big fan of intellectual property rights. And, without reading the stuff he’s referring to, I think I disagree with Mark. I may agree with him about the undesirability of certain “gibbering and twitching” in the popular culture, but I think he’s off his feed if he’s really suggesting the way to still such gesticulations is to weaken intellectual property rights.

That said, Mark hits on one of my — and my dad’s — favorite points. Copyright laws are, simply, a form of censorship. They prevent me from saying certain things, in certain ways, under certain circumstances, merely because they’ve been said before. Now, it’s a form of censorship, broadly speaking, I endorse.

I believe that what the NRO staff propose is technically trademark infringement rather than copyright infringement.But I have to wonder why self-proclaimed conservatives and protectors of property rights show so little regard for a capitalist mega-corporation and its trademarks. After all, Star Trek-themed NRO gear might certainly seem to create the miss-impression that the creative team behind Star Trek was endorsing ideological perspectives radically different than those affirmed in their scripts and story-lines.

Filed as: hypocrisy

Dan Nexon

Daniel H. Nexon is a Professor at Georgetown University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Government and the School of Foreign Service. His academic work focuses on international-relations theory, power politics, empires and hegemony, and international order. He has also written on the relationship between popular culture and world politics.

He has held fellowships at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the Ohio State University's Mershon Center for International Studies. During 2009-2010 he worked in the U.S. Department of Defense as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. He was the lead editor of International Studies Quarterly from 2014-2018.

He is the author of The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton University Press, 2009), which won the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) Best Book Award for 2010, and co-author of Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2020). His articles have appeared in a lot of places. He is the founder of the The Duck of Minerva, and also blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money.