From: Lee Daniel Crocker (lcrocker@mercury.colossus.net)
Date: Tue Dec 21 1999 - 12:34:24 MST
> > Grand ideas are no more intrinsicly valuable than manual labor;
> > the idea that either has value is the Marxist fallacy. Value comes
> > from demand, not labor. Neither labor nor invention should be valued
> > or rewarded until it produces something that people want to buy. If
> > abolishing the patent system means that grand ideas will be less
> > rewarded, I say that's a good thing.
>
> The patent system does not reward ideas, in that no one gets paid when
> they receive a patent. It's the other way around, you have to pay to
> get one. Hence there is no presumption that ideas have value in the
> patent system; patents are granted on worthless ideas with no significant
> burden on society.
A patent is a grant of monopoly; it is a promise by the government to
use force--at taxpayer expense--to eliminate your competitors. That's
an economic benefit. Of course you don't accrue that benefit unless
you actually produce something and then your competitors also produce
it, but when that happens the court will be there.
> What the patent system allows is that you can get paid for your idea,
> if there is demand for it. Without patents, idea creators can't get
> paid (much) for their idea, no matter how much demand there is for it.
People _shouldn't_ be paid for ideas. Ideas are worthless vapor.
Only _products_ have value. People should get paid for making
products. (Of course, the people who make those products need ideas,
especially for products like books and software whose primary
attraction is the ideas they embody, so they should hire creative
people to come up with those ideas, but it is not the ideas themselves
that they sell, it's the products). The idea that creativity will not
be rewarded without patents is a naked assertion that I have debunked
so many times here and elsewhere that I will not bore us again; If the
archives worked, I say go search them, but you may be out of luck.
> This is unlike labor; a great laborer, a skilled craftsman or artist
> whose works are in great demand, can receive a corresponding reward.
> Each of his works is unique and cannot be reproduced (assuming he is
> producing physical objects). But a great thinker, whose works are
> solely in the form of information, faces the problem that his output
> can be freely duplicated without losing value.
That's absolutely true. That doesn't mean, however, that there's
anything wrong with that state of affairs. Again, ideas _don't_
have value, and _shouldn't_ be rewarded unless an actual useful
product results from them. And in that case, the inventor should
be under contract to a producer of those products, who _should_ get
most of the money, because ey's the one meeting the demand. The
world economy and production of creative works and inventions
exploded during the Renaissance entirely without the burden of
copyrights or patents, and would do the same today.
> Patents and copyrights are intended to rectify this inequality, by giving
> the thinker the same ability to be rewarded for his works as the laborer.
Patentes and Copyrights were _intended_ as grants of privilege to the
elite. They are _justified_ by the rhetoric you parrot, but all bad
laws have nice-sounding justifications.
-- Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lcrocker.html> "All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past, are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC
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