Political Theory

Re: IP a disincentive to R&D

I. Ryan — Tue, 11 May 2010 16:05:41 GMT

scineram:

What was unclear?

Everything; otherwise, I would have been more specific.

scineram:

[Have y]ou read from Stephan about new rationalist rights theories?

Barely.

Re: IP a disincentive to R&D

scineram — Tue, 11 May 2010 15:58:50 GMT

What was unclear? You read from Stephan about new rationalist rights theories?

Re: IP a disincentive to R&D

Sieben — Tue, 11 May 2010 15:57:58 GMT

Even if IP rights aren't legitimate, you can still sell your product under the condition that the buyer not copy or distribute it... IP rights might not exist a priori but they are certainly valid if they are the result of voluntary exchange.

Re: IP a disincentive to R&D

I. Ryan — Tue, 11 May 2010 15:53:28 GMT

scineram:

Here is a simple use of the estoppel approach, curtesy of Kinsella.

- If it weren't for IP laws, a given piece of intellectual property would not exist.

- Therefore you are estopped from complaining, that you havo to pay for its use.

Huh?

Re: IP a disincentive to R&D

scineram — Tue, 11 May 2010 15:20:36 GMT

Here is a simple use of the estoppel approach, curtesy of Kinsella.

- If it weren't for IP laws, a given piece of intellectual property would not exist.

- Therefore you are estopped from complaining, that you havo to pay for its use.

Re: IP a disincentive to R&D

chrispy — Thu, 06 May 2010 23:16:20 GMT

Ash Lawson:
Need a quick and easy answer, maybe an example to proove some friends wrong. They believe that firms would stop investing in R&D if copyrights, patents, industrial design rights and trade secrets, were to be abolished.

The long answer is to read Against Intellectual Monopoly and Against Intellectual Property.

My favorite short example is music. Look at all the development in music from the time primitive humans started banging two rocks together until IP started to take off in the late 1700s. And even today in genres like hip-hop, is more or less music created if we allow sampling? I think the answer is clearly more; IP only stifles creativity. And would a band like U2 suddenly stop touring if Joe Shmoe is allowed to publish a cover version of Zoo Station without paying a royalty? It seems unlikely, to say the least.

Re: IP a disincentive to R&D

I. Ryan — Thu, 06 May 2010 20:40:25 GMT

scineram:

The argument. You accepted his counterpoint.

I wrote this:

I. Ryan:

So does that mean that you accepted my argument that it is a different of degree[?]

To that, he said "quite possibly" but then elaborated that the difference of degree is huge.

Re: IP a disincentive to R&D

scineram — Thu, 06 May 2010 20:37:44 GMT

The argument. You accepted his counterpoint.

Re: IP a disincentive to R&D

I. Ryan — Thu, 06 May 2010 20:34:29 GMT

scineram:

So you concede?

Concede what?

Re: IP a disincentive to R&D

scineram — Thu, 06 May 2010 20:33:53 GMT

So you concede?

Re: IP a disincentive to R&D

I. Ryan — Thu, 06 May 2010 20:28:19 GMT

hayekianxyz; boldfaced added by I. Ryan:

Quite possibly, I'll go over and give your post another read sometime soon. But in the meantime, I'm not sure it makes the slightest bit of difference. The fact of the matter is that the degree is so large between the two markets. R&D for a bakery is limited and bakeries are far more personal and can engage in greater product differentiation. On the other hand, R&D for pharmaceutical companies involves millions and millions dollars, which they may see minimal return on if they're not granted a monopoly over it.

Indeed.

Re: IP a disincentive to R&D

I. Ryan — Thu, 06 May 2010 20:15:54 GMT

nirgrahamUK:

the sum total of the welfare gains to the thousands of recipients be greater than Gates's reduced utility

Which is the justification of much of what democracies do. But there are two problems: (a) I am not aware of how to compare "utility" between people. And (b) if you do that, in the long run, people will not try to acquire such wealth, because they may fear that, once they acquire it, people will just take it away. That is, it will mess up the incentives to acquire wealth. Whenever you make keeping wealth less secure, you make creating wealth less attractive. (And we know that, when you create wealth, in a "free market", you are serving other people, not just yourself; that is, we know that, in creating wealth, you are creating wealth not only for yourself but also for other people.) So redistribution seems not to be in the long term interests of people; that is, redistribution of wealth does not seem to be in the interests of people who have a long "time horizon" and understand what I am saying, that redistribution destroys the incentives to build wealth for yourself and others, in the long term.

But then the question is this, how do we judge whether a "time horizon" is correct or not? What if people know that they will be worse off in the future, but want to go ahead and do these things anyway, because their time preference is so high? How can we say that these people are "incorrect"? How do we choose whose time preference is "correct" and whose is not?

Well, the only people that are relevant to this discussion are the people who both (a) have high time preferences and (b) because of that, want to redistribute wealth to themselves through the processes of a democracy, through petty theft, or whatever. If the people with the high time preferences just smoke weed constantly or something because of it and do not commit any sorts of crimes, they are not relevant; for, because they are not commiting any sorts of crimes, they are only a part of society as far as they are producing things for other people and getting things in return, which, of course, is what society is. Who we are talking about are people who both (a) have high time preferences to the extent that they barely care about the future and (b) threaten the security of property rights. (Notice that most criminals are people that we would characterize as having high time preferences.)

So how can we feel justified in beating these people into submission because they possess a higher time preference than us? Well, I think that saying it that way is misleading. For we do not directly care about the fact that they have a high time preference. What we directly care about is how they threaten the security of property rights because of that. So the real line of questioning is this:

I. Ryan:

Don't we need to bring in a sort of "objective" morality here to show that we are "correct" but the people trying to destroy society, like murderers, thieves, rapists, or whatever are "incorrect"? How else would be feel justified in killing these people? Why are our ends more important than theirs? Why is the end of a person A, that is, to raise a family, more important than the end of a person B, to kill people, including people like person A? We feel so passionate about our hatred toward people like B; so, surely, there is a reason why the ends of the person A are more important than those of the person B!

I explore those questions in the rest of the post that I just quoted above and those that I link to in it.

Re: IP a disincentive to R&D

hayekianxyz — Thu, 06 May 2010 19:49:17 GMT

So does that mean that you accepted my argument that it is a different of degree, not one of kind?

Quite possibly, I'll go over and give your post another read sometime soon. But in the meantime, I'm not sure it makes the slightest bit of difference. The fact of the matter is that the degree is so large between the two markets. R&D for a bakery is limited and bakeries are far more personal and can engage in greater product differentiation. On the other hand, R&D for pharmaceutical companies involves millions and millions dollars, which they may see minimal return on if they're not granted a monopoly over it.

Re: IP a disincentive to R&D

nirgrahamUK — Thu, 06 May 2010 19:38:29 GMT

>>Well, my first question would be this, what makes that distribution "superior"?

>>the sum total of the welfare gains to the thousands of recipients be greater than Gates's reduced utility

Re: IP a disincentive to R&D

I. Ryan — Thu, 06 May 2010 19:34:17 GMT

hayekian:

See, this is the problem with you argue with slogans. You end up making ridiculous comparisons, like between bakeries for whom the marginal cost of innovation is negligible to other firms whose investments require fixed costs of multiple millions.

So does that mean that you accepted my argument that it is a different of degree, not one of kind?