5 ms·

"Overprotecting intellectual property is as harmful as underprotecting it. Culture is impossible without a rich public domain. Nothing today, like nothing since

by J3L2404 15y ago

"Overprotecting intellectual property is as harmful as underprotecting it. Culture is impossible without a rich public domain. Nothing today, like nothing since we tamed fire, is genuinely new. Culture like science and technology grows by accretion. Each new creator building on the works before. Overprotecting stifles the very forces it is supposed to nurture."

jannes 15y ago
I, too, found this quote very remarkable. But it left me wondering. Can anybody tell me where the harm in underprotecting "intellectual property" comes from? This is an honest question. I don't understand it. Maybe it's because I'm too young and don't depend on "intellectual property" protection yet. I don't understand where this idea comes from that ideas can be owned by anyone. What if the limit of copying would become what's copyable and not what is allowed to be copied? Wouldn't that accellerate innovation? Isn't innovation more valuable to a society than anything else? Why do we put a tax on it?
- pavel_lishin 15y ago
  The obvious argument is that it lowers the incentive for people to create truly new ideas. If you can't patent or copyright something, why would you sink a significant amount of time, money, or effort into it? Especially for big projects - operating systems, etc.
- archangel_one 15y ago
  The usual argument is that protecting "intellectual property" encourages the production of culture, ie. you are forced to buy copies of CDs instead of copying them for free, which means that the artist earns more money and thus there is a financial incentive for them to record songs. Obviously the same argument can be taken to apply to TV, movies etc and IIRC is more or less implied by the US constitution (it says that a system of limited rights may be permitted for the progress of the creative arts, or something like that). I guess the same thing is taken to apply to innovation as well, that Apple is encouraged to invent a cool new operating system for their mobile phone because they control it exclusively once they've done that. The argument would run that if anyone could then just copy it, Apple wouldn't gain relative to their competitors by creating it so wouldn't have spent the money in the first place, and hence less innovation. I'm not necessarily arguing for this point of view - goodness knows I think that it's too far-reaching and over-enforced at the moment. That's just a description of some of the usual arguments in favour of it.
- seabee 15y ago
  > Can anybody tell me where the harm in underprotecting "intellectual property" comes from? I will speculate that, without any protection, there will be significantly less investment in intellectual property, and any projects will be smaller. People have to eat, if you make a business of content creation you get to spend more time doing it than if it's just people working in their spare time. Either that, or rely on rich patrons to fund the arts. But you would never have Hollywood with just their help. This is both a bad and a good thing, for reasons easily imagined.
  - cturner 15y ago
    You're framing the issue by saying that creation of IP happens for the reason of selling it later on. This is circular (IP wouldn't exist - it is a direct product of prootection), but I'll assume you meant that there'd be less investment in ideas in an environment without IP. I disagree with your framing and conclusion. People work with ideas for the purpose of solving problems or satisfying interest that they have, not just directly commercialising the results. I write software in order that my business can operate in its environment. Mendelssohn was inspired to write the Scottish symphony. Free software authors have a commercial interest for their work because it increases their chances of getting good work, and the same applies for music teachers who compose and record, and literature professors who write, and scientists who publish. Creating an ecoosystem that is oriented around direct commercialisation through the mechanism of IP cannibalises the innovation of people who solve problems and satisfying interest because of the extra weight of restrictions it places upon them. Many of the tunes in Handel's _Israel in Egypt_ were directly ripped from other work he had access to. That oratorio could not have been created in the current IP atmosphere. Further, ideas benefit from network effects in a liberal idea space. Copyright hampers the exchange. You equate IP with being all protection - this is misleading. IP is just one form of protection, one that is government backed. Consider Steam - a mechanism that furthers commercialisation of ideas without leveraging IP. The growth of models where businesses take responsibility for their own commercial model is stunted by the government protectionism offered in the form of easy copyright. This further fuels arguments like the one you've made. We look around us and see copyright everywhere tied up in ideas, and fail to appreciate the opportunity cost of the situation. Without copyright you wouldn't have Hollywood, but you would have something else.
- sigil 15y ago
  If your creation is completely unprotected, there's less incentive to create it in the first place. Would you be as likely to put a year of your time and money into creating something, if you knew it would just be ripped off and profited from the instant you released it? On the other hand, if copyrights / patents lasted forever, the beneficial effects of competition might never kick in, and in the long run consumers would be the worse off for it. So I see copyright / patents as a practical rather than a theoretical issue: what's the optimum term for the protection? What length of time will result in the greatest benefit for us all in the long run? Should it vary by type of creation maybe -- shorter terms for less capital-intensive creations, longer terms for others? It really is an optimization problem. The authors of the U.S. Constitution seemed cognizant of the tradeoffs and that they might need tweaking [2]. There was a fascinating story about a manufacturer of bra-rings in a National Geographic article about Chinese "Commodity Towns" a while ago [1]. I'm not sure what Chinese IP law is like, and what recourse if any the original inventor had, but it illustrates the problems quite well. [1] page 2 and 3 of 8, http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0706/feature4/text2.html http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0706/feature4/text2.ht... [2] "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries" http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_United_States_of_America#aI-s8 http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_United_Sta...
  - tambourine_man 15y ago
    Would you be as likely to put a year of your time and money into creating something, if you knew it would just be ripped off and profited from the instant you released it? If I could just as easily rip of and profit from other's work? Sure. It turns out people either do a crappy job at copying you, in which case your are fine, or they do a much better job than you did, which means you just have to work harder.
    - adrianN 15y ago
      It's hard to pay rent when your only profit is the ability to copy other people's work.
- Homunculiheaded 15y ago
  The problem is the same as over control: in the end large corporations would have essentially absolute control over creative content. Let's say you're a musician in your free time and you wrote a pretty catchy song that you post to your web-site. A coke marketing guy hears it and thinks it would make a great song for an advert. They use the song and it's tremendously successful, people love it and coke has made millions because of it. People refer to it as "that coke song" (your name is in the fine print since in our imaginary world there is still some vague regulation on attribution, in a world with no ip laws at all Coke could claim authorship). In the end, despite it being your work, you receive neither money nor fame from it. Anyone who has done any sort of creative work knows that larger corporations aren't typically the best at producing it, a world without ip laws would ultimately mean that this issue could simply be overcome through easy exploitation.
  - rwmj 15y ago
    That's great, although I think you also need to describe how that is materially different from what we have now.
- GHFigs 15y ago
  I don't understand where this idea comes from that ideas can be owned by anyone. Intellectual property is not about owning ideas. Consider that if you read a book and take in it's ideas, you have not violated copyright, because it applies to the text of the book, not the ideas. On the other hand, if you just take the text and print your own books, you have violated copyright even if you never read the book at all and have no inkling of the ideas expressed. Again: it's not about owning ideas.
  - thristian 15y ago
    On the other hand, if you read a patent and take in its ideas, and then act on them (say, by applying those ideas yourself), you may well have violated the patent. "Intellectual property" is more than just copyright.
    - nkassis 15y ago
      From wikipedia's page on patents: "The term patent usually refers to an exclusive right granted to anyone who invents any new, useful, and non-obvious process, machine, article of manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, and claims that right in a formal patent application" From what I underestand, the ideas themselves aren't patentable under this definition but the process or the invention that implements the idea is. (The idea of rolling on something isn't patentable but the shape of the wheel that makes that idea work would) In that sense software patents bend the rules.
- squeed 15y ago
  This is a great question, and not a hypothetical one. In fact, there are places in the world that have essentially no IP protection. As always, it's hard to say what the "results" are, since these places didn't switch from a IP to non-IP environment, but it can be interesting to compare. The first example is China[1]. Chinese consumers have been raised in an environment where everything can and will be pirated over and over. "Chinese consumers 'won’t pay a penny' for recorded music," claims the article. Yet, artists are still producing a steady stream of music. The article is, sadly, short on details about how musicians and music distributors actually make money. Perhaps it's via advertisement? In another article that I can't for the life of me find, it seems that the only Chinese musicians that make any money at all have massive star power and can command high ticket prices. So, the Chinese music market has turned in to a publicity machine to sell celebrity and the resulting high ticket prices. The second example is "Nollywood", or the massive Nigerian film industry[2]. In this case, the film studios have about a week before pirates manage to distribute new films. The only way they can make nmoney is to produce, well, a new film each week. I posit that the films would be of higher quality if there was less piracy. So, I think it's fair to say that there can be such a thing as too little IP protection. 1: http://www.economist.com/node/17627557 http://www.economist.com/node/17627557 2: http://www.economist.com/node/17723124 http://www.economist.com/node/17723124

by J3L2404 15y ago

jannes 15y ago

I, too, found this quote very remarkable. But it left me wondering. Can anybody tell me where the harm in underprotecting "intellectual property" comes from? This is an honest question. I don't understand it. Maybe it's because I'm too young and don't depend on "intellectual property" protection yet. I don't understand where this idea comes from that ideas can be owned by anyone. What if the limit of copying would become what's copyable and not what is allowed to be copied? Wouldn't that accellerate innovation? Isn't innovation more valuable to a society than anything else? Why do we put a tax on it?

pavel_lishin 15y ago
The obvious argument is that it lowers the incentive for people to create truly new ideas. If you can't patent or copyright something, why would you sink a significant amount of time, money, or effort into it? Especially for big projects - operating systems, etc.
archangel_one 15y ago
The usual argument is that protecting "intellectual property" encourages the production of culture, ie. you are forced to buy copies of CDs instead of copying them for free, which means that the artist earns more money and thus there is a financial incentive for them to record songs. Obviously the same argument can be taken to apply to TV, movies etc and IIRC is more or less implied by the US constitution (it says that a system of limited rights may be permitted for the progress of the creative arts, or something like that). I guess the same thing is taken to apply to innovation as well, that Apple is encouraged to invent a cool new operating system for their mobile phone because they control it exclusively once they've done that. The argument would run that if anyone could then just copy it, Apple wouldn't gain relative to their competitors by creating it so wouldn't have spent the money in the first place, and hence less innovation. I'm not necessarily arguing for this point of view - goodness knows I think that it's too far-reaching and over-enforced at the moment. That's just a description of some of the usual arguments in favour of it.
seabee 15y ago
> Can anybody tell me where the harm in underprotecting "intellectual property" comes from? I will speculate that, without any protection, there will be significantly less investment in intellectual property, and any projects will be smaller. People have to eat, if you make a business of content creation you get to spend more time doing it than if it's just people working in their spare time. Either that, or rely on rich patrons to fund the arts. But you would never have Hollywood with just their help. This is both a bad and a good thing, for reasons easily imagined.
- cturner 15y ago
  You're framing the issue by saying that creation of IP happens for the reason of selling it later on. This is circular (IP wouldn't exist - it is a direct product of prootection), but I'll assume you meant that there'd be less investment in ideas in an environment without IP. I disagree with your framing and conclusion. People work with ideas for the purpose of solving problems or satisfying interest that they have, not just directly commercialising the results. I write software in order that my business can operate in its environment. Mendelssohn was inspired to write the Scottish symphony. Free software authors have a commercial interest for their work because it increases their chances of getting good work, and the same applies for music teachers who compose and record, and literature professors who write, and scientists who publish. Creating an ecoosystem that is oriented around direct commercialisation through the mechanism of IP cannibalises the innovation of people who solve problems and satisfying interest because of the extra weight of restrictions it places upon them. Many of the tunes in Handel's _Israel in Egypt_ were directly ripped from other work he had access to. That oratorio could not have been created in the current IP atmosphere. Further, ideas benefit from network effects in a liberal idea space. Copyright hampers the exchange. You equate IP with being all protection - this is misleading. IP is just one form of protection, one that is government backed. Consider Steam - a mechanism that furthers commercialisation of ideas without leveraging IP. The growth of models where businesses take responsibility for their own commercial model is stunted by the government protectionism offered in the form of easy copyright. This further fuels arguments like the one you've made. We look around us and see copyright everywhere tied up in ideas, and fail to appreciate the opportunity cost of the situation. Without copyright you wouldn't have Hollywood, but you would have something else.
sigil 15y ago
If your creation is completely unprotected, there's less incentive to create it in the first place. Would you be as likely to put a year of your time and money into creating something, if you knew it would just be ripped off and profited from the instant you released it? On the other hand, if copyrights / patents lasted forever, the beneficial effects of competition might never kick in, and in the long run consumers would be the worse off for it. So I see copyright / patents as a practical rather than a theoretical issue: what's the optimum term for the protection? What length of time will result in the greatest benefit for us all in the long run? Should it vary by type of creation maybe -- shorter terms for less capital-intensive creations, longer terms for others? It really is an optimization problem. The authors of the U.S. Constitution seemed cognizant of the tradeoffs and that they might need tweaking [2]. There was a fascinating story about a manufacturer of bra-rings in a National Geographic article about Chinese "Commodity Towns" a while ago [1]. I'm not sure what Chinese IP law is like, and what recourse if any the original inventor had, but it illustrates the problems quite well. [1] page 2 and 3 of 8, http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0706/feature4/text2.html http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0706/feature4/text2.ht... [2] "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries" http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_United_States_of_America#aI-s8 http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_United_Sta...
- tambourine_man 15y ago
  Would you be as likely to put a year of your time and money into creating something, if you knew it would just be ripped off and profited from the instant you released it? If I could just as easily rip of and profit from other's work? Sure. It turns out people either do a crappy job at copying you, in which case your are fine, or they do a much better job than you did, which means you just have to work harder.
  - adrianN 15y ago
    It's hard to pay rent when your only profit is the ability to copy other people's work.
Homunculiheaded 15y ago
The problem is the same as over control: in the end large corporations would have essentially absolute control over creative content. Let's say you're a musician in your free time and you wrote a pretty catchy song that you post to your web-site. A coke marketing guy hears it and thinks it would make a great song for an advert. They use the song and it's tremendously successful, people love it and coke has made millions because of it. People refer to it as "that coke song" (your name is in the fine print since in our imaginary world there is still some vague regulation on attribution, in a world with no ip laws at all Coke could claim authorship). In the end, despite it being your work, you receive neither money nor fame from it. Anyone who has done any sort of creative work knows that larger corporations aren't typically the best at producing it, a world without ip laws would ultimately mean that this issue could simply be overcome through easy exploitation.
- rwmj 15y ago
  That's great, although I think you also need to describe how that is materially different from what we have now.
GHFigs 15y ago
I don't understand where this idea comes from that ideas can be owned by anyone. Intellectual property is not about owning ideas. Consider that if you read a book and take in it's ideas, you have not violated copyright, because it applies to the text of the book, not the ideas. On the other hand, if you just take the text and print your own books, you have violated copyright even if you never read the book at all and have no inkling of the ideas expressed. Again: it's not about owning ideas.
- thristian 15y ago
  On the other hand, if you read a patent and take in its ideas, and then act on them (say, by applying those ideas yourself), you may well have violated the patent. "Intellectual property" is more than just copyright.
  - nkassis 15y ago
    From wikipedia's page on patents: "The term patent usually refers to an exclusive right granted to anyone who invents any new, useful, and non-obvious process, machine, article of manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, and claims that right in a formal patent application" From what I underestand, the ideas themselves aren't patentable under this definition but the process or the invention that implements the idea is. (The idea of rolling on something isn't patentable but the shape of the wheel that makes that idea work would) In that sense software patents bend the rules.
squeed 15y ago
This is a great question, and not a hypothetical one. In fact, there are places in the world that have essentially no IP protection. As always, it's hard to say what the "results" are, since these places didn't switch from a IP to non-IP environment, but it can be interesting to compare. The first example is China[1]. Chinese consumers have been raised in an environment where everything can and will be pirated over and over. "Chinese consumers 'won’t pay a penny' for recorded music," claims the article. Yet, artists are still producing a steady stream of music. The article is, sadly, short on details about how musicians and music distributors actually make money. Perhaps it's via advertisement? In another article that I can't for the life of me find, it seems that the only Chinese musicians that make any money at all have massive star power and can command high ticket prices. So, the Chinese music market has turned in to a publicity machine to sell celebrity and the resulting high ticket prices. The second example is "Nollywood", or the massive Nigerian film industry[2]. In this case, the film studios have about a week before pirates manage to distribute new films. The only way they can make nmoney is to produce, well, a new film each week. I posit that the films would be of higher quality if there was less piracy. So, I think it's fair to say that there can be such a thing as too little IP protection. 1: http://www.economist.com/node/17627557 http://www.economist.com/node/17627557 2: http://www.economist.com/node/17723124 http://www.economist.com/node/17723124