Most of the serious research and
development, the hard part of it, is funded by the public. In fact most of
the economy comes out of public expenditures through the state system, which
is the source of most innovation and development. I mean computers, the
internet. Just go through the range, it's all coming out of the state
system primarily. There is research and development in the corporate
system, some, but it's mostly at the marketing end. And the same is true of
drugs.
This is absolutely false. I agree that discovery isn't easy, but you know what's even harder? The other 90% of the work needed to finish it and make it a reliable product. Chomsky trivializes the work of synthetic organic chemists, the engineers that set up and keep production lines going, researchers that test the drugs, and so on.
In software terms, this is like saying that all the hard work is done because someone banged out a prototype over the weekend. It's full of bugs and doesn't have the features people want yet.
If you believe that Chomsky's right, try running a startup while holding his idea. You'll fail, or you'll discover that it's not easy and reject his idea.
Much of what we call research vs. what we call development is simply an artifact that stems from the way science is funded today. However, science can't (and won't) always be funded by giant government bodies. (To say that it will assumes that the way things are can go on forever, but history shows that civilizations have lifespans just like everything else.)
Pharmaceutical R&D companies have become just development companies because they stop looking for new drugs and are simply repackaging and reformulating existing drugs (e.g. Claritin/Clarinex).
They're doing this because it costs too much to do research and development gives them quicker return on investment.
They'll do their own research when the government stops competing with them in that arena. Until then, why duplicate it when they (and everyone else) has been forced to pay for it anyway? (I'm all for research, but I'm against forcing people to pay for it. The best scientific research is intricately tied into industry anyway. For example, where would biochemistry be without cyclotrons, radiolabeling, glassware and chemical reagents? All of that was possible because of private industrial work. Ever heard of Peter Mitchell?)
Second, pharmas aren't free to develop whatever they think would be profitable. New drugs cost around a billion dollars to develop because of the FDA, which is ridiculous. There are many rare illnesses for which affected people don't want the "safety" the FDA imposes. As long as billion dollar development costs are imposed on every drug, there is no chance that any progress can be made for these people. So it's not the pharmas, it's the regulation.
The other side of that argument is of course that most patients don't want "unsafe" drugs, so that regulation has a purpose.
Is there any way to get a best of both worlds in this scenario? Quicker to-market times for drugs for rare and dangerous diseases, and the safe route for the more common drugs?
Is there any way to get a best of both worlds in this scenario? Quicker to-market times for drugs for rare and dangerous diseases, and the safe route for the more common drugs?
Of course there is. Regulations can be changed, freeing drug companies to research and develop these drugs. In fact, I'm sure that this change - this partial deregulation compromise - is going to happen, someday.
But on what principle should we stop there? Where do you draw the line, and why? If the regulations say "freedom only for drug developers that treat diseases that affect 15,000 people with five years," on what principle do you cut freedom short for the 15,001th patient, or the one who is expected to live five years and a day?
You draw the line where it works best, because it works best.
The goal isn't some nebulous definition of "freedom", where "freedom" is defined as "adherence to conservative orthodoxy regardless of the particulars".
Edit: I say that each of us has to do that for ourselves.
Also, I'm not a conservative. I'm anti-religion, pro-selfishness, pro-gay, anti-environmentalism, pro-abortion, pro-capitalism. I'm a radical for reason.
In this conversation, "works better" was defined 2 short comments ago as "easing the regulatory burden for exceptional cases [and in general if possible] while still maintaining safety standards for mundane drugs". Paraphrased.
But you jumped way past "working better" into some unrelated and 100% ideologically-driven conception of "freedom". What are we talking about here, my freedom to get poisoned by cough syrup because I didn't perform my own scientific studies on the matter with a large sample population?
How come freedom only ever applies to the already-rich cutting corners for an extra buck?
How come freedom only ever applies to the already-rich cutting corners for an extra buck?
It doesn't. Yaron Brook just addressed this in a debate held in New York last week:
"The biggest victims of government intervention in the economy, the biggest victims of socialism (as someone who came from a socialist country, where government intervened a lot more than here) are the ambitious poor - the people who could rise up under freedom.
The people who want to work, who want to make something of their lives, who want to succeed, who want to prosper. They are the real victims. They are the ones we should shed tears for when we regulate, when we control, when we put them through public education, when we put them through the whole social mechanism, when we use welfare to institutionalize them into poverty and take away their sense of personal responsibility and personal morality that is so crucial for their development as successful, happy, prosperous human beings. If anything Objectivism should rally around, it's those people. You know, I wasn't rich, I was an ambitious poor guy. I came to this country with nothing. Those are the people who are the real victims of state intervention, and the real benefactors of freedom and capitalism."
Well, pardon my phrasing here, but all you're doing here is doubling down on the hand-wavey bullshit in longer form. I could give you a similar academic paragraph from a trotskyist, it would be just as substantive and just as wrong.
To his point, in the last 30 years, we've slashed taxes for the rich and really slashed welfare. Shouldn't the poor be picking themselves up by their bootstraps by now? Or is something a little more robust than "I don't even need to know the details, the problem is SOCIALISM and the solution is FREEDOM" required?
And meanwhile, none of this has anything to do with the very real problem of FDA regulatory reform. You haven't laid out the first reason why I wouldn't be poisoned by a bottle of cough syrup from duane reade or why it should be on me vs the drug company to prove that their cough syrup is safe.
I suppose we could always have a company that was in charge of rating drugs, and the drug companies could pay them for ratings, like AAA and BBB. I mean, it works for the financial industry, right?
You haven't laid out the first reason why I wouldn't be poisoned by a bottle of cough syrup from duane reade or why it should be on me vs the drug company to prove that their cough syrup is safe.
No, just see the other comment right below:
You should be free to do this yourself or to seek the advice of those you've chosen to trust on scientific (or any other) matters.
As to your comment about the financial industry: it's inapplicable because it's not a free market. In a free market, there would be no Federal Reserve, no Fannie or Freddie to distort the market. Immoral firms such as Goldman Sachs would have nothing to take advantage of.
.. and my trotskyist would argue that the Soviets failed because they never achieved "true" communism. He's just as right as you.
Gotta go, but on that whole federal reserve thing, go take a look at the boom/bust cycle in the US prior to and after establishing the federal reserve.
Again, it's not about what you find ideologically satisfying, it's about what actually works in the real world.
EDIT: btw, the fed and fannie/freddy had almost zero to do with the housing crisis. The problem was the multiplied leverage much more than the housing debt itself, and fannie/freddy's rules about loans to minorities only affected a miniscule % of total defaults.
Again, it's not about what you find ideologically satisfying, it's about what actually works in the real world.
Actually, it's got to be both. Being smart is being able to correctly predict things, and that requires both theory and empirical observations. While everyone has some sort of philosophy, some philosophies are better in the real world than others.
Being smart means also knowing that you inherently cannot predict things. You may be better than others at getting stuff right, yet you are inevitably going to be wrong.
Its pretty established that the financial firms doubled down on leverage and then blew up. A free market would have made things worse, faster and earlier. Nothing could save you from people who are lying to you, and have begun to believe their own horse. No amount of informational accuracy will help.
We have. We've chosen the government, because they're probably more neutral and objective than a private entity, and that's more important than them probably being less efficient.
> In software terms, this is like saying that all the hard work is done because someone banged out a prototype over the weekend. It's full of bugs and doesn't have the features people want yet.
That's the early Google, Facebook etc. for you. Of course most of such ventures fail, but sometimes they get it done and gain traction.
I guess his argument is based on the premise it takes organization on scale of a state (country) to be able to organize broad-sweeping long-term research in areas that don't look promising at first. Without the sight of immediately sellable product or service. Businesses seem to be more oriented towards research that improves incrementally something that's already somewhat known.
I was going to write Bell Labs were one of notable exceptions, but then I realized they got much state funding for research related to military.
If you're talking about keeping production lines going - this isn't really part of what no-IP would do. Someone would still need to operate and maintain production and distribution - however the competition to do this would drive costs down dramatically.
Also, high margins and no competitive pressure make research and dev methods stagnant - no IP + public research funding and FDA subsidies seems like a more effective system to me.
Chomsky trivializes the work of synthetic organic chemists, the engineers that set up and keep production lines going, researchers that test the drugs, and so on.
Because private companies would be willing to throw money into the wind to fund research. The concept's been proven, the risky part is over; although not necessarily the difficult part.
Blue-sky research is much higher risk. Without the shorter term payoff that corporations seek. It's reasonable to call an endeavor "harder" when it's less certain of success. Particularly when we're talking about real innovations like computers and the internet, versus a company hiring a couple guys to toss together a "minimal viable product" with PHP.
(If that description of corporate productization sounds unfair, I think it's closer to the mark than saying basic research is analogous to "someone banged out a prototype over the weekend".)
That wouldn't stop people from doing it privately. For example, biochemist Peter Mitchell (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Peter_D._Mitc...) won a Nobel in Chemistry in 1978 for work he did entirely without government funding, out of a house he owned. (It's not some little thing he discovered, either - if you take an undergraduate course in biochemistry, you'll run across his chemiosmotic hypothesis directly, and it's taught in less detail in a lot of other biology courses.)
Interesting example. Pete was actually my step-grandfather, and I visited Glynn quite often as a kid. One thing worth bearing in mind is that he was quite wealthy, having inherited a lot of money (from the wimpey family I believe). So while it is clearly true that some blue sky research can occur without government funding, his path may not be all that easily replicated by others
Conversely, the impossibility to exclude (copyright and patents) didn't stop the industry from funding the Linux kernel.
But both cases are probably marginal. In a world where one has to earn money to survive, innovation is slowed down, either because of copyright and patents, or the lack of funding.
The trick is to get a world where one doesn't need to earn money.
"The trick is to get a world where one doesn't need to earn money."
At the very least we need to move towards a place where money is not the final arbiter of 'Good'.
"Intellectual property rights has very little to do with individual initiative. I mean, Einstein didn't have any intellectual property rights on relativity theory. Science and innovation is carried out by people that are interested in it. That's the way science works. There's an effort in very recent years to commercialize it, like they commercialize everything else. "
I'm a BSD fan myself, but startups are possible without open source. Stack Overflow runs on Windows, for example.
The one thing that startups need is freedom to make what people want so that those people will freely choose to pay the startup (how many startups existed in the USSR in 1970?). OSS is just a nice-to-have once you look at it that way. If it was a necessity, you'd have to explain how there were startups before anything was open source.
Edit: OSS would still exist in some form even if there were no government funding for it. You know how some people say they do it just for fun? I think that's true.
Also, another thing. Linux/BSD push the bar way high up and force Windows to try and catch up. So even if you use windows, you're still affected by Linux. In the same way that you're affected (positively) by Apple even if you use Ubuntu.
Minor rhetorical note - you used the phrase "exception that proves the rule" incorrectly. You used it to mean "the single exception to a general rule", with "open source software is necessary for a successful startup" being the rule, and Stack Overflow being the exception.
The phrase actually means that the existence of a specific rule implies that the negation is true for circumstances not covered by the rule. So, if half of the blocks in a city have "parking prohibited" signs, and no such signs elsewhere, that "proves" that parking is in fact allowed on the other blocks, since the signs are excepting the general rule. In other words, why would there be a sign if it was understood that there is no parking?
Sorry to make such a big point out of a small matter, but we already lost one good phrase ("Begging the question") to widespread improper usage. Wikipedia has more info, including the origin of the phrase: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_that_proves_the_rule
The point is that the phrase "exception that proves the rule" should only be used when talking about man-made rules and laws, not inductive hypotheses. You don't get to use evidence against your hypothesis as evidence for your hypothesis!
Put another way, when used correctly, "the exception that proves the rule" is a valid rhetorical phrase regardless of how many exceptions there are. Whereas if there were 500 successful startups using non-open-source tools, you wouldn't say that they were the exceptions that proved the rule.
> You don't get to use evidence against your hypothesis as evidence for your hypothesis!
But you do. That's the point. It's not an absolute law. I'm sure you can find a great application written in Visual Basic. This doesn't make Visual Basic a great choice over Python.
If you could list 50+ successful startups running on Windows, then you could say there's a strong evidence.
And even then, this only proves that Windows is as good as Linux. It doesn't counter the original point about Linux being great despite not having a business model centered around IP.
I completely agree with your overall point - that open source Unix-type tools are better for startups, and that Windows-based tools aren't a good fit. I was simply saying that you used a rhetorical phrase incorrectly.
The operating system is just one component. People had lives and did things before there were operating systems of any kind.
Edit: For example, could you write CAD software without an OS as we know it today? It would be undoubtedly harder, but you could. People did this in the 60s.
It might be easier to write CAD software without an OS. At least, writing directly to a framebuffer is simpler than using X11 or OpenGL or Win32. Unless I'm missing something, a modern CAD system has to plot each entity twice; once to the display system and once to an internal grid. The internal grid is used for entity selection, possibly culling and other things.
The older AutoCADs (on DOS) apparently plotted the internal grid (hi-res), then resampled it to generate the screen display.
Thus, minor panning and zooming could be accomodated without "regenerating" -- replotting the hi-res grid.
Anyway, a CAD system doesn't really use the facilities of an OS; something like a web server, however, seems to benefit from an OS.
That depends on exactly what you mean by that. The funding sources are quite diverse. Most often, they start out with no funding at all and then, once they solve problems of interest to enough people, they start to attract both government and private sponsors.
But yes, there are government grants. Here's the first example I could find, one for developing a secure Linux desktop:
I think there is a [citation needed] there, but I also think he's willfully ignoring that productizing stuff is difficult.
Here's a great example of "public goods" that's near and dear to my heart: I love Linux, and there's no way in hell I'd use anything else. However, it's hard to argue that it sets the pace in terms of usability. Commercial operations produced easier systems for the end user well before Linux got there.
Why? Because they got paid for their results, and they got paid because of intellectual property. And as they got paid, they sunk part of that money back into research and development into improving the experience. There is a comparatively tiny amount of money going into the Linux Desktop.
The fact that producing stuff is difficult is enough to create an opportunity. If you produce better stuff (price,quality,marketing) you get to sell more and earn more. This gives you an opportunity to invest more in to the system. So you get to be ahead of your competitors. And everybody gets to be ahead as side result with time as well, thus you need to keep investing and keep on trying.
The problem is that some industries feel entitled to retire on mohito island while humanity gets to drag them along.
Also most of people using and developing Linux live off it - one way or another. I'm certain that professional/user ratio is in strong favour of Linux.
Idea that companies put money into R&D solely due to intellectual property, or that they only make enough to put something into R&D because of IP is wrong.
Look at some of the most successful businesses in the world. Selling sugared water, selling grilled pieces of meat, selling washing machines and various appliances, selling pieces of wood that fit together,...
Taking whatever IP from them wouldn't change their R&D and other forward looking spending activities much.
And don't come back to me with low tech/high tech argument. High tech production is even harder, that's why those who know how to do it and keep successfully investing into getting beter, get to run the show. Those who don't know how to improve and those who want to collect tax on everybody forever should just roll over and die.
> producing stuff is difficult is enough to create an opportunity
Producing "information stuff" is difficult, but copying it is extremely easy.
You can pay a team of 100 guys to work for a year creating a program, a movie, or whatever, and then have it copied around the internet in a few hours, for free. Leaving you zero income, and a large loss on your sunk costs.
That's why IP exists. There is ample scope for arguing about whether the present rules and regulations are ideal (I don't think so), but the idea behind the system makes sense for many situations.
Not so easy in the world of drugs or other manufactured goods. You can't torrent a factory, trained labourers, a distribution system, etc. And you can't torrent the finished product, either. If IP laws disappeared tomorrow, I wouldn't be any closer to owning a Lambourghini.
>If IP laws disappeared tomorrow, I wouldn't be any closer to owning a Lambourghini.
Why do you want a Lambo?
To me this seems contrary to the ideals that would support the liberation of IP. Why should we be wasting resources on such things?
You'd probably be able to get any item you liked with a Lambo TM (or are we keeping some form of trademark laws? please?) and certainly be able to buy some sort of Ford/Toyota/Kia with a Lambo shell. But it will definitely be a knock-off.
Lamborghinis will still be expensive not because of scarcity but because they're a huge waste of money and so in practise few people really want to spend the money on them.
If you wanted a Volvo instead I think you have a chance but you'll probably find it extremely hard to get one that lasts more than a few months, is safe. It will probably be even harder to get parts that are actually worth fitting.
If you wanted an iPad then I think you stand a chance and it might actually be half decent, Chinese factories are already making ripoffs of such things after all. Apple would have to own the supply chain outright otherwise the manufacturer will undercut them (sell at lower price exact same product) and Apple would be left with the R&D and design bills.
You're assuming I picked the Lambourghini for it's brand name value. I could have said "Volvo" but I didn't. Substitute "Volvo" for "Lambourghini" if you like and you'll get eh same point---a manufactured good will not become free by removing IP laws. I can download 10,000 albums this month without incurring any extra cost on top of my internet bill (which is cap-free where I live), but I can't buy a manufactured good without someone manufacturing it first. Cheap knock-offs won't happen (even in China) if nobody pays for them.
They think they'll get paid more because of IP that'll give them a monopoly if they hit the lock-in jackpot and one or two of the many competitors does get paid in that way, while the others fail. Remove the IP and you remove the lottery-style incentive structure and then you'll see investment in the smaller, but still commercially relevant returns available from building on open systems. (This is similar to massive investment in minor, but patentable, changes to existing drugs rather than investment in novel, but less profitable drugs).
There are a ton of "smaller but commercially relevant" companies that sell closed software products too, and would not be able to do so, or would be hampered, without some form of intellectual property.
I'm a bit at a loss as to how many people on a site dedicated, in part, to startups, which for most of us are based on information goods (software) would blithely throw out the baby with the bathwater in terms of IP. Take a good, hard look at the current system and fix major portions of it? Sure. Eliminate it entirely? Probably a bad idea.
If Chomsky wants to argue that government funded research is the source of innovation, then he should also ask, what is the source of government funds?
Government takes dollars from those who earn it, and spends it according to collective values at best, or in favor of corrupt interests at worst.
Who is to say that if those dollars were left in the hands of those who earned them, they wouldn't be spent more wisely?
He doesn't cite many examples/sources, but the PARC lab and spin-offs seem to be a huge exception: laser printer, mouse, windows, postscript, ethernet.
Granted, they're not fundamental science, but they were, at least, innovations.
In fairness just because something is published on the web doesn't mean it is in the public domain. A manufacturer can publish blueprints but you can't build and sell an improved version of their product if they have a patent on it.
He is `set' because he continuously fulfills the expectation of the employer: he publishes (and teaches etc.). And expectations of the wide public: he provides information to us. The employer (university) is happy, because those publications bring them money, even if indirectly.
And you were going to say that's a bad thing because...?
Sure university is a somewhat special case; we don't expect everybody to become a professor. But, in similar vein, artists earn money by performing. Open source developers earn money by utilizing their knowledge and skill in paid-for projects. Etc., etc.
> Even if they were all in the public domain, he's basically "set", being a university professor with tenure.
> He is `set' because he continuously fulfills the expectation of the employer: he publishes (and teaches etc.). And expectations of the wide public: he provides information to us.
I don't think you understand what "tenure" means. Think of it like having your stock options fully vested and exercised, except that the company pays dividends every year, and you had so many options that you can live on the dividends.
If you read what I wrote, I made no criticism of him for doing his job. I said it would be a poorer world were the only people who could afford to write those with independent sources of income.
> artists earn money by performing
What you're saying, in economic terms, is that musicians have rivalrous, excludable goods they can produce: the concert experience.
That's not bad, although it would have the IMO negative effect of leaving the Brian Wilson (much more oriented towards studio work than touring) types between a rock and a hard place.
Authors don't really have that: they could sign books, but that would reduce their income drastically, as most copies would be freely had.
> Open source developers earn money by utilizing their knowledge and skill in paid-for projects.
As for the open source developers, but WHERE DOES THE MONEY COME FROM in those paid-for projects? Scarcity is where it comes from, and often, they're getting paid to work on open source by someone who deals in the artificial scarcity of intellectual property.
> Authors don't really have that: they could sign books, but that would reduce their income drastically, as most copies would be freely had.
Cory Doctorow seems to manage just fine. OK, that's not easy. But I'm not sure it's harder than earning money from a standard publisher, and it looks at least possible.
Cory Doctorow's work appears to be released under the "Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike" license, which means that only his publisher has the right to sell paper copies. Granted, he's being very generous and liberal, but he is still utilizing IP laws to create some scarcity.
Also, you have to look at these things at the margin: were all authors to do this, how many would no longer be able to support themselves with their writing, and thus be forced to stop or curtail their activities? He's a relatively well known writer: maybe it's ok for him to make, say, 100K rather than 200K a year. Some guy making 50K a year may have to give it up if his income is cut in half.
Furthermore, consider that just now the Kindle and similar systems are really starting to take off. In 2005 or so, you either bought the paper book and had yourself a nice read, or stared at an LCD for hours, which is not my idea of pleasant.
In the case of consulting, the scarcity might be expertise in putting together some kind of enterprisey system, but there is always going to be scarcity, otherwise no money will be exchanged.
And you can rest assured that IBM has made plenty of money from IP itself over the years - they're no strangers to software or any other kind of patents, nor selling software like DB2. Also: do you think that IBM's services division would make as much money if they posted all their code to the internet? I bet many of their clients believe (right or wrong) that the custom solutions they're getting are a competitive advantage and do not want to freely share them with the competition who is not shelling out big bucks to IBM.
With regards to Google's IP, you can be very sure that they would invoke all kinds of IP laws were someone to walk out of their HQ and post important bits and pieces of their search engine tech to the internet. These days, they're in a pretty good position to survive in any case, but think about trying to start a company and have no way of doing anything if people walked out and posted your "crown jewels" to the internet.
Meaning, if you want to gain any wealth, then work on something scarce, and make sure it stays scarce. Let everyone do that, and we get a world of scarcity.
There exists concept of Gift economy [1] where scarcity is not a driving factor. The (historical) implementations we had so far aren't exactly shining examples of quick development. But it may have been just partly related, or even unrelated, to the economic model.
Competition has a way of ensuring that scarce things become abundant. Look at, say, automobiles or computers or food or most normal goods. Sure, monopolies exist, but we also have laws to limit their harm as well.
You don't just get to wave your hands and make things "abundant", someone has to do the work, and in order to do the work they have to make a living at it, at the very least.
> Sure, monopolies exist, but we also have laws to limit their harm as well.
A monopoly large enough is able to self-sustain, by adjusting the environment to its needs. And let's say that openly: including adjusting the law.
Of course, at some point their growth is stopped by growing pains of internal communication & management. What does the development of management theory and practice spell for the future, we shall see.
As I've said numerous times here, I don't think that IP laws in their current form are ideal, just that the idea of tossing them out entirely is likely to have some very serious consequences in terms of the production of information goods.
Counter example - affordable new AIDS medicines Or better internet connectivity/speeds in America.
While competition does have its place for helping humanity, it should also be recognized as not being useful in the production of other types of goods.
How is throwing out IP laws completely going to get you those things? I don't see it. Who's going to bring drugs to market? Sure, government sponsors basic research, but to get there to the market is not exactly a walk in the park.
I've read the thread again, could you tell me where I came across as "throwing out IP Laws completely"?.
I think -
A) Competition is good for some types of goods, not all. (I don't remember/know the correct economic criteria to define this.)
B) IP laws are good/great for some research, and bad/terrible for others.
C) I do not see the current system incentivizing humanity's good over personal/shareholder profit.
D) The current system has 'Human Good' occur as a side effect of rewarding people to do their best. It is vastly better than any system which has existed before. it will be better if we can fix C).
The original article was about Chomsky saying IP was a bad thing, and a lot of commenters here seem to like the idea of ditching it, lock stock and barrel.
I agree with your points, and think that D and C are incremental improvements to the existing system to try and make with time, rather than a reason to junk the entire thing.
I agree that ditching the whole thing would be ineffective. Even if we did, I would bet that the new system would be the old system with minor differences.
There is good in the system, it needs more people to help managed and identify fraudulent/cheating behavior which is aimed at gaming the system.
I also think we need a smaller net so that fewer things can be patented. Again, this is for the freedom to exchange information and ideas, which leads to the betterment of humanity as a whole.
Everything we do has been built on the ideas and labor of others before us.
It makes little sense to me to imagine we will be better off by not letting future generations do the same.
There are proposed alternatives to IP protections. For example, a society could decide to fund these as public goods. (Say, in a participatory bottom-up manner.)
Then you don't have the stick-filesharers-in-jail problem.
I would champion this point - at least in terms of research and science.
On the other hand when it comes to artists and sharing of other similar IP, the current system can do with shorter copyright terms. At least thats my non-nuanced starting point on these discussions.
Man, Does he "fulfill the expectation of the employer"? This guy rocks:
According to the Arts and Humanities Citation Index in 1992, Chomsky was cited as a source more often than any other living scholar from 1980 to 1992. He is also the eighth most cited source of all time, and is considered the "most cited living author".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Chomsky
Chomsky is talking about institutional factors. He typically admits he is affected by them the same as anyone else. What kind of readership can a public domain book get? How would publishing it be funded? If it was a success, another publisher could just begin a print run. Old public domain books manage to get published, but, they have the advantage that they don't need to be advertised, have shelf space speculatively bought, etc. etc.
Chomsky also doesn't believe we should have regular property (at least not in the "rights" sense), but he still owns stuff.
Putting work into the Public Domain is ironically not the best way to serve the public good. It's much safer to have a permissive license. Chomsky's answer here might have unintentionally passed the wrong idea in that sense.
There's always someone trying to make everyone out to be a hypocrite. It is not a conflict to both have a belief and not act within that belief. If the world suddenly started working the way he described and he still tried to sell things he expected others to give away then it would be hypocritical behavior.
There's always someone trying to make everyone out to be a hypocrite. It is not a conflict to both have a belief and not act within that belief.
It is only not a conflict if you are, in fact, a hypocrite, and do not bother to judge yourself by your own standards.
If the world suddenly started working the way he described and he still tried to sell things he expected others to give away then it would be hypocritical behavior.
This is the shelter that most hypocrites hide under, claiming that they can't possibly be expected to live by their own high ideals until all men are good and fair and wise. It is the claim of every communist dictator who hoards the wealth he denies his citizens, and every capitalist who colludes with government for protectionism and corporate welfare while crying for free-markets, and every cheap preacher who slinks around with prostitutes while bleating about the sexualization of our culture.
If you dedicate yourself to high ideals, then dedicate yourself to them, and show the world that they are ideals that humans can live up to. If you are too enamored of worldly ways to do so, then be willing to forgive others of the same.
One can easily believe "X is good." without believing "X is what everyone should do in all situations." So to, one can believe "it would be better in numerous important ways if everyone did Z all the time." without believing "it would be better in all situations on all important measures if one more person did Z." You are advocating we judge others using a simplistic abstraction of what principles are. Good rhetoric perhaps, but not good thinking.
Put another way, it is untrue to think that principles can only be beliefs without conditionals.
I disagree with this bit of hyperbole. You only live one time. Living the life of a pauper because of some ideals if just not practical. Most people will never hear of your sacrifice and those who do will write you off as a nutter. Chomsky is doing what he can by delivering his message to the youth, the future. He wouldn't be in a position to deliver that message if he were off trying to start a one-man revolution.
Any published work is copyrighted by default. Are you aware of Chomsky making any effort to keep his books out of people's hands? Has he sued anyone for copying or distributing his books?
But it is easy enough to declaim the restriction to copying if one wishes CC-SA, CopyLeft, CC0¹, PD etc.. Chomsky is likely contractual obligated, at least in part, if he holds a tenured professorship and may not be able to do this without leaving that post.
If he's contractually bound then I think it would be fair to say that he is railing against the restrictions imposed upon him rather than being hypocritical.
Of course, this is all speculation until someone either gets a response out of him on the issue, or he starts chasing down "pirates".
This is quite relevant all on its own, even if slightly off-topic:
[the WTO Uruguay agreement is] called a "free trade agreement". It's in fact a highly protectionist agreement. The US is strongly opposed to free trade, just as business leaders are, just as they're opposed to a market economy.
Here's a different perspective for you guys that is more or less in agreement with Chomsky's:
The universe does not recognize our artificial restrictions on information.
This is inherently why people generally think it's ok to violate the copyrights of others. Because we know, and the universe knows that nothing was taken away from them. The restrictions are entirely artifical and designed to do nothing except create an enormous inequality between the the "owner" of the information, and everyone else. That's the sole purpose. These Imaginary Stuff owners then use this disparity (a legal fiction entirely) to generate massive wealth based on entirely contrived circumstances.
Since the dawn of speech nothing like this has existed because it never made sense. Anything one person said could be repeated by anyone who could remembered it. So when did information suddenly become ownable? It's a nonsensical legal fiction of epic proportions.
I contend that if the information is publicly available, you no longer own it. This is how the universe operates. Fans of Imaginary Stuff rights will not be able to get their way for long. Or rather, they shouldn't be allowed to use the legal system to enforce their artificial disparity. If you want to own information, keep it a secret. Otherwise, it's everyone's.
Another way of looking at it is, if you want to get paid for good information/content/art production, you're going to have to do what every other human does, continue working even after producing great works. You should be valued for your talent, and ability to produce from it over and over - just like everyone else. A bricklayer doesn't lay one brick really well and then charge everyone to use it daily. The value should be placed on the ability, not the product, since there's no physical product at all really. The slight exception being physical works of art etc, but then they're not just information, so the rules I'm talking about do not entirely apply. Photographic reproductions are information, but an original work in physical form is still valuable for being the first and physical.
What do you other smart folks think about this? I know a lot of us work in information production in some form. I myself am a software engineer, so I'm not just trying to take from everyone else and pretend the rule doesn't apply to me because I'm not an information/content producer. I actually am. So this hits me hardest too.
To my knowledge, one of the reasons Universities were granted the right to patent their work was as a defensive measure - work patented at the University was intended to be available to the public, or at least, a whole lot easier to access than work patented by a private entity. The idea was to make the results of publicly funded research more, not less, accessible.
Nice read. I've never read any Chomsky. He mentions inventions related to industries (textiles, steel and pharmaceutical...) and sciences. I'd be curious to read more from him about IP applied to art. Any idea where to look at?
Relativity theory isn't patentable as there is no business model which could commercialize it.
Patents were originally intended as a way to encourage innovation because they created a give and take relationship between private interests and the public. The inventor had to disclose the invention's inner workings, and in exchange they were given a relatively short period of exclusivity. The public benefited because the innovation was fully disclosed for others to dissect and re-apply some of those techniques and processes to new inventions.
In the current modern US copyright & patent system, where very few patents actually cover true innovation, there is little public benefit beyond this notion that protecting the inventor from copycats increases their likelihood to innovate. Of course, there is no scientific process that has lead people to this conclusion, so it is honestly an educated guess at best.
The dominant thinking in the business world seems to be that overall execution has become the dominant factor in commercial success and not a particular single innovation. Protecting these interests provides little benefit to anyone besides IP attorneys.
Copyright and patents are very different bits of IP.
Creative works like books are under copyright. You don't think that the ability to earn a living benefits the public by allowing a higher level of production of books, movies, music, etc...? I'm certain that things are tilted too far in favor of companies like Disney, but that doesn't mean the system should be thrown out entirely.
Patents seem like they depend more on the field: I think they're a hindrance for computer science, but am less convinced that they're a bad thing for things like drugs. In any case, it's a compromise, like you say, so the answer is likely to be in the middle somewhere.
I wrote a gigantic direct reasoning post in response to this, but I think a gigantic anecdotal analogy will work better.
In the state of Tennessee, where I live, there is currently a debate about repealing some laws that regulate the sale of wine, which would allow grocery stores to sell it. Polls put 70% of consumers favoring the measure. Arguments are being made mostly by liquor & wine store owners and employees that they have spent decades building their businesses based on the current legal environment, and that it is unfair to expose them to this competition. They're also arguing that service quality will be lowered, because the mass market grocery stores do not have the kind of expertise the current stores have in their product. They argue that local jobs will be lost. Church leaders are arguing that it will expose alcoholics to temptation they will not be able to resist. To these people, it is just unfathomable to change what exists now because it seems to work best for them. They have already resigned themselves that there is no possible way it could be any better any other way and they will fight it irrationally until the bitter end. My girlfriend and her father work at the largest liquor store in Tennessee. Toting the short-sighted company line, most of the employees are against the repeal.
Most liquor & wine stores ONLY exist because of these protection laws, and many of them are expensive and poorly ran. Very few of them can actually make the argument that their expertise or service sets them aside. Other burdensome regulations such as required distance from churches, schools, and other liquor stores are anti-urban and basically make certain locations extremely lucrative for the owners as they operate somewhat of a local monopoly and are grandfathered in. These people will go out of business. Successful stores can't even create multiple locations, so the best businesses in this arena are unable to scale.
There is a strong correlation between availability of wine and increased consumption. When overall consumption increases, the distributors stand to increase their revenues substantially, and overall the better liquor & wine stores that have increased selection and service will continue to stay where they are for the most part, if not see increases, even in the face of stiff competition from grocery stores. Grocery stores will likely focus on low margin, commodity wines that make the liquor & wine stores little money. Liquor & wine stores, of course, are viewed as "dirty" establishments and this deters many more conservative consumers from trying a product they may genuinely (and responsibly) enjoy. Just as any argument that protect jobs, their argument for "saving local jobs" is just arguing for robbing Peter to pay Paul. The money to pay these people comes directly from consumers, which means it's diverted from other jobs.
There is also some innovation to be had that will save consumers billions and unleash the potential of specialized stores that sell specialized and/or paired food and wine products. The current distribution model is poor and extremely inefficient. The last 30 years of innovation in supply chain management are missing from the distribution chain. A very small minority of retail stores even use UPC codes to perform computerized inventory & point-of-sale pricing. Even at the largest stores, ordering is done by entirely by hand. Management understands it's inefficient, but there is so much money rolling in, and usually a territory they monopolize, so there's very little incentive to change. Most stores are stocked entirely by the sales staff at distribution companies, based on what creates the most margin for them, not what consumers demand. Grocery stores are simply incompatible with the model that exists now, so the distributors will be forced to modernize to be able to get their product on those shelves.
This is the price we pay for unpopular, overreaching protectionist laws that hold together obsolete business models and rob real innovation and creativity, diverting gigantic sums of capital in unproductive ways and strongly inhibiting consumer choice. The current state of consumer-impacting copyright law holds these media companies together, and just like the wine & liquor stores in Tennessee, they are "fire and brim-stoning" us claiming that all of this high quality music & movies we enjoy will go away. The media companies want us to believe their business model is legitimate, that the choices they make for us are what we actually desire, that copying music and movies that we would otherwise not purchase IS theft and therefore morally wrong, and that the criminal punishment for copyright infringement should continue to massively exceed the act of actual theft from a store.
I sometimes enjoy a "big production movie", along the lines of Avatar (although I wasn't wild about that one), and think the world would be worse off without them.
Movies cost millions of dollars to produce. With no IP, we would be left with either movies produced by some rich patron or only by very low-budget amateurs, because otherwise, how do you recoup the money?
I am not sure why you are discussing wine; it is not a good analogy, as it is not an information good, and while you may feel that the "laws are all outdated", any reasoning about the purchase and distribution of wine is likely to not apply much to information goods.
You need to consider opportunity cost. What amazing things are we prevented from realising as a result of restrictive law and the practices it supports?
There was a time where the church could point to its awesome musical, architectural and wine traditions and say that they wouldn't exist without the strong forced support of the populace, land privileges, the right to cut the balls off young boys, education monopoly and other ludicrous concessions.
I'm a huge fan of the results of some these traditions, but there's more to life.
I think the parent post was very apt. Copyright and patents are both forms of protectionsim, like the Tennessee license laws he describes.
> What amazing things are we prevented from realising as a result of restrictive law and the practices it supports?
If you look at open source software, there's a lot of very good stuff out there, but it's not some amazing new world, really, except for the people who take it and use it, and give nothing back. They get a ton of value for free. That's ok, open source producers signed up to that world voluntarily, and in general, it sort of works out.
By taking away IP, you would force everyone to contribute their work for free to zillions of other people, thus collapsing the market - plenty of people contribute to open source for fun, but if they were forced to, a whole lot of people would get out of the software business.
I think eyeforgotmyname was saying it was ironic considering Einstein worked in a patent office, not that he thought Einstein should have been able to patent it.
Comparative advantage is generally not understood. It does not mean that countries only manufacture those things that they are best at. From the piece:
>But those of us who would be here would be pursuing our comparative advantage and
exporting fish and fur. That's what economists tell you is right. Pursue your comparative advantage. That was our comparative advantage. We certainly wouldn't have had a textile industry. British textiles were way cheaper and better.
Comparative advantage allows for trade even when one country has an absolute advantage over another. Even if British textiles were better and cheaper than the American ones if America started to produce textiles it could make sense for the British to reduce their textile production if there are other goods they can apply the same resources to that have a higher value than they will pay for the American textiles they are now buying.
The wikipedia page is pretty good at explaining this:
That's true ONLY IF America started to produce textiles. But the textbook trade models (e.g. Ricardian, Hecksher-Olin, etc) all pretty much recommend that America should just stick to producing fish and fur to maximise its gains from trade, and forget about a homegrown textile industry.
We certainly wouldn't have had a textile industry. British textiles were way cheaper and better. Actually British textiles were cheaper and better because Britain had crushed Irish and Indian superior textile manufacturers and stolen their techniques. So they were now the preeminent textile manufacturer, by force of course.
I have no idea what he's talking about here. The British did do a number of horrible things in India and did use force to crush, for example, the Indian shipbuilding industry. They also could have learned a lot from Indian metallurgy if they were a bit less arrogant. But textiles? I guess they did "steal" cotton, but that wasn't really an invention in the sense he's talking about.
They certainly crushed the Indian textiles industry economically, which speaks to his broader point that the dominant players only talk about free markets etc. when it suits them.
Chomsky is just one man, and thus subject to the same intellectual failings as other individuals, but his integrity is well beyond the vast majority of people with a pulpit. You should definitely read and consider what he has to say, because otherwise you may be hearing only lobbyists' perspectives.
I find his perspective really refreshing. Most articles that I encounter nowadays are very US-centric, or Europe-centric. They look at the consequences for a certain country or group within it, not the world at large, and are thus very polarized. Chomsky's reasoning feels truly international. And his comments about IP and medicine are appropriate as ever with the ACTA treaty (and sons) being pushed on us all by the US.
I wish there were more people with a clear vision such as his. It could make the world as a whole a better place.
