What's the Solution To Intellectual Property? 979
StealthyRoid writes "I'm an anarcho-capitalist, and a huge supporter of property rights, both physical and intellectual. At the same time, I find the current trend of increasing penalties for minor violations, criminalizing civil IP matters, anti-consumer technologies like DRM, and abuse of the legal system by the *AA's of the world really disturbing. You'd think that by now, there'd be a reasonable solution to the problem of protecting intellectual property while at the same time maintaining the rights of consumers and protecting individuals from absurd litigation, but I have yet to find one. So, I pose these questions to the Slashdot community: 1 — Do you acknowledge the legitimacy of intellectual property to begin with? That is, do you believe that intellectual property is a valid construct equivalent to physical property, or do you think it's illusory? If not, why? 2 — If so, how would you go about protecting the rights of intellectual property holders in a way that doesn't require unfair usage limitations or resort to predatory abuse of the tort system?"
Everyone needs to read Boldrin & Levine (Score:5, Informative)
Before reading some chapters from Boldrin & Levine I was somewhat convinced that copyright at least had some beneficial elements to it that should be respected and preserved, but they sure put the nail in that coffin too. They went through the origins of copyright as a *relaxation* to a censorship regime by the crown (IIRC), and it just went downhill from there. Now it just seems like copyright is extended to every damn little thing, and that wasn't the original purpose of it by far. While they don't prove that removing copyright would be beneficial to everyone, they take a shot at showing that it wouldn't be a total disaster to authors/artists. For everyone else, it wouldn't prevent new books from being written, new music from being produced, etc., and it would be a net gainer, by far.
If you have the time to read a 300 page book this summer, by all means at least read a few chapters of Boldrin & Levine. You will understand intellectual property much better and hopefully lose a few sacred cows in the process.
You can select what you may want to read from this landing page:
http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/againstfinal.htm [ucla.edu]
Physical property and I"P" are INCOMPATIBLE. (Score:4, Informative)
Physical property and intellectual "property" rights are incompatible. You simply can't successfully have both - the one necessarily undermines the other, as Stephan Kinsella laid out. See http://www.stephankinsella.com/ip/ [stephankinsella.com], particularly "Against Intellectual Property" [mises.org] [PDF].
Since the choice is ultimately between physical property rights and intellectual "property" rights (and of course I already think the latter are rather suspect for a number of other reasons) I simply choose physical property rights.
When people say "but I'P' is valuable!" I say - of course it is, each EU or US patent granted steals value from literally hundreds of millions of people's physical property rights. A patent lets you usurp the value of everyone's physical property - A patent, by definition, says "you can no longer make your physical property into this particular form without my permission".
An I"P" system is death of a thousand cuts to the physical property system. "Anarcho-capitalists" who think they can support both should get a clue.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Time Limits (Score:3, Informative)
IIRC a patent by default only lasts for four years, and has to be renewed after that, every four years, up to a maximum of 20 years.
Can anybody give any insight as to what the requirements are for a patent to be renewed? Is it just a case of bureaucracy and fee-paying, or is there some requirement, as suggested above, to prove that the patent is actually being used?
And if not, would the renewal point be a good mechanism for introducing such a requirement?
Re:The goal should be innovation (Score:2, Informative)
True, but the same doesn't apply to the big corp funding the creator...
Re:Everyone needs to read Boldrin & Levine (Score:5, Informative)
First of all, 20 of the 46 top selling drugs had no need for patents. These are things that doctors still prescribe or use like aspirin, insulin, penicillin, quinine, morphine, vaccines, vitamins, etc.
It claims 54% of new drug applications use active ingredients already in the market, the "innovation" being merely in dosage amounts or other incidentals.
The book says that 75% of drug R&D costs are for development of me-too drugs. The way I would explain this is this: a lot of otherwise unnecessary patents are filed on slightly modified drugs based on a successful earlier design. The new drugs are heavily promoted to doctors so that it can earn the company royalties while the old, perfectly good drug is ignored by the big name pharmas. Drugs are not developed as things that the whole society needs, but rather on the basis of marketability.
The book argues that clinical trials for new drugs could (and should) be paid completely by NIH grants, and this would remove the conflict of interest of having the drug company doing its own testing. Doing so would eliminate any need for drug patents to exist, because this is the cost that the companies are citing they would need to recover (the marketing cost being optional and really up to them to decide). The legal costs of fighting patents would of course also go away (too bad for the lawyers).
So yes, surprisingly they would still be invented. Then there's the question about whether the generics makers would take all of the profits. Think for a moment about how patents are filed, describing the drug in detail. Without patents, the first drug company to produce a successful drug would have a very large lead over the other companies. The others, once they see the drug is selling well would basically try to reverse engineer it, but in order to produce the drug in significant quantities they would have to retool their factories and that takes time. If typically takes the generics manufacturers about 4 years to get up to speed, and that's about half of the length of a drug patent period anyway. Overall, that means drug companies can still recover their costs, save hugely on legal costs and still make a tidy profit.
The upshot is that after 4 years any given drug of any importance would be very, very cheap everywhere and thus widely accessible by all economic strata.
Re:Time Limits (Score:4, Informative)
Time after grant Non-small entity/Small entity
3.5 years $930.00/$465.00
7.5 years $2,360.00/$1,180.00
11.5 years $3,910.00/$1,955.00
There is a six month grace period to pay for which a surcharge of $130/65 is charged. There are no other requirements to keep a patent in force (well, other than having the patent held invalid or unenforceable by a court)
In many countries outside the US fees are charged annually, although I'm not familiar with the various amounts.
Re: Artificial scarcity (Score:5, Informative)
Neither of these concepts is inherently bad or evil.
I am a semi-pro photographer (meaning that I earn some good money from doing commercial photography) but it's a side-job. I like being in control of my work, meaning that if you want to use a photo I made, you should ask for permission - after all I had to invest in equipment and it took considerable amount of time to create that photo; if you want to use that photo in a magazine or for advertising, you better pay up. Without that protection, I may not be doing this. If anyone could copy my work with no consequences, photography would remain strictly hobby for me.
In other cases, IMO sometimes photographers abuse their position. For example, some wedding photographers would take photos at weddings for the customer, but retain the copyrights, so the client goes to the photographer each time they want a new set. A "work for hire" style of agreement would work better - the client pays a fee and then the photos (slides, RAWs, whatever) is their.
In the same vein, if I'm a publishing house and decide to print Harry Potter, it's perfectly fine for the author to be compensated. Same goes for Mickey Mouse. Things get muddy when we start talking about derivative works. If I want to write a book about the Adventures of Young Gandalf, should I pay up?
Patents are a whole different matter. Scrapping them completely wouldn't really work, but limiting the time to 2 years, requiring a working prototype, banning patents on concepts (algorithms, practices) would do wonders.
Re:no more artificial scarcity (Score:5, Informative)
(Watch documentary "The Future of the Food" for more details)
The biggest problem here is how to revert to non-contaminated crops and how to prevent future contamination (aka stop the wind from blowing).
Re:Agree and disagree (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Now that would be wrong. (Score:4, Informative)
Well, the outcome was that the farmer in question got sued by Monsanto, and Monsanto won. Neat how this works, huh ?
Re:In America we don't need kings for that (Score:3, Informative)
If I have to, yes.
Copyright is not a natural right (Score:3, Informative)
Copyright is different. It is a created "right." Really, it is more like a "deal" than a right: It is a limited term grant of exclusivity. No real right works that way, and no other right is explicitly created - they are assumed to exist with or without the acknowledgment of the government.
Therefore you do not need to be an "anarcho"-anything to reconsider copyright. The Founders themselves considered it less than a right.
Copyright isn't even a contract. It is a kind of charter that can be revoked or modified at the whim of the granting party. So reducing a copyright term isn't even a "taking."
Copyright was created by the government to benefit the people. If it stops working that way, copyright has no purpose.
Re: Artificial scarcity (Score:3, Informative)
You've said it yourself. A "work for hire" style of agreement works just fine. Someone wants a photograph, he pays you to make it. No copyrights needed at all. You can even make a contract over how they are allowed to use said photographs, so you can use ordinary contract law to protect your photos in those few cases.
Re:Time Limits (Score:4, Informative)
Value is and always will be relative, variable in nature and subject to disagreement. The best way to resolve the argument of value is a truly free market where people can decide for themselves what something is worth. Think "web 2.0" applied to economics. If you create something unique, put it up for sale. Fiddle with the price until "sales volume A" X "unit price B" = "the largest amount C". If you set "B" so high that "C" decreases you are clearly an idiot. The whole system is predictable because everyone is expected to look out for their own interests.
The only way this isn't fair is when the seller rigs the market, but even then the buyer is still free not to buy-they can also buy something similar from someone else. Maintaining a truly free market is the fairest thing any government can do-the fact that this doesn't always happen is another story. Free market forces include human ingenuity. Our main problem now isn't the market itself but the fact that it isn't as free as it needs to be to function in a fair manner.
Private property is a good system. Why should you have the right to take something I make with my own two hands? Why can't you just go make you're own? You first invoke the right to kill to take someone else's property, then later claim it's wrong for them to defend themselves. Frankly, if you tried to take my house because of some imaginary "birthright" I would consider it justification to kill YOU. So much for material property rights.
Intellectual property isn't different. How many months of labor does an author put into a book? Why do you expect them to do this work for free? The problem with our current system isn't that intellectual property isn't fair, it's that we have a bad system for authors to sell their work. Besides, the whole linux thing shows that even when someone abuses the system, the market will produce a viable alternative. The MARKET decided that OS software should be free, but I guarantee that every person who chose to contribute code is getting paid for something, somewhere. This is the only way people could afford to donate their labor.
Art like books, music, movies and games are a bit different. Because nobody NEEDS them to survive so the value best assigned by what people are willing to pay. Creators deserve to be able to trade their work for other goods, but the current system is out of whack as evidenced by the RIAA/MPAA litigations. I can't say exactly how to fix the system, but it will have to account for the market reality that production and distribution costs are essentially zero. Prices have been artificially high for years as production and distribution were limited by existing technology. Technologies changed and the market must be allowed to adapt.
By the way, please don't launch into some idiotic argument claiming that everyone's labor per unit time is valued equally. The garbageman's time is not as valuable as a doctor's. The garbageman went out one day and got a job that anyone can do. The doctor spent years learning and honing his skills, studies continually to keep his knowledge current and bears legal responibility for his decisions. How do you valuate? Let the market decide - just remember the market includes buyers AND sellers and it needs to be free.
This just in... (Score:3, Informative)
You can not design a system that works better than anarchy.
If you believe in anarcho-capitalism you do not believe in inherent rights, but rights that make economic sense. In most cases intellectual property does not make economic sense (total surplus is always less under any monopoly).
You don't really sound like an anarcho-capitalist... I should know, since I am one.
Also, if you want to ask this sort of question then there is a whole fucking forum devoted to it with really smart, responsive and helpful people here...
http://austrianforum.com/ [austrianforum.com]
Being an anarcho-capitalist... YOU SHOULD KNOW THIS!
Re:In America we don't need kings for that (Score:3, Informative)
(Sorry to reply twice, missed this point in my original post)
You don't need to look that far [wikipedia.org] to see the limitations of tanks and F-22s.
Re:Time Limits (Score:2, Informative)
If something is 'rightfully' yours, it is only because you believe in perpetuating the status quo. How did that 'rightfully' come to be the property of those whom you bought it from?
Also, how did you come to be a person with ample opportunity to study, work, make money, and buy things? What powers made such a world possible for you, before you were even born, while at the same time limited or prevented such opportunities for others?
Cheers, -m
Yes you do need a government (Score:3, Informative)
It is not a natural right - it was dreamed up by the guys who wrote your constitution. To be 'natural' you'd have to be born with it and even in the US I don't see babies being born with guns in their hands.
Right - so if say a foreign government invades to steal your land you and your gun will happily be able to see them off without any government help? No I didn't think so. You do need a government to enforce your property rights otherwise another government will come and take them away.
The rights of your government come from exactly the same basis as all of your rights. They are written down in the law of the land. The same laws that give you a right to bear arms give the government the right to pass laws over you. To say that your government has no rights is to say that you have no rights.
Re:no more artificial scarcity (Score:3, Informative)