In a recent New York Times editorial, the Times chastises China for not protecting IP sufficiently, and urges them to be more “aggressive.” Read the complete editorial here.
See also my related posts Wikileaks cables reveal that the US wrote Spain’s proposed copyright laws, Intellectual Property Appears to Figure Prominently In Wikileaks Cablegate, The Economist on Patents and Innovation in China, and Intellectual Property Imperialism.
Included as ch. 23 of Stephan Kinsella, ed., The Anti-IP Reader: Free Market Critiques of Intellectual Property (Papinian Press, 2023).
***
On occasion a pro-IP libertarian who is also an admirer of Hans-Hermann Hoppe, the world’s leading libertarian intellectual, will express incredulity and dismay at the idea that Hoppe would oppose IP. It has been obvious to me for ten years that Hoppe is anti-IP. He welcomed the publication of my “Against Intellectual Property” article in the Journal of Libertarian Studies in 2001 when he was editor (in fact he came up with the title); and its reasoning and conclusions are based on and perfectly consistent with Hoppe’s anarcho-Austrian-Rothbardian ideas on property, rights, ethics, and economics. But some Hoppe admirers are loath to admit this (see the comments of Dave Narby here, and Stranger on this thread,1 for example).
Just to set the record straight, since this issue keeps coming up over and over:
In this comment, one Stephen observes:
Here’s a video of Hoppe where he clearly attacks IP.
[1:13:20]
[Audience member]
I’ve heard people defending intellectual property rights from the same rules as you use. Could you touch briefly on that?
[Hoppe]
Very briefly. I should make you aware of a great article by a friend of mine, Stephan Kinsella, who is actually a patent lawyer, but doesn’t believe in patents. That article has appeared a few years ago in the Journal of Libertarian Studies, which is available on the net @ www.mises.org, and if you just type in Kinsella, you get his five or six articles that he has are published for the journal, and from the title you would clearly recognize that it deals with intellectual property rights. But let me say this much at this point: recall, I said property rights can only be acquired in things that are scarce, and only because they are scarce, are conflicts over their use possible. Now ideas, once they have been thought, are no longer scarce. If I think the same idea that you think, I am not taking anything away from you. You can still think exactly the same thing as before. Nothing is diminished on your part. Thoughts are, once they have been thought, free goods and conflicts over them are impossible. Again, imagine what the consequences would be if we would not accept this view. Then we would owe royalties to the widow of Aristotle until the end of our lives. Not even the widow has survived up to this point either, but Aristotle’s little Aristotles run around in Greece. They might still collect money whenever we say A and non-A cannot exist at the same time. And I think I would consider that to be utterly unfair because I can think this idea myself also. I would not have needed Aristotle to come up with this idea, but nonetheless, he was the first one to write it down. So this is the same thing, you are all free-riding on my ideas, I could just collect royalties now from all of you, plus I’ve used some words that you might not have heard before, I might have expressed some thoughts that you will repeat, that you found funny or not so funny, and you will now be eternally indebted to me. I should throw you all into debtors prison unless you just deliver your weekly, or monthly, or annual royalties to me. So keep that, please, in mind.
[1:17:00]
See also the conclusion to my article Ideas Are Free: The Case Against Intellectual Property:2
Professor Hoppe realized this as far back as 1988. At a panel discussion on ethics with Hoppe, Rothbard, David Gordon, and Leland Yeager, there was the following exchange, and I’ll conclude with it:
AUDIENCE QUESTION: I have a question for Professor Hoppe. Does the idea of personal sovereignty extend to knowledge? Am I sovereign over my thoughts, ideas, and theories? …
HOPPE: … in order to have a thought you must have property rights over your body. That doesn’t imply that you own your thoughts. The thoughts can be used by anybody who is capable of understanding them.[18]
See also these excerpts from Hoppe Interview on Anarchy and Intellectual Property:
Daily Bell: Where do you stand on copyright? Do you believe that intellectual property doesn’t exist as Kinsella has proposed?
Dr. Hans-Hermann Hoppe: I agree with my friend Kinsella, that the idea of intellectual property rights is not just wrong and confused but dangerous. And I have already touched upon why this is so. Ideas – recipes, formulas, statements, arguments, algorithms, theorems, melodies, patterns, rhythms, images, etc. – are certainly goods (insofar as they are good, not bad, recipes, etc.), but they are not scarce goods. Once thought and expressed, they are free, inexhaustible goods. I whistle a melody or write down a poem, you hear the melody or read the poem and reproduce or copy it. In doing so you have not taken anything away from me. I can whistle and write as before. In fact, the entire world can copy me and yet nothing is taken from me. (If I didn’t want anyone to copy my ideas I only have to keep them to myself and never express them.)
Now imagine I had been granted a property right in my melody or poem such that I could prohibit you from copying it or demanding a royalty from you if you do. First: Doesn’t that imply, absurdly, that I, in turn, must pay royalties to the person (or his heirs) who invented whistling and writing, and further on to those, who invented sound-making and language, and so on? Second: In preventing you from or making you pay for whistling my melody or reciting my poem, I am actually made a (partial) owner of you: of your physical body, your vocal chords, your paper, your pencil, etc. because you did not use anything but your own property when you copied me. If you can no longer copy me, then, this means that I, the intellectual property owner, have expropriated you and your “real” property. Which shows: intellectual property rights and real property rights are incompatible, and the promotion of intellectual property must be seen as a most dangerous attack on the idea of “real” property (in scarce goods).
Daily Bell: We have suggested that if people want to enforce generational copyright that they do so on their own, taking on the expense and attempting through various means to confront copyright violators with their own resources. This would put the onus of enforcement on the pocket book of the individual. Is this a viable solution – to let the market itself decide these issues?
Dr. Hans-Hermann Hoppe: That would go a long way in the right direction. Better still: more and more courts in more and more countries, especially countries outside the orbit of the US dominated Western government cartel, would make it clear that they don’t hear cases of copyright and patent violations any longer and regard such complaints as a ruse of big Western government-connected firms, such as pharmaceutical companies, for instance, to enrich themselves at the expense of other people.
Note also Hoppe’s comments here:
“Furthermore, the tendency [of the process of civilization, i.e., the lowering of time-preferences] will actually be accelerated insofar as A and B…engage in voluntary trade or cooperation and even without any such exchange insofar as they merely observe each other’s activities and copy each other’s knowledge.” —Hoppe, Democracy: God that Failed, p. 10; also in Time Preference, Government, and the Process of De-Civilization – From Monarchy to Democracy, Journal des Economistes et des Etudes Humaines, Vol.5, 2, 1994; also published in John Denson, ed., The Costs of War (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1997)
See also Hoppe’s comments here: PFP145 | Hoppe, Dürr, Kinsella, van Dun, Daniels, Discussion, Q&A (PFS 2015):
A lightly edited transcript of the exchange:
QUESTIONER: Okay. My question is for Stephan Kinsella. It’s a question, not an argument.
4:58
What is the case for private photos and pictures shared over the internet on Facebook and someone else is using it?
5:08
What is the argumental basis on that from the IP perspective?
>> STEPHAN KINSELLA: What’s the justification for using someone else’s?
5:15
> QUESTIONER: Using, or do they need our permission, without permission? What is the case for…
>> STEPHAN KINSELLA: Do you mean under current law or under libertarian system?
5:23
> QUESTIONER: Under – both.
>> STEPHAN KINSELLA: Well, under current law, copyrights – photographs are owned by the photographer, and if you put it online you still own the copyright, but you’re giving a license for people to use it for limited purposes like doing it on their browser.
5:39
If you use it beyond that, unless there’s a creative common license attached to it, you could be sued.
5:45
And the perverse aspect of copyright – let’s suppose you’re on vacation and you hand your iPhone to a stranger and he takes a picture of your family.
5:53
He owns the copyright but you don’t know who he is, so you have this great picture, and you may be infringing his copyright when you put it on your Apple TV.
6:02
And there’s other perverse aspects of copyright. There are cases where there’s – someone takes a photograph.
6:08
They have a copyright in the photograph, and it becomes a best-selling print or something like that.
6:14
And someone else will go to the same location and recreate the photo by taking their own photograph, and they can be sued by the owner of the first copyright for taking a photograph in that location.
6:26
Under libertarian law, there would be no property rights whatsoever in information at all.
6:32
Information is not an ownable thing. Information is the impatterning of an owned thing, a physical material resource.
6:38
Information is never free-floating. It’s always the impatterning of a substrate: your brain, electromagnetic waves, a CD-ROM, a USB drive, a hard drive on a computer.
6:49
And those things are already owned by someone according to the principles Professor Hoppe referred to earlier. The owner of the thing—I own this physical object. It’s structured in a certain way, which is the information.
7:00
I don’t own the information and the phone. I own the phone and the feature – it has certain features.
7:06
This phone has a weight. It has an age. It doesn’t mean I own the age of the phone. If I did own the age of the phone, I would own lots of other phones in the world that were made on the same day you see.
7:15
So the problem with owning an aspect of a thing that you own is it’s a universal that applies to any number of instances in the world.
7:23
And to own that universal feature of the thing would instantly give you ownership claims over other material resources in the world that other people have claims to.
7:32
This is the very problem with IP. So if you put a photograph online in a free society, then you have to take the risk that other people might look at it and use it.
7:44
>> HANS-HERMANN HOPPE: On intellectual property rights, a funny movement – you reported about it on your website —where people, some alleged Austrians from Vienna, Mrs. What’s-Her-Name from the Hayek Institute, Barbara Kolm.
8:10
She wants to defend physical and intellectual property rights at the same time.
8:16
It never occurred to her that that is an absolute impossibility. To give you an example, I whistle a song.
8:26
You hear the song, and you copy it. You whistle the same melody.
8:34
If intellectual property rights exist, of course I would be able to then sue you for having whistled the same song without having received my permission.
8:50
But that means that I thereby acquire property rights over your own body, that I am then an owner of your vocal chords and whatever it is.
9:07
And that shows quite clearly that either physical property rights exist or intellectual property rights exist, but both of these things cannot exist simultaneously. So it’s simply a contradiction.
9:28
>> STEPHAN KINSELLA: And an actual illustration of that is the “Happy Birthday” song, which is in litigation right now.
9:35
This is literally true. Waiters in restaurants in the US sing a different song because they may be sued for singing the one that’s in the movies, which movie studios have to pay licensing fees for.
9:48
It’s another way IP would help movie studios. Their costs would go down. I want to read something Hans said in 1988 on a panel with Rothbard and David Gordon and Leland Yeager.
10:02
And this is ’88 at the Mises Institute I assume, and an audience member said “I have a question for Professor Hoppe. Does the idea of personal sovereignty extend to knowledge? Am I sovereign over my own thoughts, ideas, and theories?”
10:14
And Hans said, “in order to have a thought, you must have property rights over your body. That doesn’t imply you own your thoughts.
10:21
The thoughts that can be used by – the thoughts can by used by anybody who is capable of understanding them.” So Hans understood this with pure praxeology 30 – almost 30 years ago.
10:38
> HANS-HERMANN HOPPE: Then I was still young.
Finally, see also Hoppe and Intellectual Property: On Standing on the Shoulders of Giants (July 31, 2006), and The Critique of Copyright in Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s Argumentation Ethics.
And finally: this is a bit amusing. As noted in this comment on a Mises.org thread debating IP and whether Hoppe is anti-IP, the commenter writes: ”
Hoppe with Kealey (who challenges IP as a non-Rothbardian) and Kinsella PFS 2010
Kinsella @ 18:40 (Note, Hoppe does not judo chop him for saying IP is not libertarian, despite Hoppe being well within striking distance)
Again at 36:20
See also:
Related:
On this Christmas day, I present to you: U.S. Pat. No. 4,993,176, issued Feb. 19, 1991, for a Christmas tree stand watering system. Abstract:
This is a watering system for a stand for a botanical specimen. The watering system includes an ornamental reservoir from which a water hose and an air hose extend. The hoses have terminal ends which are positioned in the container of the stand. The container is filled with water and the terminal ends are cut on a bias. As the water in the container is depleted, the biased terminal end of the air hose is opened to the atmosphere causing water to flow from the reservoir to the container through the water hose. The watering system could also use a single hose of greater diameter than either of the hoses of the first embodiment. The terminal end of the hose is positioned in the container and is cut on a bias. As the water in the container is depleted, the biased terminal end of the hose is opened to the atmosphere causing water to flow from the reservoir to the container through the bottom half of the hose.
Claim 1:
1. A water system for a stand for a botanical specimen comprising a reservoir, a water hose, an air hose and a plant container, the water hose having a first terminal end and a second terminal end, the first terminal end extending into the reservoir, the second terminal end extending into the plant container, the air hose having a first end and a second end, the first end extending into the reservoir, the second and extending into the plant container, whereby with water in the reservoir and in the plant container covering the first end and the first and second terminal ends and the second end above the water, water will flow from the reservoir to the plant container.
Res ipsa loquitur.
“E-books, self-publication and agents are like abortion, marijuana and taxation—it seems no one can discuss them rationally.” —David Levine (quoted here) (Note: it’s neither David S. Levine nor David K. Levine of our Board; it may be this David Levine–trying to verify now)
From the WSJ. See also Susan G. Komen Foundation Elbows Out Charities Over Use Of The Word ‘Cure’
Charity Brawl: Nonprofits Aren’t So Generous When a Name’s at Stake
By CLIFFORD M. MARKS
As the leading breast-cancer charity, Susan G. Komen For the Cure helped make “for the cure” a staple of the fund-raising vernacular.
The slogan is so popular that dozens of groups have sought to trademark names incorporating the phrase. Among them are “Juggling for a Cure,” “Bark for the Cure,” and “Blondes for the Cure.”
Charity event Kites for a Cure, top, refused a name change request from Susan G. Komen For the Cure, which held the event pictured above.
Komen sees this as imitation, and it’s not flattered. Instead, it’s launching a not-so-friendly legal battle against kite fliers, kayakers and dozens of other themed fund-raisers that it contends are poaching its name. And it’s sternly warning charities against dabbling with pink, its signature hue.
I’ll be on the Katherine Albrecht radio show from 4pm-5pm CDT today discussing net neutrality — for more information, see my post Against Net Neutrality.
Here is the link to the show page for this episode; MP3 file (local copy).
Great post by Mike Masnick at Techdirt:
US Ambassador To The UN: Protecting Patents & Copyrights More Important Than Development
from the say-what-now? dept
The US’s ambassador to the UN in Geneva, Betty E. King, recently gave a press conference in Geneva to talk about a variety of issues. What caught our attention, not surprisingly, was the discussion on intellectual property issues, which seemed to raise a lot more questions than it answered. Towards the end of her talk, she basically complained about WIPO, and how various developing countries are hijacking WIPO to focus on “development,” at the expense of things like patents and copyright. She says that she, and the US government, are pro development, but not if it comes at the expense of patents and copyrights.
Of course, that makes no sense. The whole point of patents and copyright is supposed to be to create incentives for development. So development should always be at the core of the discussion. It’s not, as King implies, that the two should be in conflict. Instead, if the two are in conflict, it suggests that there’s something wrong with the way our intellectual property laws are working. What’s really scary is she seems to think that more and longer patents automatically means better results:
Now long before I got here the United States has been stationing its experts around the world to help more countries be better able to apply for patents. We have our patent officers in our Embassy in Egypt as well as in other places around the world, and that has worked because we have seen an increase in the number of patent applications from a broader range of countries. That is good. However, the group in Geneva seems hell-bent on shortening these patents and creating more exceptions.
My point is if you create too many exceptions to a rule, you may as well not have the rule.
The problem is that she doesn’t seem to realize that those exceptions actually have been shown, time and time again, to improve overall development. Which is what she should be in favor of supporting. But, it quickly becomes clear that King is simply unfamiliar with the history of copyright or pretty much any of the details of how intellectual property works, when she makes the laughable claim that exceptions to copyright will mean we’ll have no more books:
While we certainly want access to books for a lot of people around the world, I think denying the authors of these books their rights, or abrogating the rights of these authors, would mean that eventually we will never have a book.
Someone should send King a study on the history of copyright in the US, including the fact that, during its developmental stage, the US refused to respect the copyrights of any foreign book… and how, despite that, Charles Dickens made a ton of money in the US by using the cheap copies of his books that were abundant to fund lavish tours of the US which were quite profitable for him. There are ways other than copyright to make money. And there are many reasons, other than copyright, to write books. It’s kind of scary when an official so high up in US government policy circles doesn’t seem to know that. [continue reading…]
This is great intellectual properganda (h/t Manuel Lora):
but I prefer Nina Paley’s Copying Is Not Theft:
Good example of how innovation and creativity can thrive without IP. From Reason:
That Screwy, Ballyhooey Nollywood
Jesse Walker | December 21, 2010
Recommended reading: a great article in The Economist on Nigeria’s film industry, a.k.a. Nollywood, which “churns out about 50 full-length features a week, making it the world’s second most prolific film industry after India’s Bollywood.” The report covers everything from the way movies are produced and consumed in a country with no traditional studios and hardly any conventional theaters…
The market traders control Nollywood to this day. They make films for home consumption rather than for the cinema–a place few can afford, or reach easily. DVD discs sell for a dollar. Print runs can reach a million. Studios, both in the physical and the corporate sense of the term, are unknown. There are no lots, no sound stages and no trailers for the stars. “Films are made on the run, sometimes literally,” says Emem Isong, one of Nigeria’s few female producers, during a shoot. “Some of the guys are hiding from the police.”
All scenes are shot on location and with a shoestring budget of no more than $100,000. Most of the financiers are based in a vast, chaotic market called Idumota. It is a maze within a labyrinth. Crowds push through narrow, covered alleys. The sound of honking motorbikes is drowned out by blaring television sets showing film trailers. The flickering screens light up dim stalls lined with thousands of DVDs on narrow wooden shelves.
…to the reactions of Africa’s cultural and political elites:
Jean Rouch, a champion of indigenous art in Niger, has compared Nollywood to the AIDS virus. Cultural critics complain about “macabre scenes full of sorcery” in the films. The more alarmist describe Nigerian directors and producers as voodoo priests casting malign spells over audiences in other countries. They talk of the “Nigerianisation” of Africa, worrying that the whole continent has come to “snap its fingers the Nigerian way”.
Governments can be hostile, too. Several have brought in protectionist measures, including spurious production fees. In July Ghana started demanding $1,000 from visiting actors and $5,000 from producers and directors. The Democratic Republic of Congo has tried to ban Nigerian films altogether.
And for anyone who wonders how the absence of effective copyright protection will affect the incentive to produce, Nollywood turns out to be an interesting laboratory:
It takes the pirates just two weeks to copy a new film and distribute it across Africa. The merchants must take their money during that fortnight, known as the “mating season”, before their discs become commodities. As soon as the mating season is over they start thinking about the next film.
The article also includes the phrase “itinerant writers trawling the market.” So read the whole thing. If you’re like me, it’ll make you want to see a bunch of the movies — and maybe spend a few week in Lagos watching the crews and financiers at work.
Reporting Software Piracy
Software piracy equals lost wages, lost jobs, and unfair competition. Struggling to fight against piracy, some companies must devote resources to anti-piracy technology, ultimately slowing down the development of better products and services. Others fail under the pressure of prices that legal resellers can’t match. Reporting piracy means keeping a level playing field, and ensuring the most reliable products for your customers.
You can help stop this illegal and harmful activity. Knowing how to spot and avoid illegal software, and reporting suspected intellectual property violations when you encounter them, can have a positive impact on the fight against piracy. Please learn more about this criminal activity, and take action.
There are three ways to report piracy.
Method 1: E-mail [email protected]. Method 2: Call the Microsoft Anti-Piracy Hotline at (800) RU-LEGIT. Method 3: Fill out an online reporting form.
As I noted in Supreme Court lets ban on “gray market” imports stand, the Supreme Court has upheld a ban on unauthorized “gray market” imports (see my previous related discussion in Leveraging IP). C4SIF board member Wendy McElroy has a superb piece on this in the latest issue of The Freeman:
The Free Life | Wendy McElroy
Ominous Copyright Ruling Stands
The right to resell is undermined.
A stunning but little-noticed Supreme Court ruling signals that the face of business and the boundaries of ownership could soon change dramatically. The December 13 ruling in Costco Wholesale Corp. v. Omega S.A. is little-noticed because as a 4-to-4 decision, with one Justice recused, it merely affirmed a lower-court decision without setting a national precedent. What it signals is how all but one Justice would rule on the “first-sale” doctrine within copyright law.
Omega is a Swiss watch manufacturer. Costco is an American retailer known for selling brand-name goods at deep discount. Its business model includes the common arbitrage practice of “parallel importation” by which a commodity selling more cheaply abroad than domestically is imported and marked up by an unauthorized seller. A New York-based supplier imported Omega watches and resold them to Costco. Although each step of acquisition was legal, Omega sued because Costco was not “authorized” to distribute its copyrighted logo.
The suit challenged the legal doctrine of “first-sale,” recognized in 1908 by the Supreme Court in Bobbs-Merrill Co. v. Straus and codified in the Copyright Act of 1976. Under this doctrine the buyer of a copyrighted work can dispose of it without permission of the copyright holder. For example, you can sell used books without permission from authors or publishers. Because there is a low threshold for copyright registration, first-sale applies to a vast array of products, from breakfast cereals to kitchen appliances, from beauty aids to vitamins. It also applies to foreign parts used in assembling otherwise American goods. [continue reading…]
From Gizmodo:
Disney Patents Interactive Cakes
Think back, if you will, to the last time you ate a birthday cake. Don’t you remember griping about how it didn’t really do anything? Well, Disney’s looking to fix all that with interactive cakes. Yes, birthday cakes with pico-projectors.
Just when people were perfecting the non-interactive cake, Disney had to go and throw this curveball. Their recently awarded patent for “Projector Systems and Methods For Producing Digitally Augmented, Interactive Cakes and Other Food Products” has changed the cake game forever. StitchKingdom anticipates what we might find in this strange new world:
The system would be capable of detecting the topography of a cake which essentially means that if a slice were to be cut out, it could detect the missing piece and respond appropriately. For example, cut out a slice where there’s a simulated lake and you may instantly create a waterfall in which water is now represented as flowing down the sides of the new missing cake portion. Additionally, props and specially coded utensils could trigger events such as Tinker Bell flying around the cake and leaving a trail of pixie dust when someone waves a wand in front of the cake. Perhaps Captain Hook would instantly appear and draw his sword, preparing for battle, as someone approaches the cake with a knife.
I’ve been attending the Mises Institute’s Austrian Scholars Conference meetings since the beginning, in the 1990s. I’ve missed a few in recent years, but go whenever I can. I’ve met so many great and interesting people there. One of them is the brilliant Canadian economic geographer Pierre Desrochers, who was recently profiled in this Mises Institute Faculty Spotlight Interview. I just re-read his nice, short article, “Excludability, Creativity and the Case Against the Patent System,” Economic Affairs, vol. 20, no. 3 (September 2000), pp. 14-16. Many libertarians are now coming out against IP1 but Desrochers was an early skeptic. His article, published in 2000, cites my working paper presented at the 2000 ASC, which was later published as Against Intellectual Property in the JLS. Desrochers attended that ASC, if I recall. I also recall the Objectivist George Reisman attending my anti-IP speech and approaching me afterwards, a bit incredulous that I could oppose patent and copyright, and asking me to confirm that I indeed was opposed to these laws. I said yes, and he just nodded, and he just turned around and slowly walked out, a bit stunned.)
Anyway, Desrochers’s piece is a nice, concise criticism of the patent system. (See also his article On the Abuse of Patents as Economic Indicators, Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics (Winter 1998).)
Some choice quotes:
The previously listed flaws of the patent system are serious enough to make the case for its abolition. An even stronger case can be made, however, when one considers that the patent system rests on a fundamentally flawed view of human creativity.
A misleading view of human creativity
As many psychologists and historians of technology have shown, innovation does not proceed through major breakthroughs by specific individuals, but rather through the collaboration of different people who, through small and cumulative improvements, yield novel and useful artefacts over time.7 All of patent law, on the other hand, is based on the assumption that an invention is a discrete and novel entity that can be assigned to the individual who is determined by the courts to be its legitimate creator. The associations of an invention with other existing or past artefacts are therefore obscured. Despite its philosophical foundation, however, the patent system cannot entirely obscure the true nature of technological change. As already explained, virtually every new patent infringes in some way on other patents. Furthermore, most patented innovations are typically very minor improvements. As F. M. Scherer has noted:‘As the bleary-eyed reviewer of some 15,000 patent abstracts in connection with research … I was struck by how narrowly incremental [adaptive?] most “inventions” are.’8 Even an anonymous author writing in a brochure of the Canadian Intellectual Property Office9 had to admit that 90% of all patented inventions are minor improvements on existing patented devices.
What the incremental view of technological change implies is that the contribution of an individual to a new device is likely to be small. Thus an inventor who comes up with a better mousetrap is building on the previous work of metallurgists, machinists and woodworkers, but also on the contribution of other individuals who previously worked on similar devices (if only by learning what did not work). Granting him a 20-year monopoly from the initial filing date seems somewhat outrageous in this light.
… The fact that people solve problems by combining existing things in a new configuration goes a long way towards explaining the persisting recurrence of ‘simultaneous inventions’ throughout history.
See also George Basalla, The Evolution of Technology (Cambridge, 1988), at pp. 57 et seq.:
The Origins of the Discontinuous Argument
Despite evidence to the contrary, there is widespread support for the idea that inventions are the result of revolutionary upheavals in technology brought about by individual geniuses. The sources of this outlook are threefold: the loss or concealment of crucial antecedents; the emergence of the inventor as hero; and the confusion of technological and socioeconomic change.
Given the nature of technology and technological change, inventor and public alike are apt to forget, or at times deliberately suppress, the debt owed to a key antecedent. Whitney’s first gin bore a strong resemblance to the Indian charka, but that likeness was quickly lost as the machine evolved into its modern form. Few realize that important features of the modern automobile’s form, structure, and mode of manufacture were derived from the bicycle, yet the first automobiles were little more than four-wheeled bicycles — Henry Ford called his invention a quadracycle —powered by gasoline engines. …
Antecedent loss or concealment has occurred throughout history; the creation of the myth of the heroic inventor, however, is confined mainly to the past 300 years. Before the eighteenth century, inventors did not routinely gain especial recognition for their contributions. The history of earlier technology is largely an anonymous one with a few prominent names remembered.
…
Given this amalgamation of technology with national interests and prestige, patriotic pride dictated the writing of chauvinistic histories of inventions that attributed the most important ones to fellow countrymen and passed over the work by individuals in other countries, no matter how talented or influential these inventors might be. A bizarre situation thus developed in which the heroic inventors of one country were scarcely acknowledged in another land. To take a well-known example, the “inventor” of the incandescent electric light bulb is Sir Joseph W. Swan in Britain, Thomas A. Edison in America, and A. N. Lodygin in Russia. Similarly, the Russian assertion that A. S. Popov invented radiotelegraphy is disputed by those in the West who designate Guglielmo Marconi as the inventor. In sum, parochialism limits the acknowledgment of the prior work done by technologists in other countries, focuses attention upon the de novo emergence of inventions from the solitary labors of heroic nationals, and favors a revolutionary approach to technological change.
The patent system is another modern development that has contributed to the support and dissemination of the discontinuous argument. Patents are the legal means by which industrial societies reward and protect technological innovators. In the process of doing so, an invention is uniquely identified with its inventor and its associations with existing artifacts is obscured. All of patent law is based on the assumption that an invention is a discrete, novel entity that can be assigned to the individual who is determined by the courts to be its legitimate creator. Thus, the patent system converts the continuous stream of made things into a series of distinct entities.
In a capitalistic society, the holder of a patent is in a position to use the patent for personal financial advantage. Because money, social status, and ego gratification are all at stake, the contenders in a patent dispute often fight less than fairly to preserve their claim to originality. Samuel F. B. Morse, for example, stoutly and falsely denied that he had ever learned anything crucial to the development of the electric telegraph from physicist Joseph Henry. Eli Whitney, in the midst of securing a patent for his cotton gin, asserted that he had never seen the improved roller gins that had been devised to attempt to clean short staple cotton. (He did not declare, however, that he had never encountered the older charka gins that had undoubtedly influenced him.) Even Thomas A. Edison was not above making dubious claims when he sought recognition for the invention of moving-picture apparatus. Such dissimulations are the result of a system that attempts to impose discontinuity on what is essentially a continuous phenomenon.
In granting a patent the government does more than give its originator an exclusive legal right to exploit it. A patent bestows societal recognition on an inventor and distorts the extent of the debt owed to the past by encouraging the concealment of the network of ties that lead from earlier, related artifacts.
The final source of the revolutionary explanation for technological change is the confusion of technology with its social and economic ramifications, best exemplified by the title Industrial Revolution. In the early nineteenth century, it meant a series of crucial inventions that transformed industry. The revolution was assumed to have occurred first within technology and then spread to industry. This meaning persists in modern usage in phrases such as the “Second Industrial Revolution” and “Third Industrial Revolution,” referring to fundamental changes in industry caused by the introduction of electronics and computers. A second meaning, and one that has a wider currency, defines the Industrial Revolution as a major alteration in society brought about by technology. That is how Friedrich Engels used the term (1845) when he wrote that a revolution had “changed the entire structure of middle-class society” in England.
According to the first definition the technological-industrial change is revolutionary; according to the second it is the social and economic changes that are so. Because in current practice these two definitions have been merged, it is not always clear precisely what has undergone a revolution.
The industrial changes of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were truly revolutionary in the ways they affected the lives and fortunes of the people of Great Britain. Yet the machines, and the steam engines that powered them, were the outcome of evolutionary changes within technology. Neither marked an abrupt break with the past. The economic and social consequences of these developments, on the other hand, were so far-reaching that they transformed the social order.
Upheavals in the social and economic spheres have all too often been interpreted wrongly to signify revolutionary changes in technology. The establishment of the first industrial society in Britain was a change of such magnitude that it overwhelmed the techno- logical continuity on which it was based and helped to perpetuate the view that technology advances by leaps from one great invention to another.
The confusion between technology and its consequences joined the myths of the heroic inventors, the ideas of material progress, nationalism, and the patent system and furthered the discontinuous explanation of technological change. Only a close study of artifacts can demonstrate the inadequacies of that outlook and the relevance of the continuous argument.
As a recent column in the Wall Street Journal reminds us, online freedom is jeopardized in the name of “net neutrality” (The FCC’s Threat to Internet Freedom). This is just another case of the state re-labeling things to sound benign but that are really invasions of liberty and property rights–another good example being use of the term “intellectual property” to masque the true nature of state-granted monopoly privilege rights (patent and copyright) (see my post Intellectual Properganda).
It is true that some corporations probably have extra-market power to control aspects of the Internet, as the result of state interventions such as IP, FCC licensing, antitrust law, big business favoritism, and so on. But the solution is not to grant the state even more power to regulate private companies.This is the criminal gang that has fouled things up in the first place. Another recent example of federal Chutzpah is the Obama administration’s proposal to provide a “Web Privacy ‘Bill of Rights’“–how obscene. The mob that is the greatest threat to online privacy freedom, and rights will protect us? I’m reminded of the phrase, “We’re from the government. And we’re here to help.” Thanks, but no thanks, guys.
These are the same parasites who do everything they can to hobble and destroy business and innovation–they impose costly regulations; tax individuals, making employees more costly; inflate the money supply and cause destructive business cycles; impose insane, murderous policies on pharmaceutical and medical innovations via the FDA; and then impose double tax by taxing corporations too, after imposing Sarbannes Oxley on them for the “privilege” to exist as a corporation (a privilege that is not a privilege; corporations do not need state privileges to exist1 ). And then, as a solution to the damage done to innovation by the state’s malicious hobbbling, the maniacal intellectual properteers urge giving the state more power to grant intellectual monopoly privilege grants to companies. (But then, if the companies use these monopoly grants “too much”, it’s called “abuse” and the state persecutes them under its evil antitrust laws.)2
Likewise, net neutrality is an attempt by the state to see more power to control private property rights as an ostensible response to various “market failures” that are really themselves caused by state intervention. In this, it is anohter example of the state’s creating a crisis and using this as a justification to seize more power under the pretense of saving the people from the crisis that it caused.3
Libertarians should oppose net neutrality–and the state interventions that gives rise to the problems net neutrality pretends to address.4 Don’t trust the state to “protect” you. Ever.
The Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom (C4SIF) is dedicated to building public awareness of the manner in which so-called “intellectual property” (IP) laws and policies impede innovation, creativity, communication, learning, knowledge, emulation, and information sharing. We are for property rights, free markets, competition, commerce, cooperation, and the voluntary sharing of knowledge, and oppose IP laws, which systematically impede or hamper innovation. IP law should be completely and immediately abolished.
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