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Economic Gridlock – the Invisible Cost of IP Law
smellsofbikes writes "This week's New Yorker magazine has a financial article, 'The Permission Problem,' discussing the hidden cost of patent, trademark and copyright laws. It's a subject anyone here already knows well, but he brings up two interesting points: 1) He uses the term 'tragedy of the anticommons.' Instead of depletion of a shared resource, this describes under-use of hoarded resources: areas that can't be explored because they're encumbered by patent/copyright issues. As he points out, the result of this is an invisible loss: drugs not made, software not written. The loss is impossible to quantify and difficult to see. I like the term 'tragedy of the anticommons' because it encapsulates a long-winded explanation into a pithy, memorable phrase that will stick with people unfamiliar with the topic. 2) He also cites a study by Ben Depoorter and Sven Vanneste that discusses why anticommons effects are seen, beyond mere competition. Individual right holders value their contribution to the overall project as a significant fraction of the project value, so if there are more than three or four right holders, their perceived value can far exceed the total value of the project, making it uneconomical."
I've been anti-copyright for years, testing the water in a large variety of industries to see how getting rid of copyright can actually aid artists. I've now discovered that in every market I've tested, holding on to copyright creates less profit for the artist.
In music, I helped 3 bands (one who is now on an international tour, has had MTV coverage, and sells out a lot of shows) move away from copyright. Tell your fans to bootleg your album, and amazing stuff materializes. It's free promotion, and the tour is where you make your money. Let the fans design their own shirts, and you're getting your own artists for nothing. The plumber makes his money doing repeat work, the musician does the same. The plumber goes to school, and learns new skills all the time; the musician does the same when they compose music.
I moved on to photography and discovered that giving away your photography (say, as free stock imagery) is the best form of marketing your ability as a photographer. I now know at least 3 photographers who openly give their images away online, and have seen their hired work double or even triple. Again, marketing is free if you give it away.
As a writer myself, I repudiate copyright on all I do. I openly ask others to reprint my writings, and even stick their own names on it if they want. Because I write about niche markets, the aid of distribution of my thoughts means more people are attracted to those ideas, which means they'll likely eventually find me. That's a huge benefit for me as I can then sell future newbies to the market on my newsletters, or even hire myself out as a ghost writer or personal writer. My income has surged because I don't copyright my writings, or even ask others to attribute me during the redistribution process.
Copyright doesn't inhibit a market in any way, it inhibits the artist who thinks they can retain creative control and distributive control of prior labor. That's over -- if you didn't charge for the labor, it's now a marketing tool. If you did charge for the labor, you've profited. If you market your abilities correctly, you'll get hired for the work in the future.
I do understand the "need" to patent medicines, but I truly believe even that is useless. Research and development for medicines does not need to be publicly funded or protected by patents. Instead, research can continue the way it always has: fund raisers, private charitable donations, and other ways to get the money needed to develop new medicines. What is the biggest reason medicine costs hundreds of millions to develop? The FDA and other organizations which restrict the market due to government intervention. No different from why copyright is a failure and harms the copyrighter more than it helps them.
YouTube cartoonists will trump Disney eventually. Online music distribution has already destroyed the record stores. Free PDF newsletters, blogs and other web products are killing the newspaper industry and periodical industry. Free product = marketing yourself for being hired to do new work. It's a good thing.
"WKRP in Cincinnati" was a mildly popular TV show in the late 70s/early 80s. It was one of my favorite shows and I waited anxioously for it to be released on DVD. Delays delays delays until finally, last year it was released. Unfortunately it was butchered. You see popular (for its time) music played an integral part of the background of the show and quite often character dialog was over music. Unfortunately, when the time came to release the DVD, music rights could not be secured and they had to re-dub the audio of major major parts of most of the show with different (not the original) actors. If you, like I do, remember the show vividly, these re-dubs jolt the senses and make the DVD basically unwatchable.
TDz.
How so, I thought it's been blindingly obvious for many years.
Patents, once the means to help an inventor have a little time to make their money back, have become an economic weapon. That was never going to end well.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
I've seen a situation where a few major manufacturers dominate a field (which i wont name) but all have cross-licensing agreements with each other.
It'd be like Ford holding patents on wheels, doors and windows but GM holding streering wheels and brakes. Then they agree to cross license all their patent portfolios.
This effectively makes it nearly impossible for a newcomer to break into the field. They don't have the resources to challenge fords "wheels" patent, and all the people who are resourced to have that thrown out - aren't motivated to because they have a licensing agreement.
Discussing patents and copyrights can quickly become an exercise in futility when people have an almost religious fervor about their rights. While some would say that copying ideas is natural human behavior, which IP laws artificially restrict to a degree in the name of public good, others would argue that IP is an inherent human right which IP laws simply recognize. These two positions are fundamentally opposed.
But even IP fundamentalist can be convinced that fully exercising one's own rights is not always in one's own best interest. For example, suppose we believed that each of us had the innate right to rule the world and everything in it. That right would work fine if humans could live far enough apart so as never to have any contact with each other. We could live under the illusion of total dominion (at least until we wanted to reproduce). But stubbornly defending that right in practice would be a huge obstacle to forming any kind of functioning society.
Modern IP laws and their vocal proponents have gone a long way toward convincing the public that IP rights are indeed inherent and sacred, not merely privileges granted by lawmakers "for limited times," but a fundamental requirement of civilization. In discussions about limiting copyrights or patent rights, IP fundamentalists invoke images of a backward, anarchic world without modern conveniences, medicines, literature or basic services. It's a false dichotomy, but one that has been painted all too vividly on the public's mind.
I've always found that real-world examples are a good way to point out the flaws in absolutist arguments. The example of the aircraft patent pool illustrates how IP cooperation can be beneficial even when it has to be forced. But there are readers out there who will argue that even that specific example was a bad idea. Some people feel threatened by any notion that something they consider theirs might be taken away from them. They seem to feel that losing everything is at stake whenever they give up anything, and that totalitarianism is always just around the corner. I don't know how to communicate with those people.
I make singleplayer PC games. Can you explain to me how abandoning copyright makes me better off?
I hear these claims a lot. They generally come from people who aren't the ones risking their livelihood on an unproven business model.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
share stuff you made all you want. Nobody cares. Its when you share stuff other people worked hard to create, that we have a problem.
Most people see that as blindingly obvious.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
Drugs are a special case; much of why the patent system is such a mess is that the same rules are applied to drugs and software, while the economics behind the two fields are so different.
Getting back to making an effort at explaining the parent's (grandparent's?) comments -- without indicating any agreement with the same:
Sure, the GPL depends on copyright... so what? Folks can't make derivative works combining GPLed works with proprietary software (or software under permissive but incompatible licenses, which there are a lot of) -- and such proposed derivative works really are "software not written". (What do I mean by "proprietary" in a proposed world without copyright? Source code is a trade secret, object code is obscured). There've been plenty of fan-based projects trying to resurrect classic games by writing modern engines for them shut down because the original copyright holder -- while not selling the original game -- refuses to allow creation of the involved derivative work... and there are plenty of cases where Free Software avoids implementing functionality which is known to be patented; look at how the development of Tux3 was held up.
The argument that there are works not created due to restrictions via intellectual property laws is quite sound. That said, I tend to give credence to the position that intellectual property protection is necessary for much (not all) commercial development to take place as well... but that level of protection doesn't need to be anything like what it is today. Personally, I'd like to see copyright durations rolled back to their original values, and patents only available in fields where they make sense (not business models, not software)... but the latter seems unlikely, and the former flat-out impossible.
I'd prefer not to stoop to their level, but you don't win against a bully by fighting fair.
On the contrary, usually that is exactly how you beat a bully. Most bullies win precisely because the people they are bullying consider themselves constrained in ways the bullies do not. Release those constraints to put the participants on an equal footing, and most bullies lose very quickly.
This applies almost universally, whether you're talking about the kid who gets beaten up at school because the teachers always tell him not to fight back, or the RIAA cases against song swappers where one side has to pay silly legal fees just to get their day in court while the other side pays no legal fees if it gets settled out of court.
However, you're right that the results of the "loss calculations" for works never produced because of copyright would be just as valid as the RIAA's, which is to say not at all.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
There is a saying - for any problem there is a quick, easy and obvious answer that is wrong. You have clearly found that answer here.
There are MANY companies that conduct research only that have no interest whatsoever in being in the business of making any thing. Most of the research conducted in biotechnology is performed in such companies. And the individual inventor? You have just wiped him out completely. There is NOTHING wrong with a company or individual focusing on inventing things, and then using the licensing of those inventions to support itself.
And of course what of universities? Your idea makes it very difficult for any university to obtain a patent.
And copyrights? To begin with the TFA is making a serious error incorporating copyrights into this discussion. It shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what a copyright is, so much so as to completely discredit the author. With your application of copyright law you have wiped out freelance photographers, artists, individuals writing books with hopes of being discovered, and millions of other individual content creators.
Copyrights owned by defunct companies are something of an inconvenience, but it is not a really large one thanks to the existence of fair use, right of first sale, libraries, etc.
The reason golden rice fails is simple - it does not deliver a high enough amount of vitamin A. It takes 300 gm of golden rice to deliver the dietary requirement of vitamin A to a child. Most target children eat less than one half that amount of rice. Then there is the question of bioavailability. For it to be useful their needs to be a certain level of body fat present, something that is often lacking in the target population.
Ultimately there are a lot of OTHER micronutrients missing too. Golden rice doesn't do anything for these. Poverty and overpopulation are the real issues. GE rice isn't going to fix these.
The basic issue in IP discussions always seems to boil down to whether IP rights are granted with society's consent, or are inherent properties of being human.
What bothers me is that we continue to have this debate in the United States, when the U.S. Constitution is crystal clear on the subject. Where we keep getting tripped up is on the "limited times" part - it's ridiculous that it's been construed to mean "a period of time far in excess of the average person's lifetime".
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
Western society has to make something to be economically solvent. We can't build our economies by making everyone a sodding barista.
If you go for manufacturing, then you create a population of poor people and shatter the illusion of prosperous capitalist society. If you, as most western countries have done, outsource the dirtiest jobs to other countries you can provide the illusion of prosperity for all, you must rely on more high tech industries that tend to require IP, and you kill innovation in the name of having a nice middle class buffer between the billionaires and the sweatshop workers.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
If you look at the disruptive growth of Linux HPC clusters, you will find that there are no IP agreements. I actually wrote about this: Why Linux On Clusters?. The absence of IP agreements allowed the HPC community to work together and grow faster than anyone imagined. On the famed Beowulf mailing list (started by Don Becker BTW) their is a free exchange of ideas and no one claims ownership of any IP. I call it a "Lawyer Free Zone" similar to what was proposed in Scotland back in the late 90's.
HPC for Primates. Read Cluster Monkey
These ideas won't work for many reasons. Here are a few.
1. Patents are often granted on improvements to processes that are owned by other companies. The commercial resolution may involve complex cross licensing including other technologies and patents. Your ideas do not account for these agreements.
2. In just about every country in the world you lose the ability to patent an invention if you disclose it to a 3rd party prior to filing. You may put in place a change to US law that makes it impossible for a US company to patent an idea in both the US and the rest of the world unless you get every other country to change its laws. Not going to happen.
3. Many patents are intermediate steps to a final product. Placing a restriction that each patent be practiced in a fixed time frame will discourage R&D into some very complex problems - precisely the kinds of problems that most need solving, and generate the most valuable type of innovations.
4. Some inventions (most famously drugs) have a lengthy regulatory process associated with them. It may take a biotech company 10 years after patent grant to get through the FDA approval process.
5. Selling a patent before it is granted insures the inventor will not get a good price for the invention. A granted patent is worth FAR more than an application.
6. There may be technological or other obstacles to bringing a patent to commercialization completely outside the control of the inventor. In these cases your proposal punishes the inventor for things outside his control.
7. Forcing the inventor to sell a patent before it is granted or even filed raises the possibility that the buyer will just withdraw the application (or not even file) and bury the invention. This is contrary to the whole concept of patents; that is they are a contract between the government and the inventor where the inventor completely discloses the invention and how to practice it in exchange for a grant which allows the inventor to prevent anyone else from practicing the invention.*
*Note: On Slashdot you often see the statement that patents are a state sanctioned monopoly. That is not accurate. A patent does NOT give you the exclusive right to practice an invention. It only grants you the right to prevent OTHERS from practicing the invention. Your right to practice may be blocked by others in a variety of ways - laws, regulations, other patents, etc. This is ANOTHER reason why the concept of requiring that the invention be practiced in order to be granted a patent is just flat out undoable.