Posts Tagged ‘ intellectual property ’

"Economic historians have usually assumed a direct link between patents and innovation, basing much of their chronicle of history on records at the Patent Office. Much of what we think we know -- that Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, that the Wright Brothers were first in flight, that Thomas Edison holds the record for inventions because he has the most patents -- comes from these records. But is it true?" (05/10/13)

"Myriad is a company that holds patents on genes (BRCA1 and BRCA2) that correlate for a significantly increased risk of breast and ovarian cancer. Myriad claims that they can permissibly patent the 'isolated' BRCA genes because they are the product of their own investment and research. By isolating the genes, Myriad claims they are creating something new out of something natural -- like carving a baseball bat from a branch. Critics point out that a more accurate analogy is that Myriad has created a mode of discovery (like a telescope) and used the discovery method to patent the thing in nature that it has discovered (as if Galileo had tried to patent Jupiter)." (04/16/13)

"We certainly can’t get very far in a debate about property without first coming to an agreement on what qualifies as property. The general Austrian economic view of property rights is a system for defining ownership over scarce resources. All resources are scarce, and individuals make decisions in using those resources based on their preferences. This is the foundation of Austrian economics. As Austrians, Wenzel and Kinsella agree on this. The disagreement arises from Kinsella’s claim that ideas -- and here we are really talking about the expression of ideas as formulas, patterns, etc -- are not scarce resources and therefore cannot be considered property." [hat tip -- Stephan Kinsella] (04/12/13)

"A book or a painting is a physical object -- but where is a song? Is it notes on paper that tell you how to sing it? Is it a live performance? Is it the recorded notes? Is a singer singing someone else's song copying that song, or is she making a new artistic work? Turning music into property is, in other words, conceptually complicated -- which is why, Cummings, suggests, struggles over intellectual property have often started, or been worked out first, in struggles over ownership of music. The fact that music is widely seen as 'intellectual property' is itself a product of that struggle." (04/09/13)

"he essential logic of feud is simple: If you wrong me, I threaten to hurt you unless you compensate me for the wrong. It is a decentralized form of law enforcement. In order for it to work, it requires some mechanism that makes my threat of hurting you substantially more believable when you actually have wronged me than when you have not, in order to prevent the enforcement mechanism from being used instead for extortion. To put it differently, you need some mechanism such that right makes might." (04/02/13)

"Intellectual property is one of the cornerstones of modern civilization. But there are lots of people amongst us, including a sizeable percentage of libertarians it seems, who sincerely believe that once your valuable intellectual property -- your product or discovery -- is revealed to the public it becomes fair game for intellectual trolls, none of whom contributed or risked anything whatsoever into the process of creation and discovery of your works, to simply take it, copy it, manufacture it, and market it entirely for themselves and for their own profits without compensating you a nickel. These 'libertarians' argue incredulously, on the pages of RRND no less, that intellectual property protection is incompatible with liberty and freedom." (03/31/13)

"IP and libertarianism are politically incompatible because of the incredible policing of individuals that is necessary to monitor the 'crime' of sharing ideas and expression. The policing would be necessary whether or not the copyright was contractual or state-enforced. If nothing else, the immense flow of information over the Internet means that more invasive methods are being and will be used in the name of IP protection." (03/20/13)

"The assumption in the criticism of patent trolls is that so long as you use a patent that covers one of your products, against your competitors, this is okay. But why? This is even worse than what patent trolls do. Patent trolls just want a small fee. They want to 'wet their beak,' like a mafia guy. They don’t want to kill the businesses they are trying to parasite off of. By contrast, Apple would love to get injunctions against and totally demolish any competitor making a smart phone 'too similar' to their own product." (03/01/13)

"Antigua recently made headlines by threatening to set up a web site offering pirated U.S. products. But this is not some modern-day, government-run file-sharing service like Napster. Antigua is attempting to enforce a successful legal complaint brought against the United States at the World Trade Organization (WTO), related to a U.S. ban on foreign online-gambling websites." (02/22/13)

"There is no denying that patent trolls -- or 'non-practicing entities,' companies that assert patents that do not cover any products they sell -- impose large costs on the economy. ... But as bad as trolls are, they are not as bad as 'practicing entities' -- companies whose patents do cover their products. ... You see, patent trolls don’t want to stop competition, unlike, say, Apple in the smartphone wars trying to quash Samsung’s competing products. They only want to 'take a taste,' as mafioso might say, or 'wet their beak' a little." (02/02/13)

"Shakespeare wrote without copyright protection. George Bernard Shaw, no mean creator of content himself, famously observed 'the cry for copyright is the cry of men who are not satisfied with being paid for their work once, but insist upon being paid twice, thrice, and a dozen times over.' One need not look farther than the 20th Century to find examples." (01/22/13)

"If property rights and normal competition were applied in the fields of culture and knowledge, there would be no such thing as the copyright monopoly whatsoever. It would be like any other field of entrepreneurship. Compare it, for example, with how a professional chef needs to create new recipes and then can monetize them either by performing, by educating others, or by selling cookbooks, just to name a few methods. I use chefs as example on purpose here, as food recipes are explicitly not covered by the copyright monopoly -- and yet, there are many cooks, chefs, and famous star chefs." [hat tip -- Stephan Kinsella] (12/16/12)

"Arguments for IP are notoriously confused, hypocritical, inconsistent, incoherent, vapid, and all over the map. A recurring error is the correlation-equals-causation fallacy. For example: postwar Japan prospered because it had a patent system; countries with the most IP are the most prosperous; America’s prosperity and growth since its inception is due to its patent and copyright systems." (12/15/12)