More on libertarians and IP. This week, the argument that IP is a government-granted monopoly, which of course is not a position peculiar to anti-IP libertarians. Jefferson described intellectual property as such, so have many others. The argument is a straightforward one, somewhat different for copyright and patent. I'll sum up the argument about copyright first; it rests first on the history of copyright as a grant to the English Stationers' Guild of the exclusive right to reproduce copyrighted works. Today, copyright is still fairly described as as a limited exclusive right to reproduce a certain creative work, and so can easily be tagged a "monopoly." So...

copyright transforms each author, photographer, director, and so on into a leviathan akin to the Post Office? Well, no, and here we come to a problem with labelling copyright a "monopoly." It isn't a very interesting sort of monopoly, certainly not the sort that precludes or restrains competition. It isn't any more a monopoly than ordinary property rights. Note that opponents (Benjamin Tucker for example), of ordinary property rights also tag them a "monopoly:" and so do supporters: Ludwig Von Mises cheerfully points out that a vendor located in a prime commercial location has a "monopoly" on the benefits that flow from that location (I'm paraphrasing, don't have the text in front of me). There is no other like it. But none of these are particularly threatening sorts of monopolies. Thus this doesn't work well for me at all as an argument against copyright.

Patent is trickier because patents preclude independent invention of the same thing. So I will cheerfully admit that they, too, are "monopolies." The idea is that one may fairly get a short-lived such monopoly in exchange for disclosing one's idea. I guess to some people that doesn't seem like a fair deal, but it does to me. One can always invent around the patent--invent another drug that cures the same illness, or another software routine, and so on (unlike the Post Office: no one else can deliver first class non-urgent mail by any method). So again these monopolies are not in themselves especially interesting.

There is the possibility that they might grow into more interesting forms of market power. For example, the Bell phone system originally got its head start on the independents partly because of its patents on phone switches; that head start in turn lead to network effects that lead to Bell's aquisition of the independents. But if the alternative is no certain incentives to create phone switches at all. I'll take the monopoly, thanks. For a limited time... Just don't patent the wheel.

posted by Solveig Singleton @ 1:40 PM | Liberty and IP

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