Read the rest of his post.
My personal view is that intellectual property law has to be pragmatic. If you take an absolute view that is always in favor of intellectual property, then I think you end up defending too much--business process patents, for instance. If you take an absolute view that is always against intellectual property, then I think you have destroyed the incentive to undertake some valuable activities--pharmaceutical research, for instance.
Does anyone else have any other perspectives on this?
2 comments:
I see intellectual property as a subsidy. It is, of course, true that if you eliminate a subsidy, you will have less of the subsidized activity. But is this a bad thing? Or is there some sort of Keynesian-multiplier-type argument in favor of innovations above what the market provides?
I'm more or less in agreement with "thought" (justice/right/incentive): IP rights allow one to protect one's efforts and to derive profit therefrom. The existence of that sphere of protection offers an incentive to potential creators to invest in innovation. Hence, IP rights represent an exchange, a bargain struck between innovator and society: if you're willing to invest in creating something that we might find useful, but we didn't think of on our own, we'll give you exclusivity in return for making your creation available to us. (You could probably argue that for patent, copyright, and trademark, but patents seems the most immediately obvious illustration.) But, implicit in this bargain is the possibility that Innovator Two may have an even better idea, so granting absolute exclusivity to Innovator One would not be an advantageous bargain to the rest of us in the long run. All of which is a long-winded way of generally agreeing with Mr. Kling's "pragmatic" up there.
Admittedly, not all innovation requires a great deal of investment, but good chunks of it do, hence my preference for the incentive/bargain view.
As for manipulating the law...that's what lawyers do...
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