"And Then They Came for Bill," by Gideon Kanner, Professor Emeritus, Loyola Law School from the National Law Journal "This ruling says to creators of intellectual property that the government can take away what you've created if it turns out to be too popular." Bill Gates, commenting on the court order to break up Microsoft. Welcome to my world of property takings, Mr. Gates. What took you so long? Not only does the government take land by confiscatory regulations but it rips off intellectual property too. When it does and gets nailed, the victim only gets a royalty on the idea stolen by the government instead of a tort measure of damages. See Tektronix, Inc. v. United States, 552 F.2d 343 (Ct. Cl. 1977). And piracy is not the only way the government can take intellectual property. It can order disclosure of a trade secret to the public, which, of course, reveals it to one's competitors. See Ruckelshaus v. Monsanto Co, 467 U.S. 986 (1984). So to the extent Microsoft has been ordered to license its Windows operating system to computer makers, facilitate their ability to study it, and been enjoined from modifying its start-up sequence and desktop so as to remove some of its features, it looks like it has suffered an uncompensated taking of its intellectual property. As James De Long noted in his 1997 book Property Matters, it was only a matter of time before someone would hoist the Jolly Roger flag and go after intellectual property rights. For the past half-century private property rights have been under attack, and one reason land has been its focus is that-apart from historical factors that make land the most important species of property-you can't move land out of the regulating jurisdiction. It just has to lie there and take it, along with its owners. So why haven't landed nabobs like Bill Gates led the opposition to extreme forms of land regulation? Answer: because they have been co-opted. The most common type of property regulation is zoning and its myriad associated land-use laws that allow the folks in City Hall and the local Establishment to micromanage the homes of free Americans to an amazing extent. Zoning is also regularly used to stifle competition for existing, entrenched businesses, and the process of redevelopment (once quaintly called "slum clearance") has been transmogrified into an engine of wealth redistribution whereby cities seize unoffending private property, undercompensate its owners and then turn it over at subsidized prices to well-connected private, profit-making mass merchandisers, shopping center developers, car dealers, race track promoters and even gambling casinos. Land-use regulations may do some good, but they can also place the posh suburbs of influential folks beyond the reach of competing seekers of the good life, which is why they remain so popular with the NIMBY crowd. Whether they are really necessary is another story. The city of Houston, Texas, has no zoning and yet looks no significantly different from other cities of similar size, age and location. As the late dean of America's land-use bar, Richard Babcock of Chicago, put it in 1985, "it is a curious phenomenon that the titans of industry who abhor government regulation and place full-page ads in the Wall Street Journal extolling the virtues of the marketplace are among the most zealous devotees of zoning." Actually, there is nothing "curious" about it. In the first zoning case to come before the U.S. Supreme Court (Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co. 272 U.S. 379 (1926)), the trial judge astutely observed that one purpose of zoning was to facilitate social and economic segregation. And surely you need no lesson on how land-use regulations have been used in aid of ethnic discrimination. When the environmentalists launched their attempt to legitimize takings by extreme regulations that deprive owners of all use of their property, the government advisory committee that recommended uncompensated expropriation of development rights of private property included Laurance Rockefeller, Walter E. Hoadley, VP of the Bank of America, John R. Price, Jr., VP of Manufacturers Hanover, James W. Rouse, the big-time developer, and Pete Wilson, who later became the Republican Governor of California. (Gladwin Hill, Authority to Develop Land Is Termed a Public Right, N.Y. Times, May 20, 1973, p. 21). These were no anti-property radicals, and if you think they were crazy thus to attack what might seem like their birthright, rest assured that they were crazy like a fox -- they were defending their home turf from the likes of you. But what goes around comes around. Bill Gates, nabob extraordinaire, is now feeling the sting of government taking of his property. I hope he learns the right lesson from it. If he were as smart as he thinks he is, he would use some of his remaining gazillions to fund a high-class think tank devoted to the study of the virtues of private property, and populate it with the best minds around. He would also do well to give generously to public interest law firms like the Pacific Legal Foundation, and the Institute for Justice, that are fighting the brutal intellectual trench war of defending private property rights -- his rights -- in the courts. It is a bedrock American principle that when constitutional rights of some people are impaired with impunity, sooner or later the rights of others will suffer too. Bill Gates, take note and double-click on that. ************************************************************************** Subscribe to Freematt's Alerts: Pro-Individual Rights Issues Send a blank message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the words subscribe FA on the subject line. 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