[p2p-research] CAD files at The PIrate Bay? (Follow up)

[Kevin Carson]

On 10/22/09, Samuel Rose <samuel.rose at gmail.com> wrote:

>  The problem, as Kevin mentions, is that this route (low cost rapid
>  prototyping to capitalized patented products) requires small producers
>  to partner with more traditional companies who are better funded to be
>  their "facilitators".  Kevin is right that this way of bringing
>  products to market requires lots of capitalization for both the
>  patenting process and the transfer of design from prototype to product
>  (plus the marketing that most of these firms believe is needed, etc
>  etc). This model will be somewhat pervasive as distributed
>  manufacturing emerges. There could even likely be a bubble emerging
>  around more traditional firms "sourcing" emerging garage
>  manufacturers.  These companies see each other doing this, and see the
>  short term advantage, and are already starting to tap into what they
>  see as a shortcut resource. Yet, ultimately,  since it requires so
>  many resources, it will collapse or diminish.

Actually, I believe the traditional model is on the way out; garage
manufacturing will expand at the expense of big companies.  But for
small companies serving local markets with a lot of lean product lines
organized on a JIT basis, the cost of patents won't be worth it.  The
whole idea is expensive patenting, followed by large-batch production
to service the overhead, is becoming irrelevant to ever-larger
sections of the economy.

Re the bubble of partnerships between traditional manufacturing corps
and outsourced garage producers, that's a major theme of Doctorow's
Makers, which I'm in process of reviewing.  The interesting thing,
though, is that the micromanufacturing bubble in his scenario popped
much more catastrophically than the dotcom bubble.  The reason was
that with entry costs as low as they were, it became harder and harder
to reap entrepreneurial profits from the first mover advantage and
then get out before widespread adoption drove costs down.  The
periods of entrepreneurial rent became shorter and shorter, until
entrepreneurs were overtaken by a shock wave of competiitive cost
implosion--every favela and shantytown in the country had its own Fab
Lab operating out of a store front or garage.


-- 
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html
Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html