From DigitalKoans:
Eric E. Johnson has self-archived “Intellectual Property’s Great Fallacy” in SSRN.
Here’s an excerpt:
Intellectual property law has long been justified on the belief that external incentives are necessary to get people to produce artistic works and technological innovations that are easily copied. This Essay argues that this foundational premise of the economic theory of intellectual property is wrong. Using recent advances in behavioral economics, psychology, and business-management studies, it is now possible to show that there are natural and intrinsic motivations that will cause technology and the arts to flourish even in the absence of externally supplied rewards, such as copyrights and patents.
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The usual flimsy and transparent arguments: Confusing the willingness of some people to give away their creative works, for a “groundswelling movement” and a historic trend that demands the demolition of the evil, totalitarian copyright and patent system. Another document for the Utopia pile…
Rantings of the deluded wrapped in the cloak of legitimate “Abstract”. Comical.
It might be true that the impulse to create comes from with in. Certainly there are many amateur musicians, artists, and even writers who produce their “art” for no reason other than the joy of creation. However, I would argue that there is a difference between the creation of work and the publication of a work. Even in fields where there is no effective financial reward for doing so, there are other, less tangible rewards for the publication of work. For example, in many folk music genres, there is little or no financial reward for distributing a new tune; there is however the recognition that comes should such tune become popular within the folk music community. Copyright protects that recognition.
Further, even if I am motivated to produce and publish works with no external reward, that doesn’t necessarily mean I have the opportunity to do so. Great artists and writers need the income provided by intellectual property to provide them the freedom to create. I think there is little doubt that many great authors had the freedom to continue to create because they already were deriving an income (even if it was a small one) from the works they had already published. A writer who can spend 8-10 hours a day writing should be able to write far more than the author who struggles to find an hour or two a day to write.
I can understand how someone whose career consists of rebooting servers and ghosting desktops would feel that creative activity is something that only happens in your free time, and that it’s perfectly possible to be a successful artist and have a day job.
Yeah. Sure.
Because, you know, recognition pays rent and buys food.
Idiot.
The fallacy of IP, including the economic arguments and many other arguments for it, have been detailed in Against Intellectual Monopoly by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine and Against Intellectual Property by Stephan Kinsella. Unsurprisingly, both books are also available as free PDFs.
The effectiveness of IP is ably illustrated by the history of the United States of America.
One of the unfortunate side effects of a free market in ideas, is that inane and moronic books/titles like those by Boldrin and Levine get published. Thankfully no one really pays them any attention.
Your deep understanding, analysis, and criticism of arguments against intellectual property are greatly appreciated. Thank you for your invaluable contribution to this conversation.
You are welcome Spider. I thought I dispatched the argument efficiently and effectively. Appreciate it. LOL
I’m sure that drug companies will invest in developing new drugs and sell t-shirts to recoup costs. And movie companies produce movies due to their great love for art–make them give them away for free and there’ll be no problem in having fewer movies.
We all know that most writers (like most musicians) never make much money. That doesn’t mean we aren’t motivated by the dream that we might become part of that 1% that actually makes all the money. Intellectual property is not only real, it’s the only real value that exists in the post-industrial world.
Rob Preece
Publisher
Since the vast majority of writers read far more books than they sell, there should be a net benefit to them in removing IP costs. The main losers would be those few writers who sell in the tens or hundreds of thousands. No more million-dollar advances? Oh dear…
Jon, with respect, the majority of the authors who do benefit from IP the most are the ones who are generally described as mid-list authors. They never get rich from their writing, but writing forms a major, if not their soul source of income. Without IP laws, their outputs would be seriously curtailed since they would have to devote more time to other activities other than producing IP. Since these authors make up the bulk of the shelves of most fiction genres (like scifi, romance, mystery, etc.) the readers are probably the ones who would be hurt the most by removing IP.
Copyright in itself isn’t that bad an idea, in its essence of eliminating free-riders by granting authors some kind of say on what happens with their work – and historically probably worked reasonably well to get away from a system where creative people needed some powerful patron to subsidize their works – but it currently suffers from two major flaws.
Most fundamental of these two is that one important premise on which copyright worked, that is, the scarcity of reproduction equipment, and as a result, the relative ease of regulating the use of that equipment, is no longer true. Copying equipment is now in everybody’s hand, and suppressing their use for one purpose, while allowing it for another will be near-impossible. Technological progress makes spreading a movie to your friends as easy a spreading a piece of gossip, and, taking into account the idea of “six degrees of separation”, it will be no-time before everybody who wants it has it. For books, the situation is worse, as with fairly little effort, one can find thinks like “5000 High Quality ePubs”; basically more than most people will read in 10 years, and a nominal value of $50.000.
The other fundamental problem with copyright is its absurdly increased scope and duration. Where a half a century ago, copyright lasted (in the US) 28 years, with an option of renewal for another 28 years (which wasn’t used that much; only successful works got extended), we are currently looking at life + 70 years. The result is the majority of works ever produced are effectively unavailable in any form, and that long-dead authors now compete with currently active authors for a share of the limited attention and funds of the public. From an economic point of view, that makes no sense, and by doing so, copyright also has lost its justification as an incentive to make works available, and instead has become a means of artificial scarcity and private taxation – and its popular support as something that helps authors has become popular dismay as a tool to extort money by publishing cartels…
Both flaws need clever thinking to come up with a system that does make it possible for authors to continue to do what they are best in, and gives the public the biggest choice of works to read from.