Comments Elsewhere

Henry,

As a response to Hayek, your statement suffers from having misunderstood Hayek’s central point, which has nothing to do with maximizing or sustaining the current quantitative output of literary works or inventions. What he said was this:

Yet it is not obvious that such forced scarcity is the most effective way to stimulate the human creative process. … Similarly, recurrent re-examinations of the problem have not demonstrated that the obtainability of patents of invention actually enhances the flow of new technical knowledge rather than leading to wasteful concentration of research on problems whose solution in the near future can be foreseen and where, in consequence of the law, anyone who hits upon a solution a moment before the next gains the right to its exclusive use for a prolonged period.

Both his discussion of copyright and his discussion of patents have to do with not only the quantity but the quality of the output. Just pointing to some folks who happen to be writing right now, or who happen to be inventing things right now, and saying “Without patents or copyrights these folks wouldn’t be inventing or writing!” does not even begin to answer his objection. In fact he’s quite explicit in the case of patents that he thinks a lot of the actually existing work encouraged by patent restrictions is misdirected or less than optimal. Thus your complaint about his focus on “great works of literature,” etc. is misguided. If you think that maximizing quantity of output, or maximizing quantity of output from a particular group of people (e.g. “working folks with a need to remunerate themselves”) then you would have some grounds to object to Hayek’s maneuver. But you would need to give some argument for that position, which so far you have not.

It is, however, disingenuous of you to claim that you are discussing only Hayek, and not patents or copyrights in general. In the case of copyrights at least you made quite specific claims about the global economic effects that (for example) abolishing copyrights would have, which are independent of anything in particular that Hayek addressed.

Without going any further in this direction, all I’m trying to say is that putting or taking money from peoples’ pockets isn’t as easy an issue as you’re trying to make it.

This is tendentious, to say the very least. I deny that allowing for a free market, and thus refusing to recognize arbitrary demands for monopoly rights, is appropriately described as “putting or taking money from people’s pockets.” And protectionist appeals to the poor working folks who will have to actually do the work of competing on price and quality are hardly going to move anyone who is serious about free market economics.

Lifting patent protections means giving more benefit to those organizations which can sell commodities most effectively.

To be precise, it does not mean “giving more benefit” to anyone. Free markets are opportunities, not gifts; what it means is stepping back and allowing those who can best sell the product to benefit from their own honest labor. (I think it’s interesting, for one thing, that you treat “pure out-and-out execution,” i.e. manufacturing and distributing and selling commodities, as something which doesn’t require “brains.” Ha ha ha.)

Now, I think that as a matter of economics, you are begging the question when you presume that “media conglomerates” or other “multi-billion-dollar” corporations are likely to be better than other companies at producing and distributing creative or inventive works. Since they have so much money and existing distribution channels, they may very well profit in the short term. (On the other hand, you need to keep in mind that there are several conglomerates in competition with each other, and their biggest sales opportunities would be in distributing copies of each other’s products — thus undermining the margins for all.) But in the long term, there is no reason to suppose that other players might not develop more efficient distribution channels, or that large-scale distributors will get products to local markets more cheaply than small-scale distributors. I think the long-run effects of abolishing IP restrictions would be to undermine the titans in the field, since today they (Disney, WB, BMG, Sony, Pfizer, GSK, etc.) depend on zealously guarded copyright and patent portfolios in order to generate those fat margins. There is no evidence at all that their product line or their internal culture is fit for competing in a market unencumbered by patent and copyright.

I also think it is gravely mistaken to suppose that abolishing patents or copyrights would reduce creative and technological fields into “a manufacturing economy,” in which the dominant activity is simply manufacturing and distributing commodities based on other people’s creation or invention. There are many ways for creative types to make a living other than exploiting grants of intellectual monopoly. I should hope if you ever hope to go into writing, for one, that you’ll figure some of them out, because most writers have a very difficult time eating on the royalties (if any) from their writing. Some people pursue creative/inventive/whatever endeavors as a hobby while making their living at a day job. Others go into a line of work that supports their writing/research/whatever by other means (for example, by entering the academy). One can easily imagine that under a free market these strategies would continue to exist, and would indeed expand.

But all of this to one side, the more important point to me has little to do with economics, and a lot to do with ethics. Even if it turned out that a free market resulted in overwhelming market dominance by a few large manufacturers and distributors, that would be no reason to sustain copyrights or patents even one hour longer. Neither I nor you nor anybody else has the right to stop other people from making a living through honest labor — i.e. rendering goods or services without employing force or fraud — just so that we can guarantee a particular set of market arrangements or a particular standard of living for ourselves. Since both patents and copyrights depend on suppressing other people’s right to make and sell copies of information they have freely obtained for an arbitrarily dictated length of time, they depend on just such an injustice. And I should hope that you, too, would rather work in a factory than do injustice to innocent people.