More on people missing the point on copyrights and patents... It's an incentive, right? So let's see how that works. Suppose you're a potential author/inventor. You are considering taking time off your job to write a novel, or tinker full time on that funny-looking scooter in your garage.
Now suppose this could go on in any of four hypothetical worlds. In the "information wants to be free" world, the minute you show your book or your toy to someone else, they can run out and sell your book without a dime to you, or manufacture an identical scooter. At this point, unless you're really invested, you're just going to give up.
Now suppose you have 5 years of exclusivity, in the "as short as possible" world. That might just be long enough for you to make the cash to justify your year off. So you'll go for it. But what about Giant PharmaCo? They want to make a new drug that will cost them about $1 billion to develop. They figure they can make about $400 million in revenue per year, of which $100 million is profit. If they can only go for five years, they make back only half of their original investment. Clearly that's a losing proposition.
So suppose the term is extended to 20 years, in what I call "a period long enough to sound right in my contrived example" world. Now you, the individual creator, are doing quite nicely. And Giant PharmaCo makes quite the tidy profit off their new drug, so that 20 years later, when it falls into the public domain, they're well recompensed for their investment.
Finally, there's the "intellectual property is just like any other property," wherein there's no expiration, or at least no effective expiration (a work created today has life of author + 70 years of copyright protection, which is easily a century in the general case, at which point I'll be long dead, so it benefits me not at all). Given the trajectory that most works follow, namely, the majority of their profit comes in the decade or two after initial publication, the extra 80 years of profit doesn't really affect anything. Furthermore, profit made 25 years from now is pretty unlikely to affect your decision to invent now. If your work does well, you'll have more than enough money from the 20 years. If your work does poorly, it's not going to make a difference whether you own copyright on it for a year or a century. Very few will fall between those two extremes. So as an incentive to me, the individual inventor, there's very little difference between a term of 20 years and a term of 100 years. And as it states in the Constitution (as quoted previously), this is "to promote ... progress." If it doesn't make a substantive difference to me as an inventor to extend my term 80 years, then it's not promoting progress, and so shouldn't be that way. Corporate interests might feel differently, but the whole point of copyright was to protect the weak from the strong by preventing the latter from stealing the ideas of the former.
I realize I'm mixing copyright and patents, but to an extent, they can be treated the same way in an example such as this.
¶ 288 Posted at 02.23 PM ⇒ No Comments ( ideas | copyright )