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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."
Indeed, we need more IP Address protection... er... wait-a-minute...
Wow. They should patent that "not anything new" idea, just like everybody else, nowadays ;-).
--sex
Very popular slashdot journal for adul
GameTab - Game Reviews Database
"A long but interesting article"
;)
Ah, the true readership culture of Slashdot shows itself.
The coolest voice ever.
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,
Boldrin and Levine's original paper is available here (pdf).
IP protection does NOT work, abstinence is the solution.
Be cool, Don't do it!
Now you may hate the entire country of France, but they have a saying, "Der er biler paa striben i aften" which could be transferred to the Simpson quote "Take an existing product and put a clock in it".
Of course innovation requires that you won't get ripped of when you come up with a great idea, but at the same time what good is it if no one can use it. Would the WWW have accelerated so fast if you were to pay license fees for every application using HTML codes? I think not. It's a fine balance that you have to maintain. To little and too much protection is evil.
That Crazypatents site is a gold mine of hilarity.
1 .gif
http://www.crazypatents.com/images/Large/4044405-
Here is something just like that idea actually, but it's implemented in a truly ingenious way. They have an image of a fly in the urinal which looks real and so people will automatically aim for it.
Oh, and I actually came across GameTab the other day. Great site, I've found it very useful. I'm looking forward to Freelancer right now, but think I'm going to wait until the reviews start coming in.
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?
The basic idea of civil society, as articulated by the great enlightenment social contract philosophers, 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", such as the right to your own property, the right to freely enter into contracts, freedom of speech, and so on.
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".
But the most insidious of them all is the recent pronouncement that copyright, and intellectual property laws in general, create "monopolies", and so in fact are in opposition to the principles of free market economics. This is a gross perversion of the term monopoly, as it usually applies to monolithic, stifling state-supported enterprises. You might consider the case of the Coca-Cola corporation: They sell a popular soft drink which you may be familiar with. The secret to its popularity is great taste, and this is because of a time-tested, proprietary formula. In order to produce this beverage, naturally, operators of bottling plants have to enter into agreements with the Coca-Cola corporation, and pay royalties. If one is to follow the analogy favored by piracy advocates, Coca-Cola has "monopoly" on this drink, and it is unfair that only they are allowed to sell it, and it impedes the operation of free markets. But just ask their competitors: This idea is ridiculous. Just because they can't sell beverages made according to the exact Coca-Cola formula doesn't mean that they are prevented from selling soft drinks. It just means that in order to compete, you are forced to innovate yourself, and this results in the diversity that a market economy should provide: Pepsi, RC Cola, Jolt, and many other unique varieties of cola are available, and they are all able to profit because of their distinctive taste and branding. 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?
Of course an individual or corporation ought to have rights to the unique result of their own creative work, and they should also have the right to transfer these rights to anyone they please if it is in their own interest. 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. It isn't like Oxygen or water: Every O2 or H2O molecule is the same, but Microsoft Windows XP is the result of billions of dollars of research and development money invested over 20 years. And maybe it wants to be free, but perhaps so does your car: That doesn't mean that someone who tries to steal if from shouldn't be thrown in jail. We accept these abrogations of "natural law" because the result is more prosperity and more fairness for everybody.
"...it appears that their paper is making waves in economic circles."
I'm extremely happy to hear this. You can't imagine how upset the issue about patents makes me when I keep hearing about more protection, stronger laws, another lawsuit against infringement, another idiotic patent issued, and more power to the large coporations that in reality due some of the least amount of innovation, especially considering their size, power, and wealth. Good to see the issue finally coming out besides just in court suppressing the little guy. I read most of the paper a few days ago, well said, and its good to see such a long article discussing the issue on Reason.com. I must say that the issue scares a lot of people. It is because the elimination of such strong laws giving an individual or corporation ownership of an idea would in effect help bridge the gap between rich and poor. Scary isn't it? The idea would also cause a major shift in economic structure in various industries that have relied on using intellectual property as a means of profit or part of their business. Like on the front of "Programming Perl" says, "There is more than one way to do it." Yes, the current system works, but how well? Does the constant threat of piracy and increase in spending to fight it a sign of an efficient system. I sure don't think so.
Question everything.
It is such a relief to hear this. Intellectual property is not free market, or even a valid form of property. People just take it on faith that just because the government calls something a property, that it is - and has all the advantages of free market property ownership. In fact if you don't believe in it, you are even called socialist. Identifying myself as libertarian, this irks me even more. They just don't get it, IP is not about property at all - it is about controll.
Here
It's actually from march 2002. It's a 30-page academic paper with differential equations and other nice stuff, for the impatient I have reproduced the abstract:
ABSTRACT: We construct a competitive model of innovation and growth under constant returns to scale. Previous models of growth under constant returns cannot model technological innovation. Current models of endogenous innovation rely on the interplay between increasing returns and monopolistic markets. In fact, established wisdom claims monopoly power to be instrumental for innovation and sees the nonrivalrous nature of ideas as a natural conduit to increasing returns. The results here challenge the positive description of previous models and the normative conclusion that monopoly through copyright and patent is socially beneficial.
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
First off, IBM, Microsoft, and Sun are too large precicely because of intellectual property. I saw this happen once when I was working at a fab-facuility. It was bought out, and pretty much shut down, not because it couldn't make a good profit, but because the buyer bought it to corner a strategic market using its patent holdings. Second off, if you and everyone else loose say a million worth of IP, but in return gain access to a trillion worth of IP - then this is not a net loss for anyone. In fact, it would likely create an innovation and business explosion.
This is such a refreshing article which finally attempts to put good economic theory to work rather than the extremes on both sides: artists will dies f starvation, or IP will make it illegal to think.
I particularly found interesting the concept of rent-seeking bahvior,
I sure would like to have seen a deeper exploration of that theory, as I feel that is where the most problems lie with the whole IP issue. Consider for instance the cost of the patent itself. The article does a good job of analyzing the cost of R&D; the initial investment in technology. But it doesn't talk about patents in their own as an object of value. How many IP-hoarding companies exist soley to accumulate patents, and have never made any investment into research or innovation?
The patent has an inherent value separate from that of the technology that it may describe.
I would also like to see more thought about the issue of the interaction of patents with each other. The article seems to concentrate solely on one idea at a time...that each patent or IP instrument exists in isolation of all others. It does not deal with the deadlock of interdependent patents. When company A has a patent on idea X and company B has a patent on idea Y, it becomes an impediment to invent idea Z which is created from both. And in the real world, this deadlocking of ideas is out of control.
And finally, the article does not consider fully the costs imposed by the patent or IP system itself. Especially since patents are written in such a manner as to be maximally ambiguous and stealthy it becomes an extreme economic burden on any inventor to know if the ideas being developed have already been claimed. Thus why we are seeing such strange imbalances; you know, 10 lawyers for every engineer.
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.
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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
Government is not about sacrificing rights for common unity and security, but rather about people having natural law rights who organize to secure those rights. Property rights are a natural law right, copyrights and patents are not. (accept that if you invent something you always have the right to keep it secret, and you have the right to be acknowledged as the first creator because someone else who claimed to would be acting fradulently)
The right to copy things is a natural law right that exists outside of government. It is like freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, and the right to bear arms. These rights exist outside of government, or anywhere in the world even if local governments refuse to acknowledge them. Unlike other property rights that derive from the fact that not every body can use something at the same time. With information and ideas they can - copyrights and patents are an artificial construct that has artificialy harmfull consequences.
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
I had long held the same opinion of the paper, that patents are fundamentally just government sanctioned monopolies. But the theory the article presented made me rethink; there is one huge and important difference between a capitalistic monopoly and these artificial monopolies. With patents it is possible to obtain a monopoly with 0% market share!
Essentially patents allow you to get a monopoly on not producing something. You can't do that in the real market-driven world where monopolies must be gained by capturing near 100% of the market. This is also one of the main differences between copyright and patent: I can't copyright something before I write it, but I sure can patent something without ever having to produce anything.
Patents used legitimately as a means to allow an inventor to safely outlay a large initial economic investment are somewhat defensible, but patents which exist soley to prevent anybody from ever acting upon some idea are just evil. And that's what seems to be happening so much today, especially in the area of software patents.
Oh, really. Allow me to retort: Too bad people don't judge on actual merits than on imagined hobgoblins. The bad reputation of ARI (which I guess you're making some reference to as ReasonOnline is an objectivist magazine, and ARI being the "official" objectivist organization (with a earned bad rep)) needn't spill over to ReasonOnline. Personally I have always found their articles very well written. Capitalism Magazine on the other hand...
Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.
And to quote the article: Much of Arrow's article examines economic means of dealing with uncertainty, none of them completely successful.
So it seems that the granting of monopolies for innovators is also not completely successful. So it goes...
That is all.
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.
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- - 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!
But Reason is a good magazine, and its online version is even better. I find them to be more intellectually honest - by far - than the Cato Institute, they have a good sense of humor, excellent writers, and are generally fair-minded. And I'm not the only person who thinks so; a lot of people who don't subscribe to all of Reason's views still give it props as a source of writing, especially in the last year or so.