A parallel that was not mentioned has to do with intellectual property. In the 19th century the US did not respect foreign copyrights or patents; smuggled British machinery was cloned to produce the American industrial revolution, and Charles Dickens was the most popular author in the US but he didn't get a dime from American publishers, who could just take and print his works.
Likewise the Chinese often ignore foreign copyrights and patents, though not as much as the US did back then.
So what it sounds like is copyright stifles societal growth to ensure the originator gets his rent? Copyright is more than paying "fair share," the enforcement apparatus puts a large opportunity cost which is ordinarily unaccounted for. I am less likely to innovate and iterate if I have to navigate patents and copyright compliance, as all of that is administrative cost and the legal risks are well and above R&D costs. I argue it creates an environment of not bothering, when one has to tip-toe on egg shells to avoid massive liabilities in suits coming out of nowhere from trolls and such.
If I built a binary Linux distro, you know damn well ZFS will be in the kernel, it will be hosted on only .onion and .i2p, and all Linux Foundation and Oracle Corp C&D emails will be published with sensibly witty lampooning comments.
It sounds like one party is getting all the advantage of a piece of IP without having to make any investment in it's generation, which is a competitive advantage.
That's the idea behind patents. You get a period of what is essentially monopoly license in exchange for the idea being made available to the public. The issue with copyright is that it lasts far too long now compared to the original length (14 years in the US), which throws off the balance.
> So what it sounds like is copyright stifles societal growth to ensure the originator gets his rent?
Even this feeble pitch would hold a lot more weight if companies either couldn't own copyright or couldn't purchase the copyright. As it is it's more like a corrupt rent-extraction scheme with government backing.
> If you’re ignoring copyright and IP rights while catching up? That’s just freeloading, you need someone to pay for all the research/innovation.
This is not true. Everyone, everywhere, who created any thing ever, built it on the backs of [millennia of] previous creators.
History teaches us that innovation flows in the absence of restrictions - including rent-seeking. Conversely, modern history teaches us that IP gets in the way everywhere it can.
Innovation and progress happened at a snail’s pace (by modern standards) before IP rights (at least rudimentary) became a thing. Not saying there was a causal relationship necessarily but if we look at some of the most important inventions like the steam engine it’s unlikely that it could have been invented and perfected at the time it was without patents.
It’s rather [extremely] simple and obvious , generally R&D requires significant investment. If you can’t get any return on your investment, you won’t invest.
Of course there needs to be a balance to minimize rent seeking beyond a certain point.
From what I understand, it was possible to build fantastic steam engines only after the patents expired. Before everyone was sitting on pats of it unwilling to cooperate like stubborn children.
Charles Dickens writes a book. Everyone copies and sells it without permission. Charles Dickens starves. Charles Dickens either becomes a factory worker or dies. No more Charles Dickens books.
The first publisher to get a hold of one would have a massive advantage.
Publisher pays Charles Dickens to only provide his newest work to them. Many publishers want this privilege, there is a bidding war.
Publisher sells millions in the first week, eventually other publishers get in on the action but it takes time to typeset, print and ship the books. The book is the talk of the town, consumers want one now.
Publishing house doesn't make outsized profits years after the authors death and instead has to compete on the quailty of its publishing in the free market.
Rent seeker has to get a factory job or dies. The market is brimming with high quailty editions of each authors work available to everyone at a price point they can afford.
That’s not how it worked back in the 1800s, that’s not even how it works now.
In any case Charles Dickens would have earned less than he did and a larger proportion of surplus would have went to printers and publishers. How is that in any way a positive thing?
And of course without physical distribution your “business” model is even more absurd (being very absurd to begin with).
I’m not sure if you are aware (presumably not) but that’s how publishing worked in the 1500s. Cervantes got a lump sum for the Don Quixote (and his other books) and he was never able to sustain himself by writing and a had to have a daytime job.
His books were (relatively) extremely popular at the time and no publishers outside of Spain paid him anything. It seems rather absurd that even someone like him could never make a comfortable living by writing?
> Rent seeker has to get a factory job or dies
These bizarrely unhinged anti IP takes are truly something else..
I mean sure the “fair” duration of copyright is up for discussion, author’s life + 70 years is probably excessive.
> Why does that level of effort entitle someone to a "comfortable living"?
Because people enjoyed his books and were willing to pay for them? (But all the profits when to the printers in Belgium etc)
> That's on the order of a few words a day.
That irrelevant. It’s about the value/utility you provide and not the amount of labor.
Also you(or me) really have no clue how many words he wrote per day even if that were relevant. Maybe he wrote a dozen drafts for each book which he discarded, how would that change anything?
I mean… if you wrote down 500 words per day would you believe that you deserve to be paid more for that than Cervantes for e.g. 0.01 of his words?
> Shakespeare
Ran a theater (together with his partners) i.e. he was both the writer and the publisher.
His final theater troupe was sponsored directly by the King (previous one by the Lord Chamberlain) and had a royal patent and operated in a heavily regulated market. So surely not a very good example?
Or is patronage and a system heavily regulated by the government preferable to legal copyright? Because that the only realistic alternative besides having no content.
> entitle
What entitles you to the content of your bank account or retirement savings? Maybe even your house? What kind of a question was that even? (I don’t really get it)
The talking point is always focused on rewarding those who did the work but that I have to pay to enforce the scheme and the cost of going without if we don't get permission is also not important at all.
Funny as hell to pay so that it can be assured I don't get to use something.
I think we should find ways to at least judge some technology valuable enough to buy it into the public ___domain at sensible but non-negotiable rates.
America's economic strength doesn't rely on something as easily copyable as intellectual property.
Look at SpaceX. What they had perfected isn't going to be easily available in patents, homeworks for other people to copy, especially the Chinese. What they are willing to do is what other companies and organizations aren't willing to do. When SpaceX steadily made progress, people kept dismissing them until it's too late and now SpaceX is pushing ahead anyway.
It's a form of false strength, and there had been discussion about how detrimental patent laws are to innovations.
My grandfather filed patents on his method of forming large halide crystals. However, all attempts to duplicate his process have failed to produce those crystals, and he's long dead.
He apparently wished to both protect his process and keep it secret.
It seems like the usual status quo power and revisionist power conflict: [0]
In every political system, the existing rules are created to preserve the existing status quo. Where do those rules come from? There is chaos and war (not necessarily kinetic; there are trade wars too), the war ends with a political settlement which satisfies enough participants to create stability (as all wars must end; otherwise people keep fighting), and the signatories to peace create rules to maintain their desired outcome.
Later a power arises for whom that peace isn't desireable. They are the revisionist power and want a change. Intellectual property rights are desireable for those who have a lot of intellectual property, the status quo IP powers. New powers might not have IP and don't find IP rights to be desireable.
If the revisionist power is strong enough, then either the status quo powers accomodate them - perhaps a controlled IP transfer program for developing countries, in return for strong IP laws or openness to foreign investment within those countries - or there's war (again, not necessarily kinetic war - maybe lots of hacking and IP theft, for example).
[0] "International relations analysts often differentiate between status-quo and revisionist states. Revisionist states favor modifications to the prevailing order: its rules and norms, its distribution of goods or benefits, its implicit structure or hierarchy, its social rankings that afford status or recognition, its division of territory among sovereign entities, and more."
I'll try to keep my sentences shorter for you. :-)
It's not that 'wars must end, otherwise they keep fighting', but that there is 'a political settlement which satisfies enough participants to create stability ... otherwise they keep fighting'. [0]
I will stipulate that the sentence could have parsed more clearly. :-(
[0] It's just Clausewitz, effectively: Warfare is politics conducted by other means.
In 2000, Bo McCoy and Ron McCoy organized a joint family reunion of the Hatfield and McCoy that garnered national attention. More than 5,000 people attended.
What does that mean? Aren't there endless examples of peace? Unless you just say all conflict is part of a great universal conflict, which you'll have to give us some evidence for.
I'd say either both are equally natural (hard to believe when you've been conditioned in a mostly competitive environment) or cooperation is actually more common (it's just that you consciously register the competitive).
It’s very successful in areas where software is a “cost center” (i.e. allows companies to use it reduce the cost of developing (semi)proprietary software)and not the end product. Everywhere else it’s mixed or a failure (e.g. video games).
Well… by Western standards the patent on silk (tea is probably no even applicable) would have expired a couple of thousand year prior to the 1800s. Nobody is arguing in favor of perpetual patents..
Edit: the Romans first “stole” silk in the 500s, but still
To be fair it’s not like the Chinese were unwilling to buy western goods (not just opium) it’s just that the ultra mercantilist Qing government didn’t allow them to..
One reason I'm always skeptical of the IP moralists. IP is not property. If it was it wouldnt need the classifier. It's really just a rent seeking mechanism
IP law is more analogous to zoning in that it fixes the supply of land that can be used for a particular purpose.
I know everyone gets a stupid stick up their ass over property ownership and "rent seeking" but property ownership is just ownership of "something". You can rent seek any investment. The whole point of much every professional license is that we all agree to let these people "rent seek" because they've proved they don't suck at the subject.
Yeah some people don't get that "property" is just as much a constructed concept as everything else is. It is an agreement/contract between people that is enforced by other people (e.g. the government).
Owning a home might seem more "real" than owning some IP, but it is just an agreement, and without a proper enforcement, anybody could enter and live in your house (which is what actually happens with squatters in some European countries where you're not allowed to kick them out by yourself and police don't care).
So property rights were never "real" (inherently) — they only become real when somebody kicks your ass for violating them. That's the only real thing about it.
The guy who developed the textile industry in the US memorized the drawings for the machinery before immigrating to the US. There was nothing for the export customs people to find.
Likewise the Chinese often ignore foreign copyrights and patents, though not as much as the US did back then.