Structures of Intellectual Property

PeterP writes: "ARSTechnica has an interesting editorial today. It advocates altering the discussion of intellectual property laws to be one of structures, as opposed to rights. Kind of a breath of fresh air from the dogmatic, kneejerk debates this topic usually brings up. An interesting read, too." I second that. Definitely one to read and think about.

Comments

Why corps MUST be allowed to own IP rights

[nels_tomlinson]

I don't think that in general we should assign right to IP. But there are specific cases in which it is best to do so, and when we do assign such rights, it must be possible for corporations to own them.

There is a common misconception in the old Soviet Union: we'll have a free market, we just won't let anyone have property rights, because that's not good socialism. Of course, you can't have a market without property rights.

The problem with the suggestion that ...corporations cannot have patent and IP rights, they can only be assinged to real people. is that if you can't sell your rights, they have no value. Period. If you can only trade these "rights" among individuals, then you restrict the market to folks like you and me. I certainly wouldn't pay $400 for the rights to paper clips under that scenario. The only way that a corporation could justify paying for IP would be if it was assigned to someone who is a majority stock-holder. As you point out, why buy your engineer a patent if he can walk off with it? Buying the patent for someone who is contractually bound to stay or sell the patent back seems pretty shady. If that doesn't violate our hypothetical law, it should.

But one could license the rights to a corp, you respond. Fine, how about exclusive rights to use and sub-license, irrevocable, for the term of the patent? How is that different from an outright sale? It seems to me that this is really all-or-nothing: either you are free to dispose of your invention as you see fit (assuming that we are going to assign property rights at all) and it has value, or you aren't, and it doesn't.

You point out that

truly brilliant people who are inventive would be rewarded. These people would become like athletes as they became more desirable as the number of core patents they hold increases.

This would work fine for folks who could innovate on their own, but how about engineers and geneticists who need multimillion dollar facilities? How could a corp justify paying out tens of millions for someone to develop a patentable invention, which they could then walk off with? Again, contractual ties which bind the rights-holder to the corp are no different than outright assignment to the corp.

I believe that there is no natural right to intellectual property. That's exactly opposite to the situation with physical property, where there certainly is such a natural right. The difference, of course, is that physical property doesn't copy well: if I eat your hamburger, you can't. If I use your idea, you can too. All you have lost is the monopoly.

For all of human history, we have built on the intellectual shoulders of those who came before. It is right and natural that we should share ideas, and we are all better off when that happens. In order to encourage that, the US constitution (Article 1, Section 8)gives Congress permission

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries

This was obviously to work in the public interest, by encouraging productive work and its public disclosure. Enriching inventors is plainly not the aim. Nor does it suggest any pre-existing natural right.