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Originally Posted by James Boyle
Out of this pattern of habit and influence, and out of much deeper notions about authorship and invention that I have explored elsewhere, developed an ideology, a worldview. Call it maximalism. Its proponents sincerely believed in it and pursued it even when it did not make economic sense. (Think how lucky the movie industry is that it lost the Sony case.) It has been the subject of this book. Its tenets are that intellectual property is just like physical property, that rights need to increase proportionately as copying costs decrease, and that, in general, increasing levels of intellectual property protection will yield increasing levels of innovation. Despite its defense of ever-increasing government-granted monopolies, this ideology cloaks itself in the rhetoric of free markets. The bumbling state, whose interventions in the economy normally spell disaster, turns into a scalpel-wielding genius when its monopolies and subsidies are provided through intellectual property rights rather than regulatory fiat. Above all, this way of seeing the world minimizes the importance of creativity, expression, and distribution that takes place outside its framework and ignores or plays down the importance of the input side of the equation—the need to focus on the material from which culture and science are made, as well as the protected expression and inventions made from that raw material.
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