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Copyright and Patent Laws Hurt the Economy
Norsefire writes "Two economists at Washington University in St. Louis are claiming that copyright and patent laws are 'killing innovation' and 'hurting [the] economy.' Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine state they would like to see copyright law abolished completely as there are other protections available to the creators of 'intellectual property' (a term they describe as 'propaganda,' and of recent origin). They are calling on Congress to grant patents only where an invention has social value, where the patent would not stifle innovation, and where the absence of a patent would damage cost-effectiveness."
While there might be a good reason to call Article I, section 8, clause 8 of the Constitution the "Copyright Clause" when talking about copyrights specifically, this clause of the constitution also authorizes patent law and perhaps other kinds of intellectual property that Congress hasn't been innovative enough to think of yet. We could call it the "Intellectual Property Clause" or the "Copyright and Patent Clause," but for my money I like "Progress Clause."
I went to ye olde library today to get copies of 2 Articles from the Journal of Applied Polymer Sciences, a Wiley Interscience Publication. Xeroxing the articles under fair use from the library was free for me.
The Whiskey Tango Foxtrot Moment came when I checked online to find out how much it would cost to subscribe to the journal. I thought someone misplaced a decimal point: $23,245 a year is the institutional subscription rate! That's about what I paid yearly in college tuition back when I was in college. Even worse, it's almost the value of the lab equipment I'm using in the work I've been doing on my own time.
No, I am suggesting an amount of time which would give someone a reasonable opportunity to exploit their own work however they see fit. Unlike you, I am not basing my suggestion on whether they have made "enough" money, I am basing it on the practicalities of exploiting creative work.
Apparently you regard the service of printing and distributing a book to be far more valuable than the service of actually creating the words which go into that book. You must love the phone book - it's totally free and has a huge number of excellently printed words in it.
Read Pynchon.
someone like that not receiving any royalties (even if they are dead, the royalties being left to whomever they willed it to or whatever) isn't fair.
I wonder, how many times does it have to be pointed out that the copyright clause isn't about "fair" or authors "getting their due"? It's right there in the bloody constitution. It's about being just enough enticement to encourage people to create these works in the first place so as to enrich the public domain to the maximum degree. If Emily-dang-Dickenson wrote 1800 poems without making money off but a few, then obviously the enticement was adequate.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
> "what should and should not be patentable"
The trouble is it is very hard to: "grant patents only where an invention has social value, where the patent would not stifle innovation, and where the absence of a patent would damage cost-effectiveness."
How can some average patent examiner do that consistently and reliably enough? The temptation after a while would be to just rubberstamp everything.
To me what they should do is to award Prizes for Innovation, much like Nobel Prizes. Most people's hindsight is better than their foresight.
To qualify for the prize, inventors have to register their inventions and pay a registration fee that goes to the prize pool.
You could have one category of prize being awarded by "Experts in the Field", and another category awarded by members of the public (somewhat similar to the Hugo and Nebula prizes, except maybe we could allow a wider participation for members of the public?). Multiple prizes per category would be awarded. Prizes could be awarded every year.
Inventors could win a prize for something they did years or even decades ago.
So even if you are 30 years ahead of everyone and/or your stuff only gets declassified decades later, you can still win a prize.
In contrast patents don't reward the inventors who are really far ahead of their time. They instead reward people who somehow manage to sneak "Method of making omelettes by using contents of eggs while excluding shells and detritus" past overworked patent examiners deluged by similar garbage.
Also, punitive actions could be taken against people who falsely claim they were the first to invent something - at least based on the patent registration database.
What the "Patent Office people" would then do is: try to reduce dupes (you can't prevent dupes 100% but at least reduce them), organize and manage the data so that it is not too hard for people to find candidates for nomination - for instance you don't want to have people keep nominating an invention that has already won! That said an invention that has already won, could qualify for a "top winners amongst winners category".
The patent office workers could also help authoritatively link registered inventions with actual products out in the market.
There is no 'Capitalism'. There is classical Liberalism, and there are other 'systems' that depart from it in degree, some more than others.
Liberalism is more advantageous for everybody and benefits nobody in particular, while all systems we currently experiment today are attempts to favor certain groups while necessarily screwing everybody else in the process. Which is kind of why they're so popular today. :-)
Send your spendthrift head of state this
China, which is kind of like our Wild West(tm) right now, does whatever it wants. And it's going to completely leave us behind much as we did with Europe. Remember, Europe at the time had very restrictive guilds, laws, and regulations. The U.S. didn't. So we invented and invented. We built and didn't really care that much if it was someone else's idea.
Just like China now is doing.
And you wonder why they are going to put up their own space station modules next year and beat us to a habitat on the moon... We have to dismantle the idiocy or we'll never be able to move fast enough to keep up.
Honestly, if I was interested in space or technology or just making new things, I'd be making a beeline to China and doing it there without the millions of laws and tens of thousands of lawyers all suing everyone into oblivion over idiotic patents.