|
I recently wrote an essay on the topic of stimulating innovation/creativity, and in it I (thanks to Julie Cohen's wonderful discussion in "Creativity and Culture in Copyright Theory", as well as Boldrin & Levine's Against Intellectual Monopoly and Boyle's The Public Domain, all freely available on the net) made an issue out of the assumption that innovation is (or even can) be stimulated by creating more property rights.
As Boldrin&Levine point out, IPRs are always created well after it has already been established that a market can be profitable, specifically when the main companies in the field have amassed enough clout to be able to work the system and create patent rights for them which means that innovation can only occur when there is adequate protection for inventors does not hold water at all for the riskiest cases of innovation, namely when setting up an entirely new industry. Yet for some reason, IPRs are deemed essential anyway. How is that?
It is in this light that I can only look upon ACTA with amazement, as it ignores entirely the question that should really be asked -- namely how one can stimulate innovation in a culture, something that is definitely not dependent solely on the existence of IP legislation -- in favor of discussing how broadly the proposed solution (IPRs) should be applied to the entirety of society and industry.
It is an amazing win for established industries that they can, without anyone doubting them, claim that IPRs are needed to 'insure' the survival of businesses, as otherwise "competitors will come in who will undercut us". Yet how, one wonders, do they imagine will those competitors be able to grasp the industry when even they have trouble innovating, etc. This last fact seems to imply directly that innovation, or even production, in that industry is hard, requires lots of up-front capital investment, etc. Which is a risk that new company would be taking just as much as the old company did, requiring lots of expertise collected in the same company, and so on.
ACTA is crap, but it's mostly crap because it seeks to protect incumbents against new entrants, rather than protecting companies who are innovating all the time. Protected industries are complacent ones. (Just look at AT&T before 1980s) As such, it's little more than rent-seeking by the Old World Order against the "threat" of Asia (that is, the threat of increased competition.), all to protect the incomes of the few white men on top, and all even though it's been shown time and time again that competition and innovation are hugely dependent on each other, and screwing with one strongly affects the other.
|