Andy Streich wrote:
On Friday 28 April 2006 08:34 pm, Mike McCarty wrote:
'll respond to the very last sentence first. I don't know. But
you might ask Benjamin Franklin, because he put everything he
did into the Public Domain, and lobbied hard to have neither
Copyright nor Patent Law in the USA. He lost his battle, so
he put everything into the Public Domain.
I didn't know this about old Ben. He sounds very much like a pure socialist
and that's very surprising --
What's not to love about Ben? He was an atheist too.
> and very much like Richard Stallman since
without copyrights and patents there's no protection for intellectual
property. I wonder what Ben thought about how an author or inventor would
survive in a free market economy. Just the other day I was watching a Senate
hearing where a songwriter was saying she could not make a living without the
copyright and IPR laws. And I've wondered a long time about how the economy
might have to change if there were no IPR. The idea has appeal in so many
ways, then you run smack into the wall of monetary incentives.
Writers and programmers would make money without IP laws. The difference
is that it would prevent a few companies from dominating entire
information industries.
The willingness of people to spend money on the music, movies and the
software they like would not change if IP laws were removed. What would
change is the way that money is distributed to the producers of those
works. Rather than to have a few companies and people that have
absolutely superlative incomes, with everyone else barely able to make
ends meet, there would be many more companies and people able to
participate in information industries, but each would make far less money.
The industry's income would be shared amongst a far larger number of
companies and people, because the legal structure (IP) for dominating an
information industry would not be there.
To use software as an example, without IP laws, Microsoft would probably
go away but be replaced by 20,000 companies and individuals who are
ready to create and maintain software. The companies would be small,
perhaps having 5-10 employees, and the individuals would make living
wages, but none of the entities would have superlative incomes. The
software industry's income would be shared amongst a larger group of
people.
Naturally, a standards organization would help this large group of
people coordinate their activities to produce a single, working product.
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