Adumbration

These two episodes discuss intellectual property, my notes are in part from some time back when I first listened to them.  I have been thinking recently about the reasonableness of patents and copyrights, wondering whether there is a defensible stand for owning information (as opposed to media). My perspective is that information changes not a whit as it passes among us; we can hold back on passing knowledge to others, but their independent discovery isn't a taking.    Certainly there is scope for contracts to provide for protection of confidential information that is kept in ones care, such as financial and medical records held by institutions, but also for such specifics of process held by employees of a company (for such reasons I'm not revealing trade secrets of my company). The challenge I see is the situation where the creator deliberately puts that information out in public.

I understand the historical intention to "promote the progress of science and useful arts", but have been questioning whether those objectives are actually effective on balance, and whether there is a consistent application of property rights that can include such information. There are also historical cases, such as the Wright brothers, whose single-minded attempt to control their patented concepts seriously hampered their continued development and ended up consuming their limited resources on legal protections rather than improvement of their great technology. From my own experience, the actual patent is such a small part of what makes it possible to provide a good or service; the much bigger part is the detailed engineering development that realizes the invention, which development is the main obstacle to competitive development.

Last weekend I was talking to a few high school students about their idea for freight transport using derigibles, and the first thing they came up with when I asked what they thought to be the next steps in this development was "patent it".  Such is the current sway of the thinking about the value of ideas that the first thought about how to make use of the idea was not to develop it into a working model, or proof of concept, or detailed engineering, or performance assessment, but to bring it to courts (or the legal equivalent) and try to fence off the idea to collect rent from whomever might themselves try to do one or another of those things.

The discussion from the first of these is from a very different business perspective;  I had previously seen Johanna Blakeley give a TED talk.  See also my fb posts from 4/18/2010 at 9:03 am for more on this.

Fashion and Intellectual Property (6/14/2010) - Johanna Blakley of the University of Southern California talks about the fashion industry and the role of intellectual property. In the fashion industry there is limited protection for innovative designs and as a result, copying is rampant. Despite the ease of copying, innovation is quite strong in the industry and there is a great deal of competition. Topics discussed include the role of the street in generating new designs, the role of fashion in our lives, and whether the host of EconTalk has any hope of being fashionable. The conversation concludes with a discussion of the Grand Intervention, an urban park design competition, and the potential of Second Life for studying social trends.

Intellectual Property (5/18/2009) - Michele Boldrin of Washington University in St. Louis talks about intellectual property and Boldrin's book, co-written with David Levine, Against Intellectual Property. Boldrin argues that copyright and patent are used by the politically powerful to maintain monopoly profits. He argues that the incentive effects that have been used to justify copyright and patents are exaggerated--few examples from history suggest that the temporary and not-so-temporary monopoly power from copyright and patents were necessary to induce innovation. Boldrin reviews some of that evidence and talks about the nature of competition.