Intelluctual Property should't be?

It basically makes the case that freely benefitting from someone else's intellectual property rights is often the best way to form a free and creative society. A topic which has very important ramifications not only to Sindome, but to business models and open communities everywhere.

Here's the abstract:
Courts and scholars have increasingly assumed that intellectual property is a form of property, and have applied the economic insights of Harold Demsetz and other property theorists to condemn the use of intellectual property by others as "free riding." In this article, I argue that this represents a fundamental misapplication of the economic theory of property. The economics of property is concerned with internalizing negative externalities - harms that one person's use of land does to another's interest to it, as in the familiar tragedy of the commons. But the externalities in intellectual property are positive, not negative, and property theory offers little or no justification for internalizing positive externalities. Indeed, doing so is at odds with the logic and functioning of the market. From this core insight, I proceed to explain why free riding is desirable in intellectual property cases except in limited circumstances where curbing it is necessary to encourage creativity. I explain why economic theory demonstrates that too much protection is just as bad as not enough protection, and therefore why intellectual property law must search for balance, not free riders. Finally, I consider whether we would be better served by another metaphor than the misused notion of intellectual property as a form of tangible property.

-Kevlar

In layman's terms: Information wants to be free.

Better?

*mumbles something about tools with no purpose*

-Kevlar

Kind of ironic seeing as we seem to be moving towards a society where information is power.

Ironic how?

Information has ALWAYS been power. The only thing that's changed in the past few years is the ease of which it's obtained and distributed. It used to be that the average citizen didn't have immideate access to an entire library of knoledge, a panel of experts, and a ocean of opinions at a moments notice. Now people who DON'T have that power are the exception. I think what you ment was we're moving towards a society where information (power) is more readily distributed and obtained.

Power through freedom of information is what this paper talks about. There's an important distinction being made there.

It's true that for many many years businesses operated on the (valid) assumption that intelluctual property is best leveraged by not sharing it. Watching the framework that upheld that assumption and made it mostly true crumble and wither away is a facinating case study of evolution in a macrocosom in my opinion…

-Kevlar

I totally agree that this whole intellectual proprety thing, in  most cases is a farce.  And maybe I should read the whole article before I judge(though I probibaly won't) but his argument seems kinda flimsy.

thanks Kev for that post. And do not mind the 13 year old mentalities, they will eventually have to learn to read or face shitty jobs as a mop-jockey.

Thank you, Iga, for the insightful view.

And thanks everyone else who had something intelligent to add. Better to be thought a fool and remain silent than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.

Back to the topic: The creative commons inheriantly realizes the value of shared intelluctual property.

This paper aptempts to show how existing models of economics and property law don't necessairly apply.

If anything, this paper should be a tool in anyones toolbox who has a interest in seeing the creative commons succeed on a broader scale. This paper appeals to people like business analyists and other professionals who need tangible models for expressing the concepts that thoes who embrace the creative commons allready inheriantly understand.

-Kevlar

(Edited by Kevlar at 2:33 pm on Sep. 10, 2004)

If I received zero financial benefit from creating saleable work, then it would become a hobby and my days would be filled with drone work to support myself, and this diminishes the environment for creative work.

Your making a fatal assumption there: That putting something into the public domain is equlivent to making no money off it.

What about the artist who gives away some of his work, but sells it all on an album? He can garner more interest in his work by making some of it freely available, thereby directly increasing sales.

What about the coder who get's paid to work on open source work? The code he writes goes back into the public domain where it can recieve peer review on a scale not possible within a closed model. As a result his code improves, thereby making his business more efficent.

Think this dosn't happen?

What do you think IBM is doing with Linux?

They give away the code, and sell the support. And they're changing the marketplace and giving Microsucks a real run for their money.

It happened at the place I work at.

I'm a commiter on an Apache project. A number of components from this project is integrated very tightly into the architecture at the place I work. Someone else who also works on the project found a bottleneck in my code that I had written for my company, on my company's time, and put into this Apache project. As a result of someone who wasn't even working for us, our whole website got faster, because we make our intelluctual property readily available.

It works. It really really does.

The problem you face is the old business model dosn't work, and new ways of approaching the problem are required.

-Kevlar

Let's use the human genome.

Who owns that? The company that mapped it?

Corperations can use the collective information to research and produce more advanced forms of medicine. By making the intelluctual property surrounding the human genome, corperations as a whole stand to benifit a lot. If someone makes a new advancement and releases that to the outside world, people everywhere will benifit. Someone unlocks the cure for cancer, and 4 medicine companies are gonna jump on it. These 4 medicine companies would have never found the solution were it not for the discovery and release of information from the outside. Competition is built into capitolism after all.

Or…. a single corperation or collaberation of corperations could monopolize this intelluctual property, and probablly make a fair amount of money doing it.

But what happens when they accidently make a virus that they can't stop? The secret to stoping the virus would be locked up in their intelluctual property.

What if the corperation decides to not go down a path of exploration and research, neglecting it for years? How many people will die from a desiese that would have a cure if more eyes were looking at the problem? How many missed capitolistic opertunities are they passing up?

Sometimes the decision to release the information is so you can make more money.

If you take the myopic view of all IP should be heavily guarded because that's the way the world's built, you completely miss the opertunity to expand the capitolistic model into something more profitable.

But let's bring this back to reality:

The other point your completely missing is releasing it do the public DOES NOT EQUATE to releasing your ownership and control of it!

Read that again. You can give your entire life's work away, and still retain complete control over it. You can deny a person or anyone from doing anything other than what you allow of it. This is a right afforded to you by copyright law.

Take the GPL. This license states that if you use the content (usually code) attached to it, and you make money off it, you have to release your changes to it back to the publc. This way, people who make money off your work must give you back the work they've done in turn in order to make money with your product.

Now instead of a single person improving a product, anyone can make improvements to it, and they HAVE TO give you back that work if they make money using it. Failure to do so results in a revocation of their rights to use the product in the first place.

In this senario, the creator has given away his work, but has not relinquished control of it. He still owns it, and has a say over how it's used.

If that licensing scheme dosn't work for you, pick another. There's a ton out there designed to fit the nuiances of releasing IP without relinquishing control over it. The GPL is just one example of a license designed to leverage the power of releasing your work to the public.

These same licenses can be applied to anything: Music, art, literature... anything.

Capitolistic markets DO drive the world. And thoes who figure out how to leverage what they have better than the others are the ones that are going to survive.

-Kevlar

Somepeople might say that in order to compete with the visual culture and pixilated word, todays authors need to take a more flexible approach to their work as well as to the printed medium of old fashioned books and classic linear/solo story telling. Smothering protectivisme won't do anyone any good.

I wish i could download and read that paper but the cafe I'm at is in lockdown and downloads will get you tazered.

*wishes for wireless.*

You have a valid possition, and raise an interesting and very important point. If one is a writer, artist, or musician how do you produce work that is intellectually stimulating to your creative process and still make a living. And how do you retain control over the revenue from the use of your work.

It is a very inportant issue to creative object producers.

My personal solution is to make two streams of work. One stream is commercially viable, the second stream is conceptually viable. Different products for different markets. One I make a profit, the other I give away. If I have what I think is a great idea, and wish to spread that idea, I find it counter-productive to attach a monetary value to the idea. But I still have to pay rent, so everything I make is not free.

But in terms of intellectual property legislation, I think the idea of 'intellectual property' is lame, and I love the idea of just freeing it up. The cynic in me says that people will bastardize, rape, and pillage my work. The realist in me says people already will bastardize, rape, and pillage my work weather intellectual property laws are in place. The optimist in me says that after a period of adjustment people would get tired of rehashing each other's stuff up and stop bastardizing, raping, and pillaging things on a mass scale in favour of self exploration.