What's the Solution To Intellectual Property?

StealthyRoid writes "I'm an anarcho-capitalist, and a huge supporter of property rights, both physical and intellectual. At the same time, I find the current trend of increasing penalties for minor violations, criminalizing civil IP matters, anti-consumer technologies like DRM, and abuse of the legal system by the *AA's of the world really disturbing. You'd think that by now, there'd be a reasonable solution to the problem of protecting intellectual property while at the same time maintaining the rights of consumers and protecting individuals from absurd litigation, but I have yet to find one. So, I pose these questions to the Slashdot community: 1 — Do you acknowledge the legitimacy of intellectual property to begin with? That is, do you believe that intellectual property is a valid construct equivalent to physical property, or do you think it's illusory? If not, why? 2 — If so, how would you go about protecting the rights of intellectual property holders in a way that doesn't require unfair usage limitations or resort to predatory abuse of the tort system?"

Comments

Everyone needs to read Boldrin & Levine

[sweet_petunias_full_]

To save you 300 pages of reading "Against Intellectual Monopoly," basically patents don't spur innovation, not even the ones on concrete inventions. Case after case is presented where it is clear that the idea of spurring innovation through patents is flawed at best, and highly damaging at worst. They basically prove that steam engine development was slowed down by patents and only really began to chug when the patents expired. Inventors you thought were heroes finally come across in a more realistic light. They present lots of examples like this and you just basically see the light (at the end of the tunnel?). Now, if your goal was to slow down technological progress or science itself, then maybe patents would be a good idea.

Before reading some chapters from Boldrin & Levine I was somewhat convinced that copyright at least had some beneficial elements to it that should be respected and preserved, but they sure put the nail in that coffin too. They went through the origins of copyright as a *relaxation* to a censorship regime by the crown (IIRC), and it just went downhill from there. Now it just seems like copyright is extended to every damn little thing, and that wasn't the original purpose of it by far. While they don't prove that removing copyright would be beneficial to everyone, they take a shot at showing that it wouldn't be a total disaster to authors/artists. For everyone else, it wouldn't prevent new books from being written, new music from being produced, etc., and it would be a net gainer, by far.

If you have the time to read a 300 page book this summer, by all means at least read a few chapters of Boldrin & Levine. You will understand intellectual property much better and hopefully lose a few sacred cows in the process.

You can select what you may want to read from this landing page:
http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/againstfinal.htm

Re:Everyone needs to read Boldrin & Levine

[sweet_petunias_full_]

I haven't finished reading it, but I can cite a few things.

First of all, 20 of the 46 top selling drugs had no need for patents. These are things that doctors still prescribe or use like aspirin, insulin, penicillin, quinine, morphine, vaccines, vitamins, etc.

It claims 54% of new drug applications use active ingredients already in the market, the "innovation" being merely in dosage amounts or other incidentals.

The book says that 75% of drug R&D costs are for development of me-too drugs. The way I would explain this is this: a lot of otherwise unnecessary patents are filed on slightly modified drugs based on a successful earlier design. The new drugs are heavily promoted to doctors so that it can earn the company royalties while the old, perfectly good drug is ignored by the big name pharmas. Drugs are not developed as things that the whole society needs, but rather on the basis of marketability.

The book argues that clinical trials for new drugs could (and should) be paid completely by NIH grants, and this would remove the conflict of interest of having the drug company doing its own testing. Doing so would eliminate any need for drug patents to exist, because this is the cost that the companies are citing they would need to recover (the marketing cost being optional and really up to them to decide). The legal costs of fighting patents would of course also go away (too bad for the lawyers).

So yes, surprisingly they would still be invented. Then there's the question about whether the generics makers would take all of the profits. Think for a moment about how patents are filed, describing the drug in detail. Without patents, the first drug company to produce a successful drug would have a very large lead over the other companies. The others, once they see the drug is selling well would basically try to reverse engineer it, but in order to produce the drug in significant quantities they would have to retool their factories and that takes time. If typically takes the generics manufacturers about 4 years to get up to speed, and that's about half of the length of a drug patent period anyway. Overall, that means drug companies can still recover their costs, save hugely on legal costs and still make a tidy profit.

The upshot is that after 4 years any given drug of any importance would be very, very cheap everywhere and thus widely accessible by all economic strata.

Physical property and I"P" are INCOMPATIBLE.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm an anarcho-capitalist, and a huge supporter of property rights, both physical and intellectual. Then you're misguided at best.

Physical property and intellectual "property" rights are incompatible. You simply can't successfully have both - the one necessarily undermines the other, as Stephan Kinsella laid out. See http://www.stephankinsella.com/ip/, particularly "Against Intellectual Property" [PDF].

Since the choice is ultimately between physical property rights and intellectual "property" rights (and of course I already think the latter are rather suspect for a number of other reasons) I simply choose physical property rights.

When people say "but I'P' is valuable!" I say - of course it is, each EU or US patent granted steals value from literally hundreds of millions of people's physical property rights. A patent lets you usurp the value of everyone's physical property - A patent, by definition, says "you can no longer make your physical property into this particular form without my permission".

An I"P" system is death of a thousand cuts to the physical property system. "Anarcho-capitalists" who think they can support both should get a clue.

Back to the constitution.

[jcr]

The purpose of patents is to get inventors to disclose their inventions in exchange for a temporary monopoly. It's a deal between the inventor and everybody else: tell us how you did it, and we won't compete with you for a set amount of time. The alternative is that the inventor attempts to keep it a secret, and the idea dies with him.

-jcr

Re:Time Limits

[Anonymous Coward]

In the US maintenance fees are due according to the following Schedule:

Time after grant Non-small entity/Small entity

3.5 years $930.00/$465.00
7.5 years $2,360.00/$1,180.00
11.5 years $3,910.00/$1,955.00

There is a six month grace period to pay for which a surcharge of $130/65 is charged. There are no other requirements to keep a patent in force (well, other than having the patent held invalid or unenforceable by a court)

In many countries outside the US fees are charged annually, although I'm not familiar with the various amounts.

Re: Artificial scarcity

[gaspyy]

You mix copyrights and patents.
Neither of these concepts is inherently bad or evil.

I am a semi-pro photographer (meaning that I earn some good money from doing commercial photography) but it's a side-job. I like being in control of my work, meaning that if you want to use a photo I made, you should ask for permission - after all I had to invest in equipment and it took considerable amount of time to create that photo; if you want to use that photo in a magazine or for advertising, you better pay up. Without that protection, I may not be doing this. If anyone could copy my work with no consequences, photography would remain strictly hobby for me.

In other cases, IMO sometimes photographers abuse their position. For example, some wedding photographers would take photos at weddings for the customer, but retain the copyrights, so the client goes to the photographer each time they want a new set. A "work for hire" style of agreement would work better - the client pays a fee and then the photos (slides, RAWs, whatever) is their.

In the same vein, if I'm a publishing house and decide to print Harry Potter, it's perfectly fine for the author to be compensated. Same goes for Mickey Mouse. Things get muddy when we start talking about derivative works. If I want to write a book about the Adventures of Young Gandalf, should I pay up?

Patents are a whole different matter. Scrapping them completely wouldn't really work, but limiting the time to 2 years, requiring a working prototype, banning patents on concepts (algorithms, practices) would do wonders.

Re:no more artificial scarcity

[iive]

Now at the same time, Monsanto does not get to fly those seeds over random farms and drop them and then sue those farmers, thats bad business,.... Surprisingly enough, but they do. Here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percy_Schmeiser is the story of a farmer who got his crops contaminated with Monsanto's GMO genes (cross breed from neighbor's crop) and Monsanto went ahead and sued him for patent infringement. And they won.
(Watch documentary "The Future of the Food" for more details)

The biggest problem here is how to revert to non-contaminated crops and how to prevent future contamination (aka stop the wind from blowing).