Slashdot Mirror
Reason on IP Protection and Creativity
rnturn writes "A long but interesting article over at Reasononline discusses a paper written by a pair of economists and published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis (!) and the reactions to it of several other economists. A snippet from the article: 'Moreover, U.S. court decisions in the 1980s that strengthened patent protection for software led to less innovation. "Far from unleashing a flurry of new innovative activity," Maskin and Bessen write, "these stronger property rights ushered in a period of stagnant, if not declining, R&D among those industries and firms that patented most."' Not exactly news to most readers but it appears that their paper is making waves in economic circles."
Reactions to the paper have been mixed. Robert Solow, the MIT economist who won a Nobel Prize in 1987 for his work on growth theory, wrote Boldrin and Levine a letter calling the paper "an eye-opener" and making suggestions for further refinements.
/. has been saying this for years, but some one with a Nobel Prize calls it an eye opener?
It is amazing,
The recent trends in DRM etc are actually consequences of this. If you haven't yet, go read Stallman's A right to read. He anticipated DRM 9 years ago. The point is that there are certain things as unenforceable digital restrictions, such as sending a copy of a file on a machine you own to another machine you own through a channel you own. The media companies are seeking to prevent exactly this. To succeed, they will have to own all computing. From this point, I think we are on a path of no return. Either we will end up in a big-brother like situation, or there will be a major social revolution and rebellion, an overthrow of the existing order, and major reevaluation of the thinking on intellectual property issues.
From the article:
This guy "gets it". What needs to be done is to raise awareness on a large scale so that we can meet the threats head on.I like IP rights. I think they're good; people should have the right to make a few bucks with something they invented, without the worry of competition for a little while. This is a good thing, because it gives motivation to innovate -- why create something if your competitors are free to copy it immediately and glut the market?
However, I agree that IP rights are out of control. Copyrights are being extended indefinitely, patents are granted with broad wording that allows for devious undermining of previous IP.
The cause is very obvious: corporations. They have the money and power to lobby for extentions and special rights on their legal monopolies. The solution is simple: eliminate corporate right of ownership of IP, and return it to the hands of the inventors and authors.
Obviously even with such a change, there would be openings for abuse, but they would be greatly limited by also eliminating the right to sell or transfer IP rights. Anyway, that's my opinion on the subject. Feel free to pick it apart.
"Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised."
-Marilyn Manson
I just had to leave my place of employment, as the new management wanted us to sign new contracts. Part of the contract stated that any idea, document, illustration, patent, trademark, (and the list goes on and on) that I may come up with, on or off the clock, or on or off the job site, at any time during my employment, was then the property soley and exclusively of the company.
Most "innovation" and invention has traditionally been done by a person in their garage or basement, working on the proverbial better mouse trap. Corporations are trying to cash in on this, saying stuff like, well, you wouldn't have gotten that idea if you didn't work for me, so it is now mine. No wonder there's been a lessening of "innovation", invention, progress, etc. What I do on my time is mine.
I may work for a corporation, but I refuse to be owned by one.
For those who describe their systems as 'boxen', do you order multiple 'boxen' of corn flakes also?
As a prelude I'd like to point out that writings or inventions simply aren't property. IP -- which is a very misleading term -- actually refers to the copyrights, patents, etc., and not the subject matter they exist in reference to. It's a subtle, but important distinction.
At any rate, two differences present themselves. Firstly, there is frequently a greater public necessity to use writings and inventions that other people have developed as opposed to a need to use other people's real or personal property. Secondly, that that writings and inventions are nonrivalrous. That is, if you have an invention, and I use that invention, I do not preclude your use of it. Whereas if you had a car, and I took the car, you could not use that car at all while I had it.
This is a gross perversion of the term monopoly, as it usually applies to monolithic, stifling state-supported enterprises.
Copyrights and patents are granted by the state, exclusively to particular parties. One needn't be ATT to have a monopoly, and at any rate, the assertion that patents, copyrights, etc. are monopolistic dates back at least over two hundred years (Jefferson was suspicious of permitting them, because they'd create monopolies), and likely even farther back.
Why should they not be rewarded for their investment in research and development? And why should someone who rights software, books, or music not also be rewarded?
Who shall reward them? If you want to reward them, that's fine. But why should I be forced to do so? To compel me to reward them amounts to a gross imposition on my own liberties. Remember the civil society you mentioned? It is fundementally a quid pro quo. People enter into the social contract because they feel they're going to personally benefit more from doing so than they would if they did not.
Thus, while I don't mind necessarily, rewarding authors or inventors, I see no reason to do so unless I benefit more from doing so than I would if I abstained. Certainly the mere assertion that creation 'earns' the ability to curtail my rights is nonsense. Someone could spend millions upon millions of dollars inventing the best buggy-whip in the world, but I won't feel beholden to use it, and a patent with no economic value hurts the inventor just as much, as they still receive no reward or compensation.
Patents, copyrights, marks, and trade secrets all have their place. And I have no problem in respecting them within reason, because it is in my best interests to do so. However, when they become oppressive; that is, more of a burden than a benefit, then they need to be reduced to a more managable level, or abolished outright.
Exclusive rights over something like the text of a particular, source code to a particular program, or a particular performance of a popular song, do not translate into a "monopoly" in the general case: It only forces competitors to produce their own original products, which produces diversity that we as consumers should value anyway.
This is not always true. For example, someone might discover the demonstrably best possible method of doing something. Perhaps the ONLY method of doing something. There will be no substitute of like value. Permitting rights in such a case would harm the public measurably.
At any rate, you're looking at this one-sidedly. Remember, what's going on is fundementally a bargain between creators and the rest of the world (including all the other creators). Prosperity and fairness are fine if both sides get them, but a system that prefers creators is unacceptable to the people being asked to submit to the demands of the creators. Thus, it won't stand. It just isn't worth it.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
First of all, Reason is the one major publication other than a Linux rag or The Nation, that would get it right off the bat. The Reason Foundation does what its conservative counterparts screech about doing, but never get around to: rolling back government involvement in ours lives. They can claim credit to saving Indianapolis taxpayers around $600M because they put together a plan to privatize all non-essential government services.
/.'er in the US should keep bookmarked in case they need it against a cartel shill.
This is very bad news for the content cartels. While many people may not know about Reason, most Libertarians do and a lot of Libertarians who actually sided with the cartels will probably be swayed over against them. My father is frequently amazed (he's a staunch conservative) at how many times he's been forced to agree with a position taken by Reason Online because it just "makes sense" more than anything from the National Review. I've long said that Libertarians and Classical Liberals better represent the conservative platform than Conservatives themselves.
I read this in their print magazine. This is not a turning point against the cartels, but it is certainly a major blow. There are two types of the Right: those that believe individual rights are an essential ingredient to morality and those that believe that individual rights are expendable in order to maintain public "morality." Reason in my experience wins over the former quite easily on most issues because its arguments are realistic and it proposes how we can balance morality and individual rights in its articles related to vice and stuff like that.
One of the things that IIRC I've seen argued in Reason articles on drug prohibition is that stripping drug users of free medical care even if they are veterans would do 10x more to stop drug usage than jail terms. They frame such issues in terms that the Right can appreciate and make it very clear that such programs are nothing more than government subsidizing licensious behavior.
Invariably Reason ends up kicking its conservative competitors' asses on a regular basis. It indirectly exposes them for the statist hypocrites that they are such as ol' Goldberg over at NRO who thinks that those who are complaining of slippery slopes in regard to the PATRIOT Act and DeptHS are whiny paranoid nuts. This is an article that every
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
Not too far above your post, a poster (bninjapenguin, if I remember correctly) reported that he had to leave his job because he refused to sign a "we own you" contract.
Now, what exactly is to stop IBM from taking your ideas before you even have them, and thus making them useless to you? (Except common sense, of course). Nor was that an isolated case. This exact same thing happened to my brother. The boss said that it wasn't his preference -- the banks insisted upon it -- and I actually believe that, because the company is in debt, not up to their ears, but definitely up to their belly button.
So essentially what we are seeing at this point, is if there are going to be IP laws, then there will not be, in reality, any IP, because the IP will all be owned by whomever is the most powerful. Typically, the "most powerful entity" is called the government.
Think about that. These IP laws are taking you closer to being owned, as chattel, by your government, than you've ever been before. It's no different than in "communism", where everybody owning everything means nobody owns anything.
As for your question "what can a little guy do...?", Little guys can always fit in niches that big guys never notice. Sooner or later, of course, bug guys do notice if you do well. At that point, the smart big guys buy you out. You continue to look for more niches.
----
You think this is a sig, but
it isn't. I type this by
hand each time, of course.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Just a question here... if I remember correctly, patents *only* apply to commercial use for sale. They do not apply to making a thing for yourself and using it. Is this correct?
Because if it is, then an obvious defensive position presents itself: the homestead.
You have enough money to set up your own self-sufficient, cash-free homestead, and stick it in a state that is free from land taxes (such as W Va, or California -- whoops, scratch California: that was a joke).
Then you can invent and use what you want and need, to your heart's content. Of course, a self sufficient homestead doesn't run on the power of just one family, so part of this will be that you allow others to live there if the contribute and fit in. But still, all cash free.
Now, this ends up being unprofitable for those who live and help out, but unprofitable does not equate to a loss, when real losses are occuring elsewhere. In other words, if that's the best deal they can get, then they will come.
My train of thought isn't to advocate anything -- but simply to note that if things are really progressing in this direction, it would seem a form of feudalism with petty kings will be next.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
> Now, most copyright and patent infringement advocates don't have a problem with private ownership of material property, even though this is also an artificial construct which takes away their "right" to steal whatever they like and gives whoever acquires ownership of property through lawful market transactions a "monopoly" over its use. So why do they claim that intellectual property is any different? Usually the answer is a hodgepodge of weak analogies, claiming it is similar to such things as oxygen and water, unsubstantiated slogans like information wants to be free", and of course the favorite retort of totalitarian zealots, "its inevitable".
Your analogy is not relevant.
Patent law deprives me of the right to use the fruit of my own labour, if I independently invent something that has already been patented. Given the patent office's tendency to patent obvious ideas, this is a real problem.
If I independently invent something, why should I be prevented from using it just because someone else invented it too?
In concert with this, companies like microsoft use patent law to prevent interoperation. They embed some patent in a protocol, and presto! you can't write an interoperating program without infringing.
Tim Josling
Congress: the best government money can buy.
he finds it works well if he tweaks assumptions about the consumption and production of the intellectual assets, but it falters if he changes time constraints.
Everything works greate as long as there is a delay before people copy you. You just need to make sure the time contraint doesn't get too close to zero. You just need to artificially maintain the lower limit.
Patents and copyrights are an artificial time constraint. They preform a useful function. They give innovators a motivation - an opportunity to profit from innovating. The necessary "monopoly profits" can be captured very quickly. This does not require DECADES, this can be accomplished in MONTHS.
The current durations of copyright and patent protection do not encourage innovation, hey stifle it. Strong protections are fine as long as they are SHORT. Hell, even idiotic software patents and business method patents would be harmless as long as they expired rapidly. No one will bother to file for "defensive" and "frivolous" patents if they expire rapidly.
It would also be easy to immunize yourself against ALL patent and copyright attacks. You just need to prove that you first created/aquired your product a year or two before you actually started delivering it to customers. All copyrights/patents that predate your prototype have expired and your prototype is "prior art" for any that have not expired. It usually takes about that long to go from "prototype" to shipped product anyway.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Somebody defined reality once as that which does not go away when you stop believing in it...
Which is pretty much everything AFAIK...
Discussion about whether reality exists is why nobody pays any attention to philosophers - and justifiably so...
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
- The basic idea of civil society, as articulated
- is this: You give up your "natural rights", that
= is, the right to take by force whatever you have
- the power to take, to the state, and in return,
- you are granted "civil rights"...
I haven't read the "great social philosophers" you refer to, but this is nonsense. It sounds more like propaganda than the reality.
The reality is this: The state says, "You give us everything you have (including your life if we say so) and do exactly what we tell you to do, and we will protect you from the bad people outside and inside our borders - and if there aren't any bad people, we'll make some - by simply telling you they're bad."
This is the historical reality of government - it is a protection racket, pure and simple.
And no one has a "natural right" to steal. First, because there is no such as a "natural right". Second, because coercion as an economic activity is nonproductive for the species as a whole.
The idea of the state being defined as a "monopoly on the use of the coercion" is basically from Ayn Rand, and is refuted by her own acceptance of the Austrian School identification of the fact all monopolies must be basically coercive to exist. The same problem exists for a monopoly on coercion as exists for any monopoly - namely, investment to try to achieve monopoly profit. If coercion is profitable, more and more people will try to invest in it, resulting in competition and the eventual collapse of the monopoly. The only way to maintain a monopoly on coercion is to be imperialistic as well as coercive - basically you have to rule the world, which brings you into conflict with the whole world, which becomes the very unproductive general spread of coercion that you intended to avoid by having a monopoly on coercion.
And if everyone agrees you should have the monopoly on coercion, then why bother? Everyone already agrees not to coerce in that case.
No, the state is a protection racket, and there are absolutely no rational arguments to justify its existence.
You are also misconstruing the nature of monopoly. In a sense, everything is a "monopoly of one". That is irrelevant. A monopoly can only exist if it is enforced by coercion. Otherwise, you have the situation you describe with Coca Cola (which, BTW, I suspect, relies on trade secret IP, and therefore, yes, is a monopoly in that sense.) The reason Coke can sign agreements with bottling plants to produce their product is because they own the trade secret of Coke and anyone who obtains that trade secret will be prevented by the state from producing that product. This is state-supported monopoly, exactly as you describe.
The fact that other companies can produce competing soft drinks merely proves the basic problem with monopolies - there is more than one way to do something and a product which is the result of a "natural monopoly" (i.e., the proprietary Coke formula) can be competed against by some other way of doing the same thing (unless of course it runs afoul of overly broad patents, which is another IP problem). The only way to achieve a true monopoly is via coercion.
IP laws create a monopoly for a given product, not an industry. You are conflating an industry monopoly with a product monopoly. But the same economic effects apply. Some one is granted a monopoly profit and everyone else is prohibited from investing in this profit at the point of a gun (i.e., state law). The result is a distortion of investment, higher prices for goods to everyone else, and as Bodrin and Levine point out, lack of reason of innovate on the part of the monopolist.
Someone was complaining recently about Beethoven having to put out a lot of product to compete with guys down the street, since he didn't have IP laws to protect him. This seems to fly in the face of the notion that a creator is only motivated to produce when he has protection. It is clear that if you are producing to survive, you will produce more, not less, if you have to compete. And without IP, you have to compete more, not just in creation, but in production, marketing, etc. And if you cannot compete, then by definition your product is not as valuable to the rest of the world as those of your competitors.
The notion that IP has some sort of "objective value", and that the producer has to be compensated commensurately, is nonsense. The basis of human economics is subjective value. You value something to the degree that you will give up something you have for it. If you don't actually do that, your actual valuation of that product is much less than your stated valuation. IOW, everybody gets exactly what they deserve...unless of course they can use coercion to get it...
So the idea of IP boils down to some people wanting to get more of your money for their product than you are willing to pay for it, and they are willing to use a gun (IP law) to get it by preventing other people from producing the same or similar product at lower cost.
The supposed positive effect of this behavior as increasing the net amount of useful concepts in the world has never been established, and is probably dwarfed by the many other reasons and methods for producing useful concepts.
The fact of the matter is, most people produce a useful concept, go into business, sell it, make a living, and never have to sue anybody for "infringement". Only those people who suddenly find themselves unable to compete (due to changes in the market and/or changes in technology) suddenly feel a need to invoke "intellectual property".
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!