148: Tom W. Bell on Special Economic Zones, Copyright and Liberland

Tom W. Bell earned his Juris Doctor degree from the University of Chicago in 1993, then practiced law in Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C. before serving as a policy director at the Cato Institute. In 1998, he joined the faculty of Chapman University, Fowler School of Law, where he teaches all of the first-year common law courses and electives in high-tech and intellectual property law.

Professor Bell has published papers on copyright, Internet law, polycentric law, prediction markets, and the Third Amendment (the one about quartering troops). His books include “Intellectual Privilege: Copyright, Common Law, and the Common Good” (Mercatus 2014) and “Your Next Government? From the Nation State to Stateless Associations” (Cambridge University Press 2017, forthcoming). Through Archimediate LLC, Tom designs, installs, and supports legal systems for special jurisdictions. Most recently, that work has taken him to French Polynesia, where he helped forge a memorandum of understanding to allow seasteading in that island paradise.

In this Episode, Tom talks about:

• Copyright.
• Start-Up Cities.
• Private cities/communities.
• Co-op and private cities: how they work and whether crime rates are different there than in any other city.
• What are Special Economic Zones and what do they do for the country?
• Why SEZs are making a comeback.
• How the United States boosted SEZs again in 1948, when Operation Bootstrap made Puerto Rico a free trade zone for U.S. companies engaged not just in trade but also in production.
• Zones for Employment and Economic Development (ZEDE).
• Honduras, US, Hong Kong, China and Saudi Arabia (KAEC 2006 and Neom 2017).
• Seasteading.
• Liberland: who owns it?
• Elon Musk, Space X, Tesla and the HyperLoop.
• Georgia’s Anaklia Port project.

Links:

• www.tomwbell.com

Books:

• Your Next Government? From the Nation State to Stateless Associations by Tom W. Bell
• Intellectual Privilege: Copyright, Common Law, and the Common Good by Tom W. Bell
• Intellectual Privilege: Copyright, Common Law, and the Common Good (FREE PDF DOWNLOAD) by Tom W. Bell

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