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Is IP Property?
An anonymous reader writes "In a recent article, Stanford Law Professor Mark Lemley argues that intellectual property is not 'property' in the traditional sense. According to Lemley, while 'free riding' off of someone else's land or other physical property rights is always undesirable, freely benefitting from someone else's intellectual property rights is often the best way to form a free and creative society. Lemley's distinction also points to the unusual fact that in IP, traditional liberals are often calling for less and less government, while conservatives demand regulation in order to protect their exclusive right to use their intellectual creations."
Lemley's distinction also points to the unusual fact that in IP, traditional liberals are often calling for less and less government, while conservatives demand regulation in order to protect their exclusive right to use their intellectual creations.
I don't think this is all that suprising. Conservatives believe what's good for the corporations is good for everyone. Liberals believe that what is good for the people is good for everyone. Strong IP laws favour the big companies - weak IP laws favour the little guy more.
IP isn't property. It never has and never will be. For example, A granted patent isn't valid if there's prior art. How could you apply that principle to say the ownership of a car? I don't think you can. I can smash, steal, set fire to or urinate on a car - I can't do any of these things with a patent! When patent infringement occurs it isn't even stealing in the traditional sense. When someone steal something wealth is transfered atomically. When infringement occurs wealth can be diverted (and that's a dodgy word) away from the patent holder but it's never a transfer from the patent holder directly to the infringer. It's just not correct to call IP property in the traditional sense of the word.
Simon.
What about liberals like Howard Berman? I think it affects both sides equally, as both sides have people willing to take money for whatever cause.
If you look at where most of the support for IP in the form of DRM, media restrictions etc, it is from the liberals with the senator from Disney leading the charge.
Digital is, by definition, imperfect. Analog is the way to go.
What a lot of people who take this kind of position often don't realize is the fact that treating IP as property, and protecting peoples' rights to those properties, is what provides the motivation for many of people to be so creative and to pour themselves into their work.
I realize this may not be the case with a lot of open source developers and project members, but in the case of corporate America and entrepreneurs, the financial benefits derived from the protection of IP is a huge motivating factor to its creation.
I agree with Mark Lemley that, given the level of IP creation today, total sharing of it would definitely benefit mankind. However, if you remove the financial benefits of its creation, there will (IMHO) be a drastic drop in the creation of what we now consider to be IP.
Again, I realize this motivation doesn't apply to everyone. But it does to me, and many of my heartless capitalistic cohorts.
-- "A chicken is an egg's way of making another egg."
I'm not buying the liberal/conservative bit. Wasn't Clinton's administration responsible for bringing us the DMCA?
Where's my lobbyist? Right here.
That's not really true. There are plenty of Liberals who support Intellectual Property, and plenty of Conservatives who do not.
Use any definitions you like, but the distinction between Left and Right is moot for IP.
Lemley's distinction also points to the unusual fact that in IP, traditional liberals are often calling for less and less government, while conservatives demand regulation in order to protect their exclusive right to use their intellectual creations."
Let's get this correct: True Liberals and true conservitives, both, want less regulation - or alt least, reasonable balances between the public-domain and free enterprise.
It's the self-serving politicians that want more regulation - regardless of their labels.
Remember: it took both a Republican house/senate and a Democrat president to pass DMCA and idea-monopoly extensions (read copyright extensions)
Remember: it was Democrat politicians that were pushing for the v-chip and music labels.
Remember: it was Republican politicians that were being bought by Disney.
Both parties suck.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
The claim is mostly inaccurate because it presupposes that the copying individual would otherwise have bought a copy from the publisher. That is occasionally true, but more often false; and when it is false, the claimed loss does not occur.
The claim is partly misleading because the word "loss" suggests events of a very different nature--events in which something they have is taken away from them. For example, if the bookstore's stock of books were burned, or if the money in the register got torn up, that would really be a "loss." We generally agree it is wrong to do these things to other people. But when your friend avoids the need to buy a copy of a book, the bookstore and the publisher do not lose anything they had. A more fitting description would be that the bookstore and publisher get less income than they might have got. The same consequence can result if your friend decides to play bridge instead of reading a book. In a free market system, no business is entitled to cry "foul" just because a potential customer chooses not to deal with them.
The claim is begging the question because the idea of "loss" is based on the assumption that the publisher "should have" got paid. That is based on the assumption that copyright exists and prohibits individual copying. But that is just the issue at hand: what should copyright cover? If the public decides it can share copies, then the publisher is not entitled to expect to be paid for each copy, and so cannot claim there is a "loss" when it is not. In other words, the "loss" comes from the copyright system; it is not an inherent part of copying. Copying in itself hurts no one.
to me it is more interesting that many law-makers want intellectual property treated as 'real' property for certain purposes, yet not treated as real property for others.
if IP were 'real' property it should be subject to value-based tariff when it enters the country. this might keep things like drug research, materials research, heck, analysing radiograms in the US instead of being exported as labor and imported as... thin air.
I'd be much more agreeable to strict IP laws if my 'real' job were treated with the same 'IP is real property' menality.
MORTAR COMBAT!
You are standing on the shoulders of giants. There is no idea in your head that was not influnced by those who came before. They never got their due, and yet you sit around demanding yours. As it is freely received, it should be freely given.
Most people have half formed ideas anyway. They usually need to be finished by someone else. IP slows this process down, and in turn slows down progress.
They both want government regulation. They just happen to want regulation for different things. To say that one doesn't and the other does, is just plain ignorant. Now as far as liberal vs conservative on IP regulation, that's a tough nut. There will always be people from both sides of the fence that will want some sort of regulation because it's not just the wealthy who come up with some "great ideas". They just happen to be the people that can make the ideas happen and hire lawyers to enforce the "regulation" of said idea.
-Randy
That's why it's called Intellectual Property. Guess what? Both IP and physical properties are only owned (property) because the laws say that they can be. Hence there is really no difference in terms of ownership between IP and physical property other than copying someone's IP (potentially) devalues the IP, but you cannot copy physical property.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
"...in IP, traditional liberals are often calling for less and less government, while conservatives demand regulation in order to protect their exclusive right to use their intellectual creations."
Hollywood must be quite the bastion of conservatism, they way the MPAA is fighting for stronger IP laws. And it is also interesting to hear that the Right has strong conservatives like Fritz Hollings (D-Disney) and Bill Clinton (signer of DMCA and Copyright Extention Act) on their side.
Interesting theory, but no. On this issue, there are good guys and bad guys on both side of the aisle, and which position they take has more to do with who they represent and where they get their funding than how conservative or liberal they are.
There are many artists who barely make enough money from their 'intellectual property' to scratch out a very modest living: freelance writers, most novelists, most musicians. How are they supposed to make a living when you copy and steal their art, their IP? With no income from their art they'll be reduced to working in McJobs and have little time for creative work. Eliminate IP and you will greatly decrease the number of people who can afford to spend their time being creative. On the other hand I care nothing for the rights of evil corporations such as Viacom/CBS, AOL/Time Warner, Disney/Miramax etc.
Yes, they may pescribe 1) the manner in which marriage shall be proved, and 2) the effect of that marriage.
1) Are they going to declare that there's no way to "prove" a marriage in which the state makes publicly available its records - or that they can only "prove" some of the records (despite both same sex marriages and opposite sex marriage data being publicized in the same manner)? That would be a hard sell, especially given equal protection.
2) The effect thereof. Again, quite a hard sell under equal protection, if the state treats both same sex and opposite sex marriages the same.
Note also that congress is not given the right to *forbid* full faith and credit - only the right to determine the details of implementation.
Santa Ana Winds: Like the Dustbowl, but with awards shows.
Although I know /. is almost violently anti-capitalist and anti-corporate to a fault, it needs to be said: IP laws have their place and can be beneficial to society so long as they are not abused. I will illustrate this point with a bit of example and a dash of history, and unless you're a frothing zealot, it would behoove you to read on before knee-jerking that "mod down" option.
/. would like it that way, but reality has a tendency to intrude on such Utopian Worker's Paradises.
IP laws exist so that researchers and developers of new things can do their researching and developing with a reasonable expectation of being reimbursed for their time and efforts. Sure, the system gets abused, but that's more due to the overly-legalistic culture of the U.S. and the woefully-outdated patent system in this country, not because IP laws are a faulty concept.
Let us assume I am a multinational drug company researching a cure for cancer. I employ hundreds of researchers and doctors along with their thousands of assistants, accountants, network administrators, and janitors needed to support them. This headcount is not free; these people expect to be paid, and pay them I must if I want them to work on the cancer cure.
Now let us assume I (being the head of the company) spent $20 billion over five years researching this cancer cure and finally succeeded. I'm now $20 billion in the hole and have to find a way to recoup my costs. Society now has two options:
1. I can use IP law to protect my research and my creation, selling the cure and recouping my investment with the profits. Or...
2. With no IP laws, a competing firm can immediately copy my cure and, having not spent a dime on R&D, can vastly undercut my price and prevent me from ever making back my $20 billion investment.
In scenario 1, the world gets a cancer cure, I make back my investment and modest profict, and my company goes on to develop the Next Big Thing.
In scenario 2, the world would never get a cancer cure. Why? Because no company is going to spend $20 billion developing anything if it can't be assured of making that money back!. Any research project or invention requiring any significant amount of investment in order to bring to fruition simply won't be done. Why should it? After all, you do all the hard work, someone else makes all the money, you get nothing. I'm sure the socialists, communists, and anarchist who make up a significant fraction of
Now, I'll be the first one to admit that IP laws have been taken to unhealthy extremes. Instead of being used to protect companies that take risks on long-term research projects, it's being used to lock-up potential avenues of research and squelch competition. What's needed here is tort reform, not a dissolution of IP laws.
A few centuries ago, around 1791 to be exact, France tried a little plan of abolishing patent laws. All the "people" thought it was such a great idea. After all, all these nasty, evil, wicked companies were just making beaucoup bucks off the backs of the noble, kind, honorable, downtrodden working classes. "Why work to feed a bunch of fatcats?" they thought. So, out went the laws, and in came Utopia.
Only it didn't work. Companies ceased to innovate in France. Instead, they left France and went elsewhere. Unemployment skyrocketed, invention stagnated. The poor got poorer than ever. The middle class evaporated. The upper class pulled up stakes and went elsewhere. After a bit of this, the laws were changed back to something more intelligent, and things recovered, but for a while the "workers" got a real taste of what they'd wrought, and it wasn't pretty.
The moral of the story here is IP laws are necessary, and anyone claiming otherwise is living in a fool's fantasy. You can despise the company you work for, you can despise other companies because of their patents and ridiculously-complex and overreaching copyright statues, but
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Fixating on the word "property" is a mistake, taking this discussion in the wrong direction.
Invariably, someone asserts that IP is equivalent to "ideas" and that it is wrong/unethical/immoral to claim ownership of ideas.
I assert that entire line of argument is pointless. By its nature, an idea cannot be owned. An idea exists only as a thought confined to someone's brain.
However, works of intellect are not ideas. They are physical entities that use symbols to express and convey the information, the story, that the work's creator is trying to convey to others. Yes, those symbols express an author's ideas, but they are not ideas. The ideas remain in the mind of the author and, perhaps, in the minds of his audience.
So, therefore, if I write a book, the file or manuscript that is the single existing copy of that book belongs to me. Society may or may not benefit from exposure to that book, but society has no rights of access to it unless I, as its owner, transfer those rights.
The same applies, of course, to any such work -- music, sculpture, painting, etc. At some point, each work exists as some sort of a single physical entity that is owned, exclusively, by the person who made it. All rights to that object are vested in that person. No one else can legitimately access that work unless its owner transfers the necessary rights to them.
None of this has anything to do with ideas or access to ideas. To cite an extreme hypothetical example, if I conjure a formula for immortality and write it down on a piece of paper, I can do whatever I wish with that piece of paper. I can make millions of copies and drop them for airplanes, post it to Slashdot, or burn it and never tell anyone.
The counter to this argument requires explaining how rights to an object can move from that object's creator to someone else without that creator's sanction. (Such rights cannot move to "society", which is only a useful linguistic construct. They must move to one or more specific individuals.)
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
The problem is, they were into the whole "IP is property" scam since day one (go read Atlas Shrugged for an early example). It used to figure more prominantly in their platform than it does at present, but it was one of the main reasons for my disenchantment with them (toning it down is good, repudiating it would be better).
The path they seem to be following (slowly) is the realization that "IP" is actually a government created monopoly, which they would on priciple oppose, rather than a natural property right, which they would on principle support.
-- MarkusQ
"freely benefitting from someone else's intellectual property rights is often the best way to form a free and creative society."
Yes, I'm sure given the billions of dollars required to develop prescription drugs, and the relative ease required to copy these drugs to produce generic equivalents, in a world without IP, there will certainly be a huge influx of money to develop prescription drug ideas that will immediately be stolen. Hell, regulating prescription drug prices in Canada and Europe has alone caused a lot of investmnet in prescription drug development.
If you didn't notice I was being sarcastic.
Vote for Pedro
It isn't absolute. Absolute property is defined by being physical property, unique and in your possession. No one can deny the existence of that property, although they may deny your continued ownership of it (communists, thieves).
Intellectual property is artificial. It doesn't exist in the real world. It exists only because we allow it to exist, and (currently, at least) grant it the status of absolute property, supposedly for a certain limited period of time. Under the Constitution, the ONLY reason for the existence of artificial property is "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". Nowhere in the Constitution does it mention that copyright is to be used as an absolute guarrantee of profit, nor does it say anywhere that anyone has a right to profit. Profit doesn't enter the equation, except indirectly, by allowing an inventor or creator time to ATTEMPT to make a profit, if he or she so desires.
All arguments concerning copyright and the 'right' to profit are pure bullshit. The Constitution never mentions a right to profit, or the right to make a profit from copyrighted materials. That right doesn't exist. Many people here and elsewhere seem to (deliberately) be confusing copyright with a right to profit that does not, and never has, existed. That includes profit which is dressed up in the doublespeak known as 'lost sales'.
The sole purpose of copyright is to spur development by allowing an inventor or creator a LIMITED AMOUNT OF TIME to get the jump on potential competitors. Current copyright laws, while they may fulfill the technical definition of 'limited', are ridiculously long. The copyright has been extended several times to keep works of art which belong to certain powerful corporations out of the public domain, and for no other reason. This directly contradicts the purpose of copyright as defined by the Constitution, even if it doesn't violate the letter of the law. But it seems that the purpose of a law means little these days, and it's only the actual wording that counts in court.
It's rather clear that extending copyright to an absurd extreme does nothing whatsoever for the public welfare, and is designed solely to protect the profits of a few vested interests with the ability to buy Congressmen through bribes (colloquially known as 'campaign contributions' or 'a weekend in Tahiti with a teenage hooker'). But it's gone even farther than this, in that copyright laws are being used to prop up outdated business models in the face of advancing technology, an attempt to put a halt to that technology altogether. Copyright laws are being used as a weapon AGAINST innovation in a vicious, winner-take-all fashion. If the RIAA, MPAA, Disney et. al. have their way a number of new technologies would be banned from the United States altogether.
That's what the most serious issue is. It isn't about a 'right' to profit, which doesn't exist, and it isn't about the 'rights' of authors or musicians or movie makers, who only have the rights we feel like granting them when it comes to artificial property (re the Constitution). The biggest issue is that current vested interests are using whatever weapons they have at their disposal (or 'encouraging' Congress to create new ones) to slow down or put a complete halt to a variety of new technologies. They are, in fact, doing their very best to cripple innovation and impose a form of stasis over the entire American economy (with the help of a whole lot of other businesses who are doing the same thing by abusing the patent system) so that they'll remain at the top of heap, forever, secure that the government will destroy their competition for them.
Whether or not you happen to agree with free market principles (I'm a libertarian, so you can guess my take on this whole sorry business), the only logical outcome of this tangled mess is that America will no longer be a leader in technologica
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
IP should only belong to its creator and/or inventor. When the lone geek invents something and accidently dies, corporations might store his stuff on DVD and make insane absurd profits out of a dead man/woman's IP. Certain corporations go as far to lament the complete branch of expertise with a dead persons work. For a society its unacceptable.
So when the creator/inventor dies , his works and IP should go into the public library, except if his will describes otherwise.
If the corporation created the IP by themselves, the corporation owns the IP and is valid as long as the corporation lives. If the corporation is taken over, a special ruling board should decide if the merger of take-over does not mean IP is being destroyed , intentionally or unintentionally.
Bottom line for me : IP should never be allowed to die or get jailed into someone's office drawer.
Robert
I won't disagree with you that Clinton really disappoints when it came to his inability to see those laws for what they were and block them. I don't know if there would have been any point to vetoing these bills however, when they mostly passed uncontested at the time. The real problem was that nobody seemed to stop and think twice about what the legislation actually said and what the real consequences were. I attribute this partially to the poor funding of organizations like the EFF, which we should all be giving money to every year to pay for lobbyists to get in front of our legislators with these issues.
Sometimes I wish Hollywood would just stay the hell away from the Democratic party. I really don't think they do any good for the Democrats other than providing funds to the party, and their cozy relationship seems to get Democrats to look the other way when this kind of nasty, thoroughly unliberal legislation gets pushed through.
Lemley makes the grand mistake (made so often by people arguing for an "IP-free state") of making this statement:
In a market econonomy, we care only that producers make enough return to cover their costs, including a reasonable profit . . . . so long as the price stays above marginal cost producers will still make the good."
This is true for a mature product. But we're talking about invention, which implies innovation, which implies risk.
Lemley uses the example of a copy of "Hamlet". If the actual production cost of the book is $5.00, how much should a producer be allowed to make? What is a fair profit? 20%?
Now, say that the product isn't a book. Let's say it's a pill for cancer patients. The pill costs $0.30 to produce (that is the "marginal cost"). Still think 20% is okay?
Lemley would ignore the fact that this company spent billions of dollars on the research that led to the cure, in addition to billions of dolloars on ongoing research that never leads to a cure. How do they afford this? They have shareholders who are willing to take a risk: let's spend billions of dollars, and maybe we can get a return on our investment. Lemley says that "rent ['unfair' profit] seeking behavior" is "socially wasteful." Nothing could be further from the truth. Rent-seeking behaviour is the essence of entrepreneurship, and it is the very behavior we should encourage.
The bigger the risk, the bigger the reward that is required to make entrepreneurs take that risk. Any academic who uses the rhetoric of "covering costs, plus a fair profit" should be summarily ignored. Entrepreneurs do not take giant risks and invest in the creation of world-changing technology for "a fair profit."
The stuff you create, whether physical or intellectual, should be yours, and you should be able to do what you want with it, at least for some period of time. If it is in your interest to release your property under the GPL (as it most certainly is for some companies and their software assets), you should be able to do it. If you want to be the Grinch and stuff it under your mattress, you should be able to do that, too. For the good of the world and everyone in it, entrepreneurs should be allowed and encouraged to seek profit. And "zero-sum", "profit is wasteful", "you-should-only-have-'fair'-profit" academics like Lemley should be dismissed.
"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself, but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it.
He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breath, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.
Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property."
Makes sense to me!
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Since the concept of private property has for the most part been eliminated from American life.
Think about it, ever since the advent of "property taxes", you have no real property rights, all you really do is lease from the gov.
Don't believe me? Try not paying your property taxes and watch what happens. Do you get compensation from the gov after they sieze your "property"? No, and according to the concept of property and the Constitution, you should. That is the end of the idea that you actually own something here in the USA.
Later...
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
Ture, that a "loss" from copying by someone that would have never paid a penny for the item is only a virtual loss, and not a real one, in terms of money.
But one of the concepts of property, is the right to do with it as you want -- the right of "control" - which is irrelevant to money.
Is trespassing across a vacant lot really a "loss" to the property owner? I live in a state where I (the property owner) own the beach to the waterline of the Atlantic Ocean. Is someone sitting on the sand above the waterline "harming" me? Do I suffer a "loss?"
The answer is yes. See Dolan v. City of Tigard, 512 U. S. 374, 384 (1994) ("[T]he right to exclude others" is " `one of the most essential sticks in the bundle of rights that are commonly characterized as property' ") (quoting Kaiser Aetna v. United States, 444 U. S. 164, 176 (1979)
Infringing the right of a property owner to exclude others (this that do not pay for the right to use the property) is indeed a loss.
The difference in IP and other property is that IP rights (copyright and patent) have limited terms, recognizing the need to reward creative efforts with LIMITED exclusivity voer the invention but balancing with the benefit to society by that right not being perpetual.
The question is thus one of what is the proper time frame. That answer may change witht he type of right protected, the type of use, etc. Those are subjective judgments, but don't affect the premise that IP rights, regardless of whether the property involved is tangible or not, are important rights, not for just economic reasons.
Would you rather see J.K. Rowling making billions of dollars off the Harry Potter books, or would you rather see her still trying to make ends meet as a substitute teacher while single-handedly raising her daughter, and only writing in what little spare time she has because "IP wants to be freex0r!" Same goes for Mike Mignola, Neal Stephenson, or whatever other successful author you want to blow. Unlike the current problems with patent law, IP law IS still working, and encouraging people to believe they can make a living as an author/artist/whatever because there are laws protecting their creations.
A: No.
That's the short answer. The long answer is that while many people would like you to believe in "intellectual property", it has no support in nature or law. Copyrights, trademarks and patents are very different things, and are only in existence because we as a society (of the people), through the government (by the people), have decided that it is beneficial to society (for the people) to encourage people to create by giving them financial incentive to do so. There is no such thing as "intellectual property". There is copyright, patent and trademarks. Lumping them all together is not only foolhardy, but short sighted and misleading.
See the Disinfopedia article and the Wikipedia article for more details.
Nathan's blog
What the DMCA really did was grant copyright holders a new right that they had never had before. Before the DMCA, a copyright holder could not tell you what you could do with a copyrighted work once you'd bought a copy, so long as you didn't make more copies and distribute them. But you could read the work, set fire to it, wallpaper your bedroom with it, or wipe your ass with it. And you didn't need the copyright holder's permission to do any of these things. In fact, before the DMCA, it was entirely legal to buy a DVD, break the encryption, transcode it into a DivX file, and store it on your private file server so that you could watch it on your computer without needing the disc.
The DMCA made it illegal to break the encryption, even if you legally bought a copy, without explicit permission from the copyright holder. Combined with encryption methods that were themselves protected by IP law (like CSS, on DVDs), and suddenly the copyright holder can legally control how you can use their work in the privacy of your own home. You can decrypt the DVD by using a player that is either licensed by the CCA -- thus limiting what you can do with the DVD, since the CCA only licenses players that have a restricted set of functions -- or by using a player which is not licensed by the CCA (and allows you to do whatever you want with the DVD) -- but doing so violates the DMCA.
So now, even though the right is not explicitly spelled out in law, copyright holders can legally control what you can do with the work in the privacy of your own home. This is a right they do not need and should not have, and thus the DMCA should be repealed.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Let's face it - patent and copyright laws are utilitarian. Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8 of the US Constitution grants Congress the power to promote science and the useful arts (that's copyright and patent, respectively) by providing authors and inventors exclusive rights to their writings and discoveries. Therefore, once the advancement of science and the useful arts is hobbled by copyright and patent laws, we've gone too far.
Hi, and thanks for googling....
The Statute of Monopolies modified the power of the crown to establish monopolies--limiting it, ostensibly, to granting monopolies for devices. Like a lot of English law, there was a gulf between word and deed--the crown kept right on issuing monopolies (the Hudson Bay Company springs to mind, and I expect that the East India Company had not been chartered yet). And inventors were not given property rights to their inventions--they could petition the crown for a monopoly, but there was nothing that said they'd get one.
And, in fact, few did. It was not until the development of "modern" patent law, in the 1740s and 1750s, that the rules changed.
Read Longitude--there's an excellent discussion of the situation there.
Actually, I think it's something like 17th biggest in terms of GDP. I brought that up because you originally stated that it was the biggest. And I agree that it's irresponsible to reduce taxes without reducing spending. As I alluded earlier, I'm against a lot of the recent spending increases. But I wouldn't say it's meaningless.
You give one analysis of foreign policy, but I see it a bit differently. Getting rid of regimes like Sadam or the Taliban does help protect the homeland. Your logic would have also kept us out of Europe during the Cold War, since why would we want to keep other people's freedom from a tyrant. I'd rather take the fight to our enemies than let them choose the place and time of battle, like we did until 9/11.
Yeah, his record on trade is very mixed. I think he should have used some vetos and not gone along with all the spending proposals. I'm not sure where the 'sanctity of the constitution' part comes in here (unless we're arguing over the definition of national security?). I can't quite see how the 'endless war on terrorism' plays here either, unless you're proposing to elect someone willing to surrender. Should we have never occupied Germany or Japan? If we don't take the fight to the terrorists and their allies, how would you propose to fight them?JOIN US FOR PONG!
By the way, Australia isn't a republic. They have a parlimentary government. Their experiences with IRV don't make good analogies with a republic style of government
Being a republic or not has absolutely zero influence as to how democratic processes work. In fact, the phrase "republic style of government" is an oxymoron. The only reason Australia isn't a republic is that their nominal head-of-state is a (foreign) Queen.
China is a republic, and they're still stuck in a one-party system... I seem to remember a place called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, too... what was it like?