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Patents aren't free market, since they require the government to play a role (enforcement) in favour of patent holders. A free market wouldn't be able to protec

by tajen 11y ago

Patents aren't free market, since they require the government to play a role (enforcement) in favour of patent holders. A free market wouldn't be able to protect the IP, it would use DRM and peer-to-peer contracts, and as soon as the receipe gets out, they'd be in for ther investment. A socialist government would define a type a company that is allowed to conduct medical research and fix the bounds within which the company can invest or the sale prices.

Nutmog 11y ago
That's stretching the definition of free market a bit. You could apply it to real estate property rights too and argue that a corner shop isn't in a free market because the owner has paid for a monopoly on access to that building which is most suited to selling things from. His property rights are protected by the police to stop competitors sending their goons in to take over the building. The same goes for any business that owns any sort of valuable property, especially if their ownership gives them exclusive access to it. So I think a useful definition of free market has to include various property rights, including IP. As long as people can trade those rights among each other, whoever holds the patent would probably have spent a fair amount of money to either invent or buy it.
- jvz 11y ago
  There's a fundamental difference between physical property and intellectual "property": an owner of the former can conceivably hire guards to protect or restrict access to that property, since physical objects are generally localized phenomena. But there is no conceivable way to enforce things like copyright or patents without something at least as powerful as a government, since they are supposed to be binding on every single person, everywhere, all the time. IMO the concept of "intellectual property" is at best orthogonal to that of a "free market".
- tajen 11y ago
  There is always debate over the extent of "free". At the extreme, the state doesn't enforce land property and the landlord is responsible for hiring an army to protect some land. In a more moderate situation land and property are organized and enforced by the state, because this protection is more efficient for everyone. Intellectual property is incredibly hard to enforce, because anyone can copy an idea, or bits on a hard drive, so you'll have to come up with convoluted solutions to check for the presence of information at every point in a network, and we're expecting citizen to pay taxes to pay the police force who will enforce those rights in favour of the owners. There are other, more efficient means, but they involve the richest to get a smaller cut (e.g. instead of the state enforcing DRMs for free, they have to pay for good DRM themselves), so it's very valuable for them to leverage the state to enforce their self-proclaimed rights.

by tajen 11y ago

Nutmog 11y ago

That's stretching the definition of free market a bit. You could apply it to real estate property rights too and argue that a corner shop isn't in a free market because the owner has paid for a monopoly on access to that building which is most suited to selling things from. His property rights are protected by the police to stop competitors sending their goons in to take over the building. The same goes for any business that owns any sort of valuable property, especially if their ownership gives them exclusive access to it. So I think a useful definition of free market has to include various property rights, including IP. As long as people can trade those rights among each other, whoever holds the patent would probably have spent a fair amount of money to either invent or buy it.

jvz 11y ago
There's a fundamental difference between physical property and intellectual "property": an owner of the former can conceivably hire guards to protect or restrict access to that property, since physical objects are generally localized phenomena. But there is no conceivable way to enforce things like copyright or patents without something at least as powerful as a government, since they are supposed to be binding on every single person, everywhere, all the time. IMO the concept of "intellectual property" is at best orthogonal to that of a "free market".
tajen 11y ago
There is always debate over the extent of "free". At the extreme, the state doesn't enforce land property and the landlord is responsible for hiring an army to protect some land. In a more moderate situation land and property are organized and enforced by the state, because this protection is more efficient for everyone. Intellectual property is incredibly hard to enforce, because anyone can copy an idea, or bits on a hard drive, so you'll have to come up with convoluted solutions to check for the presence of information at every point in a network, and we're expecting citizen to pay taxes to pay the police force who will enforce those rights in favour of the owners. There are other, more efficient means, but they involve the richest to get a smaller cut (e.g. instead of the state enforcing DRMs for free, they have to pay for good DRM themselves), so it's very valuable for them to leverage the state to enforce their self-proclaimed rights.