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being a former College Librarian I totally agree with the statement. it was so frustrating to hear the aggression and fear of Open Source. when it came to copy

by baldfat 13y ago

being a former College Librarian I totally agree with the statement. it was so frustrating to hear the aggression and fear of Open Source. when it came to copyright librarians are the biggest defenders. I never understood why. also these academia patents probably had public money funding then also.

eshvk 13y ago
> also these academia patents probably had public money funding then also. Yes, but does that mean that all things that made from public funding should not be monetized? Is it a requirement that a road constructed out of taxpayer money should not have a toll?
- AnthonyMouse 13y ago
  Road tolls are quite undesirable. Tolls require some toll collecting apparatus which wastes that portion of the collected funds and may have negative externalities (e.g. increased surveillance, increased air pollution or reduced road capacity due to slowing for toll booths). Moreover, it discourages productive use of the road. If a toll discourages use of a road at any point in time when the road is being used at less than its full capacity then you're "wasting" the road and creating secondary inefficiencies, e.g. fewer people in the office park on one side of the toll road will travel the road to visit a coffee house on the other side which causes the coffee house to lose business, and allows a different coffee house that happens to be in the opposite direction from the office park to raise prices and gouge the workers in the office park. You can see the obvious analogies with patents on publicly funded research. This is to be distinguished from congestion pricing which has nothing to do with paying for the road and should only apply at the times when the road would otherwise have insufficient capacity for the traffic volume, with the explicit intent of reducing usage. Note however that congestion pricing can be inefficient for many of the same reasons and is also undesirable unless the alternatives of expanding road capacity or improving mass transit to reduce traffic volume are both impractical.
  - Rizz 13y ago
    One reason for tolls (and patents from public research) is that they cause the people who use them to pay, instead of everyone. That seems reasonable to me in those instances where the road or invention isn't clearly for the public good of the whole public.
    - AnthonyMouse 13y ago
      The flaw in this argument is that if it isn't for the public good of the whole public then the government shouldn't be doing it in the first place. The reason the government has to do it at all is that the benefits are so diffuse within the population that private collective action is incapable of overcoming the transaction costs. In order for the government to fairly collect based on the utility of the roads, they would have to go out and pay all the transaction costs to determine the correct amounts -- how much should someone without a car be paying for the roads for the benefit of allowing mail and packages to be delivered, or of having goods they can buy delivered to local stores, or of having a timely emergency response? Shouldn't people more likely to need an ambulance be paying more for roads ambulances can use? Shouldn't trucks that deliver necessities be paying a higher toll since the recipients clearly benefit from them more than trucks delivering frivolous things? How do we determine what proportion of the value of some delivery of goods or other use of the road is attributable to the existence of the road, and what do we use as a reference to calculate the alternative in each case? Apportioning the value of the roads to the people who find them useful is utterly hopeless. And if you're not going to do it right, and doing it wrong causes both unfairness and economic inefficiency, you ought not to do it at all and just fund it through general taxation.
  - enjo 13y ago
    I disagree with that entire premise. Yes it requires technology to collect the tolls. We have that down to a pretty efficient science these days thanks to cameras. They don't even slow down traffic to collect tolls. I've never encountered a toll road that wasn't a major expressway. The coffee house argument is non-sensical. Toll roads have a very attractive benefit to me. I don't drive. I'm kind of happy to have the people who make the decision to live far away from their work to actually pay for the cost of their commute.
- judk 13y ago
  Good example. Toll roads are a sort of FRAND licensing, though-- maybe there are some reasonable guidelines for public patents.

by baldfat 13y ago

eshvk 13y ago

> also these academia patents probably had public money funding then also. Yes, but does that mean that all things that made from public funding should not be monetized? Is it a requirement that a road constructed out of taxpayer money should not have a toll?

AnthonyMouse 13y ago
Road tolls are quite undesirable. Tolls require some toll collecting apparatus which wastes that portion of the collected funds and may have negative externalities (e.g. increased surveillance, increased air pollution or reduced road capacity due to slowing for toll booths). Moreover, it discourages productive use of the road. If a toll discourages use of a road at any point in time when the road is being used at less than its full capacity then you're "wasting" the road and creating secondary inefficiencies, e.g. fewer people in the office park on one side of the toll road will travel the road to visit a coffee house on the other side which causes the coffee house to lose business, and allows a different coffee house that happens to be in the opposite direction from the office park to raise prices and gouge the workers in the office park. You can see the obvious analogies with patents on publicly funded research. This is to be distinguished from congestion pricing which has nothing to do with paying for the road and should only apply at the times when the road would otherwise have insufficient capacity for the traffic volume, with the explicit intent of reducing usage. Note however that congestion pricing can be inefficient for many of the same reasons and is also undesirable unless the alternatives of expanding road capacity or improving mass transit to reduce traffic volume are both impractical.
- Rizz 13y ago
  One reason for tolls (and patents from public research) is that they cause the people who use them to pay, instead of everyone. That seems reasonable to me in those instances where the road or invention isn't clearly for the public good of the whole public.
  - AnthonyMouse 13y ago
    The flaw in this argument is that if it isn't for the public good of the whole public then the government shouldn't be doing it in the first place. The reason the government has to do it at all is that the benefits are so diffuse within the population that private collective action is incapable of overcoming the transaction costs. In order for the government to fairly collect based on the utility of the roads, they would have to go out and pay all the transaction costs to determine the correct amounts -- how much should someone without a car be paying for the roads for the benefit of allowing mail and packages to be delivered, or of having goods they can buy delivered to local stores, or of having a timely emergency response? Shouldn't people more likely to need an ambulance be paying more for roads ambulances can use? Shouldn't trucks that deliver necessities be paying a higher toll since the recipients clearly benefit from them more than trucks delivering frivolous things? How do we determine what proportion of the value of some delivery of goods or other use of the road is attributable to the existence of the road, and what do we use as a reference to calculate the alternative in each case? Apportioning the value of the roads to the people who find them useful is utterly hopeless. And if you're not going to do it right, and doing it wrong causes both unfairness and economic inefficiency, you ought not to do it at all and just fund it through general taxation.
- enjo 13y ago
  I disagree with that entire premise. Yes it requires technology to collect the tolls. We have that down to a pretty efficient science these days thanks to cameras. They don't even slow down traffic to collect tolls. I've never encountered a toll road that wasn't a major expressway. The coffee house argument is non-sensical. Toll roads have a very attractive benefit to me. I don't drive. I'm kind of happy to have the people who make the decision to live far away from their work to actually pay for the cost of their commute.
judk 13y ago
Good example. Toll roads are a sort of FRAND licensing, though-- maybe there are some reasonable guidelines for public patents.