"the first people that will tell you this are the drug companies"
Truly.
"which spend a tremendous amount of money finding how certain molecules will do certain things"
You mean, 'which spend four times as tremendous an amount of money telling you they need more money and then wasting it on administrative fat and other inefficiencies', right?
Not even a fifth of the money paying for the drug companies patents actually goes to research. The rest of that money represent resources wasted that could have paid for more research or more medicines.
"But it's not as bad as people in the software industry make it out to be."
Mostly, once you start throughly examining the economic effects and the effects on technological development and adption, it's much, much worse.
The perspective of someone thinking about patent law within the field of patent law is grieviously incomplete. As patents affect and are affected by everything from technological development to market macro economics, with a healthy dose of sociological aspects thrown in, the number of people who understand the interactions are few and far between. Being educated in a specific aspect may even be a disadvantage, as it might bias ones opinion, especially in a field that is limited to one single specific aspect of the system.
"The maximum benefit of most things occurs when one doesn't play by the same rules as everyone else"
In this case, one is playing by the same rules. The rules simply are that it's better to do as little costly and risky research as possible to obtain the reward. That means it's broken.
"If you've seen numbers that suggest otherwise, I'd be interested to see them."
It's not a question of the grants that cover existing products, it's a question of exacting monopoly rent from the market. The premium paid for patents by everyone in the economy; those resources dont materialize out of nowhere.
For example, take the medical industry. Of the resources diverted into the pharmaceutical corporations via patents, only about 20% are used for R&D. The rest of the money goes to marketing, administration and inefficient protected production. Now, the money paying for that from (depending on where you live) medical insurance or taxes would otherwise be spent on other products, result in lower costs for labour, etc.
"accounting and disclosure requirements"
It would be very difficult to disclose such data under the current system either way; it's impossible to know exactly how much money is wasted. Without a free market pressure it's very difficult to know the price of the most efficiently produced version of something. That's why a free market economy works so much better than a planned one; it always optimizes for the most efficient production.
One can infer the differences through observation of post-patent costs and by observing where the money goes; for example, medicines often drop to a price a small fraction of the patent price, and you can observe the money spent on R&D in pharmaceuticals, which was the intended recipient of the incentive. The difference between unprotected price plus R&D percentage and actual protected price would be an indication of the level of lost resources, but only an indication. You still dont catch such costs as overly expensive R&D due to lack of competetive pressure.
And even when one can calculate an approximation, it's not enough to see the exact effects; you're still missing such things like the extra costs of slower adoption of newer technology in the economy (the monopoly rents exacted can be compared to a specific tax on new products; you can imagine the effects of that).
"How would you propose to correct this?"
If I could correct that one I could make a plan economy work as efficiently as a free market economy. Somehow I doubt I could. It would be like somehow making a former Soviet union state factory report how much cheaper they could produce something. It's not until they're exposed to competition, or there's something equivalent to compare them to, that it's apparent how much more efficient they can become.
"The result is the US consumers, on a whole, pay less for the same products"
Unless, of course, those products are protected by monopoly legislation in the US, in which case the lower price needs not be passed on to the consumer. See; intellectual property law, trademarks, patents and copyright. Then consider the inevitable impact on the competetiveness of citizens in the economy where that monopoly protection is extensive.
"If I'm going out of my way to avoid advertisements and commercials what would make these folks think I would want to search for commercials?"
Greed? Losing contact with their customer base? With reality?
The current idea of marketing is going to get more or less wiped out by context marketing ranging from google to price-checking sites, simply because marketing to consumers who are actually shopping for a that specific product is vastly more efficient.
While TiVo may have understood that, they unfortunately do not have a relevant delivery system. People watching TV are usually interested in watching TV, not in shopping, therefore advertizing in such a medium would by its nature fall among the less efficient forms of ads. Especially among TiVo owners who are probably even less likely to have an interest in the ads.
"Now the reason the patent system is broken is the huge number of patents covering ideas that did not require investment to come up with."
And unfortunately, you get the highest ROI when you have no investment. It's economically impossible to create a system that grants monopolies to encourage risk and investment; the maximum value is gained when you obtain the monopoly while not risking or investing.
Further, as there is no 'budget' for the system as it's financed through monopoly rent grants there is no fiscal responsibility. The costs to the economy and consumers are real, equivalent to product taxes, but as they're hidden and unaccounted for, the patent office can grant any number of patents they want; spending everyone elses economic resources without anyone ever telling them they ran out of their 'investment support budget'.
"It smells authoritative and is treated that way by too many people."
Sortof like most our media, in fact, like most information we're ever exposed to that we cannot independently verify ourselves?
"The only cure is for smart people who know better to cite better, direct information"
The only cure is for smart people who know better to cite multiple independent sources of information. As long as you use a single source you're always vulnerable to disinformation.
And the only way we will be able to cite those multiple independent information sources is if some segments of the academic community gets over itself and commits to freely publishing its research and papers; otherwise Wikipedia will end up being the 'authoritative' source by default.
Yes, food is a time-limited, disposable nightmare. That doesnt mean you have to churn out time limited disposable nightmares to exchange for food.
Specific players in an economy may gain by creating deliberately time-limited products, but the economy as a whole, and the wealth of society as a whole gets diminished.
The classical example would be the broken window fallacy; the bakers broken window does not generate more employment and higher turnover in the economy. It seems that way when you only look at the economic chain following the window replacement, but in fact it merely forces the baker to buy a new window instead of buying a new pot, thus causing there to be the same number of windows but one less pot available in the economy.
Money spent replacing something that gets destroyed or deliberately obsoleted without cause is not money coming from nowhere, it's money that would have been spent purchasing (and financing the creation of) something else.
"Then what? What do you sell then?"
Then you damn well sell something else or get a job, just like everyone else. A free market economy is not a corporate welfare system intended to support the profits of people who want to keep doing the same thing over and over again when they've already saturated their market.
The very foundation of the creation of wealth in a free market economy is that the ever increasing efficiency in the economy is what is allowing everyone to accumulate as much material wealth as possible. Legos get so cheap that everyone can own them? Great, that's the whole idea of a free market, it's done its thing, legos are no longer a scarcity, we've all become 'richer', we now have the spare wealth that would have been spent buying legos available to buy something else. Now go over to maintenance mode on that old product and produce something new, attracting that newly available spare wealth so we all become even 'richer' again.
"There is nothing wrong with trying to 'keep them coming back'"
If you truly understand the fundamentals of the economics of the world then you will understand what is wrong with trying to keep them coming back with certain methods. Deliberate unnecessary obsolecense has very specific effects on the wealth of society and the economy as a whole. A sale gained for one by unecessary obsolecense is a sale lost for someone else, and ultimately a piece of 'wealth' that goes uncreated for us all. And so, it can be considered 'wrong', in the same way as any other deliberate destruction of someone elses property.
"At at least one leading journal, _millions_ of dollars a year, just on the peer review process; and that's for a journal that doesn't pay it's reviewers a penny."
That sounds like someones flushing a whole load of money down the drain. If the reviewers arent paid an open system would have a cost approaching zero, and the money spent on paying for what is apparently very expensive administration could be much better spent by the subscribers buying lab equipment.
"The sexes: Study after study has identified differences between the sexes..."
Of course, but the statistical differences between the groups are only valid for the groups themselves and cannot be applied outside that situation.
For a wild example, say you know women are better at multitasking than men. You apply that in a situation where you want to fill a position for a nuclear facility monitoring technician, and look for a woman for the position.
Now, lets say we have 'good at multitasking' rate, where 100 is super, and 0 is horrible. The average woman has 60, with a distribution between 20 and 100, while men have an average of 50 with a distribution between 10 and 90.
Now, if you look for a woman in specific you are looking for someone of a group which includes a lot of not-very good multitaskers while you are ignoring a lot of valid applicants. Despite the group difference, the correlation is more or less useless for the specific situation. Instead you should look for a better indicator, like look for 'people with drivers license', or even better, 'people with few accidents', or the best, actually designed a test for multitasking in the specific situation.
"This is going to affect how their performance compares to yours, and no amount of whining about it will serve to change this fact."
No, it's going to affect how the average group members performance compares to an average member of whatever group you choose to assign me to. If I have a higher 'intelligence' than 98% of the group I'm in, no amount of generalizing about it will change the fact that I probably also have a higher 'intelligence' than 97% of the other group. Which in turn means that any assumption about performance will be utterly and wildly wrong if you base it on that irrelevant trait.
"...asian stock...shorter than most...problems when attempting to compete at basketball."
See, there you do it again. You try to use a specific group average to apply to a specific unrelated problem.
The correct evaluation of the problem is that _short_ people have a disadvantage at basketball. Tall asians have no disadvantage. Short black people have a disadvantage. Your misapplication of group averages is not useful for solving the actual problem (should we decide there is an actual problem in this case).
You are, of course, correct that short people are overrepresented among asians. You just go wrong when you try to extrapolate from that.
To sum up: Individuals are different. Individuals are part of different groups. Smart people, short people, tall people, athletic people, competetive people, caring people, empathic people and rythmic people. Everyone deserves equal opportunity, and what they make of those opportunities reflects those differences.
Race, gender, sexual preference, hair color, skin color, are also groups. They may vary in their composition and may include more or less people of various traits, changing their average in different directions. But these differences say nothing about the specific capacity of a specific member of that group, or a specific subgroup of that group, and they are irrelevant to more or less any specific situation.
Stop trying to reason about specific traits by using unrelated groups. It might win you a few percents advantage in a game of 'guess the tallest person' over an entire population, but that doesnt change the fact that you'll still get your guess wrong a far larger percentage of the time, and you'll lose against a guy using a tape measure by a very large margin.
"In real human terms, differences matter when they are significant"
And in real human terms, variations within the group are usually larger than variations between the groups. This is what makes biological generalizations more or less pointless for anything but group statistics, and dangerously flawed when dealing with smaller groups or individuals.
"Likewise, women are not and never will be, barring genetic manipulation, "the same" as men."
One group of women can be 'the same' as another group of men. One group of men are not, and never will be, 'the same' as another group of men.
The overlap is simply far greater than the difference, which is what makes your argument flawed. Your generalizations about the groups simply dont tell you anything of value about any specific case.
The study had admins manually resolving dependency conflicts and borking their systems. I dont think 'right tool for the job' is even on the map if that's where the admins end up.
I mean, by whatever deitys protect sysadmins, _manually_ upgrade _glibc_??? I havent done that since before package systems were invented.
"If the conditions were different"
You mean, if the Windows admins spent most of their time manually copying files in dos shells from floppy disk because they for some inexplicable reason didnt want to use more modern methods for handling such problems?
If the conditions are to benchmark people doing things the wrong way then I rather doubt the value of the conclusions.
The digital revolution has made it possible to make professional recordings for less than the price of a decent used car. Pretty much anyone who really wants to make them can make them, without a record company.
As far as marketing goes, marketing in a monopoly situation is a pure loss for the economy as a whole; you just get a marketing war over the same money, which means money that should be going elsewhere gets diverted. We dont have copyright to encourage the creation of the maximum amount of advertising.
The current situation where some record companies are wasting so much money they can barely get a profit out of platinum selling artists, when anyone able to sell a few thousand copies at the current price should be in the black, is the natural result of decades of monopoly. Once you have a monopoly there is no limit on how inefficient you can become.
I think you're assigning a bit too much meaning into the concept of economic competition; in a free-market competetive capitalist system, killing your competitors would most definitely be regarded as anti-competetive from a market point of view. A free market government would be obliged to prevent such anti-competetive behaviour to protect the market, even from a strict economic point of view.
"However, our culture is so heavily geared towards competition"
I'd say our culture is so heavily geared towards _winning_ that it likes to ignore the rules when they dont serve it.
The current system _is_ taxes. The interested parties just like to call them something else.
"can the company tax anyone"
The current system is equivalent to the company in question having the right to place a product/sales tax on the specific product, comparable to product taxes like gasoline tax, alcohol tax or cigarette taxes.
We normally call this "selling".
You can call anything selling. We normally call it a 'free market' when prices are set in competition.
"C is completely different"
Not really. Product taxes work exactly the same way as monopoly rent; you simply set the price at the point at which you maximize your income. This is done by raising the price until you reach the point where many consumers cannot afford to purchase your product anymore, and profits starts decreasing. This point is the same, wether it's done by raising prices through legal monopoly power or by raising taxes through government power. You can see the effect clearly demonstrated in the changing levels of cigarette taxes in various countries.
The effect, of course, is that such items _never_ get cheaper. Their price is not dependent on the production price; it's dependent on available capital, and the price rises as more wealth becomes available (guess why medicine costs are so high in the US...). And another effect, of course, is the huge black market that gets encouraged; the margin between the regulated market price for the items and the price for competetive manufacturing of them is vast (guess why there are such striking similarities between the black markets for alcohol, tobacco and intellectual property goods).
So the current system unfortunately combines the economic inefficiency of sales/product tax equivalents with the economic inefficiencies of monopoly. It's the worst of both worlds.
And physical medias as distribution method are on their way out. As such, the whole 'war' pretty much becomes irrelevant; whoever will be able to offer the best price/GB and the lowest drive price will win.
Exactly who do you think is doing the rewarding today?
"The government?"
That's right, it's the government. That the current reward is indirect through monopoly rent does not change the fact that it is more or less equivalent to product taxation.
See;
System A; government gives monopoly rights to the innovator; innovator charges monopoly rent.
Result: Medicine that cost $10 to invent and produce now costs $60 for the consumer.
System B; government gives taxation rights to the innovator; innovator sets tax at 500%.
Result: Medicine that cost $10 to invent and produce now costs $60 for the consumer.
System C; government places a 500% product tax on the innovations and gives the money to the innovator.
Result: Medicine that cost $10 to invent and produce now costs $60 for the consumer.
"God, what a mess that would be."
No shit. Once you realize that A, B and C are fundamentally and functionally equivalent you realize just exactly how bad the system is. None of those systems have budget responsibility for the system costs, rent-seeking gets encouraged and inefficiency accumulates due to lack of competition. Not to mention, what effects do you think a 500% product tax on innovations has on the adoption of such products in society? (500% used in the example, as that is approximately the overhead level of pharmaceuticals).
Pretty much any conceivable system would be better, from all-out competition for research goals with payouts, through university funding, through several versions of the current system with balances and accountability added. Even trusting your leprechauns would probably outdo the current system.
The _goal_ of self-governed socioeconomic interaction is in one way or the other a maximization of 'wealth', which _is_ the distorted concept of 'life' in our day and age. It's simply the level of fulfillment of human needs, ranging from excess of food, heat, transportation, diversions, etc, etc.
The _method_ to achieve this in our capitalistic system is through encouraging profits from competition. This is the very fundament of capitalism. Profits in competition are generated by creating more value for less resources, leading to a total of more wealth in society as a whole. Higher efficiency is the reason we only have a few percent people farming these days, instead of all of us plowing fields 16 hours per day. This 'betterment' of humankind is simply incidental to a free market system; an argument made since the time of Adam Smith.
"And this will always involve things that are not efficient for the diversification of the product space, or for the betterment of humankind."
Of course, but as long as competition encourages efficiency the total amount of 'wealth' increases. That does not mean outlawing corporations or profit; in fact, as long as competition and whatever cooperative protective and/or social systems agreed upon by the citizens are enforced, profits should be encouraged; they're an indication someone is doing something more efficiently than the rest, thus creating more 'wealth'.
'Nowadays most patent offices around the world are "self funded"'
Not only is the patent office itself 'self funded', the actual patent system itself has nobody responsible for its budget. The money going into patent holders pockets doesnt materialize from thin air; the method of creating income through monopoly rent is comparable to product taxes.
So the patent-fee funded PTO joyfully assigns the equivalent of taxation rights all around, and the consumers and citizens are more or less powerless to do anything about it because theres nobody to hold directly responsible.
Of course, that was the entire idea from the start; when the kings of old wanted more income, but were reluctant to impose further taxes on an annoyed population, they instead handed letters of patent to merchants and nobility in exchange for funds or support, and the patent holders got to exact the funds from the population. Blame got shifted and everyone got what they wanted. Except the population of course.
"Especially in cases where an overly large capital investment is needed..."
Originally it may seem that way, but if you examine the reality you find that the monopoly protection leads to higher and higher costs, driving the need for overly large capital investment.
See, for example, the music industry. Making a professional recording today costs less than a used car. Yet the large corporations can even be unable to maintain profits for platinum-selling artists, because they're engaged in a marketing war driven by the monopoly-rent incomes, forcing a huge investment to become profitable at their overhead level. When, in fact, a group of teenagers flipping burgers after school could afford to finance the production of the actual product.
You can see the same thing in the pharmaceutical industry; 80% of their income is squandered in non R&D fields.
The prices of such monopoly products will constanly rise to absorb all available surplus capital; the pricing point is set at the point where consumers do without (a point which rises as more capital becomes available), not like in a free market, at the point where competitors will enter the market, lower prices and profit from increased efficiency.
"Temporary monopolies granted by patents allow drug companies to invest huge sums of money"
And without those temporary monopolies we'd get _five times_ as much R&D done for the same money if we simply paid for it outright.
"For our society to grow, we need to understand when monopolies are appropriate and when they are simply stupid."
Monopolies are always inappropriate and a terribly bad idea because they simply arent efficient in accomplishing the specific purpose. But dont confuse rewarding and/or subsidizing art and research with monopolies; we can do one without the other.
You mean, without appropriate economic incentives. Patents are not appropriate economic incentives; the monopolistic nature of such a 'protection' has no place in a free market capitalist system. The very idea of artificial scarcity through legal monopolies is antithetical to a free market economy.
The ability to _prevent_ others from using specific knowledge is what causes the problems, not the ability to recieve economic reward from the use of such knowledge.
"Do you really think eliminating patents would advance science?"
Without a doubt. There are far more appropriate ways to reward increased R&D without incurring the economic damage caused by monopolistic competition-free zones and artificial scarcity in the market.
It's more a question wether the cell companies are mature enough for it. Personally I'd bet they're going to price themselves out of the game with 3G and get clobbered by wlan/voip, the same way they clobbered Iridium once upon a time.
Cheaper and faster but lower coverage networks will simply wreak havoc with the size of the customer base for services which arent that essential.
"I really don't want to see a similar model applied to consumer products, or we'd see a lot of items that Uncle Sam thinks is best for us."
If badly done, yes. One could, however, imagine alternatives. For example, say we had an system where an 'innovation fund' pays out on a per-use or per copy basis. Like today, patent and/or copyright offices could award the incentive tokens, but as they'd be tasked with budget responsibility they'd suddenly have an interest in not overgranting, and the recipients of the system would also have a strong interest in there being a limited number of 'incentives' granted, as the payout per unit would shrink as the number of units grow.
Consider the implications when there is no inherent conflict between innovators, as they'll always get paid no matter who uses their 'patented' research, the more the merrier. Consider also the implications when newer and concievably more efficient products are no longer penalized by higher prices; the spread and integration of such technology into society should speed up noticably.
"but they wouldn't."
Oh, indeed. The economic logic of monopoly power ensures that economic inefficiencies and waste (such as overmarketing) will merely accrue until the available capital is consumed. Any economic surplus generated will simply be eaten; pricing is set by the pain limit at which people will have to do without (which simply rises as more capital becomes available), not at the limit where more competitors will enter the market and drive prices down. Unfortunately, that does not bode well for the economy as IP grows to a more prevalent part of it.
"I don't have the the answer, but I don't think it is to bloat the federal government."
No, the direction of research or other programs should not be under government control. What I'd suggest is merely reforming the way the incentives are funded and distributed, in a way that's more explicit, measurable and in line with the rest of our free market economy.
Yes, you're right, there is an international perspective. However, it isnt really more complicated than the current one, and would be resolved in a similar manner.
Frankly, it shouldnt be that much of a struggle. In essense it's just another subsidy/welfare system, where we take in money in the form of taxes (equivalent to the monopoly rent on artificially scarce 'protected' items), and give to those we wish to subsidize. Currently, the system is indirect, as the money usually goes to other parties than the ones we wish to subsidize, and the monopoly rent is an indirect tax that doesnt quite show up in the government budget, but that doesnt make it any less real.
Once you realize the whole IP issue is just an economic sleight-of-hand illusionist trick, you realize it isnt that hard to come up with a solution either. Like any other such system it's just a question of how much the taxpayers will accept paying for, and how to best use those taxes for the specific purpose they are supposed to serve.
Slashdot Mirror
"the first people that will tell you this are the drug companies"
Truly.
"which spend a tremendous amount of money finding how certain molecules will do certain things"
You mean, 'which spend four times as tremendous an amount of money telling you they need more money and then wasting it on administrative fat and other inefficiencies', right?
Not even a fifth of the money paying for the drug companies patents actually goes to research. The rest of that money represent resources wasted that could have paid for more research or more medicines.
"But it's not as bad as people in the software industry make it out to be."
Mostly, once you start throughly examining the economic effects and the effects on technological development and adption, it's much, much worse.
The perspective of someone thinking about patent law within the field of patent law is grieviously incomplete. As patents affect and are affected by everything from technological development to market macro economics, with a healthy dose of sociological aspects thrown in, the number of people who understand the interactions are few and far between. Being educated in a specific aspect may even be a disadvantage, as it might bias ones opinion, especially in a field that is limited to one single specific aspect of the system.
"The maximum benefit of most things occurs when one doesn't play by the same rules as everyone else"
In this case, one is playing by the same rules. The rules simply are that it's better to do as little costly and risky research as possible to obtain the reward. That means it's broken.
"If you've seen numbers that suggest otherwise, I'd be interested to see them."
It's not a question of the grants that cover existing products, it's a question of exacting monopoly rent from the market. The premium paid for patents by everyone in the economy; those resources dont materialize out of nowhere.
For example, take the medical industry. Of the resources diverted into the pharmaceutical corporations via patents, only about 20% are used for R&D. The rest of the money goes to marketing, administration and inefficient protected production. Now, the money paying for that from (depending on where you live) medical insurance or taxes would otherwise be spent on other products, result in lower costs for labour, etc.
"accounting and disclosure requirements"
It would be very difficult to disclose such data under the current system either way; it's impossible to know exactly how much money is wasted. Without a free market pressure it's very difficult to know the price of the most efficiently produced version of something. That's why a free market economy works so much better than a planned one; it always optimizes for the most efficient production.
One can infer the differences through observation of post-patent costs and by observing where the money goes; for example, medicines often drop to a price a small fraction of the patent price, and you can observe the money spent on R&D in pharmaceuticals, which was the intended recipient of the incentive. The difference between unprotected price plus R&D percentage and actual protected price would be an indication of the level of lost resources, but only an indication. You still dont catch such costs as overly expensive R&D due to lack of competetive pressure.
And even when one can calculate an approximation, it's not enough to see the exact effects; you're still missing such things like the extra costs of slower adoption of newer technology in the economy (the monopoly rents exacted can be compared to a specific tax on new products; you can imagine the effects of that).
"How would you propose to correct this?"
If I could correct that one I could make a plan economy work as efficiently as a free market economy. Somehow I doubt I could. It would be like somehow making a former Soviet union state factory report how much cheaper they could produce something. It's not until they're exposed to competition, or there's something equivalent to compare them to, that it's apparent how much more efficient they can become.
"The result is the US consumers, on a whole, pay less for the same products"
Unless, of course, those products are protected by monopoly legislation in the US, in which case the lower price needs not be passed on to the consumer. See; intellectual property law, trademarks, patents and copyright. Then consider the inevitable impact on the competetiveness of citizens in the economy where that monopoly protection is extensive.
"If I'm going out of my way to avoid advertisements and commercials what would make these folks think I would want to search for commercials?"
Greed? Losing contact with their customer base? With reality?
The current idea of marketing is going to get more or less wiped out by context marketing ranging from google to price-checking sites, simply because marketing to consumers who are actually shopping for a that specific product is vastly more efficient.
While TiVo may have understood that, they unfortunately do not have a relevant delivery system. People watching TV are usually interested in watching TV, not in shopping, therefore advertizing in such a medium would by its nature fall among the less efficient forms of ads. Especially among TiVo owners who are probably even less likely to have an interest in the ads.
"Now the reason the patent system is broken is the huge number of patents covering ideas that did not require investment to come up with."
And unfortunately, you get the highest ROI when you have no investment. It's economically impossible to create a system that grants monopolies to encourage risk and investment; the maximum value is gained when you obtain the monopoly while not risking or investing.
Further, as there is no 'budget' for the system as it's financed through monopoly rent grants there is no fiscal responsibility. The costs to the economy and consumers are real, equivalent to product taxes, but as they're hidden and unaccounted for, the patent office can grant any number of patents they want; spending everyone elses economic resources without anyone ever telling them they ran out of their 'investment support budget'.
"It smells authoritative and is treated that way by too many people."
Sortof like most our media, in fact, like most information we're ever exposed to that we cannot independently verify ourselves?
"The only cure is for smart people who know better to cite better, direct information"
The only cure is for smart people who know better to cite multiple independent sources of information. As long as you use a single source you're always vulnerable to disinformation.
And the only way we will be able to cite those multiple independent information sources is if some segments of the academic community gets over itself and commits to freely publishing its research and papers; otherwise Wikipedia will end up being the 'authoritative' source by default.
"Because eveyone has to eat,"
Yes, food is a time-limited, disposable nightmare. That doesnt mean you have to churn out time limited disposable nightmares to exchange for food.
Specific players in an economy may gain by creating deliberately time-limited products, but the economy as a whole, and the wealth of society as a whole gets diminished.
The classical example would be the broken window fallacy; the bakers broken window does not generate more employment and higher turnover in the economy. It seems that way when you only look at the economic chain following the window replacement, but in fact it merely forces the baker to buy a new window instead of buying a new pot, thus causing there to be the same number of windows but one less pot available in the economy.
Money spent replacing something that gets destroyed or deliberately obsoleted without cause is not money coming from nowhere, it's money that would have been spent purchasing (and financing the creation of) something else.
"Then what? What do you sell then?"
Then you damn well sell something else or get a job, just like everyone else. A free market economy is not a corporate welfare system intended to support the profits of people who want to keep doing the same thing over and over again when they've already saturated their market.
The very foundation of the creation of wealth in a free market economy is that the ever increasing efficiency in the economy is what is allowing everyone to accumulate as much material wealth as possible. Legos get so cheap that everyone can own them? Great, that's the whole idea of a free market, it's done its thing, legos are no longer a scarcity, we've all become 'richer', we now have the spare wealth that would have been spent buying legos available to buy something else. Now go over to maintenance mode on that old product and produce something new, attracting that newly available spare wealth so we all become even 'richer' again.
"There is nothing wrong with trying to 'keep them coming back'"
If you truly understand the fundamentals of the economics of the world then you will understand what is wrong with trying to keep them coming back with certain methods. Deliberate unnecessary obsolecense has very specific effects on the wealth of society and the economy as a whole. A sale gained for one by unecessary obsolecense is a sale lost for someone else, and ultimately a piece of 'wealth' that goes uncreated for us all. And so, it can be considered 'wrong', in the same way as any other deliberate destruction of someone elses property.
"It's called an investment."
Actually, what the labels are engaged in is called rent-seeking. Something that differs from the concept of investment in several important aspects.
"At at least one leading journal, _millions_ of dollars a year, just on the peer review process; and that's for a journal that doesn't pay it's reviewers a penny."
That sounds like someones flushing a whole load of money down the drain. If the reviewers arent paid an open system would have a cost approaching zero, and the money spent on paying for what is apparently very expensive administration could be much better spent by the subscribers buying lab equipment.
"The sexes: Study after study has identified differences between the sexes..."
Of course, but the statistical differences between the groups are only valid for the groups themselves and cannot be applied outside that situation.
For a wild example, say you know women are better at multitasking than men. You apply that in a situation where you want to fill a position for a nuclear facility monitoring technician, and look for a woman for the position.
Now, lets say we have 'good at multitasking' rate, where 100 is super, and 0 is horrible. The average woman has 60, with a distribution between 20 and 100, while men have an average of 50 with a distribution between 10 and 90.
Now, if you look for a woman in specific you are looking for someone of a group which includes a lot of not-very good multitaskers while you are ignoring a lot of valid applicants. Despite the group difference, the correlation is more or less useless for the specific situation. Instead you should look for a better indicator, like look for 'people with drivers license', or even better, 'people with few accidents', or the best, actually designed a test for multitasking in the specific situation.
"This is going to affect how their performance compares to yours, and no amount of whining about it will serve to change this fact."
No, it's going to affect how the average group members performance compares to an average member of whatever group you choose to assign me to. If I have a higher 'intelligence' than 98% of the group I'm in, no amount of generalizing about it will change the fact that I probably also have a higher 'intelligence' than 97% of the other group. Which in turn means that any assumption about performance will be utterly and wildly wrong if you base it on that irrelevant trait.
"...asian stock...shorter than most...problems when attempting to compete at basketball."
See, there you do it again. You try to use a specific group average to apply to a specific unrelated problem.
The correct evaluation of the problem is that _short_ people have a disadvantage at basketball. Tall asians have no disadvantage. Short black people have a disadvantage. Your misapplication of group averages is not useful for solving the actual problem (should we decide there is an actual problem in this case).
You are, of course, correct that short people are overrepresented among asians. You just go wrong when you try to extrapolate from that.
To sum up: Individuals are different. Individuals are part of different groups. Smart people, short people, tall people, athletic people, competetive people, caring people, empathic people and rythmic people. Everyone deserves equal opportunity, and what they make of those opportunities reflects those differences.
Race, gender, sexual preference, hair color, skin color, are also groups. They may vary in their composition and may include more or less people of various traits, changing their average in different directions. But these differences say nothing about the specific capacity of a specific member of that group, or a specific subgroup of that group, and they are irrelevant to more or less any specific situation.
Stop trying to reason about specific traits by using unrelated groups. It might win you a few percents advantage in a game of 'guess the tallest person' over an entire population, but that doesnt change the fact that you'll still get your guess wrong a far larger percentage of the time, and you'll lose against a guy using a tape measure by a very large margin.
"In real human terms, differences matter when they are significant"
And in real human terms, variations within the group are usually larger than variations between the groups. This is what makes biological generalizations more or less pointless for anything but group statistics, and dangerously flawed when dealing with smaller groups or individuals.
"Likewise, women are not and never will be, barring genetic manipulation, "the same" as men."
One group of women can be 'the same' as another group of men. One group of men are not, and never will be, 'the same' as another group of men.
The overlap is simply far greater than the difference, which is what makes your argument flawed. Your generalizations about the groups simply dont tell you anything of value about any specific case.
The study had admins manually resolving dependency conflicts and borking their systems. I dont think 'right tool for the job' is even on the map if that's where the admins end up.
I mean, by whatever deitys protect sysadmins, _manually_ upgrade _glibc_??? I havent done that since before package systems were invented.
"If the conditions were different"
You mean, if the Windows admins spent most of their time manually copying files in dos shells from floppy disk because they for some inexplicable reason didnt want to use more modern methods for handling such problems?
If the conditions are to benchmark people doing things the wrong way then I rather doubt the value of the conclusions.
The digital revolution has made it possible to make professional recordings for less than the price of a decent used car. Pretty much anyone who really wants to make them can make them, without a record company.
As far as marketing goes, marketing in a monopoly situation is a pure loss for the economy as a whole; you just get a marketing war over the same money, which means money that should be going elsewhere gets diverted. We dont have copyright to encourage the creation of the maximum amount of advertising.
The current situation where some record companies are wasting so much money they can barely get a profit out of platinum selling artists, when anyone able to sell a few thousand copies at the current price should be in the black, is the natural result of decades of monopoly. Once you have a monopoly there is no limit on how inefficient you can become.
I think you're assigning a bit too much meaning into the concept of economic competition; in a free-market competetive capitalist system, killing your competitors would most definitely be regarded as anti-competetive from a market point of view. A free market government would be obliged to prevent such anti-competetive behaviour to protect the market, even from a strict economic point of view.
"However, our culture is so heavily geared towards competition"
I'd say our culture is so heavily geared towards _winning_ that it likes to ignore the rules when they dont serve it.
"First, most of your "solutions" involve taxes"
The current system _is_ taxes. The interested parties just like to call them something else.
"can the company tax anyone"
The current system is equivalent to the company in question having the right to place a product/sales tax on the specific product, comparable to product taxes like gasoline tax, alcohol tax or cigarette taxes.
We normally call this "selling".
You can call anything selling. We normally call it a 'free market' when prices are set in competition.
"C is completely different"
Not really. Product taxes work exactly the same way as monopoly rent; you simply set the price at the point at which you maximize your income. This is done by raising the price until you reach the point where many consumers cannot afford to purchase your product anymore, and profits starts decreasing. This point is the same, wether it's done by raising prices through legal monopoly power or by raising taxes through government power. You can see the effect clearly demonstrated in the changing levels of cigarette taxes in various countries.
The effect, of course, is that such items _never_ get cheaper. Their price is not dependent on the production price; it's dependent on available capital, and the price rises as more wealth becomes available (guess why medicine costs are so high in the US...). And another effect, of course, is the huge black market that gets encouraged; the margin between the regulated market price for the items and the price for competetive manufacturing of them is vast (guess why there are such striking similarities between the black markets for alcohol, tobacco and intellectual property goods).
So the current system unfortunately combines the economic inefficiency of sales/product tax equivalents with the economic inefficiencies of monopoly. It's the worst of both worlds.
And physical medias as distribution method are on their way out. As such, the whole 'war' pretty much becomes irrelevant; whoever will be able to offer the best price/GB and the lowest drive price will win.
"Exactly who is doing the rewarding?"
Exactly who do you think is doing the rewarding today?
"The government?"
That's right, it's the government. That the current reward is indirect through monopoly rent does not change the fact that it is more or less equivalent to product taxation.
See;
System A; government gives monopoly rights to the innovator; innovator charges monopoly rent.
Result: Medicine that cost $10 to invent and produce now costs $60 for the consumer.
System B; government gives taxation rights to the innovator; innovator sets tax at 500%.
Result: Medicine that cost $10 to invent and produce now costs $60 for the consumer.
System C; government places a 500% product tax on the innovations and gives the money to the innovator.
Result: Medicine that cost $10 to invent and produce now costs $60 for the consumer.
"God, what a mess that would be."
No shit. Once you realize that A, B and C are fundamentally and functionally equivalent you realize just exactly how bad the system is. None of those systems have budget responsibility for the system costs, rent-seeking gets encouraged and inefficiency accumulates due to lack of competition. Not to mention, what effects do you think a 500% product tax on innovations has on the adoption of such products in society? (500% used in the example, as that is approximately the overhead level of pharmaceuticals).
Pretty much any conceivable system would be better, from all-out competition for research goals with payouts, through university funding, through several versions of the current system with balances and accountability added. Even trusting your leprechauns would probably outdo the current system.
The _goal_ of self-governed socioeconomic interaction is in one way or the other a maximization of 'wealth', which _is_ the distorted concept of 'life' in our day and age. It's simply the level of fulfillment of human needs, ranging from excess of food, heat, transportation, diversions, etc, etc.
The _method_ to achieve this in our capitalistic system is through encouraging profits from competition. This is the very fundament of capitalism. Profits in competition are generated by creating more value for less resources, leading to a total of more wealth in society as a whole. Higher efficiency is the reason we only have a few percent people farming these days, instead of all of us plowing fields 16 hours per day. This 'betterment' of humankind is simply incidental to a free market system; an argument made since the time of Adam Smith.
"And this will always involve things that are not efficient for the diversification of the product space, or for the betterment of humankind."
Of course, but as long as competition encourages efficiency the total amount of 'wealth' increases. That does not mean outlawing corporations or profit; in fact, as long as competition and whatever cooperative protective and/or social systems agreed upon by the citizens are enforced, profits should be encouraged; they're an indication someone is doing something more efficiently than the rest, thus creating more 'wealth'.
'Nowadays most patent offices around the world are "self funded"'
Not only is the patent office itself 'self funded', the actual patent system itself has nobody responsible for its budget. The money going into patent holders pockets doesnt materialize from thin air; the method of creating income through monopoly rent is comparable to product taxes.
So the patent-fee funded PTO joyfully assigns the equivalent of taxation rights all around, and the consumers and citizens are more or less powerless to do anything about it because theres nobody to hold directly responsible.
Of course, that was the entire idea from the start; when the kings of old wanted more income, but were reluctant to impose further taxes on an annoyed population, they instead handed letters of patent to merchants and nobility in exchange for funds or support, and the patent holders got to exact the funds from the population. Blame got shifted and everyone got what they wanted. Except the population of course.
"Especially in cases where an overly large capital investment is needed..."
Originally it may seem that way, but if you examine the reality you find that the monopoly protection leads to higher and higher costs, driving the need for overly large capital investment.
See, for example, the music industry. Making a professional recording today costs less than a used car. Yet the large corporations can even be unable to maintain profits for platinum-selling artists, because they're engaged in a marketing war driven by the monopoly-rent incomes, forcing a huge investment to become profitable at their overhead level. When, in fact, a group of teenagers flipping burgers after school could afford to finance the production of the actual product.
You can see the same thing in the pharmaceutical industry; 80% of their income is squandered in non R&D fields.
The prices of such monopoly products will constanly rise to absorb all available surplus capital; the pricing point is set at the point where consumers do without (a point which rises as more capital becomes available), not like in a free market, at the point where competitors will enter the market, lower prices and profit from increased efficiency.
"Temporary monopolies granted by patents allow drug companies to invest huge sums of money"
And without those temporary monopolies we'd get _five times_ as much R&D done for the same money if we simply paid for it outright.
"For our society to grow, we need to understand when monopolies are appropriate and when they are simply stupid."
Monopolies are always inappropriate and a terribly bad idea because they simply arent efficient in accomplishing the specific purpose. But dont confuse rewarding and/or subsidizing art and research with monopolies; we can do one without the other.
"without patents to protect the work."
You mean, without appropriate economic incentives. Patents are not appropriate economic incentives; the monopolistic nature of such a 'protection' has no place in a free market capitalist system. The very idea of artificial scarcity through legal monopolies is antithetical to a free market economy.
The ability to _prevent_ others from using specific knowledge is what causes the problems, not the ability to recieve economic reward from the use of such knowledge.
"Do you really think eliminating patents would advance science?"
Without a doubt. There are far more appropriate ways to reward increased R&D without incurring the economic damage caused by monopolistic competition-free zones and artificial scarcity in the market.
It's more a question wether the cell companies are mature enough for it. Personally I'd bet they're going to price themselves out of the game with 3G and get clobbered by wlan/voip, the same way they clobbered Iridium once upon a time.
Cheaper and faster but lower coverage networks will simply wreak havoc with the size of the customer base for services which arent that essential.
"I really don't want to see a similar model applied to consumer products, or we'd see a lot of items that Uncle Sam thinks is best for us."
If badly done, yes. One could, however, imagine alternatives. For example, say we had an system where an 'innovation fund' pays out on a per-use or per copy basis. Like today, patent and/or copyright offices could award the incentive tokens, but as they'd be tasked with budget responsibility they'd suddenly have an interest in not overgranting, and the recipients of the system would also have a strong interest in there being a limited number of 'incentives' granted, as the payout per unit would shrink as the number of units grow.
Consider the implications when there is no inherent conflict between innovators, as they'll always get paid no matter who uses their 'patented' research, the more the merrier. Consider also the implications when newer and concievably more efficient products are no longer penalized by higher prices; the spread and integration of such technology into society should speed up noticably.
"but they wouldn't."
Oh, indeed. The economic logic of monopoly power ensures that economic inefficiencies and waste (such as overmarketing) will merely accrue until the available capital is consumed. Any economic surplus generated will simply be eaten; pricing is set by the pain limit at which people will have to do without (which simply rises as more capital becomes available), not at the limit where more competitors will enter the market and drive prices down. Unfortunately, that does not bode well for the economy as IP grows to a more prevalent part of it.
"I don't have the the answer, but I don't think it is to bloat the federal government."
No, the direction of research or other programs should not be under government control. What I'd suggest is merely reforming the way the incentives are funded and distributed, in a way that's more explicit, measurable and in line with the rest of our free market economy.
Yes, you're right, there is an international perspective. However, it isnt really more complicated than the current one, and would be resolved in a similar manner.
"Everyone struggles to find a replacement system"
Frankly, it shouldnt be that much of a struggle. In essense it's just another subsidy/welfare system, where we take in money in the form of taxes (equivalent to the monopoly rent on artificially scarce 'protected' items), and give to those we wish to subsidize. Currently, the system is indirect, as the money usually goes to other parties than the ones we wish to subsidize, and the monopoly rent is an indirect tax that doesnt quite show up in the government budget, but that doesnt make it any less real.
Once you realize the whole IP issue is just an economic sleight-of-hand illusionist trick, you realize it isnt that hard to come up with a solution either. Like any other such system it's just a question of how much the taxpayers will accept paying for, and how to best use those taxes for the specific purpose they are supposed to serve.