April 25, 2014 11:18AM # Because Property Rights Are Important By [Walter Olson](https://www.cato.org/people/walter-olson) --- SHARE [Cory Doctorow at *BoingBoing*](http://boingboing.net/2014/04/24/radical-press-demands-copyrigh.html): > Lawrence and Wishart, a radical press founded in 1936 and formerly associated with the Communist Party of Great Britain, has asserted a copyright over “Marx-Engels Collected Works,” a series of $25–50-ish hardcovers, and demanded that they be removed from the [Marxist Internet Archive](https://www.marxists.org/). As [Scott McLemee notes](http://crookedtimber.org/2014/04/24/karlo-marx-and-fredrich-engels-came-to-the-checkout-at-the-7-11/), the editions in question were “prepared largely if not entirely with the support of old-fashioned, Soviet-era Moscow gold” and consist, in large part, of arguments about the moral bankruptcy and corrupting influence of claims of private property. The archive says it intends to comply with the takedown demand on May Day. ##### Related Tags [Government and Politics](https://www.cato.org/government-politics) [![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).