Copyright and Patent Laws Hurt the Economy 597
Norsefire writes "Two economists at Washington University in St. Louis are claiming that copyright and patent laws are 'killing innovation' and 'hurting [the] economy.' Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine state they would like to see copyright law abolished completely as there are other protections available to the creators of 'intellectual property' (a term they describe as 'propaganda,' and of recent origin). They are calling on Congress to grant patents only where an invention has social value, where the patent would not stifle innovation, and where the absence of a patent would damage cost-effectiveness."
Re:Absurd! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:10 Years, not Infinity+ years (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Their book... (Score:3, Interesting)
Agreed. Somehow, not-copyrighting your inventions before they are actually manufactured (IP?) will protect against those awful corporations that can do anything with their money. Because that way, you, without any money, can eventually manufacture it and finally copyright it, while the corporation that could manufacture it in 2 months and start selling it sits idly back, scared of taking your uncopyrighted non-intellectual-property un-manufactured invention from you...
[/sarcasm, if you couldn't tell]
The situation isn't good, but goodness, if there weren't ANY copyrights on non-implemented ideas, the idea of private "inventors" would be over; corporations could be in the business of stealing (only it wouldn't be stealing) ideas. We'd end up back in the hide-your-plans-under-your-pillow-for-secrecy days I guess... whenever those days were, that is. :)
Re:Their book... (Score:1, Interesting)
Intellectual Property allows people to safely invest huge amounts of money into research and other areas where the return is not immediate.
Who is going to invest millions of dollars into cancer research if they knew all their work could be stolen when/if a cure came out?
Copyright definitely kills innovation (Score:5, Interesting)
The Whiskey Tango Foxtrot Moment came when I checked online to find out how much it would cost to subscribe to the journal. I thought someone misplaced a decimal point: $23,245 a year is the institutional subscription rate! That's about what I paid yearly in college tuition back when I was in college. Even worse, it's almost the value of the lab equipment I'm using in the work I've been doing on my own time.
Re:10 Years, not Infinity+ years (Score:3, Interesting)
Let's put that in perspective. I'm writing a sci-fi trilogy. I've written and edited the first part, written (but not edited) the second. If you set the copyright term to five years, the first part and half of the second would be out of copyright. None of it has been published yet.
It is important when considering copyright laws to consider the inherent difference in published and unpublished works. Unpublished works are the exclusive right of the creator until publication. If you set the copyright term to a short period of time, there must be an exemption for unpublished works, i.e. the copyright period must begin at publication. Otherwise, there would be no incentive to create larger works because the copyright would have expired before the works were in a publishable state.
This would also be useful is in the case of bands who perform works but do not make them available on CD. Those works would then remain protected until they were popular enough to profit off of those works.
I would prefer, were I creating a copyright scheme, to create one in which the term of copyright is unlimited until the date of publication, but upon publication, the term is 7 years, renewable up to three times at 7 years apiece (for a maximum of 28 years. The rate should be exponentially graduated to encourage authors to let low-profit works lapse. It should also expire automatically and become nonrenewable if a published work is not republished for any consecutive 10 year period during the copyright term.
Re:10 Years, not Infinity+ years (Score:5, Interesting)
No, I am suggesting an amount of time which would give someone a reasonable opportunity to exploit their own work however they see fit. Unlike you, I am not basing my suggestion on whether they have made "enough" money, I am basing it on the practicalities of exploiting creative work.
Apparently you regard the service of printing and distributing a book to be far more valuable than the service of actually creating the words which go into that book. You must love the phone book - it's totally free and has a huge number of excellently printed words in it.
Re:10 Years, not Infinity+ years (Score:3, Interesting)
I disagree. Too often it takes years just to take a patentable idea and turn it into a viable consumer product. A reasonable time would be at least 10 years, but probably not more than 20 years. I have nothing against patents. I have everything against patents for stupid and obvious ideas.
Now copyrights are another matter. A book or a piece of music is going to sell now or not at all. So 5 years is reasonable. I'm willing to compromise and go to 20 years. This forever minus a day is just bullshit.
There's a whole lot of classic blues and jazz music that should have fallen into the public domain but have not and are locked up by forever copyrights so we can't get to them. Even if they don't reduce the copyright period, at least put in a death clause so that if the copyright holder does not make it available for a certain period of time (say two years for the sake of argument) it automatically falls into the public domain. And no pulling bullshit tricks like making it available for $1,000,000 per track just to say they complied. It must be made available at industry standard prices, e.g. a buck a track.
Re:10 Years, not Infinity+ years (Score:3, Interesting)
Distribution is easier, but creating the works still takes time. That novel that you took a year to write should be protected for more than single digit years. I would argue that the copyright duration should be dependent upon the amount of risk the creator or creators had to take on in order to create the work. Thus, a photograph's copyright might last only five years because it takes a fairly short amount of time to create it and the risk is thus relatively low. A novel... twenty years. A movie... ten years.
You may be asking why a movie deserves less protection than a novel. Several reasons. First, having created both, I find that it's a lot harder to write a novel than to write a screenplay.
"EXT. BASEBALL STADIUM---NIGHT.
JACK throws the ball angrily to JILL. Slow-motion take as Jill swings and hits it out of the park."
versus
"And with that, Jack wound up for the pitch and furiously threw the ball towards her. Jill watched as the ball grew closer, closer, then swung. Crack! The pitch soared over the infield, across the outfield, past the fence, and out of the park."
So movie content is written in a format that is much, much easier to write and edit. Also, while a lot of time is spent by a lot of people, it is almost always bankrolled by a large corporation with a means to distribute broadly. A novel is almost always written by an individual author without any financial backing, and as such is a much greater financial risk as far as the individuals involved are concerned.
Works of music are harder to categorize because short works of popular music are relatively easy, while large works (I'm writing a mass right now) can take years to create.
I think the risk factor should be a consideration when determining length of copyright. Works created by a legal corporate entity and other works for hire should have the shortest duration because they have no risk for the individual creator and because the actual creator rarely sees any gain from longer durations. Works created by a group of individuals retaining copyright collectively should have a longer duration. Works created by a single individual should have the longest duration.
Don't ask me what a policy like that would actually look like in practice, though....
Re:10 Years, not Infinity+ years (Score:3, Interesting)
The "boogey man" of large corporations was mentioned in my earlier post because they are precisely the ones who would benefit in tangible financial terms.
Not really. The fact that it is all public domain means the RIAA would be competing with free and legal torrents, and they are already losing to illegal torrents.
For instance, people are likely to still buy physical books and other media, so even if they only cost a few bucks the companies with the means to manufacture and distribute those things will still make money.
The publisher is providing a service. The customer would be able get the book for free online, but they may not wish to use so much toner, paper, and time to put it all in a loose-leaf binder when a professionally bound book is so much cleaner, faster, and simpler. (think "White Fang" or "Gone with the Wind")
Same with the music stores: They won't be providing music, they will be providing better access to the music (professionally pressed discs, lossless formats, etc.)
Re:Absurd! (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe not, but the concept of intellectual "property" lasting forever is definitely a new thing.
Until recently, it seemed reasonable to expect that an innovator could hold a patent or copyright for his life. Now he's got great-grandchildren sucking off his decomposing teat. What's that do for encouraging creativity, Thad?
Re:10 Years, not Infinity+ years (Score:1, Interesting)
So if I write the next Da Vinci Code, get published, then die in a car crash the next day, my wife and kids shouldn't get anything? Any moron who works at a Kinko's should just be able crank out as many copies of my book as possible?
Use your head, FFS. Of course my spouse and kids should benefit from my work. They're a huge reason I work at all.
Re:10 Years, not Infinity+ years (Score:5, Interesting)
someone like that not receiving any royalties (even if they are dead, the royalties being left to whomever they willed it to or whatever) isn't fair.
I wonder, how many times does it have to be pointed out that the copyright clause isn't about "fair" or authors "getting their due"? It's right there in the bloody constitution. It's about being just enough enticement to encourage people to create these works in the first place so as to enrich the public domain to the maximum degree. If Emily-dang-Dickenson wrote 1800 poems without making money off but a few, then obviously the enticement was adequate.
Prizes for innovation (Score:4, Interesting)
The trouble is it is very hard to: "grant patents only where an invention has social value, where the patent would not stifle innovation, and where the absence of a patent would damage cost-effectiveness."
How can some average patent examiner do that consistently and reliably enough? The temptation after a while would be to just rubberstamp everything.
To me what they should do is to award Prizes for Innovation, much like Nobel Prizes. Most people's hindsight is better than their foresight.
To qualify for the prize, inventors have to register their inventions and pay a registration fee that goes to the prize pool.
You could have one category of prize being awarded by "Experts in the Field", and another category awarded by members of the public (somewhat similar to the Hugo and Nebula prizes, except maybe we could allow a wider participation for members of the public?). Multiple prizes per category would be awarded. Prizes could be awarded every year.
Inventors could win a prize for something they did years or even decades ago.
So even if you are 30 years ahead of everyone and/or your stuff only gets declassified decades later, you can still win a prize.
In contrast patents don't reward the inventors who are really far ahead of their time. They instead reward people who somehow manage to sneak "Method of making omelettes by using contents of eggs while excluding shells and detritus" past overworked patent examiners deluged by similar garbage.
Also, punitive actions could be taken against people who falsely claim they were the first to invent something - at least based on the patent registration database.
What the "Patent Office people" would then do is: try to reduce dupes (you can't prevent dupes 100% but at least reduce them), organize and manage the data so that it is not too hard for people to find candidates for nomination - for instance you don't want to have people keep nominating an invention that has already won! That said an invention that has already won, could qualify for a "top winners amongst winners category".
The patent office workers could also help authoritatively link registered inventions with actual products out in the market.
Re:10 Years, not Infinity+ years (Score:3, Interesting)
If content creators are creating content with only profit in mind, then we don't need their crappy content.
Less new content is not necessarily a bad thing - the end result is more time to contemplate that which has already been made, and a lot less profit for artistic industry (art is never something one should endeavor to industrialize).
I know we live in a "Ooh! Shiny! New!" culture, but have you ever considered that maybe that isn't entirely a good thing?
Re:The flip side of monopoly abuse (Score:4, Interesting)
There is no 'Capitalism'. There is classical Liberalism, and there are other 'systems' that depart from it in degree, some more than others.
Liberalism is more advantageous for everybody and benefits nobody in particular, while all systems we currently experiment today are attempts to favor certain groups while necessarily screwing everybody else in the process. Which is kind of why they're so popular today. :-)
They do have a point (Score:4, Interesting)
China, which is kind of like our Wild West(tm) right now, does whatever it wants. And it's going to completely leave us behind much as we did with Europe. Remember, Europe at the time had very restrictive guilds, laws, and regulations. The U.S. didn't. So we invented and invented. We built and didn't really care that much if it was someone else's idea.
Just like China now is doing.
And you wonder why they are going to put up their own space station modules next year and beat us to a habitat on the moon... We have to dismantle the idiocy or we'll never be able to move fast enough to keep up.
Honestly, if I was interested in space or technology or just making new things, I'd be making a beeline to China and doing it there without the millions of laws and tens of thousands of lawyers all suing everyone into oblivion over idiotic patents.
Re:Their site/blog (Score:2, Interesting)
I can't wait to see the slashdot coverage of the 99.999% of economists who don't share these lunatic views.
Oh wait... this site is all about bashing copyright. I almost forgot and mistook it for actual news.
Re:The flip side of monopoly abuse (Score:1, Interesting)
"Ok, I'll step into the flamewar."
Then have some balls and do it as AC. That may seem contradictory to some, but AC on /. means comments have to somehow come up on their own merit from 0 instead of the default view of 1 given to account holders.
"When I see Enron and AIG and all pretty much lying to investors' faces, deliberately abusing the notion of deregulation, and eventually destroying tens of thousands of peoples lives, homes, and savings, I don't sit down and think "damn regulations!".
And how many of those investors did you talk to? Part of being an investor is not going with the herd, but looking into the company's background. This is why the stock market often looks more like gambling, because it's has so much speculation from people who don't research and simply risk based on a good name (see Madoff).
Case in point--how many of those investors actually bought the stock one or two degrees from the purchaser? Not many. Most bought it through funds, managed stock groups, etc. Investors didn't do the work themselves, end of story, but they sure like to complain afterwards.
You also seem to like to pick and choose--you forget the $300 billion given to Freddie prior to AIG. Not a number heard too often in Democratic Congress land. It's easy for you to pick what the "liberal" media focuses on, because the media inherently does not work to produce material goods, so mental fabrication of stories are at the forefront of their minds--what does the reporter's personal views play into the story? To point, how often do you hear of a "good energy company" in the media? Or a good bank? They exist. The bad story takes precedent, because that is the nature of news. Most feel good stories are human interest ones (cop saves kitty in tree), not "look at that excellent company" (although you occasionally get them).
Freddie was regulated. Freddie catered to those who supposedly otherwise wouldn't be. Freddie contributed to the screwing we got. If you make $30,000 a year and bought a $500,000 home, you were stupid and deserved to get screwed.
If our government, made up from generally liberal voters given the recent elections, doesn't get flack for putting money in the hands of criminals, who the hell are we to complain after the fact that stimilus funds, TARP, and other bailout money isn't used properly? WE GAVE IT TO THEM. AIG screwed us you say? Then why did you give them MORE OF THE SAME?
Government cannot regulate the businesses if the government themselves is and has been giving money to the business without strings.
Further, something you don't seem to understand, the handouts are CONTINUING because everyone is on the government bailout ticket. The poor want money. The rich want money. The middle class want money. Bail out the middle class, help the rich, help the poor...
And you think the answer lies in government regulation when the government cannot regulate itself? The government of the people, by the people, the people who you complain cannot regulate themselves?
Maybe circular to you, but it makes a perfect explanation why we are in this mess and why we are unlikely to get out of it because of the "liberals." Hell, most of the stabilization coming from the economy are from industries liberals badmouth, want to rework, and complain about--farming (don't kid yourselves, see Obama's plans) and energy.