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Against Intellectual Property

by N. Stephan Kinsella

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Reading for the 2nd time

read in August 2011

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Friendlysort said: " Kinsella's position is simplistic: throw the baby out with the dishwater! Let's go back to craftsmanship, "Learn a trade", darn it! But, wait, the modern crafts are the sciences. Kinsella says: "Kill the growth and increasing employment in all fields Kinsella's position is simplistic: throw the baby out with the dishwater! Let's go back to craftsmanship, "Learn a trade", darn it! But, wait, the modern crafts are the sciences. Kinsella says: "Kill the growth and increasing employment in all fields of science, basic research, applied research, development, and the increasingly important trade in REAL INNOVATIONS that cannot be folded into a product or service, carried around in trucks, and sold in a cardboard box." Kinsella and others seem to agree that (a) governments serve special interests and not the public, (b) intellectual property rights are and will be issued to perpetuate undeserved monopolies on "innovations" that are not innovations of a significance that could serve the interest of everyman by their very achievement. Kinsella would doom our Edisons to lives of subservience to Wall Street .. please Sir, can I have a nickel to change the world with my light bulb? How about another nickel to prevent cancer? Of course, in Kinsella's world, all of us may worship his God and read by candlelight in our communal mud and dirt huts, till our fields together, "live off the land" so to speak, and we will be better off by this return to the simple lives of yesteryear infers Kinsella - but return to which year? The 1300's? The 1700's? So, this book is a great waste of time issued by an author pushing an unstated agenda. Kinsella fails to address the true problem: how can everyman control government and minimize the agency problem associated with the existence and actions of government, which usually amounts to imposing additional indirect taxes on the lives, liberties, and financial resources of the governed? Maybe Kinsella can come up with one solution for that real, underlying problem and get a patent on it. Just not in Kinsella's world view.

I offer a far better solution to the problems hinted at by Kinsella:

1. Improvements in goods and services merit very little protection - copying is efficient for everyone except the innovator, right? Hence, provide a market in rights to copy - just pay to copy. Trade rights to copy in the marketplace and harshly penalize copying without purchasing the right to make copies. This works for smartphones and software and movies too. Essentially, this is modern copyright protection, but with an important different - it stops short of issuing a private right to exclude unless knowing failure to purchase the right to make copies, plus policing costs, is proved. So, a market for rights to copy solves many problems. The protections for product development and "software wrench work" should be far, far lower than the protections available for cold fusion energy creation, preventing cancer, or "beam me up Scottie" technology, because the market for goods and services can price in the value of mundane innovations or changes in products and software, but thus far markets cannot efficiently price basic innovations achieved through complex, lengthy, and expensive trial and error research.

2. What about protecting, pricing and thus promoting expensive, risky, lengthy basic research in cold fusion energy creation, preventing cancer, or "beam me up Scottie" technology, where the market for goods and services cannot conceive of new innovations 5 or 10 years in the future? Government needs to help create liquidity with much stronger patent rights.

How about this solution, instead: 1. Recognize that issuing 20 year patents to make use and sell claimed inventions is a "shotgun approach", 2. Reduce government role by going to a market mechanism to price the protection for most innovations (buy 5 years of royalties or no-competition in a trading marketplace, according to what you want today), 3. Make government issued rights available as a backstop mechanism to promote some long-run basic research that markets are not good at pricing, perhaps because the innovations are directed to mental processes, law, making weapons that are commonly owned, eliminating trade in weapons, reducing famine, etc. I suggest creating an integrated intellectual property system that eliminates ALL trade secrets, without exception, and requires participants to (a) disclose R&D and know-how, and (b) purchase intellectual property protection in a trading marketplace, by the month or year, (c) where the protections provide participants the right to demand royalties for any use of information created by them and disclosed to the public. No more monopoly rights, but no more trade secrets either. Trade secrets are monopolies and often are not in the public interest. If you hold trade secrets, you owe a big, fat penalty, for withholding potentially useful information from the public. Disclosure is compulsory, because it allows the public to avoid wasting resources on R&D that is already known to not work. Such a system would increase efficiency in allocation of capital, resources and skilled labor, and would establish market prices for the increasingly different financial investments, time, and expertise needed to perform basic research, applied research, from mundane product development and, for lack of a better term "software mechanics programming" - the work of many modern day software programmers doing software wrench work. Basically, protections for product development and "software wrench work" should be far, far lower (just prevent outright theft and blatant copying without some compensation) than the protections available for cold fusion energy creation, preventing cancer, or "beam me up Scottie" technology, because the market for goods and services can price in the value of the mundane innovations in products and software. ...more "

Aug 30, 2011 09:28AM · see review