Why does everyone forget the C?
Rather, intellectual property rights are the product of government fiat — of statutes that grant inventors, writers, and artists a monopoly privilege to use certain ideas for certain lengths of time.
Trademarks have been in development for centuries, and they were originally a private endeavor, having nothing to do with the government.
Come to think of it, property rights are a product of government fiat as well. My ability to claim this as my property, and for you to respect it as my property, requires a government to protect me and my rights. Without government, I may claim some property, but someone may strong arm me out of it, or try to. I would then have to protect myself, and there's no guarantee that I would be successful. Rights are all social creations, the are all enforced and back up by the government, without which, you have on actual, practical rights (only rights in theory, which amounts to as much as an idea of food when I'm starving).
Property is not some innate thing, it is a human concept. There are well-known human societies which have functioned without libertarians conceptions of property, therefor property is
not some innate right as the author tries to make it out to be - it is a positive right, afforded to you by mutual agreement between your fellow man and yourself.
Land and tangible items are subject to becoming private property in this way because they are scarce.
The author tries to distinguish between property and intellectual property in this fashion, but this distinction doesn't hold water. Two people may be able to hold the same idea's and thoughts at the same time, but the
creator of those thoughts and idea's are certainly scarce. Not everyone is a Picasso, or a Bill Gates. The kind of scarcity talked about in the article is dealt with in standard IP laws which put a limit on the claim; because idea's are so transferable, and sharable, they should not be limited forever. Rather, the limitation is a way to give credit where credit is due, and to motivate people in such a way. Pretty much, I would say this is what is meant by the statement, "Greed is good," even though that statement is horrible to my ears. Are you now going to deny that greed is good?
or at least, creative people wouldn't produce "enough" of these types of works, whatever that means.
Lazy attempt at a counter-argument. Without copyrights, creative people wouldn't have the physical ability, due to having to work other jobs, not having money, etc, to produce their arts. True, their desire to create would not go away, but their
ability to would. Companies may
want to invest, but they may not have the capital
to do so.
After all, for most of history, there were no copyrights, but people still created great literature, art, and music.
Through out most of history, our economy wasn't a global economy, where, as the author points out earlier, someone halfway across the globe, whom you've never met, could very easily come into contact with your idea. When the market-place is more-or-less your city, or a small region around that city, it's possible to monitor things on your own, to call someone out for stealing your idea, and for people to know where the idea cam from originally. Not so today.
Suppose Shakespeare had lived in a world where copyright existed. As one writer put it, "his legal bills would have been staggering."[15] Shakespeare made a unique contribution to Western civilization by putting words together in a way that no human being had before or since, but he was not a pure original. He took many stories, characters, and ideas from other works by other people — which he wouldn't have been able to do if the creators of those previous works had possessed and enforced copyrights.
It would depend upon the level to which he took those character's, also the the level to which those authors didn't care. Dream Theater is often accused of taking other bands rifts, "tributes" as you will;" but they have never once gotten in any legal trouble. Authors often do the same in their works, it's called an allusion. Also, since IP rights expire, depending on how old the art is, you're free to take whatever you want. This specific argument doesn't acknowledge that aspect.
And what of copyright protection for Shakespeare's own plays? He authored 38 plays without any incentive or protection from copyright law, and he managed to prosper besides. It's difficult to see how copyright would have prompted him to create more.
.
Again, it's a completely different market-place. In the age of digital media, especially, this point becomes invalid. If he tried to make money in today's market, with
no copyright or protections, his product would be swamped, quickly, by exact duplicates, or given away for free on-line for ad money, none of which goes to the man himself.
One can imagine, though, that if copyright had existed in Shakespeare's day, he might have spent his some of his time and effort suing people who sold transcriptions of his plays or performed them without permission, and devoted less of his time to writing, and we would all be immeasurably poorer for it.
Lol. For starter's, he would've hired a lawyer to do those things for him; secondly, there is nothing in current law to prevent Shakespeare from letting other people perform his work. What would happen is he would be approached by someone, offering him money in return for the rights to perform the play. The author seems to be constantly assuming that everyone is going to be the utmost clingy to their product, when in fact that is only happening now due to excessive corporate and economical greed.
Writers today could make money without copyright even if they're not modern-day Shakespeares. Of course, even with copyright protection, most authors whose names are not Stephen King or J.K. Rowling don't make much money from book royalties. Instead, publishing a book gives an author prestige and opportunities to do other things. Publishing in academic journals (for no pay) creates opportunities to get teaching jobs. Publishing books for a popular audience (usually for low pay) may raise one's profile as an expert and create opportunities to give speeches or do other things for money.
It may not be a money-making endeavor, but the author again completely forgets to examine how the person is
able to publish books, to gain renown, to make the money that they
do make. At the very least, you must admit that the selling of books pays for their publishing, which allows for the publicity. I could also very easily argue that corporate greed funnels royalties away from the writer, thereby corrupting much of the logic behind a patent to begin with.
One reason we can be confident of this is because books by foreign authors did not receive copyright protection in the United States for most of the 19th century, yet the authors made money here anyway. A publisher would pay an author to be the first to receive a copy of the author's manuscript, which would allow the publisher to be first publisher to reach the market with the book.[16]
Again, modern marketplace and technologies. The advantage that first publisher had to the marketpalce would disapear with modern scanning, printing, and other technologies.
Two weeks after Norton's edition came out, St. Martin's released its own edition, with additional articles and analysis included, and it too became a bestseller.
Now, on the whole, I do think the author brings up some interesting points, but it is very biased in it's analysis. Perhaps big authors like J.K Rowling
would be around still, but what about the smaller authors? The ones who
don't make much money off selling their book? In a smaller market like that, even if you get 80% of the total profits (as exampled by the article), that may be too low to keep the operation profitable. But see, this is just saying that what I'm contending is true, only that it's small, so somehow that's okay. It would be like me saying it's fine for me to steal $1,000,000 from Bill Gates, because he would never notice it gone.
If you own a patent on a mechanical rice picker, that means you can stop other people from building a better rice picker that's based on yours. For a number of years, your potential competitors can't legally innovate and improve your product — or at least, if they do, they can't bring their innovation to market without your permission until the patent expires.
This actually brings up a good point, but such a problem is easily addressable within IP laws. Make the
improvement of someone else's IP shared property, 50/50, or 80/20, or can be argued as fair. Or we could make it all the new guys innovation. But if we shared it, that would incentivize people to not only innovate, but share their invention so that other people can improve upon it, and they would still get some guaranteed loyalties.
Patents:
The first person to implement an idea would still receive exclusive benefits for some period of time, because even without patents, it would take a while for the competition to figure out how to imitate the invention and catch up.
Varies a lot with the product, it's production, and what kind of innovation and patent we're talking about. Some patent idea's are very easy to replicate, and wouldn't take much retooling and changes. Also, again, the reduced profit gain could be enough to make a possible investment not worth the risk.
tl;dr
Topic: The government and job creation (Read 13785 times)
