An Author on Literature

Alongside Night Movie to Preview Spring 2012 at George Mason University

(Facebook) October 18, 2011 (Revised February 13, 2012) — The movie adaptation of award-winning author/filmmaker J. Neil Schulman’s “1979 Novel Ripped from Today’s Headlines!” — Alongside Night — will offer a special preview at the JC Cinema on the Fairfax, Virginia campus of George Mason University during the Spring Semester of 2012.

The preview, currently scheduled for Wednesday, April 11, 2012 7:30 PM, is being sponsored by the campus organization Mason Liberty, an affiliate of Students for Liberty, the Institute for Humane Studies, and AntiWar.com.

The announcement was first made on Facebook.

The movie, which Schulman adapted from his novel and is directing as his second feature film, is currently in production. It stars Kevin Sorbo in the role of Nobel laureate economist Dr. Martin Vreeland, whose theories are the lynchpin of a political crisis when the United States dollar becomes worthless on world markets.

Alongside Night began principal photography on December 5, 2011, and is scheduled to complete principal potography in Spring 2012, with screenings planned to begin in Summer 2012.

It’s being co-produced by J. Neil Schulman’s Jesulu Productions / Alongside Night, LLC, and Richard Iott’s Braeburn Productions.

The 30th anniversary PDF edition of the Alongside Night novel recently passed 344,000 downloads from http://www.alongsidenight.net.

Alongside Night 30th Anniversary PDF edition

The novel portrays the near-future collapse of the American economy due to government overspending and the federal government monetizing its debt — resulting in a hyperinflationary collapse of the dollar — as seen through the eyes of Elliot Vreeland, the teenage son of Nobel-prizewinning economist Dr. Martin Vreeland, key player in a last-ditch attempt to prevent the United States government from collapsing because its money can no longer pay government officials or the military.

Alongside Night was originally published hardcover October 16, 1979 by Crown Publishers, with dust-jacket endorsements from Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman and A Clockwork Orange author Anthony Burgess.

The novel went on to win rave reviews in publications across the political spectrum from the Los Angeles Times Book Review and Sunday Detroit News to Reason Magazine and Liberty.

It’s often been compared to Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. One reviewer wrote, “If Ayn Rand’s ‘Atlas Shrugged’ was the elementary school of a very effective education in freedom, then J. Neil Schulman’s ‘Alongside Night’ has to be the post-graduate studies course.”

In 1989 Alongside Night won a Prometheus Hall of Fame Award from the Libertarian Futurist Society. The novel was voted the Freedom Book Club’s Book of the Month for May 2009. Also in 2009 the Karl Hess Club cited Alongside Night as one of the reasons it was awarding author J. Neil Schulman its Samuel Edward Konkin III Memorial Chauntecleer Award.

Alongside Night seen at Occupy LA * LAPD
Alongside Night at Occupy LA * LAPD
Photo by Tim Cavanaugh, Reason

Alongside Night has won cult status among libertarians, gold-bugs, advocates of laissez-faire capitalism, Tea Party proponents — because of endorsements for the novel from Tea Party icons Congressman Ron Paul and Glenn Beck — and on October 10th a copy of the novel was spotted by Reason Magazine reporter, Tim Cavanaugh, at the northern encampment at Occupy LA * LAPD. The novel — endorsed by Samuel Edward Konkin III, author of the New Libertarian Manifesto — is considered one of the founding documents of the international Agorist movement, being the first published presentation of CounterEconomics as an alternative to politics as a means of achieving libertarian social goals.

On June 13, 2009, the novel’s current publisher, Pulpless.Com, made a 30th anniversary PDF edition of Alongside Night available for free download from its website at http://www.alongsidenight.net. The novel quickly became a popular download but went viral when in five days in May 2010 over 100,000 copies of the novel were downloaded.

The 30th Anniversary PDF edition of Alongside Night passed 300,000 downloads on September 19, 2011. There have been over another 44,000 downloads since then.

Its text is the same as the 20th Anniversary edition of Alongside Night published by Pulpless.Com in 1999 and still in print as a trade paperback. An Amazon.Com Kindle edition with the same text was also published in 2009, and it was this edition that was read by Glenn Beck.

Dr. Milton Friedman wrote of Alongside Night: “A cautionary tale with a disturbing resemblance to past history and future possibilities.”

Anthony Burgess wrote, “I received Alongside Night at noon today. It is now eight in the evening and I just finished it. I think I am entitled to some dinner now as I had no lunch. The unputdownability of the book ensured that. It is a remarkable and original story, and the picture it presents of an inflation- crippled America on the verge of revolution is all too acceptable. I wish, and so will many novelists, that I, or they, had thought of the idea first. A thrilling novel, crisply written, that fires the imagination as effectively as it stimulates the feelings.”

Dr. Ron Paul wrote, “Alongside Night may be even more relevant today than it was in 1979. Hopefully this landmark work of libertarian science fiction will inspire a new generation of readers to learn more about the ideas of liberty and become active in the freedom movement.”

Dr. Paul is appearing in the movie as himself, with footage shot during his February 3, 2012 visit to Pahrump, Nevada for a campaign rally.

On his June 2, 2009 radio broadcast Glenn Beck said of Alongside Night, “It reads exactly like my show — written in 1979! Phenomenal! Phenomenal!”

The Los Angeles Times Book Review wrote, “High Drama … A story of high adventure, close escapes, mistaken identities, and thrilling rescues. … A fast-moving tale of a future which is uncomfortably close at hand.”

Publishers Weekly wrote, “An unabashedly polemical, libertarian novel which packages its message in a fast, effectively told action adventure.”

The Sunday Detroit News wrote, “Let me begin with a disclaimer: I don’t really agree with many of J. Neil Schulman’s ideas about society or politics or money. But his first book, Alongside Night, is as enjoyable piece of cautionary fiction as I have read in some years … Like Ayn Rand and Robert A. Heinlein, Schulman can tell a good story!”

Reason Magazine has called Alongside Night, “One of the most widely hailed libertarian novels since the classic works of Ayn Rand.”

Science Fiction Review called it, “Probably the best libertarian novel since Atlas Shrugged.”

Liberty Magazine wrote, “As the seventies ended … the time seemed ripe for a great libertarian novel to appear, and so it did. The novel was Alongside Night…”

Alongside Night’s author, J. Neil Schulman, is also known for his Prometheus-Award-winning novel, The Rainbow Cadenza (Simon & Schuster, 1983), known as the screenwriter of the 1986 CBS Twilight Zone episode “Profile in Silver” in which a time-traveling future historian creates an alternate time-line by stopping the JFK assassination, is author of the Charlton Heston-endorsed nonfiction book Stopping Power: Why 70 Million Americans Own Guns, and is the author of the longest interview ever conducted with science-fiction Grandmaster Robert A. Heinlein, published in Schulman’s The Robert Heinlein Interview and Other Heinleiniana.

In 2006 J. Neil Schulman wrote, produced, and directed the suspense-comedy feature film, Lady Magdalene’s, starring the original Star Trek’s Lt. Uhura, Nichelle Nichols, and the film won “Best Cutting Edge Film” at the 2008 San Diego Black Film Festival, “Audience Choice” at the 2008 Cinema City International Film Festival, and a “Special Jury Prize for Libertarian Ideals” at the 2011 Anthem Film Festival, which is part of FreedomFest. The film is currently available from Amazon.com as a Special Preview DVD and Amazon Instant Video, where the movie’s musical soundtrack is available both as CD’s and as mp3 downloads. Sponsored by Life Enhancement Products, the movie will have its local Nevada. television premiere on Halloween 2011 then be released nationally for broadcast & cable-satellite, as well as a planned Blu-Ray/DVD combo pack to be released in 2012. The complete Life-Enhancement-sponsored Lady Magdalene’s will also stream on the web for free from its official movie website at http://www.ladymagdalenes.com beginning in October 2011.


Link to Alongside Night Official Movie Website

J. Neil Schulman has written a screen adaptation of Alongside Night and is in production directing it as his second feature film, starring international film and TV star Kevin Sorbo in the role of Dr. Martin Vreeland. Both Schulman and Sorbo are executive producers on the production, and its official movie website at http://www.alongsidenightmovie.com. The producers also have set up an Official Facebook Movie Page.

Kevin Sorbo and J. Neil Schulman
Kevin Sorbo
and J. Neil Schulman

Kevin Sorbo was the star of the #1 rated worldwide TV series, Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and is featured in the 2011 movie Soul Surfer.

New York Times bestselling author Tom Woods has written of the Alongside Night book-to-movie project:

The libertarian world has been doing a good job writing and publishing in economics, history, and philosophy. But to reach a wider audience, we need to go where the people are. For one thing, people read much more fiction than nonfiction. J. Neil Schulman’s Alongside Night is an excellent example of the possibilities for libertarian fiction. And now there’s a move to get his book adapted into a motion picture. Fiction writing and the movies are two areas where we are getting killed. We’re not even putting up a fight. A project like this can change that.

Alongside Night, with major endorsements from Ron Paul and Milton Friedman, its libertarian awards and rave reviews, and the intention of Free to Choose media to use the film in its teaching modules distributed to high schools, is an extremely rare opportunity to make inroads into the mass entertainment media. It would be great to see people of means get behind this important project.

Tom Woods
Tom Woods

This article is Copyright © 2011, 2012 The J. Neil Schulman Living Trust. All rights reserved.


Winner of the Special Jury Prize for Libertarian Ideals from the 2011 Anthem Film Festival! My comic thriller Lady Magdalene’s — a movie I wrote, produced, directed, and acted in it — is now available free on the web linked from the official movie website. If you like the way I think, I think you’ll like this movie. Check it out!

Bookmark and Share

Braeburn Entertainment and Richard Iott join Jesulu Productions on Alongside Night


(OpenPress) February 12, 2012 — Braeburn Entertainment, Ltd., and executive producer Richard B. Iott, have joined Alongside Night, LLC/Jesulu Productions, in the production of the feature film, Alongside Night, based on the popular and award-winning 1979 novel, adapted and being directed by the novel’s author, J. Neil Schulman, starring international film/TV star, Kevin Sorbo, and featuring an appearance by Dr. Ron Paul.


Kevin Sorbo
and J. Neil Schulman

Alongside Nightt is a near-future action/suspense feature following Elliot Vreeland, teenage son of Nobel-prize-winning economist Dr. Martin Vreeland (Kevin Sorbo), who finds himself on the run from FEMA when his family disappears during political chaos following the collapse of the U.S. dollar due to unsustainable government spending.

In addition to being an award-winning libertarian novelist and journalist, J. Neil Schulman is writer of the 1986 CBS Twilight Zone episode “Profile in Silver,” about a future history professor who travels back to 1963 Dallas and creates a self-destructing alternate timeline by preventing the JFK assassination, and Schulman is the writer/producer/director of the triple-film-festival-award-winning 2010 suspense-comedy, Lady Magdalene’s, starring the original Star Trek‘s Lt. Uhura, Nichelle Nichols.


Rich Iott

In addition to being a successful producer on over a dozen feature films including Call of the Wild 3D (Christopher Lloyd, Wes Studi, Veronica Cartwright), Beautiful Boy (Michael Sheen, Maria Bello), and Insight (Sean Patrick Flanery, Natalie Zea, Adam Baldwin), in 2010 Richard Iott was a Republican candidate for Congress from his home state of Ohio, endorsed by Tea Party supporters.

Alongside Night began principal photography in December 2011 and is planned to begin screening in Spring/Summer 2012.

Dr. Ron Paul wrote about the novel, “J. Neil Schulman’s Alongside Night may be even more relevant today than it was in 1979. Hopefully … this landmark work of libertarian science fiction will inspire a new generation of readers to learn more about the ideas of liberty and become active in the freedom movement.”

Alongside Night was published hardcover by Crown Publishing October 16, 1979 with the following endorsements:

Nobel laureate-in-economics Milton Friedman:
“A cautionary tale with a disturbing resemblance to past history and future possibilities.”

A Clockwork Orange author Anthony Burgess:
“A remarkable and original story, and the picture it presents of an inflation-crippled America on the verge of revolution is all too acceptable. I wish, and so will many novelists, that I, or they, had thought of the idea first. A thrilling novel, crisply written, that fires the imagination as effectively as it stimulates the feelings.”


>Download Free Alongside Night PDF
Alongside Night Poster #1 Alongside Night Poster #3

Resurgence in Popularity:

Alongside Night holds the record for the most popular libertarian novel on the World Wide Web. Over 100,000 copies of Alongside Night were downloaded within five days in May, 2010. Since its release on June 13, 2009, over 340,000 copies of Alongside Night‘s 30th Anniversary PDF edition have been downloaded from www.AlongsideNight.net.

Libertarian Awards won:

1989: Libertarian Futurist Society, Prometheus Hall of Fame Award
2009: Freedom Book Club, Book of the Month for May 2009
2009: Karl Hess Club, cited in the Samuel Edward Konkin III Memorial Chauntecleer Award for author J. Neil Schulman

Reviews:

Reason Magazine:
“One of the most widely hailed libertarian novels since the classic works of Ayn Rand.”

With Liberty:
“If Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged was the elementary school of a very effective education in freedom, then J. Neil Schulman’s Alongside Night has to be the post-graduate studies course.”

Science Fiction Review:
“Probably the best libertarian novel since Atlas Shrugged.”

Los Angeles Times Book Review:
“High Drama … A story of high adventure, close escapes, mistaken identities, and thrilling rescues. … A fast-moving tale of a future which is uncomfortably close at hand.”

Liberty Magazine:
“As the seventies ended … the time seemed ripe for a great libertarian novel to appear, and so it did. The novel was Alongside Night…”

Publishers Weekly:
“An unabashedly polemical, libertarian novel which packages its message in a fast, effectively told action adventure.”

Sunday Detroit News:
“Let me begin with a disclaimer: I don’t really agree with many of J. Neil Schulman’s ideas about society or politics or money. But his first book, Alongside Night, is as enjoyable piece of cautionary fiction as I have read in some years … Like Ayn Rand and Robert A. Heinlein, Schulman can tell a good story!”

Plot Synopsis:

The American economy is in freefall. Markets are crashing. Inflation is soaring. Bankruptcies, foreclosures and unemployment are up, and even defense contracts are going overseas. The United States military is threatening to go on strike. Foreigners are buying up everything in America at firesale prices while gloating over the fall of a once great nation. Homeless people and gangs own the streets. Smugglers use the latest technology to operate bold enterprises that the government is powerless to stop, even with totalitarian spying on private communications. Anyone declared a terrorist by the administration is being sent to a secret federal prison where constitutional rights don’t exist.

And caught in the middle of it all are the brilliant teenage son of a missing Nobel-prizewinning economist, his best friend from prep school whose uncle was once an Israeli commando, and the beautiful but mysterious teenage girl he meets in a secret underground … a girl who carries a pistol with a silencer.

The setting could be next week. But this novel was written three decades ago.

Full information on the production is on the official movie website at http://www.alongsidenightmovie.com and on its Official Facebook Page at http://www.facebook.com/alongsidenightmovie .


Winner of the Special Jury Prize for Libertarian Ideals from the 2011 Anthem Film Festival! My comic thriller Lady Magdalene’s — a movie I wrote, produced, directed, and acted in it — is now available free on the web linked from the official movie website. If you like the way I think, I think you’ll like this movie. Check it out!

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Paul Rosenberg on Alongside Night

Speaking to Steven Michaels of InvisibleAssets.com in Steven’s weekly telephone conference call, guest Paul Rosenberg of Cryptohippie.com and author of A Lodging of Wayfaring Men spoke about Alongside Night and the upcoming movie.


Paul Rosenberg
Paul Rosenberg on Alongside Night
(MP3 audio, 42 seconds)



Alongside Night Movie Website Home Page

See also Alongside Night Movie to Premiere Spring 2012 at George Mason University and Alongside Night Approaches


Cato the Elder ended every speech, “Carthago delenda est!” — “Carthage must be destroyed!” Recently I’ve been ending everything I’ve been writing:

Alongside Night Must Be Made!


Winner of the Special Jury Prize for Libertarian Ideals from the 2011 Anthem Film Festival! My comic thriller Lady Magdalene’s — a movie I wrote, produced, directed, and acted in it — is now available free on the web linked from the official movie website and as a DVD on Amazon.com. If you like the way I think, I think you’ll like this movie. Check it out!

Bookmark and Share

Alongside Night Movie to Preview Spring 2012 at George Mason University

(Facebook) October 18, 2011 (Revised February 13, 2012) — The movie adaptation of award-winning author/filmmaker J. Neil Schulman’s “1979 Novel Ripped from Today’s Headlines!” — Alongside Night — will offer a special preview at the JC Cinema on the Fairfax, Virginia campus of George Mason University during the Spring Semester of 2012.

The preview, currently scheduled for Wednesday, April 11, 2012 7:30 PM, is being sponsored by the campus organization Mason Liberty, an affiliate of Students for Liberty, the Institute for Humane Studies, and AntiWar.com.

The announcement was first made on Facebook.

The movie, which Schulman adapted from his novel and is directing as his second feature film, is currently in production. It stars Kevin Sorbo in the role of Nobel laureate economist Dr. Martin Vreeland, whose theories are the lynchpin of a political crisis when the United States dollar becomes worthless on world markets.

Alongside Night began principal photography on December 5, 2011, and is scheduled to complete principal potography in Spring 2012, with screenings planned to begin in Summer 2012.

It’s being co-produced by J. Neil Schulman’s Jesulu Productions / Alongside Night, LLC, and Richard Iott’s Braeburn Productions.

The 30th anniversary PDF edition of the Alongside Night novel recently passed 344,000 downloads from http://www.alongsidenight.net.

Alongside Night 30th Anniversary PDF edition

The novel portrays the near-future collapse of the American economy due to government overspending and the federal government monetizing its debt — resulting in a hyperinflationary collapse of the dollar — as seen through the eyes of Elliot Vreeland, the teenage son of Nobel-prizewinning economist Dr. Martin Vreeland, key player in a last-ditch attempt to prevent the United States government from collapsing because its money can no longer pay government officials or the military.

Alongside Night was originally published hardcover October 16, 1979 by Crown Publishers, with dust-jacket endorsements from Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman and A Clockwork Orange author Anthony Burgess.

The novel went on to win rave reviews in publications across the political spectrum from the Los Angeles Times Book Review and Sunday Detroit News to Reason Magazine and Liberty.

It’s often been compared to Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. One reviewer wrote, “If Ayn Rand’s ‘Atlas Shrugged’ was the elementary school of a very effective education in freedom, then J. Neil Schulman’s ‘Alongside Night’ has to be the post-graduate studies course.”

In 1989 Alongside Night won a Prometheus Hall of Fame Award from the Libertarian Futurist Society. The novel was voted the Freedom Book Club’s Book of the Month for May 2009. Also in 2009 the Karl Hess Club cited Alongside Night as one of the reasons it was awarding author J. Neil Schulman its Samuel Edward Konkin III Memorial Chauntecleer Award.

Alongside Night seen at Occupy LA * LAPD
Alongside Night at Occupy LA * LAPD
Photo by Tim Cavanaugh, Reason

Alongside Night has won cult status among libertarians, gold-bugs, advocates of laissez-faire capitalism, Tea Party proponents — because of endorsements for the novel from Tea Party icons Congressman Ron Paul and Glenn Beck — and on October 10th a copy of the novel was spotted by Reason Magazine reporter, Tim Cavanaugh, at the northern encampment at Occupy LA * LAPD. The novel — endorsed by Samuel Edward Konkin III, author of the New Libertarian Manifesto — is considered one of the founding documents of the international Agorist movement, being the first published presentation of CounterEconomics as an alternative to politics as a means of achieving libertarian social goals.

On June 13, 2009, the novel’s current publisher, Pulpless.Com, made a 30th anniversary PDF edition of Alongside Night available for free download from its website at http://www.alongsidenight.net. The novel quickly became a popular download but went viral when in five days in May 2010 over 100,000 copies of the novel were downloaded.

The 30th Anniversary PDF edition of Alongside Night passed 300,000 downloads on September 19, 2011. There have been over another 44,000 downloads since then.

Its text is the same as the 20th Anniversary edition of Alongside Night published by Pulpless.Com in 1999 and still in print as a trade paperback. An Amazon.Com Kindle edition with the same text was also published in 2009, and it was this edition that was read by Glenn Beck.

Dr. Milton Friedman wrote of Alongside Night: “A cautionary tale with a disturbing resemblance to past history and future possibilities.”

Anthony Burgess wrote, “I received Alongside Night at noon today. It is now eight in the evening and I just finished it. I think I am entitled to some dinner now as I had no lunch. The unputdownability of the book ensured that. It is a remarkable and original story, and the picture it presents of an inflation- crippled America on the verge of revolution is all too acceptable. I wish, and so will many novelists, that I, or they, had thought of the idea first. A thrilling novel, crisply written, that fires the imagination as effectively as it stimulates the feelings.”

Dr. Ron Paul wrote, “Alongside Night may be even more relevant today than it was in 1979. Hopefully this landmark work of libertarian science fiction will inspire a new generation of readers to learn more about the ideas of liberty and become active in the freedom movement.”

Dr. Paul is appearing in the movie as himself, with footage shot during his February 3, 2012 visit to Pahrump, Nevada for a campaign rally.

On his June 2, 2009 radio broadcast Glenn Beck said of Alongside Night, “It reads exactly like my show — written in 1979! Phenomenal! Phenomenal!”

The Los Angeles Times Book Review wrote, “High Drama … A story of high adventure, close escapes, mistaken identities, and thrilling rescues. … A fast-moving tale of a future which is uncomfortably close at hand.”

Publishers Weekly wrote, “An unabashedly polemical, libertarian novel which packages its message in a fast, effectively told action adventure.”

The Sunday Detroit News wrote, “Let me begin with a disclaimer: I don’t really agree with many of J. Neil Schulman’s ideas about society or politics or money. But his first book, Alongside Night, is as enjoyable piece of cautionary fiction as I have read in some years … Like Ayn Rand and Robert A. Heinlein, Schulman can tell a good story!”

Reason Magazine has called Alongside Night, “One of the most widely hailed libertarian novels since the classic works of Ayn Rand.”

Science Fiction Review called it, “Probably the best libertarian novel since Atlas Shrugged.”

Liberty Magazine wrote, “As the seventies ended … the time seemed ripe for a great libertarian novel to appear, and so it did. The novel was Alongside Night…”

Alongside Night’s author, J. Neil Schulman, is also known for his Prometheus-Award-winning novel, The Rainbow Cadenza (Simon & Schuster, 1983), known as the screenwriter of the 1986 CBS Twilight Zone episode “Profile in Silver” in which a time-traveling future historian creates an alternate time-line by stopping the JFK assassination, is author of the Charlton Heston-endorsed nonfiction book Stopping Power: Why 70 Million Americans Own Guns, and is the author of the longest interview ever conducted with science-fiction Grandmaster Robert A. Heinlein, published in Schulman’s The Robert Heinlein Interview and Other Heinleiniana.

In 2006 J. Neil Schulman wrote, produced, and directed the suspense-comedy feature film, Lady Magdalene’s, starring the original Star Trek’s Lt. Uhura, Nichelle Nichols, and the film won “Best Cutting Edge Film” at the 2008 San Diego Black Film Festival, “Audience Choice” at the 2008 Cinema City International Film Festival, and a “Special Jury Prize for Libertarian Ideals” at the 2011 Anthem Film Festival, which is part of FreedomFest. The film is currently available from Amazon.com as a Special Preview DVD and Amazon Instant Video, where the movie’s musical soundtrack is available both as CD’s and as mp3 downloads. Sponsored by Life Enhancement Products, the movie will have its local Nevada. television premiere on Halloween 2011 then be released nationally for broadcast & cable-satellite, as well as a planned Blu-Ray/DVD combo pack to be released in 2012. The complete Life-Enhancement-sponsored Lady Magdalene’s will also stream on the web for free from its official movie website at http://www.ladymagdalenes.com beginning in October 2011.


Link to Alongside Night Official Movie Website

J. Neil Schulman has written a screen adaptation of Alongside Night and is in production directing it as his second feature film, starring international film and TV star Kevin Sorbo in the role of Dr. Martin Vreeland. Both Schulman and Sorbo are executive producers on the production, and its official movie website at http://www.alongsidenightmovie.com. The producers also have set up an Official Facebook Movie Page.

Kevin Sorbo and J. Neil Schulman
Kevin Sorbo
and J. Neil Schulman

Kevin Sorbo was the star of the #1 rated worldwide TV series, Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and is featured in the 2011 movie Soul Surfer.

New York Times bestselling author Tom Woods has written of the Alongside Night book-to-movie project:

The libertarian world has been doing a good job writing and publishing in economics, history, and philosophy. But to reach a wider audience, we need to go where the people are. For one thing, people read much more fiction than nonfiction. J. Neil Schulman’s Alongside Night is an excellent example of the possibilities for libertarian fiction. And now there’s a move to get his book adapted into a motion picture. Fiction writing and the movies are two areas where we are getting killed. We’re not even putting up a fight. A project like this can change that.

Alongside Night, with major endorsements from Ron Paul and Milton Friedman, its libertarian awards and rave reviews, and the intention of Free to Choose media to use the film in its teaching modules distributed to high schools, is an extremely rare opportunity to make inroads into the mass entertainment media. It would be great to see people of means get behind this important project.

Tom Woods
Tom Woods

This article is Copyright © 2011, 2012 The J. Neil Schulman Living Trust. All rights reserved.


Winner of the Special Jury Prize for Libertarian Ideals from the 2011 Anthem Film Festival! My comic thriller Lady Magdalene’s — a movie I wrote, produced, directed, and acted in it — is now available free on the web linked from the official movie website. If you like the way I think, I think you’ll like this movie. Check it out!

Bookmark and Share

Alongside Night Tops 300,000 Downloads!


(OPENPRESS) September 20, 2011 — Award-winning author/filmmaker J. Neil Schulman’s “1979 Novel Ripped from Today’s Headlines!” — Alongside Night — has just passed three-hundred-thousand downloads from http://www.alongsidenight.net.

Alongside Night 30th Anniversary PDF edition

The novel portrays the near-future collapse of the American economy due to government overspending and the federal government monetizing its debt — resulting in a hyperinflationary collapse of the dollar — as seen through the eyes of Elliot Vreeland, the teenage son of Nobel-prizewinning economist Dr. Martin Vreeland, key player in a last-ditch attempt to prevent the United States government from collapsing because its money can no longer pay government officials or the military.

Alongside Night was originally published hardcover October 16, 1979 by Crown Publishers, with dust-jacket endorsements from Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman and A Clockwork Orange author Anthony Burgess.

The novel went on to win rave reviews in publications across the political spectrum from the Los Angeles Times Book Review and Sunday Detroit News to Reason Magazine and Liberty.

It’s often been compared to Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. One reviewer wrote, “If Ayn Rand’s ‘Atlas Shrugged’ was the elementary school of a very effective education in freedom, then J. Neil Schulman’s ‘Alongside Night’ has to be the post-graduate studies course.”

In 1989 Alongside Night won a Prometheus Hall of Fame Award from the Libertarian Futurist Society. The novel was voted the Freedom Book Club’s Book of the Month for May 2009. Also in 2009 the Karl Hess Club cited Alongside Night as one of the reasons it was awarding author J. Neil Schulman its Samuel Edward Konkin III Memorial Chauntecleer Award.

Alongside Night has won cult status among libertarians, gold-bugs, advocates of laissez-faire capitalism, and most recently Tea Party proponents, this last because of endorsements for the novel from Tea Party icons Congressman Ron Paul and Glenn Beck. The novel — endorsed by Samuel Edward Konkin III, author of the New Libertarian Manifesto — is considered one of the founding documents of the international Agorist movement, being the first published presentation of CounterEconomics as an alternative to politics as a means of achieving libertarian social goals.

On June 13, 2009, the novel’s current publisher, Pulpless.Com, made a 30th anniversary PDF edition of Alongside Night available for free download from its website at http://www.alongsidenight.net. The novel quickly became a popular download but went viral when in five days in May 2010 over 100,000 copies of the novel were downloaded.

The 30th Anniversary PDF edition of Alongside Night passed 300,000 downloads on September 19, 2011.

Its text is the same as the 20th Anniversary edition of Alongside Night published by Pulpless.Com in 1999 and still in print as a trade paperback. An Amazon.Com Kindle edition with the same text was also published in 2009, and it was this edition that was read by Glenn Beck.

Dr. Milton Friedman wrote of Alongside Night: “A cautionary tale with a disturbing resemblance to past history and future possibilities.”

Anthony Burgess wrote, “I received Alongside Night at noon today. It is now eight in the evening and I just finished it. I think I am entitled to some dinner now as I had no lunch. The unputdownability of the book ensured that. It is a remarkable and original story, and the picture it presents of an inflation- crippled America on the verge of revolution is all too acceptable. I wish, and so will many novelists, that I, or they, had thought of the idea first. A thrilling novel, crisply written, that fires the imagination as effectively as it stimulates the feelings.”

Congressman Ron Paul wrote, “Alongside Night may be even more relevant today than it was in 1979. Hopefully this landmark work of libertarian science fiction will inspire a new generation of readers to learn more about the ideas of liberty and become active in the freedom movement.”

On his June 2, 2009 radio broadcast Glenn Beck said of Alongside Night, “It reads exactly like my show — written in 1979! Phenomenal! Phenomenal!”

The Los Angeles Times Book Review wrote, “High Drama … A story of high adventure, close escapes, mistaken identities, and thrilling rescues. … A fast-moving tale of a future which is uncomfortably close at hand.”

Publishers Weekly wrote, “An unabashedly polemical, libertarian novel which packages its message in a fast, effectively told action adventure.”

The Sunday Detroit News wrote, “Let me begin with a disclaimer: I don’t really agree with many of J. Neil Schulman’s ideas about society or politics or money. But his first book, Alongside Night, is as enjoyable piece of cautionary fiction as I have read in some years … Like Ayn Rand and Robert A. Heinlein, Schulman can tell a good story!”

Reason Magazine has called Alongside Night, “One of the most widely hailed libertarian novels since the classic works of Ayn Rand.”

Science Fiction Review called it, “Probably the best libertarian novel since Atlas Shrugged.”

Liberty Magazine wrote, “As the seventies ended … the time seemed ripe for a great libertarian novel to appear, and so it did. The novel was Alongside Night…”

Alongside Night’s author, J. Neil Schulman, is also known for his Prometheus-Award-winning novel, The Rainbow Cadenza (Simon & Schuster, 1983), known as the screenwriter of the 1986 CBS Twilight Zone episode “Profile in Silver” in which a time-traveling future historian creates an alternate time-line by stopping the JFK assassination, is author of the Charlton Heston-endorsed nonfiction book Stopping Power: Why 70 Million Americans Own Guns, and is the author of the longest interview ever conducted with science-fiction Grandmaster Robert A. Heinlein, published in Schulman’s The Robert Heinlein Interview and Other Heinleiniana.

In 2006 J. Neil Schulman wrote, produced, and directed the suspense-comedy feature film, Lady Magdalene’s, starring the original Star Trek’s Lt. Uhura, Nichelle Nichols, and the film won “Best Cutting Edge Film” at the 2008 San Diego Black Film Festival, “Audience Choice” at the 2008 Cinema City International Film Festival, and a “Special Jury Prize for Libertarian Ideals” at the 2011 Anthem Film Festival, which is part of FreedomFest. The film is currently available from Amazon.com as a Special Preview DVD and Amazon Instant Video, where the movie’s musical soundtrack is available both as CD’s and as mp3 downloads. Sponsored by Life Enhancement Products, the movie will have its local Nevada. television premiere on Halloween 2011 then be released nationally for broadcast & cable-satellite, as well as a planned Blu-Ray/DVD combo pack to be released in 2012. Its official movie website is at http://www.ladymagdalenes.com.


Link to Alongside Night Official Movie Website

J. Neil Schulman has written a screen adaptation of Alongside Night and is in pre-production to direct it as his second feature film, starring international film and TV star Kevin Sorbo in the role of Dr. Martin Vreeland. Both Schulman and Sorbo are executive producers on the production, and its official movie website at http://www.alongsidenightmovie.com. Facebook maintains a group named Alongside Night — Book to Movie.

Kevin Sorbo and J. Neil Schulman
Kevin Sorbo
and J. Neil Schulman

Kevin Sorbo was the star of the #1 rated worldwide TV series, Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and is featured in the 2011 movie Soul Surfer.

New York Times bestselling author Tom Woods has written of the Alongside Night book-to-movie project:

The libertarian world has been doing a good job writing and publishing in economics, history, and philosophy. But to reach a wider audience, we need to go where the people are. For one thing, people read much more fiction than nonfiction. J. Neil Schulman’s Alongside Night is an excellent example of the possibilities for libertarian fiction. And now there’s a move to get his book adapted into a motion picture. Fiction writing and the movies are two areas where we are getting killed. We’re not even putting up a fight. A project like this can change that.

Alongside Night, with major endorsements from Ron Paul and Milton Friedman, its libertarian awards and rave reviews, and the intention of Free to Choose media to use the film in its teaching modules distributed to high schools, is an extremely rare opportunity to make inroads into the mass entertainment media. It would be great to see people of means get behind this important project.

Tom Woods
Tom Woods

This article is Copyright © 2011 The J. Neil Schulman Living Trust. All rights reserved.


Winner of the Special Jury Prize for Libertarian Ideals from the 2011 Anthem Film Festival! My comic thriller Lady Magdalene’s — a movie I wrote, produced, directed, and acted in it — is now available as a DVD on Amazon.com and for sale or rental on Amazon.com Instant Video. If you like the way I think, I think you’ll like this movie. Check it out!

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Nick Gillespie at Reason.TV Interviews J. Neil Schulman at FreedomFest 2011

From http://reason.tv/video/show/author-and-filmmaker-j-neil-sc

At FreedomFest 2011, Reason’s Nick Gillespie sat down with author and filmmaker J. Neil Schulman to talk about some of his most recent projects.

J. Neil Schulman at FreedomFest 2011

Held each July in Las Vegas, FreedomFest is attended by around 2,000 libertarians and advocates of limited government. Reason.tv spoke with over two dozen speakers and attendees and will be releasing interviews over the coming weeks. For an ever-growing playlist, go here now.

Scroll down for downloadable versions, and subscribe to our YouTube Channel to receive notifications when new material goes live.

Winner of the Special Jury Prize for Libertarian Ideals from the 2011 Anthem Film Festival! My comic thriller Lady Magdalene’s — a movie I wrote, produced, directed, and acted in it — is now available as a DVD on Amazon.com and for sale or rental on Amazon.com Instant Video. If you like the way I think, I think you’ll like this movie. Check it out!

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An Open Statement to Law Enforcement


Late last night I opened up my email queue and found a Google alert. Google Alerts are like the old newspaper clipping services professional publicists used to subscribe to for their clients. These days it’s a simple, no-cost key word search on the web, and I’ve set up several for my name and the titles of things I’ve written. One of them is my 1979 novel, Alongside Night.

This Google alert sent me to the website of an ABC News local station in Tampa, Florida.

Here’s the website link to the news story:


‘Silk Road’ website called the Amazon, eBay of heroin, cocaine, drug trafficking



That got my attention. I read the story. And discovered that my three-decade-old novel directly inspired this drug-trafficking website.

Alongside Night 30th Anniversary Edition
Alongside Night 30th Anniversary Edition

So let me make this clear and open statement to any law-enforcement investigators.

I don’t know anything more than this news story told me.

Nobody from this website has ever told me they were going to do this, are doing it, or identified themselves to me in any way.

I neither buy nor sell nor use illegal drugs.

Investigating me as a way to get to them is a dry hole.

Alongside Night has been in print since 1979. It’s won literary awards, got reviewed a lot, has gotten written about a lot. In the past couple of years there have been over 275,000 downloads of the novel from my website. No, I don’t have any records of who downloaded the novel.

I’m saying this right up front because I have no desire to have a SWAT team raid the home where I am writing this. If you want to interview me for an investigation, my contact information is publicly available here. Make an appointment with me and I’ll willingly tell you everything I know, which — by the way — I just did.

Here are all the links you need to find out everything about Alongside Night:

Download the Novel for Free
Official Movie Website
Official Novel Facebook Page
Official Movie Facebook Page
Amazon.com Page
Wikipedia Article
IMDb Page

Sincerely,

J. Neil Schulman

P.S. I’m currently working on turning Alongside Night into a movie. If you think financing my movie will be helpful to your investigation, I’m willing to take your money.


Winner of the Special Jury Prize for Libertarian Ideals from the 2011 Anthem Film Festival! My comic thriller Lady Magdalene’s — a movie I wrote, produced, directed, and acted in it — is now available as a DVD on Amazon.com and for sale or rental on Amazon.com Instant Video. If you like the way I think, I think you’ll like this movie. Check it out!

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My Unfinished 30-Year-Old Debate with Wendy McElroy

Three decades ago, at a libertarian meeting in Los Angeles, the program paired me with Wendy McElroy to debate the question, “Is Copyright a Natural Right?” Wendy argued against. Instead of arguing “for” as I’d agreed to I cheated by abandoning defense of copyright and instead offered my own brand-new theory of all property rights, including property rights in the products of authorship and invention.

In the thirty years since Wendy and I have both published on this topic, but in my view she has never gone beyond the original debate question by addressing my actual presentation.

A few days ago Wendy updated her first publication of her side of the debate and published it as “Contra Copyright, Again.”

Reprinted under a creative commons license, here is Wendy’s new article and my new reply.

–J. Neil Schulman

Author Wendy McElroy
Author Wendy McElroy


Contra Copyright, Again

Wendy McElroy

Retrospective

Ernest Hemingway once wrote, “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.” Los Angeles in the early ’80s was like that for libertarians. It brimmed over with supper clubs, student groups, small magazines, debates and conferences. Given the concentration of high-quality scholars and activists in the area, the explosion of activity was inevitable. Although the new-born Libertarian Party was extremely active, the circles in which I ran were generally anti-political or apathetic about electoral politics. They included the cadre gathered around Robert LeFevre, a sprinkling of Objectivists (mostly admirers of Nathaniel Branden), a few Galambosians, and as many Rothbardians as I could meet. And, then, Carl Watner, George H. Smith and I established our own unique circle by creating The Voluntaryist newsletter and re-introducing the term Voluntaryist back into the libertarian mainstream. A libertarian used book store named Lysander’s Books that I co-owned became the center of Voluntaryism.

One intellectual circle in particular exerted a profound influence on the development of my thinking on intellectual property: the anarcho-capitalists who banded around Samuel Konkin III (or, as he preferred, SEK3), many of whom lived in the same apartment complex as SEK3; the complex became known as the anarcho-village. (In truth, it was SEK3 and Victor Koman rather than the entire circle that exerted the influence.)

My first exposure to the theories that constitute intellectual property came from reading Ayn Rand,[1] but I gave the matter little thought. It was not until reading Lysander Spooner that I began to analyze the issue critically. Spooner advocated a rather extreme form of ownership in ideas. He once wrote, “So absolute is an author’s right of dominion over his ideas that he may forbid their being communicated even by human voice if he so pleases.”[2] I had adopted many of Spooner’s ideas wholesale but I balked at his view of intellectual property. Although I did not then question the claim that ideas could be property, I was disturbed by how closely so much of Spooner’s advocacy came to the Galambosian view at which so many of my companions laughed derisively. Galambos famously had a nickle jar into which he would deposit a coin every time he used a word that had been “invented” by someone else and to whom (in his opinion) he owned money for its use. I thought then (and now) that such ownership claims went against the free flow of knowledge required by a thriving society … or a thriving individual, for that matter. In short, Spooner’s approach to intellectual property felt wrong.

At that same time, I was also engaged in indexing Benjamin Tucker’s 19th century periodical Liberty (1881–1908) and, eventually, I progressed into Tucker’s discussion of intellectual property in which he fundamentally disagreed with the views of his mentor, Spooner. The pre-Stirnerite Tucker considered the issue to be his only deviation from Spooner. As I read the very active debate within Liberty, I began to reduce my commitment to intellectual property, to narrow it. For example, I abandoned altogether the belief that inventions could properly be patented. My belief in copyright, however, was more persistent despite the fact that Murray Rothbard—my idol and my friend—was anti-copyright. Frankly, Murray and I never discussed that subject.

But SEK3 and I did. Many people found SEK3 to be a bit annoying in how he argued ideas. There was a persistence and casual assurance about him that irritated some but which I found charming. SEK3 was always available and “up” for gab-sessions that lasted for hours. He had an uncanny ability to find the strand of thought in your argument which could be reduced to absurdity. Some people bitterly resented this ability because they thought he was making them look foolish but it fascinated me and I found it compelling. Indeed, it had been a similar technique of arguing that had made me relinquish my belief in God at the age of sixteen. SEK3 now used the technique on me and, so, chipped away at my acceptance of copyright.[3] The last blow was dealt by the science-fiction writer and SEK3 cadre Victor Koman who asked me a pointed question at an otherwise forgettable party. Vic asked, “Do you really think you own what is in my mind?” As an anarchist who was then reading both Tucker and 19th century abolitionist tracts, one answer alone was possible: “No.” And, yet, if I claimed ownership over an arrangement of words he had read, then I was answering “yes” because that arrangement now resided in Victor’s mind. If I could compel him (as Spooner suggested) not to speak the words aloud, then I was making an ownership claim over another person’s body.

At that moment—and, granted, it took several months of consideration to reach that moment—I abandoned all belief in intellectual property.

One of SEK3’s cadre who never made the same leap was/is the science-fiction writer J. Neil Schulman. Shortly after my conversion experience, I was asked to debate J. Neil on the topic of copyright at a Westwood supper club that scrapped the dinner part of the evening in order to accommodate a longer program of debate, rebuttal, Q&A. (SEK3 may well have been the more logical choice but, as I said, he irritated some people.) The event was a rousing success in several ways. First, the large room was filled beyond capacity, with people choosing to stand for hours rather than leave. Brad (now my husband of over 20 years) attended as the representative of the Society for Libertarian Life. SLL offered 2 buttons: one pro- and one anti-copyright; as I remember, they sold out.

It was a long evening, mostly due to the fact that J. Neil went over his 20-minute time limit by about 30 minutes. Nevertheless, not a single person left and the Q&A was unusually lively. At first, I was disappointed because the questions were overwhelmingly directed toward J. Neil. But, then, I realized no one was arguing with me. Everyone was taking exception to his presentation on what he called “logorights.” At that point, I relaxed until, finally, the moderator had to cut off questions because the gathering was going beyond the time for which the room had been rented. A group of us adjourned to a Great Earth restaurant and continued the discussion.

J. Neil immediately began to write up his side of the debate and later published it.[4] I followed suit. Since I always write out my presentations, this merely required some polishing to produce “Contra Copyright” which appeared in an early issue of The Voluntaryist newsletter. A still more polished revision appears below.


Contra Copyright

Copyright—the legal claim of ownership over a particular arrangement of symbols—is a complicated issue because the property being claimed is intangible. It has no mass, no shape, no color. For the property claimed is not the specific instance of an idea, not a specific book or pamphlet, but the idea itself and all present or possible instances of its expression.

The title of a recent book on intellectual property, Who Owns What Is In Your Mind?, concretizes a commonsense objection to all intellectual property: most people would loudly proclaim that NO ONE owns what is in their minds, that this realm is sacrosanct. And, yet, if the set of ideas in your mind begins “Howard Roark laughed” do you have the right to transfer it onto paper and publish a book entitled The Fountainhead under your own name? If not, why not? To say you own what is in your mind means you have the right to use and dispose of it as you see fit. If you cannot use and dispose of it, if Ayn Rand (assuming a still-living Rand) is the only one who can use and dispose of this specific arrangement of the alphabet, then she owns that sentence within your mind. And if she owns what is in your mind, you have violated her rights in writing or speaking it because you do not have permission to use her property.

I advocate a form of copyright—free market copyright. I view copyright as a useful social convention to be maintained and enforced through contract and other market (voluntary) mechanisms. This is in contradistinction to those who believe copyright can be derived from natural rights; in other words, ideas or patterns are property and their exclusive ownership does not require a contract anymore than preventing a man from stealing your wallet requires a prior contract.

Basically, the debate over copyright—or, more generally, intellectual property—comes down to two questions: What is property? What are the essential characteristics which make something ownable?: and, What is an idea?

Before going on to a discussion of theory, however. I want to address two implications that often lurk beneath criticism of free market copyright.

First: It is said that the marketplace cannot handle intellectual property issues. Those who contend that ten different people would publish Hamlet under their own names and, so, create cut-throated chaos, are using a form of the “market failure” argument which has been applied to everything from medical care to defense. Similarly, it is claimed, the market cannot regulate the publishing industry. The opposite is true. When I co-owned a used book store—a business which is virtually unregulated—I was astonished at how effectively the free market spontaneously set standards. It was not uncommon for stores in L.A. to know the specifics of a stolen book or a forged autograph the day after it had been spotted in New York.

Second, it is said that free market copyright would strip authors of valid protection or credit for their own work. When Benjamin Tucker—a 19th century libertarian opponent of copyright—was accused of stripping authors of protection, he replied: “It must not be inferred that I wish to deprive the authors of reasonable rewards for their labor. On the contrary, I wish to help them secure such, and I believe that there are Anarchistic methods of doing so.”[5] Equally, those who oppose state-enforced copyright are not seeking to victim authors but to use free market mechanisms to offer whatever protection is just.

Returning to theory … The issue of copyright hinges on the question: can ideas be property? Which leads to another question: what are the characteristics of property?

Tucker addressed this issue in fundamental terms. He asked why the concept of property had originated in the first place. If ideas are viewed as problem-solving devices, as answers to questions, then what about the nature of reality and the nature of man gave rise to the idea of property? In a brilliant analysis, Tucker concluded that property arose as a means of solving conflicts caused by scarcity. Since all goods are scarce, there is competition for their use. Since the same chair cannot be used in the same manner at the same time by two individuals, it was necessary to determine who should use the chair. Property resolved this problem. The owner of the chair determined its use. “If it were possible,” wrote Tucker,

and if it had always been possible, for an unlimited number of individuals to use to an unlimited extent and in an unlimited number of places the same concrete things at the same time, there would never have been any such thing as the institution of property.[6]

Yet ideas defy scarcity. Since the same idea or pattern can be used by an unlimited number to an unlimited extent in unlimited locations, Tucker concluded that copyright ran counter to the very purpose of property itself, which was to ascertain the correct allocation of a scarce good.

Copyright contradicts not merely the purpose of property but also the essential characteristics of property, one such characteristic being transferability. Property has to be alienable: you must be able to dispossess yourself of it. The individualist anarchist, James L. Walker, commented, “The giver or seller parts with it [meaning property] in conveying it. This characteristic distinguishes property from skill and information.”[7] When you buy the skill and information of a doctor who gives you a check up, for example, you don’t acquire a form of title, as you would acquire title to a car from a car dealer, because the doctor is unable to alienate the information from himself. He cannot transfer it to you: he can only share it.

It was this point, transferability, that lead Thomas Jefferson to reject ideas as property. Jefferson drew an analogy between ideas and candles. Just as a man could light his taper from a candle without diminishing the original flame, so too could he acquire an idea without diminishing the original one. Jefferson wrote:

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is … an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it.[8]

When a poet reads or sells poetry without a contract, when he throws his ideas and patterns into the public realm, the listeners receive information, not property. For the publicized poems to be property they must be transferable, alienable. Yet, as the egoist J.B. Robinson said, “What is an idea? Is it made of wood, or iron, or stone? The idea is nothing objective, that is to say, the idea is not part of the product: it is part of the producer.”[9]

In other words, if the poet claims ownership to the pattern of words in his listener’s head, this reduces to a form of slavery since the ownership claim is over an aspect of the listener’s body: namely, his mind, his knowledge. Such a claim is comparable to saying you own the blood in someone else’s arm. Certainly, you could buy the blood—perhaps for a transfusion—but such a purchase would be contractual and not based on natural right.

Everyone owns the ideas within their own minds. If there is only one instance of a specific idea or arrangement of ideas—e.g. a writer who locks his novel in a desk drawer—then the idea is protected by natural right, by the author’s to self-ownership. He has right to live in peace and silence and maintain a locked desk; no one can properly break into his desk and steal his property. When an author chooses to publicize his ideas without securing protection based on a listener’s or reader’s consent, however, he loses the protection afforded by his self-ownership. He loses what Tucker called ‘“the right of inviolability of person.”

To restate this: I own my ideas because they are in my mind and you can get at them only through my consent or through using force. My ideas are like stacks of money locked inside a vault which you cannot acquire without breaking in and stealing. But, if I throw the vault open and scatter my money on the wind, the people who pick it up off the street are no more thieves than the people who pick up and use the words I throw into the public realm. And, yet, the poet might respond, no one is forced to absorb the poetry floating through the culture. They do so of their own free will. Therefore, says the poet, there is an implied contract or obligation on the part of the listener not to use it without permission.

Victor Yarros, Tucker’s main opponent on copyright in the 19th Century movement argued along these lines. He claimed, “All Mr. Tucker has the right to demand is that these things shall not be brought to his own private house and placed before his eyes.”[10] Tucker responded,

Some man comes along and parades in the streets and we are told that, in consequence of this act on his part, we must either give up our liberty to walk the streets or else our liberty to ideas … Not so fast my dear sir! … Were you compelled to parade on the streets? And why do you ask us to protect you from the consequences?[11]

Moreover, the introduction of an implied contract between the poet and listener is a two-edged sword. To fall back on some sort of implied agreement implicitly admits that copyright is a matter of contract, not of natural law for one does not need to fall back on contract to protect natural rights. If a man steals your money, there is no need to appeal to an agreement—implied or otherwise—to justify a demand for restitution. Restitution occurs because it was your money. Only when you are dealing with those things to which you have no natural right must you appeal to contract.

Historically, copyright has been handled differently than patents. Many people accept copyrights while rejecting patents. The distinction is usually based on two points: (1) literature is considered pure, personal creation as opposed to inventions which rely on the discovery of relationships that already exist within within nature: and (2) independent creation of literature is considered to be impossible. Copyright is said to protect style or the pattern of expression rather than the ideas expressed. By contrast, most people agree that ideas themselves can be independently and even simultaneously created—for example, Walras, Jevons and Menger all separately originated the theory of marginal utility—but they do not agree that style can be independently or honestly duplicated.

The issue of duplication of style raises interesting questions. For one thing, it is not unknown for poetry, especially short poems, to closely resemble each other. Do these chance similarities constitute duplication? Do they violate copyright laws? If they don’t, what prevents me from taking Atlas Shrugged and publishing it under my name after changing one word in each sentence? This would produce a similar pattern but not a duplicate one. If copyright would prevent me from doing this, then it is aimed not only at prohibiting exact duplications but at prohibiting similarities as well. And similarities are quite within the realm of honest possibility, especially when the guidelines of what constitute similarity are vague.

Many advocates of copyright would argue that honest similarities in nature are impossible or highly improbable. But laws should be based on principle, not upon probability. Tucker wrote:

To discuss the degrees of probability is to shoot wide of the mark. Such questions as this are not to be decided by rule of thumb or by the law of chances, but in accordance with some general principle … among the things not logically impossible. I know of few nearer the limit of possibility than that I should ever desire to publish in the middle of the desert of Sahara: nevertheless, this would scarcely justify any great political power in giving someone a right to stake out a claim comprising that entire region and forbid me to set up a printing press.[12]

In short, a question of right must be determined by a general theory of rights, not the likelihood of circumstances.

In regard to the ownership of a form of expression—of what is called “style”—Tucker believed that a particular combination of words belonged to no one; the method of expressing an idea was an idea in and itself and, therefore, “not appropriable.” As long as you are not claiming ownership of a specific instance of a book, but of the abstracted style of every instance of this book, you are claiming ownership of an idea.

Examples of styles or patterns surround us everywhere. In chairs, shoes, hairstyles, gardens, clothes, wallpaper, the arrangement of furniture … patterns are everywhere. And if it is out of respect for style that arrangements of words cannot be duplicated, then for that same reason, a shoemaker cannot duplicate shoes. Women cannot duplicate hairstyles or clothes for, after all, these items express style as much as a sonnet does. Yet it is only with the sonnet, with literature that the originators clamor for special, legal protection. If copyright were not the norm, if all of us had not grown up with it, we might consider it as absurd as a house owner claiming special, legal protection of the pattern of colors with which he had painted his home or the arrangement of rocks in his garden.

Indeed, to be consistent, the copyright advocate has to reduce his position to similar absurdity. For example, not merely writing but all of speech is a personal form of expression; speech is an arrangement of the alphabet in much the same manner as writing is. Therefore, by the advocate’s own standards, a man should be entitled to legal protection for every sentence he utters so that no one thereafter can utter it without his consent. Lysander Spooner, a defender of copyright much quoted by libertarians, seemed to consider this possibility when he wrote, “So absolute is an author’s right of dominion over his ideas that he may forbid their being communicated even by human voice if he so pleases.”[13]

Think about that statement; it is frightening in its implications for the free flow of ideas and knowledge upon which human progress depends. I do not believe state-enforced copyright protects the just profits of an author. I agree with George Bernard Shaw who contended “copyright is the cry of men who are not satisfied with being paid for their work once but insist upon being paid twice, thrice and a dozen times over.”[14] I believe free market copyright would temper the immense profits that can be made from writing, and that they should be tempered because such profits do not reflect just rewards so much as they do a state monopoly.

Moreover, I do not believe that the absence of state enforcement would destroy literature Most of the world’s great authors—Shakespeare for example—wrote without copyright. As for the possible destruction of the publishing industry, Tucker—a publisher—explained:

Why did two competing editions of the Kreutzer Sonata [a book he issued —WM] appear on the market before mine had had the field two months? Simply because money was pouring into my pockets with a rapiditv that nearly took my breath away. And after my rivals took the field if poured in faster than ever.[15]

As a writer I am eager to maximize my profits. I am not so eager. however, that I would claim ownership to what is in your mind. My attitude toward writers and lecturers who throw their products into the streets and, yet, claim legal protection as they do so is the same as that once uttered by Tucker: “You want your invention to yourself? Then keep it to yourself.”[16]

The energy being expended in debating intellectual property would be better used in exploring methods by which the free market could protect the just rewards of intellectual products.

*Wendy McElroy (wendy@wendymcelroy.com) is author of several books and maintains two active websites: wendymcelroy.com and ifeminists.com. This article contains a new introduction and a revised version of McElroy’s “Contra Copyright,” The Voluntaryist 3, no. 4 (June 1985), http://www.voluntaryist.com/toc.html.

Cite this article as: Wendy McElroy, “Contra Copyright, Again,” Libertarian Papers 3, 12 (2011). Online at: libertarianpapers.org. This article is subject to a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License (creativecommons.org/licenses). Published by the Ludwig von Mises Institute.

[1]See Ayn Rand, “Patents and Copyrights,” in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1970).

[2]Lysander Spooner, The Law of Intellectual Property; Or an Essay on the Right of Authors and Inventors to a Perpetual Property in their Ideas (1855), p. 125, http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=2243&Itemid=27.

[3]SEK3’s views on IP are expressed in Samuel Edward Konkin III, “Copywrongs,” The Voluntaryist (July 1986), http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig11/konkin1.1.1.html.

[4]See J. Neil Schulman, “Informational Property—Logorights,” Journal of Social and Biological Structures, 13 no. 2 (1990), pp. 93–117,

http://jneilschulman.agorist.com/2009/12/classic-j-neil-informational-property-logorights/.

[5]For further discussion of Tucker’s views on property and IP, see my article “Copyright and Patent in Benjamin Tucker’s Periodical,” Mises Daily (July 28, 2010), originally published in Wendy McElroy, ed., The Debates of Liberty: An Overview of Individualist Anarchism, 1881–1908 (Lexington, 2003).

[6]“More on Copyright,” Liberty 7 (December 27, 1890): 5.

[7]“Copyright.–IV,” Liberty 8 (May 30, 1891): 3.

[8]Thomas Jefferson to Isaac McPherson (Aug. 13, 1813), http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/a1_8_8s12.html.

[9]“A New Argument Against Copyright,” Liberty 8 (May 16, 1891): 5.

[10]“The Right to Authorship,” Liberty 7 (February 21, 1891): 4.

[11]Commentary on “The Right to Authorship,” Liberty 7 (February 21, 1891): 5.

[12]Commentary on Yarros, “More About Copyright,” Liberty7 (Dec 27, 1890): 4, at 5.

[13] Spooner, The Law of Intellectual Property, p. 125.

[14]Quoted in Clarence Lee Swartz, What is Mutualism? (1927), http://www.panarchy.org/swartz/mutualism.5.html.

[15]Commentary on “The Reward of Authors,” Liberty 7 (January 10, 1891): 6.

[16]“The Knot-Hole in the Fence,” Liberty 7 (April 18, 1891): 6.



J. Neil Schulman Reply

I could not blame Wendy McElroy for not being prepared to debate the new theory of property rights I first presented in debate with her, but she’s now had thirty years to debate my theory and she has still never done it. For in that presentation I undercut all the assumptions she was prepared to debate and in effect left her to debate the straw man she brought into the room with her. She is still debating that straw man. She has never debated me.

Wendy was prepared to debate statist copyrights and patents. Wendy was prepared to refute the ownership of ideas. Wendy was prepared to argue that the intangible could not be owned. Wendy was prepared to argue that no one could own what existed only inside someone else’s head.

I rejected all of those assumptions in the first five minutes of my presentation. I rejected both the terms “copyright” and “intellectual property” in the first fifteen minutes.

Maybe Wendy should have taken some notes and actually tried to answer my presentation. Instead, she went on with her pre-prepared speech and left it to the audience to listen and debate with me.

One of the audience members — Robert LeFevre — lent his endorsement to my presentation when I soon published it as a pamphlet. Unfortunately after thirty years LeFevre’s actual words are in a storage locker in a box somewhere, and it will be a while before I can recover them.

What Wendy has never in thirty years addressed is that my logorights theory is not a theory of intellectual property but a new natural-rights theory of property deriving from the concept of “material identity.” Previous theories of property made a distinction between real property — and Locke wrote about ownership arising from a man mixing his labor with land to homestead it — and everything else, which was regarded as ephemeral if not completely intangible. Nineteenth century libertarians divided along a false dichotomy because what property actually was and how it came into being had never been rigorously defined.

That’s the task I took on in my debate with Wendy and in the articles that soon followed.

My argument should not be hard to understand for someone like Wendy who has a familiarity with Ayn Rand’s Aristotelian-based epistemology and ontology.

If an author writes an original work that work is not the materials upon which the work is printed. This might have been a hard concept to understand in the age before computers — although I think Morse and Tesla could easily have grasped it — but an author created something which is objectively real and can be apprehended, as can any real thing, by observing its component properties.

When I completed writing my first novel Alongside Night it was not something intangible existing only in my mind. The process of writing was making something that was objectively real and capable of being seen by others than myself. The whole nature and purpose of authorship is other-directed.

The first medium that carried the novel was typing paper; but over the years this real and new thing I made has existed not just as typescript but also in bound books, on computer disks, as information objects transmitted over media both wired and wireless; and soon to be both an audio dramatization from Sound of Liberty/ARTC and a movie produced and directed by me, from my own screenplay adaptation.

None of these things are ideas. None of these things owe their existence to what is in someone else’s head. All of these things are reflections and usages of a thing I made and the component properties and uses that can be extracted from the whole.

I have used several different terms to explain this over the past thirty years since my first presentation. I have called these things a “logos” and the property rights in them logorights. I have used the terms “informational property” and referred to the “material identity” which makes anything ownable as property.

I specifically addressed the necessity of property, to be an economic good, to be scarce, and explained how a property, to be ownable, does not need to be limited in all dimensions (land ownership, for example, does not own the unlimited sky above it), but only in some dimensions.

I’ve explained how the limits of what a specific logos or information is by the Law of Identity makes it a scarce item of commerce, no matter that there be a single copy or a trillion. The copies being identical to the original, the number of existents vary but the entity — thing — itself remains unique and therefore scarce because copying does not change its defining identity.

As I recently posted elsewhere:

How many copies of Atlas Shrugged exist? Millions. How many Atlas Shrugged‘s are there? One. Atlas Shrugged is just as scarce a commodity as the day Ayn Rand finished the manuscript. It was one Atlas Shrugged then and one Atlas Shrugged now. Atlas Shrugged is a unique thing. Only the number of carriers of that singular and scarce object varies.

I’ve also explained how separating out rights for different uses of that property — and licensing them — is no different than leasing a house or apartment, or dividing use of a space by time (as in a timeshare), or selling a ride in a car as opposed to the car itself — and that the assumption that, in allowing others to observe and make use of a created work of distinct material identity the owner abandons his ownership of the thing, necessarily must annihilate the concept of private property entirely.

Most recently, in an attempt to leave in my rearview mirror the straw-man debates about owning ideas, intangibles, and what is in other people’s minds, I have devised the term Media Carried Property (MCP) as a replacement for the misleading term IP — even when by that abbreviation I meant not Intellectual Property but Informational Property.

MCP says what I mean better and without as much baggage.

Wendy has never addressed any of this. Perhaps she believes one has to be long dead before one’s ideas should be addressed.

Or maybe Victor Koman was just more dashing than I was.

References:

The Libertarian Case for IP

MCP


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Alongside Night Tops Quarter Million Downloads


(OPENPRESS) December 30, 2010 — Award-winning author/filmmaker J. Neil Schulman’s “1979 Novel Ripped from Today’s Headlines!” — Alongside Night — has just passed a quarter million downloads from http://www.alongsidenight.net.

Alongside Night 30th Anniversary PDF edition

The novel portrays the near-future collapse of the American economy due to government overspending and the federal government monetizing its debt — resulting in a hyperinflationary collapse of the dollar — as seen through the eyes of Elliot Vreeland, the teenage son of Nobel-prizewinning economist Dr. Martin Vreeland, key player in a last-ditch attempt to prevent the United States government from collapsing because its money can no longer pay government officials or the military.

Alongside Night was originally published hardcover October 16, 1979 by Crown Publishers, with dust-jacket endorsements from Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman and A Clockwork Orange author Anthony Burgess.

The novel went on to win rave reviews in publications across the political spectrum from the Los Angeles Times Book Review and Sunday Detroit News to Reason Magazine and Liberty.

It’s often been compared to Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. One reviewer wrote, “If Ayn Rand’s ‘Atlas Shrugged’ was the elementary school of a very effective education in freedom, then J. Neil Schulman’s ‘Alongside Night’ has to be the post-graduate studies course.”

In 1989 Alongside Night won a Prometheus Hall of Fame Award from the Libertarian Futurist Society. The novel was voted the Freedom Book Club’s Book of the Month for May 2009. Also in 2009 the Karl Hess Club cited Alongside Night as one of the reasons it was awarding author J. Neil Schulman its Samuel Edward Konkin III Memorial Chauntecleer Award.

Alongside Night has won cult status among libertarians, gold-bugs, advocates of laissez-faire capitalism, and most recently Tea Party proponents, this last because of endorsements for the novel from Tea Party icons Congressman Ron Paul and Glenn Beck. The novel — endorsed by Samuel Edward Konkin III, author of the New Libertarian Manifesto — is considered one of the founding documents of the international Agorist movement, being the first published presentation of CounterEconomics as an alternative to politics as a means of achieving libertarian social goals.

On June 13, 2009, the novel’s current publisher, Pulpless.Com, made a 30th anniversary PDF edition of Alongside Night available for free download from its website at http://www.alongsidenight.net. The novel quickly became a popular download but went viral when in five days in May 2010 over 100,000 copies of the novel were downloaded.

The 30th Anniversary PDF edition of Alongside Night passed 250,000 downloads on December 27, 2010.

Its text is the same as the 20th Anniversary edition of Alongside Night published by Pulpless.Com in 1999 and still in print as a trade paperback. An Amazon.Com Kindle edition with the same text was also published in 2009, and it was this edition that was read by Glenn Beck.

Dr. Milton Friedman wrote of Alongside Night: “A cautionary tale with a disturbing resemblance to past history and future possibilities.”

Anthony Burgess wrote, “I received Alongside Night at noon today. It is now eight in the evening and I just finished it. I think I am entitled to some dinner now as I had no lunch. The unputdownability of the book ensured that. It is a remarkable and original story, and the picture it presents of an inflation- crippled America on the verge of revolution is all too acceptable. I wish, and so will many novelists, that I, or they, had thought of the idea first. A thrilling novel, crisply written, that fires the imagination as effectively as it stimulates the feelings.”

Congressman Ron Paul wrote, “Alongside Night may be even more relevant today than it was in 1979. Hopefully this landmark work of libertarian science fiction will inspire a new generation of readers to learn more about the ideas of liberty and become active in the freedom movement.”

On his June 2, 2009 radio broadcast Glenn Beck said of Alongside Night, “It reads exactly like my show — written in 1979! Phenomenal! Phenomenal!”

The Los Angeles Times Book Review wrote, “High Drama … A story of high adventure, close escapes, mistaken identities, and thrilling rescues. … A fast-moving tale of a future which is uncomfortably close at hand.”

Publishers Weekly wrote, “An unabashedly polemical, libertarian novel which packages its message in a fast, effectively told action adventure.”

The Sunday Detroit News wrote, “Let me begin with a disclaimer: I don’t really agree with many of J. Neil Schulman’s ideas about society or politics or money. But his first book, Alongside Night, is as enjoyable piece of cautionary fiction as I have read in some years … Like Ayn Rand and Robert A. Heinlein, Schulman can tell a good story!”

Reason Magazine has called Alongside Night, “One of the most widely hailed libertarian novels since the classic works of Ayn Rand.”

Science Fiction Review called it, “Probably the best libertarian novel since Atlas Shrugged.”

Liberty Magazine wrote, “As the seventies ended … the time seemed ripe for a great libertarian novel to appear, and so it did. The novel was Alongside Night…”

Alongside Night’s author, J. Neil Schulman, is also known for his Prometheus-Award-winning novel, The Rainbow Cadenza (Simon & Schuster, 1983), known as the screenwriter of the 1985 CBS Twilight Zone episode “Profile in Silver” in which a time-traveling future historian creates an alternate time-line by stopping the JFK assassination, is author of the Charlton Heston-endorsed nonfiction book Stopping Power: Why 70 Million Americans Own Guns, and is the author of the longest interview ever conducted with science-fiction Grandmaster Robert A. Heinlein, published in Schulman’s The Robert Heinlein Interview and Other Heinleiniana.

In 2006 J. Neil Schulman wrote, produced, and directed the suspense-comedy feature film, Lady Magdalene’s, starring the original Star Trek’s Lt. Uhura, Nichelle Nichols, and the film won “Best Cutting Edge Film” at the 2008 San Diego Black Film Festival and “Audience Choice” at the 2008 Cinema City International Film Festival. The film may be streamed or downloaded from Amazon.com, where the movie’s musical soundtrack is available both as CD’s and as mp3 downloads. Its official movie website is at http://www.ladymagdalenes.com and it’s listed on IMDb.


Link to Alongside Night Official Movie Website

J. Neil Schulman has written a screen adaptation of Alongside Night and is in pre-production to direct it as his second feature film, starring international film and TV star Kevin Sorbo in the role of Dr. Martin Vreeland. Both Schulman and Sorbo are executive producers on the production, which is listed on IMDb and its official movie website at http://www.alongsidenightmovie.com. Facebook maintains a group named Alongside Night — Book to Movie. Wikipedia maintains an article on Alongside Night.

Kevin Sorbo and J. Neil Schulman
Kevin Sorbo
and J. Neil Schulman

Kevin Sorbo was the star of the #1 rated worldwide TV series, Hercules: The Legendary Journeys.

New York Times bestselling author Tom Woods has written of the Alongside Night book-to-movie project:

The libertarian world has been doing a good job writing and publishing in economics, history, and philosophy. But to reach a wider audience, we need to go where the people are. For one thing, people read much more fiction than nonfiction. J. Neil Schulman’s Alongside Night is an excellent example of the possibilities for libertarian fiction. And now there’s a move to get his book adapted into a motion picture. Fiction writing and the movies are two areas where we are getting killed. We’re not even putting up a fight. A project like this can change that.

Alongside Night, with major endorsements from Ron Paul and Milton Friedman, its libertarian awards and rave reviews, and the intention of Free to Choose media to use the film in its teaching modules distributed to high schools, is an extremely rare opportunity to make inroads into the mass entertainment media. It would be great to see people of means get behind this important project.

Tom Woods
Tom Woods

This article is Copyright © 2010 The J. Neil Schulman Living Trust. All rights reserved.


My comic thriller Lady Magdalene’s — a movie I wrote, produced, directed, and acted in it — is now available for sale or rental on Amazon.com Video On Demand. If you like the way I think, I think you’ll like this movie. Check it out!

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A Rich Businessman Complains About Movies




Him: I’m so sick of movies that make businessmen like me the bad guy. All I want is to make money by producing products that people need, free from government bureaucracy. Why do Hollywood producers always portray businessmen as unscrupulous monsters like Gordon Gekko in Wall Street or Parker Selfridge in Avatar? Even in a movie like Alvin and the Chipmunks, the Chipmunks business manager wants to put them in cages and make them slaves. I don’t want slaves. I don’t want to win by making other people lose. I don’t want to kill the Na’vi. I like tall blue people with tails and cute talking rodents. Why do movies make me the bad guy?

Her: So why don’t you finance a movie with a script you like?

Him: I never thought of that. You mean all I have to do is find a script I like and write a check?

Her: Yes. And I know of a good one. It’s called Alongside Night. It’s based on a famous underground novel with lots of great endorsements, reviews, and awards. It was endorsed by Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman. It was endorsed by Anthony Burgess, who wrote A Clockwork Orange. It won the Prometheus Hall of Fame Award. Ron Paul endorsed it. Glenn Beck raved about it on his radio show. The author is directing it from his own script. He’s already written and directed another movie called Lady Magdalene’s. He wrote for the Twilight Zone, the one where a future historian prevents the JFK assassination. Alongside Night reflects all your higher values. It will be exactly the type of movie you want to see!

Him: But how do I know the movie will be any good?

Her: The filmmaker is J. Neil Schulman. He already has Kevin Sorbo and Erick Avari cast in the movie. He has an Emmy-winning line producer. All you need to do is email Neil and he will send you everything a businessman like you needs to finance this movie. He will even make you an executive producer on the movie. If you want he will put your name above the title. All he needs is the financing to set a start date. And even if you don’t make money, you will have produced a movie which educates the public about the principles of free-market economics and individual liberty.

Him: But why should I risk my money? I’d rather just continue to bitch about movies I don’t like. Culture doesn’t matter anyway. Let only socialists make movies. I don’t care. I’ve only read one novel in my entire life. Atlas Shrugged. Actually, I didn’t even read it all the way. I just read John Galt’s speech and the sex scenes between John Galt and Dagny Taggart.

Her: You are an incredible asshole. I hope communists take all your property and throw you in prison. You are as selfish and stupid as they say you are. Eat shit and die.

Him: Okay, you’ve convinced me. I have learned better. I have changed my ways. Where do I send the check?

Her: J. Neil Schulman has a website. He has a blog. He is on Wikipedia and IMDB and Amazon.com. He is on Facebook. He is on Twitter. He is on LinkedIn. You can Google him. Neil will send you the script and the budget. It costs less than you think. Google Alongside Night! In the name of all that is good and holy, Google J. Neil Schulman and Alongside Night! This movie might save you! The capitalist fortune you keep out of the hands of the socialist hordes might be your own!

Him: I would but I am only a cartoon character. So which rich businessman in the real world will do what I would do if I were real?

If you are a rich businessman as smart as this cartoon character, email J. Neil Schulman at jneil@jesulu.com so Neil can email you the movie script, budget, and everything someone would need to finance this movie. This cartoon is for entertainment purposes only and is not a solicitation to invest. And when Neil sends you information on what he needs to make the movie, that isn’t a solicitation to invest, either. In fact, nothing Neil ever says to anyone is a solicitation to invest. You have to beg Neil to put money into this movie and if he’s in a good mood he might agree to take your money. He just wants to save the world. No kidding.


J. Neil Schulman addresses LibertopiaJ. Neil Schulman addresses Libertopia

For a more serious discussion of why Alongside Night should be a movie, listen to my October 17, 2010 Libertopia speech, Reloading the American Revolution.



Alongside Night Scary Poster
Go to the Alongside Night Official Movie Website

This article and its links are Copyright © 2010 The J. Neil Schulman Living Trust. All rights reserved.


My comic thriller Lady Magdalene’s — a movie I wrote, produced, directed, and acted in it — is now available for sale or rental on Amazon.com Video On Demand. If you like the way I think, I think you’ll like this movie. Check it out!

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