3 ms·

This line of thinking can be expanded beyond copyright. Exclusive access to capital assets are almost by definition rent-seeking. While there is absolutely arg

This line of thinking can be expanded beyond copyright. Exclusive access to capital assets are almost by definition rent-seeking. While there is absolutely arguments to be had for the efficiency and effectiveness of such arrangement I think we could do better in capturing the extra rent from those we grant exclusivity. To that end all monopoly grants, such as copyright, but others too, should be tied to a cost. F.ex. one could perhaps find a proxy for the rent value of a particular grant by means of annual auctions. Such a scheme wouldn’t capture the cost of losing a resource as a commons though. See Henry George and geo-libertarianism for more thinking in this direction. But I think there’s some need for innovation to address “commons based peer-production” as Yochai Benkler terms it in The Wealth of Networks).

emn13 7y ago
You may be right; but that's such a general perspective that there's a good chance it's wrong in some situations. I think it's a little tricky to overgeneralize like that - although rent-seeking is pretty much by definition harmful; but whether something merely has a high investment cost and a long payback time, or is rentseeking depends on the details. The details for copyright suggest it's rent-seeking, not necessary investment at the current length and with the current exclusivity rules; but not every incentive to produce need result in rent-seeking. The danger with generalizing is that you've made the problem harder to solve, and have more risk of unintended consequences if you do manage to solve the general problem.