One might think that the world already has enough outlets for publishing works on intellectual property.

To illustrate, our Resources page has a link to the Stanford University Libraries list of journals and reviews covering technology and intellectual property. It contains 62 entries, mostly of legal bent, and it is not exhaustive.

Nonetheless, this literature, while copious, seems incomplete in that it pays insufficient attention to:

• Concrete policy problems;

• The premise that markets and property rights are proven forces for human good, and that proposed departures should bear the burden of justification (present-day academia is not a bastion of free-market thinking);

• Empirical analysis;

• The connections between IP (Intellectual Property) and POP (Plain Old Property).

In a modest effort to ameliorate these gaps, the Center for the Study of Digital Property is starting IPCENTRAL REVIEW , which will exist only in cyberspace, not in deadtree format, except to the extent that readers choose to print out its articles.

Our editorial philosophy is that we are publishing for a general audience, not a specialized one, and we aspire to being academic in the good sense of being thoughtful and intellectually respectable without being "academic" in the bad sense of being overly abstract and pedantic. We encourage brevity in expression, and parsimony in the use of footnotes.

We will also encourage authors to turn the pieces published here into articles of greater length and more extensive documentation for publication elsewhere, should they so desire. We will keep track of these, and provide links.

Our schedule is to publish a principal article every month, often with some ancillary commentaries.

Volume 1, No. 1 is an article by Richard Epstein, Liberty Versus Property? Cracks in the Foundations of Copyright Law, with comments by Adam Mossoff and Solveig Singleton.

Volume 1, No. 2, which will appear in the near future, will contain an article by Stanley J. Leibowitz, Alternative Copy Systems: The Problems with an Alternative License. Accompanying it are riffs by Michael Abramowicz, Copyrighted Goods as Public Goods, and Katherine A. Lawrence, Why Be Creative? Motivation and Copyright Law in a Digital Era.

Instructions to potential contributors will appear in the near future.

Readers are encouraged to print out these works and to redistribute them, and permission to do so is hereby granted to, as long as credit is given to the author and to IPCENTRAL REVIEW, and as long as the piece remains unchanged. Naturally, normal fair use rights of quotation and partial reproduction remain in force, and should be generously interpreted as long as credit is given.