About damned time

The April 04 issue of Liberty is especially good, now that I have gotten to it.

Stephen Cox's and William Merritt's reflections on homosexual marriage frame my position perfectly. I wish I could link to them here, but I can't. Yet.

There's also a great article on how New Urban neighborhood design is associated with significant (up to five-fold) increases in crime. I was going to try to work that into one of my interests, the reform of water-wasteful residential development in the parched West. I want to write about how my proposed redesigns would either repeat this disaster, or be modified to avert it. But I can't. Yet.

Why not? Liberty's web presence has been, in a word, unusable. Their site carries selected articles from their April issue, of course. April of 2001. I can't link to their articles because the articles are not uploaded. I had given up checking it to see whether they had resumed the web edition.

For a long time I suspected that they prioritized their web content so low that they didn't maintain it. This suspicion was fueled in part by Liberty's editiorial positions on music ripping and Microsoft Windows, which lean strongly towards preservation of intellectual property, condemnation of music piracy, and championing the absolute right of Bill Gates to set whatever license terms please him for the use of his software. Why put your content on an URL if someone could read it without paying and, horrors, even copy it? There have also been disparaging comments about those pesky webloggers (though the most interesting reading in the magazine, Reflections, reads like a group blog comparable to VC or The Corner).

If intellectual property protection was the reason they had chosen to publish only in print, it was a poor one. No periodical that wants to be important, wants to be cited, wants the reputation for unique and incisive reporting, chooses not to publish an online edition. It was probably the question of affording a webmaster who wouldn't crater them.

At any rate, I can put all that conjecture aside.
Huzzah! Liberty Magazine finally is overhauling their web presence. I've cited her articles there in the past and will do much more in the future now that they will have URLs. Hat tip: Jacob Levy at Volokh Conspiracy.

They're worth the dead-tree subscription too. Go for it, you know you want to. And tell them you've chosen to subscribe now because their content is now accessible online. Network effects and all that.

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Why are you still here? Pick up the GD phone and subscribe!