Andy Streich wrote:
On Friday 28 April 2006 08:34 pm, Mike McCarty wrote:'ll respond to the very last sentence first. I don't know. But you might ask Benjamin Franklin, because he put everything he did into the Public Domain, and lobbied hard to have neither Copyright nor Patent Law in the USA. He lost his battle, so he put everything into the Public Domain.I didn't know this about old Ben. He sounds very much like a pure socialist and that's very surprising --
What's not to love about Ben? He was an atheist too. > and very much like Richard Stallman since
without copyrights and patents there's no protection for intellectual property. I wonder what Ben thought about how an author or inventor would survive in a free market economy. Just the other day I was watching a Senate hearing where a songwriter was saying she could not make a living without the copyright and IPR laws. And I've wondered a long time about how the economy might have to change if there were no IPR. The idea has appeal in so many ways, then you run smack into the wall of monetary incentives.
Writers and programmers would make money without IP laws. The difference is that it would prevent a few companies from dominating entire information industries.
The willingness of people to spend money on the music, movies and the software they like would not change if IP laws were removed. What would change is the way that money is distributed to the producers of those works. Rather than to have a few companies and people that have absolutely superlative incomes, with everyone else barely able to make ends meet, there would be many more companies and people able to participate in information industries, but each would make far less money.
The industry's income would be shared amongst a far larger number of companies and people, because the legal structure (IP) for dominating an information industry would not be there.
To use software as an example, without IP laws, Microsoft would probably go away but be replaced by 20,000 companies and individuals who are ready to create and maintain software. The companies would be small, perhaps having 5-10 employees, and the individuals would make living wages, but none of the entities would have superlative incomes. The software industry's income would be shared amongst a larger group of people.
Naturally, a standards organization would help this large group of people coordinate their activities to produce a single, working product.