A World Without Intellectual Property

Such an esteemed organization should refrain from using false statements to support its stance: <i>Movie makers receive most of their revenues from motion-picture theatres, not DVD sales.</i><p>is contradicted by: <a href="http://www.allbusiness.com/north-america/united-states-california-metro-areas/525001-1.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.allbusiness.com/north-america/united-states-calif...</a> titled: Digital Verite: studios see more money in DVDs than theaters.<p>And then the article says:<p><pre><code> Spend a few dollars, get a dozen good songs in your possession, or Spend the next four hours on the Web trying to find those songs performed by some obscure local artists. The answer is obvious. </code></pre> The answer isn't so obvious. First, you don't get 12 good songs, you get one good song and 11 lousy ones. And yes, most would rather go home and type in the lyrics they heard to figure out what the song and artist is, or simply do without than pay $20 to get one good track.<p>This is also not exactly correct: <i>For-profit entrepreneurs are able to take a piece of shareware, add useful features, and sell copies with tech support.</i><p>And again, a hopeful naivety: <i>Even though you would have the right to call your product Cheerios, grocery stores may refuse to carry your product.</i> Does Mises really think stores care about the consumer? They care about selling stuff. If consumers buy it because it says Cherrios on it, then they'll sell it. Why do grocery stores make their generic brands look so much like the name brands? Because when it has the same color logos and the pills are the same colors and the words look the same, the store makes more profit selling the generics.<p>Overall, poor showing by Mises on this one.<p>This article makes sense only if you side with the consumer.<p>In any society, one must ask, who do we want more of? What do we want more of? Personally, I want more content to consume and I want higher quality content at that.<p>So, to get more of that, we have to reward the producers of content. If we reward the consumers of content, we'll get more consumers. Do we want more consumers?<p>More consumers has led to a consumer society in which we are consuming more than we are producing. The American culture is in decline, because we aren't producing anything the world wants. We need to reward producers more and punish consumers so that Americans will produce more and consume less and rebuild our nation to its previous glory.<p>And this goes for everyone. We have to reward those who produce OSS <i>and</i> proprietary/commercial software. We need to reward the producers of movies and music -- not just the distributors -- the bands. The artists. The actors. The designers. Not just the big studios.<p>We need to reward the writers. The programmers, the creators. Not just the factories.<p>And we definitely don't need to be enabling the consumer to consume even more and destroy the planet even more.

The whole article seems to be very confused. Especially the section about software has several flaws that leave the impression that the author doesn't have a very deep knowledge on that topic. (The other sections sound more plausible, but I can't judge them because I'm neither an inventor nor a musician nor ...)<p>Given that predicting the future is almost impossible even for highly specialized experts in their area, it is hard to believe that broad predictions based on sciolism are of any value.<p><i>&#62; They might engineer the software to work only with permission from the software firm, requiring the consumer to pay for it.</i><p>This is true, but is missing another trend that is more important: Software as a service. Any company providing a paid web service doesn't need to cripple their software with copy protection anymore. Instead, they control the computers on which is software is running.<p>Missing that option in the article is especially odd because it is the only business model that could work absolutely unchanged if there was no copyright (which was the premise of the article).<p><i>&#62; A third option [...] is the open-source freeware/shareware model</i><p>What's "the" business model of open source, freeware and shareware? The term "open source" alone comprises lots of different models (dual-licensing, selling "just" service, etc) which are again different from the freeware model and the shareware model.<p><i>&#62; or software written by volunteers/hobbyists and made freely available without difficult licensing restrictions.</i><p>Here, "no difficult licensing restrictions" is presented in contrast with e.g. "open source" of the enumeration above.<p>However, it is in fact part of it, for two reasons: First, there is a big movement within the open source scene that exists to minimize the license terms (BSD-style licenses, public domain, etc). Second, software without restrictions fulfills the definition of free software as it obviously permits all 4 essential freedoms.<p><i>&#62; For-profit entrepreneurs are able to take a piece of shareware, add useful features, and sell copies with tech support.</i><p>Adding useful features to a shareware is quite hard if you don't have the sources, and it's almost never worth the trouble of disassembling and reverse engineering the software.<p>Withholding the sources is an important component of the shareware model, at least currently, and that is unlikely to change should the copyright be disestablished.

I recently got into a very lengthy argument with a friend of mine about this very issue. I argued that because sharing content is becoming so easy, the ability to protect copyrights and patents will disappear, and at some point we (or the next generation) will decide that it's in the better interest of society to embrace free sharing of ideas and reject the concept of owning information.<p>There's no doubt that a lot of people will lose jobs over it, and current industries and businesses as we know them will cease to exist, but that doesn't mean the music will stop. If anything, it will remove the people who are creating content just for the money and increase the overall quality of all content, media, and information.<p>It's going to happen, there's no question about this. It's just amusing to watch people desperately hold onto the old ways. I imagine this is quite like the transition into the industrial age was; fascinating to watch and be a part of.

Not sure about this. To analyze the future of so many industries without IP law in a few sentences is asking for a bunch of angry comments. Take Movies, for example: I'm pretty sure I won't be going to movie theaters nearly as often if I could just stream HD to my gorgeous TV.<p>Software is also controversial. Google works by <i>hiding</i> their code in the datacenters, you can't just copy it. Microsoft works by compiling their code into binaries, and the only workable model for OSS has been support, which isn't very sexy/scalable business model.

From the article:<p><pre><code> There are many good reasons to completely repeal patents and copyright laws: they are too complex to be understood or obeyed by anybody except a highly trained Intellectual Property (IP) attorney[...] </code></pre> Some parts of copyright law, that most people won't ever come anywhere near having to deal with, are complex. The 99.99% that covers what most people do is pretty easy to understand: if you didn't create that song or movie you just copied, don't give away the copy, and don't take copies from people who are not obeying this rule.<p><pre><code> Musicians could still get paid, even without copyright. They would still be able to sell concert tickets, even if they did not make a thin dime from CDs and MP3 downloads. </code></pre> What about musicians whose music does not work well in concert? What about bands like Pink Floyd whose stage shows lost money--they relied on album sales for their money. What about songwriters?<p><pre><code> Of course, people would still buy CDs, even with unrestricted file sharing networks in place. If you hear a CD being played in a store, and you like it, what are you going to do: Spend a few dollars, get a dozen good songs in your possession, or Spend the next four hours on the Web trying to find those songs performed by some obscure local artists. The answer is obvious. </code></pre> There are two fatal flaws with that argument.<p>1. It's not going to take four hours on the web. Right now, it might take four hours on the web to find the songs, because we have IP laws so that sites that want to offer the songs have to operate outside the law. That necessarily causes there to be some difficulty in finding and using them.<p>In the proposed IP-free world of the article, that barrier goes away. Finding the songs on the web will take minutes, not hours.<p>2. Yes, some people will still prefer a CD--even if they can find the songs on the web in minutes, and they will prefer to buy a CD rather than burn their own from downloads. Even if that is a significant number of people, will those people buy CDs <i>from</i> <i>the</i> <i>artist</i>? In the article's IP-free world, anyone can make and sell CDs. You'd be able to go down to your local CD store and find a third party copy of the "official" CD, complete with all the artwork, liner notes, etc., for cheaper than the official CD.

There are two factors that I think come into play in any discussion about dumping IP protections. I don't think treating everything as a trade secret is really that viable of an option; there are too many ways to reverse engineer things.<p>First, what will happen to industries that require significant investments before any return can be realized? Software does not fit in this category any more (perhaps it did at one time), but biotech, green, and space certainly do. If you need to dump $200M to get something <i>right</i>, then somebody else can come reproduce it for $10M in reverse engineering, your screwed. Who would invest in that space?<p>Second, would people <i>really</i> pay for "shareware" content? Would they pay enough to keep good authors writing books, good film makers making movies, and good musicians making music? Sure, there are a lot of crappy people in those categories getting paid today, but there are also a <i>lot</i> of really good artists getting paid today. If payment was optional (and with no IP protection, payment <i>is</i> optional), how many people would pay?<p>The first actually bothers me more than the second. I bet JJ Abrams could get enough donations before making a film to make it worth his while, so, while the arts would change, it would probably be OK in the end (after some painful times for all, including consumers). I'm not so sure that SpaceX could get enough donations (that is, after all what they might be) to build a space program.

The one thing I feel people often forget is that the idea of a patent (i.e. a government mechanism for providing an incentive for inventors to share innovations with the rest of the world) is a good one.<p>I think that the existing implementation of the idea and where it has lead has numerous problems, but the fact of the matter is that it is beneficial for a society to have mechanisms like patents in place.<p>The article argues that things would still be done, which is true, but in the case of inventions, the problem is that they wouldn't be shared and companies would probably work hard to obscure any innovations that they did make to make it harder for competitors to copy them.<p>The argument for getting rid of trademarks is also kinda weak. The end user should be able to easily understand what it is they are buying. You shouldn't have to worry that some sneaky guy is selling cow manure in a box and calling it cheerios.<p>Beyond that, the point that removing IP restrictions everywhere else would only have a positive effect is something that I tend to agree with.

For a rather more in-depth argument, the Mises Institute also published this 70-page book/essay: <a href="http://mises.org/store/Against-Intellectual-Property-P523.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://mises.org/store/Against-Intellectual-Property-P523.as...</a> (PDF: <a href="http://mises.org/books/against.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://mises.org/books/against.pdf</a>)

If you're truly interested in this question, you should read Against Intellectual Monopoly, available for purchase here[0] and reading for free online here[1]. It's written by two professors from Cambridge? It's the most thorough discussion of intellectual property law I've ever read.<p>0: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Against-Intellectual-Monopoly-Michele-Boldrin/dp/0521879280" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Against-Intellectual-Monopoly-Michele-...</a><p>1: <a href="http://www.micheleboldrin.com/research/aim.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.micheleboldrin.com/research/aim.html</a>

The author conveniently forgets the farmaceutic industry. There, billions need to be invested to find a drug and thoroughly document it's effects and how to make it. The production cost of the drug is only a fraction of the research. This would lead to a very big decrease in the number of new drugs appearing

I just don't understand the gall of people who want to take what isn't theirs to take. There's plenty of copyright-free work/art they could make do with, but for some reason they're not content with that.

We have rights to our work, that is clear. the nature of our existence requires it.<p>you must be able to keep others from taking the results of your efforts. If, for example, you could not improve a piece of property and keep the benefits for yourself, our modern society or even a primitive agricultural one would not be possible.<p>Our work takes many forms and so does the nature of rights associated with it. But one thing is clear. If people will not do a kind of work we value without having their rights to the results protected, than it is necessary to do so.<p>But we should not hand out rights if "we" aren't getting something of real value in return.<p>One problem is that "we" the people have far too little say about how our interests are defined and promoted by the lobbyists who have the most influence over what government does. The collective right to make such deals with innovators has been captured by private interests.