Read ranks right up there with Lew Rockwell as a genius entrepreneur of free market ideas. I can see why Read would give away material or "pull" copyrights to bring more attention to his ideas. But Read was ALWAYS thinking about marketing his Foundation for Economic Education, ALWAYS. I heard him give a speech once, about how he struck up conversations about FEE, with those sitting next to him in first class on plane rides. It was a practiced and detailed approach, for the person sittng next to him on a plane!
But, don't think for a minute that Read in his open-source marketing philosophy didn't think there weren't rights attached to the a person's writings. Here's Gary North on the decidedly non-open way Read handled outside writing of his employees:
I could see that FEE was an appendage of Read, and he was not going to let FEE grow beyond what it already was: a place for him to schmooze and for Poirot to edit The Freeman. The week that I arrived in Irvington, Read informed me of his policy that FEE would receive every dime I would ever earn in my off-hours, such as fees for writing and lecturing, which were what I did best. I saw that this would hurt my career in the long run. At $18,000 a year, I had counted on outside income to enable me to compete with stockbrokers in the local real estate market, which was merely high priced then, rather than astronomical, which it is today – the main reason why FEE has not been able to hire full-time young scholars since 1973.
If Read had allowed a 50-50 split, I might have stayed, but FEE was too bureaucratic for my tastes.
Read's marketing abilities were pure genius, but his failure to allow true freedom for his employees cost him great talents such as North. Read may have not got this, or had a different agenda, but Mises clearly understood this when he wrote:
"It is unlikely that people would undertake the laborious task of writing such publications if everyone were free to reproduce them."--Human Action, chapter XXIII, part 6.
Much less, if you had to hand over all your initial earnings from a creation!
That was Leonard Read.
