Comments Elsewhere

Jake:

It takes a $500 million and 12 to 15 years to discover and bring a significant drug to market today. Who is going to invest that kind of money without patent protection?

Boo hoo. Without tariff protection, who is going to invest in American automobiles?

Shannon Love:

If a decision-making about a resource cannot be effectively allocated to private entities via a property mechanism then state will allocate the resource via politics.

Property rights are not “allocated to private entities” by the State. They are earned by honest labor. The real choice is not between State-granted tenure to private monopolies (fascism) or total State property (state socialism); it’s between individual rights and State piracy of any kind.

How you apply this to the issue of government-enforced patent restrictions I’ll leave up to you.

Beck:

So are patent laws moral? I would argue that in general they are for the same reason that copyright laws are moral. If Person X devotes Y time and Z money towards developing a product or service, then that person deserves to benefit from the use by others of the product.

You’re right that the morality of patent restrictions is the real issue here, not the consequentialist pay-off. I’m baffled by your moral case for patents, however. People deserve lots of things; for example, I think that William Lloyd Garrison deserved a million dollars rather than a life lived constantly on the edge of penury for his long and difficult labors against the evil of slavery. But it doesn’t follow from the fact that somebody deserves a certain reward that they have the right to extract it by force. Which is of course what copyright and patents do: create monopoly profits by forcibly suppressing competitors.

You might claim: “Well, look, if I put my time and work and hard-earned money into making an automobile, that’s my property, and I have the exclusive right to sell it. Stopping competitors from selling the car I made isn’t extracting a monopoly profit by force, in any interesting sense; it’s just suppressing brigandry. It’s the same way with ideas for new drugs or with the book that I just wrote.” But there’s an obvious difference between the two cases: in order for me to take the car you made and sell it, I have to deprive you of your ability to sell or use it. That’s why it’s robbery: I deprived you of the property that you own. In order for me to “sell” an “idea,” I don’t need to deprive you of your ability to sell it. I can independently discover it by investing my own time, money, and labor without interacting with you at all; or I can discover it by investing my own time, money, and labor in taking apart and understanding your invention after I buy it; or you can tell me your idea and I can turn around and use the idea you’ve given me. But in all of these cases I’m selling things while leaving you in full possession of your idea. So what have I robbed you of? Nothing. You still have exactly what you had before.

You might point out that, while I’m not depriving you of the chance to sell the expressions of your idea, I am depriving you of the chance to sell the expressions of your idea at the rate you think you deserve. No I’m not: you can sell it at any rate that you want to, and customers will make their own decisions as to whether or not to buy it. You might point out that by underselling you on expressions of your idea, I’m depriving you of customers who might otherwise buy it at the higher price. Well, so what? You don’t have an ownership claim over customers. Sorry.