Intellectual Property Rights Same Advantages As Barbed Wire?
overcomingbias.com
overcomingbias.com
This is one of those statements that sounds good on the surface but falls apart when you dig deeper.
There are probably literally millions of people who have contributed intellectual innovations that have gone into your shiny iPhone, yet the money you give to Apple only compensates tens of thousands of them.
Imagine a world where you have to pay for every innovation you use. It would make it impossible to do anything or create any new innovations on top of existing ones.
I'm not saying IP is always bad, but it does have a double edge: it rewards innovations which HAVE been made, but it hinders new innovations from BEING made.
The idea of property really does not apply. It is the wrong way to think about the problem. We want new and better systems of organisation, but the restrictions of property are what we want to avoid if at all possible.
> You have no fundamental right to enjoy the innovations produced by others without compensating them.
That seems quite wrong; in fact the opposite is more like the truth. The form of a moral obligation is to put the interests of others before yourself. That is, to put it simply, you have a duty to help others. If others enjoy your products without compensating you, that is good -- it is pretty much what a moral act means.
Now, you might object that someone has sacrificed effort to produce, they must deserve something. But that adds something else: the idea of loss or harm, and this is precisely where IP/abstract-goods and property fundamentally diverge. Abstract goods can be used by any number of people without reducing anyone else's use or causing loss.
If you want to solve the problem you must see that thinking in terms of property is to make a mistake right at the beginning.
This would be perfect, but the obstacles to implement this ideal are enormous. The first tough question: who are "we", how do we decide how much to pay for an invention and how do we split the costs?
This could only work for ideas that are obvious. For instance, it's obvious that a more efficient solar cell would be great, so we could create a prize for that.
But could the public have pre-funded the telephone? No, because they hadn't thought of it. The most notable inventions are the ones that nobody saw coming, and hence, couldn't have commissioned.
Quotable quote: "The difference between the [prior] Kelly fence and the [patented] Glidden fence is not a radical one, but, slight as it may seem to be, it was apparently this which made the barbed wire fence a practical and commercial success. ... Under such circumstances, courts have not been reluctant to sustain a patent to the man who has taken the final step which has turned a failure into a success." 143 U. S. at 282-83.
The big problem I see with "IP" is independent invention. If the act of inventing something is so important that we must give special rights to someone who invents, then we should also be looking at the quality of independent inventino. And note that such independent invention happens all the time. Look up the Bill Maher/The Onion "Afterbirther" saga. Who invented the telephone? Who invented the telgraph? Who invented radio? Who invented "the computer"? All cases where there's a legitimate claim to independent invention. So, given that independent invention happens all the time, why should we give ownership to the first person to file papers? Shouldn't we give ownership to the person who had the biggest inspiration to get the idea? The least incremental conception should get ownership.
While I believe this is true, the other end is also true: nobody has fundamental right to enjoy the compensation from me. If they don't like it, they can keep their "methods for highliting text" to themselves.
Is political censorship valuable to North Korean goverment? Probably yes, otherwise they wouldnt pursue it. Is is valuable to the population at large? We dont know, since the North Korean population was never directly asked. Theoretically, North Koreans might also consider it valuable, but probably not.
The same way we dont know whether for-profit censorship (which copyright enforcement is) is beneficial to our population, since, similar to the North Koreans, we also never have been asked about it. Copyright has since the beginning been kept out of reach of direct democratic vote, so we'll never know whether the people consider it valuable to keep in its current form. Probably not.
"Economic analysis has come up short of providing either theoretical or empirical grounds for assessing the overall effect of intellectual property law on economic welfare." -- 'The economic structure of intellectual property law'; Landes, Posner; 2003. (Conclusion, p422, s3.)
Landes and Posner are the accepted orthodox authority on the subject, and even they are telling us that we do not even know if copyright is doing any good.
Also, I like how the ranchers could let their property invade and destroy other people's, but the reverse wasn't true. If you tried to kill their livestock, they'd see you hanged.