Freedom In Fashion: No IP, No Patents, No Licensing
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While it seems really unfair that the guy who 'invented' Bannoffee Pie never made his fortune from it it has generally been of benefit to society as:
a) we can all eat Bannoffe pie as anyone can make it and b) it doesn't appear to stifle the creation of new recipes.
Plus if there had been IP protection for the creation of Bannoffee pie I seem fairly sure that the Chef would never have seen any benefit - just the owner of the restaurant and whichever chain store or supermarket he eventually sold the IP to.
Without copy-protection companies would take the time to get the details right rather than protect their IP and sit on their laurels.
We would get fewer big leaps but a lot more iteration. Drug companies would be constantly trying to release products that are 1 or 2% better than the last one.
I suspect that this would work in society's favour.
People can't just copy whatever people come up with, because lot of these ideas will fail. So they will try to copy successful models/products. The only problem is, if they wait too long, they will lose most of the potential profits.
That's called the first mover advantage and I believe it to be sufficient incentives.(Because ya simply got there first, before anybody else, therefore you get looot of money!)
Sometime people also just never got around to copying you. This is especially true in my experience. My website once got a huge traffic spike from digg one time. Despite the overwhelming traffic, nobody ever forked my site despite its liberal copyright policies.
Heck, the first mover advantages apply to the American publishing industry centuries ago, when there is no recognition of foreign copyright. In some cases, the British authors actually earn more from their sale of manuscript to American publisher(so they can be first), than they do from royalties in their own country.
It's a sufficient advantage in slow moving industries, or ones where the cost of innovation is very low. In a world where an exact duplicate of a product can be made in very little time, it's very little advantage at all.
Your website is a prime example of something where the cost of innovation is extremely low (and further, the popularity is short term). If you consider the cost of designing and producing a new car, say, compared with the cost of copying the design and reproducing it, the economics look a little different.
As far as I know, industries as wide as steam engines, movies, sheet musics, software, fashions, agriculture, books, newspaper etc have no problem thriving without intellectual monopolies.(ERrr..actually Hollywood moved to California to escape the Edison patent regime. Patents delayed the evolution of steam engines quite a bit and divert inventor resource from R&D and production to lawyering.)
Either your theory is wrong, or there's more to it than just first mover advantage.
There's the obvious prime example: drugs manufacture. The cost to research drugs and then test them is astronomical, while the cost of producing them is often very low. Much of the cost of the drug then, pays for the original research. It takes quite some time for the drugs to pay back the research cost.
What, then, is the solution to making money in this sector without intellectual monopolies? Personally, I'm in favour of no intellectual monopolies in areas where the cost of creation is high. Where the cost is lower (new, fast moving industries, for example), IP terms would be reduced or eliminated.
The pharmaceutical industry costs' is surely higher than usual. However, the original drugs can sell for very high price, even when generic versions introduce market pressure.
The high cost of creation is not unique, and not limited to pharmaceutical industry. It is only relatively speaking that pharmaceutical industry's creation cost is much higher.(Don't forget that some of the cost are certainly inflated by an overly risk averse regulatory agency.)
In any case, introducing intellectual monopolies is a dicey game. Not only you must balance the incentives, you must also manage the bureaucracy, take into account wasted cost opportunity that could have went into research and marketing. If somebody exploit a loophole, it would take forever to change the law because congress is slow, or because of huge opposition pressure. People can be brought to favor certain corporations.
So you want to support a system of intellectual monopoly? Good luck balancing all the incentives, disincentives, and things that come up that you didn't know about. To underestimate the difficulty of managing a regulatory system is to fall prey to the planning fallacy.
Some drugs are expensive to manufacture, yes. A great many aren't, too. Regardless of that, the company that doesn't have to invest in researching the drug will always be able to turn out a cheaper product, and thus reap the large majority of the profit: there being an incentive in this case for consumers to find cheaper companies. There is no reasonable likelihood of the company doing the research covering its costs in this scenario. If drugs had a life span of a few months, this wouldn't be the case, but they are used for much longer periods of time.
I don't underestimate the difficulty of running a regulatory agency: so much is plain from the mess that the US' system is currently in. I just think that the alternative of making research in many industries a waste of time is even worse. While I favour a more radical overhaul, a few simple changes, such as eliminating software patents, would make the US system much more reasonable.
Now, are you simply just glossing over what I have told you about books and British authors? Do I have to point to you to an example of a public domain video game that actually made money? Since when my website stop being visible to the world after digg has made it through? I still get thousands of visitors each month.
such as eliminating software patents, would make the US system much more reasonable.
Do you have any sense of history whatsoever? When is at any point in history that the US patent system actually function the way it supposed to?
I can points to you horror stories about patents gone bad in the 19th century and the music sheet wars as well various submarine patents.
It's not some problem that suddenly pop up in some modern time that only impact the last 30 years or so. It's a problem that exists throughout economic history.
> Heck, the first mover advantages apply to the American publishing industry centuries ago, when there is no recognition of foreign copyright. In some cases, the British authors actually earn more from their sale of manuscript to American publisher(so they can be first), than they do from royalties in their own country.
I read this as "Way back, when distribution was substantially slower, so copying was much harder, some people's books were much more popular in the US than in Britain."
Seriously. In the modern world, all that you need is for one person to pay, and make a copy. All other copies can then be made for free. The advantage to being first in this situation is microscopic.
> Do I have to point to you to an example of a public domain video game that actually made money?
More per developer-hour than a decent commercial game? I'd certainly be interested if more than a tiny handful had pulled this off, yes.
> Since when my website stop being visible to the world after digg has made it through? I still get thousands of visitors each month.
Thousands of visits per month is hardly going to be of interest to someone looking to make real money. The initial digg spike would be, but I covered that earlier.
> Do you have any sense of history whatsoever? When is at any point in history that the US patent system actually function the way it supposed to?
Of course you can point at problems. I said that the system would be made much more reasonable, not that it would be fixed. You seem to be thinking I'm coming at this from an idealistic 'I love IP' angle, rather than a pragmatic point of view. I do get that the system causes issues - I just think your alternative is much worse.
maybe, but it would most likely take the profitability out of most good ideas for small companies. As soon as a good idea is seen as profitable, a bigger company with more resources (connections, time, money, employees) could come along and run with it.
Once companies got to a certain level, they could just sit there on their laurels and poach ideas from others. Over time, this would result in less and less innovation and we would probably have a few big companies in each industry.
People in first-world countries fail to realize that for most third-world economies with very little IP enforcement, the era of cheap replication and no IP has been around for decades, yet none of the nightmarish worst-case scenarios have appeared.
This sounds like substantial benefit?
In the industries with top 3 sales showed in the video (Food, Auto and fashion), the product cannot be transfered to another person without losing your won possession. Even if you copy a design you still must manufacture the apparel. Even if you copy the design of a car you still must manufacture it.
However, that's not the case with software, music or movie transferred over the internet. You don't have to re-write a software to share a verbatim copy. You don't have to direct and shoot the whole movie again to make a copy of it.
I'll root for thingiverse people anytime. Nothing ruin the party more than a jackass telling people not to invent, design, and engineer, and make a living.
1. Yes, the "products" of the three industries (Films, Books, Music) with low(er) sales are transferable. But that has only become the case in the last 10-15 years. Prior to that it was harder (with movies and music: both being distributed on different media) or even impossible (books: being distributed on paper only; not counting audio-books) to separate content and media. Yet, over decades these industries have done everything to protect themselves.
2. If you try to copy the way some software works (by re-writing it) you can get sued. Damocles sword is always hanging above your head.
Fashion is not exactly analogous to software though, because in fashion there are physical atoms which are difficult to copy and move around.
Anyway, that aside, even if this chart is correct, a correlation does not imply any kind of causation. There many be any number of reasons why Food has more money spent on it (perhaps because we need food to survive and music consumption is purely discretionary?)
The guy who invented working intermittent wipers was an independent. The big three refused to pay but used it.
There's currently a case involving a safety device for saws. Home Depot installed it and their injury costs went down by $1M/year. They refuse to pay royalties.
That probably makes all the difference in terms whether or not IP is a socially beneficial system.
And the GPS system (eg. your Navigator), electronic/computer board, and all this things that make you buy a Mercedes instead of a Hyundai, are patented or at least protected by IP.
Again she is comparing the "appearance" of the utilitarian market, not the engineering part of it. (You can patent and reinforce a new material for t-shirts which is unbreakable).
Oh I disagree. I think designs matter a lot more to a large fraction of people than you might think.
I think luxury cars have much in common with fashion, in the sense that people who would buy a Mercedes would never buy a Hyundai even if it had all those identical IP in it. Once you get above midrange (ie Toyota), a car is much more about status symbols and conspicuous consumption than features. Just like fashion.