That's way down from when 10/10 music consumers were pirates, just trading songs with each other around campfires and town squares without deep thought paid to credit.
Seriously, exclusive rights to music creation and reproduction are a pretty new thing; I think humanity will survive this "recent" trend.
If anybody ever tries to control some other person's activity in this way, and it happens to be my music that's at issue, that will certainly not be an appropriate position to take vis a vis my creation. (Not that my music is really worth anything to anyone, except maybe my song at DjangoCon 2012 :-) ).
I just don't understand how these ideas have even become so pervasive. The idea that I can own a song (or any data) to the exclusion of preventing someone from copying bytes from one drive to another... it's just so strange.
People don't really care and just repeat the narrative. "Musician has to eat, too, right?" Most conservative people around me don't really care about IP right. Heck, they don't even understand them at all! I've seen them repeatedly pirating images from Google or copying their music using ripping tools while still advocating for copyright.
I sometimes think about the fact that in the Feeding Of The Multitude, Jesus made and gave out numerous free copies of bread and fish without any thought for the bakers or fishmongers.
Also patents. People are all for patents because they believe that one day they'll have a brilliant idea and make money this way. Well, patents are[0] how you deprive society of being able to use that idea when the time is ripe for it to be used.
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[0] - with the possible exception of pharmaceuticals.
This is backward, the point of a patent is that it guarantees the invention will become public knowledge. The exclusivity period is compensation for that.
There is no law forcing a person or company to file for a patent. They are free to keep their trade secrets a secret forever, if they want.
This may be backwards, but it's how regular people see it, from what I've observed. They dream of patenting something and then licensing/selling it to companies. It's easier than making use of the invention by themselves.
As for guaranteeing the invention will be public knowledge, these days it's just bait-and-switch.
Using an invention to create a product is a way (maybe the most popular way) of making the invention public knowledge.
The dream of licensing is not a perversion of the patent system, it's part of the point: to get inventions out of people's heads and secret workshops, and into forms that benefit the public at large.
Not the OP, but the vast majority of the up front cost is in development. Reproduction is relatively cheap, so who's going to pour money into R&D if your formula is just going to be immediately copied and sold at a fraction of the price?
But isn't that the purpose of all patents? To promote innovation by protecting the output of up-front R&D spending from just being immediately copied by competitors?
Yes, on paper. The problem is in current practice. In most fields, patent system extends too much protection for the patent owners, allowing them to block an idea from being used by others for far longer than it's needed to recoup development costs and earn a solid profit on top of it.
Also, you forgot about the other part of the purpose of patents - to allow the public to benefit from the innovation, by making it public domain after patent protection expires. Increasingly, patents don't hold that end of the bargain, by being deliberately written in such a vague form as to be useless as a blueprint.
Back to the topic of pharma - this is the only case I know where I feel that cost/benefit of patents favors keeping them. Everywhere else, I feel things would be better if we abolished them, or at least severely reduced their duration.
Absurdly high costs of drug research (and then absurdly high costs of getting successful ones approved). We're talking about billions of dollars of investment for something that, once developed, can be copied for pennies by cheap chemical plants. I accept that there needs to be a way for "big pharma" to recoup the development costs, or else they won't even bother with drug research. It seems to me that cost/benefit of patents make them justified in this case. But not in most other industries, not with the patent lengths of today (and lack of any details that would let people reproduce the invention after patent expiration).
That same argument can be used for other inventions. Why is pharma an exception just because you added "absurdly high" to it? It is possible to fund pharma research through the government just like how much of current pharma research and plenty of other types of research are funded. And the good thing about being fully government funded for pharma research is that you get the sell the resulting medicine for very cheap.
> Why is pharma an exception just because you added "absurdly high" to it?
Yes, precisely that. If you see the problem of patents as a cost/benefit analysis and not black-and-white issue, it's not surprising that the system may be socially useful in some sectors, but not for others.
As for alternative systems of funding drug research, this is a separate topic. I'd all for abolishing pharmaceutical patents if a different effective method of funding would be available.
EDIT and lest you think I'm a fan of big pharma business, I'm not. I abhor the trickery they pull with marketing to doctors, or flipping an inert fragment of a molecule and patenting it again. But I'm inclined to cut them some slack as the society needs new drugs.
Maybe the solution is to just make patents more expensive to obtain. That way companies won't bother patenting trivial "inventions", while products that require lots of resources to develop would be worth the extra cost.
This would disadvantage individual inventors though, who would be less likely to afford the application than a company.
My current and somewhat layman opinion is that we need to take a serious look at the duration of patent protection. For instance in software, a patent longer than 2-3 years is IMO absurd, and just serves to enrich the patent owner while retarding the progress of technology. Similar calculation could be made for other industries, based on typical time-to-market and rate of progress. The application process should IMO be also more strict, to a) not let through so many patents on obvious things, and b) ensure that patent description actually allows to reproduce the invention. Lastly, we need to find a way to stop companies from stockpiling patents as if they were nuclear weapons.
And speaking of that, I wish regulators could also take a look at the duration of copyright protection, and curb the practice of extending it in perpetuity.
> Seriously, exclusive rights to music creation and reproduction are a pretty new thing; I think humanity will survive this "recent" trend.
I mean, by that standard, the entire legal system, not to mention having state police departments vs random mob justice, are also pretty new things. Do you think that we can do away with those too cause they're new?
Do you give any credence to the idea that part of the reason the last few hundred years have been incredibly productive for humanity (both in terms of general economic welfare, but also art), is partly because of things like the patent/IP system? I'd be happy to know why not, if not.
Legal systems are basically as old as, depending on how you slice it, writing. If you mean a specific US-centric model of a legal system, it dates back about a thousand years or so.
Copyright dates back to about the invention of the printing press, so about 600 years old. Common law has a good 400 years on that (and law itself, a couple thousand years on common law). Copyright is a baby by comparison. And given that it was functionally co-birthed with the printing press (since before that time, every copy was a blessing---a work of hand-crafted art someone had bothered to invest substantive human toil into because they thought a thing deserved to be recorded in more than one place), I don't think I have the tools to divide the benefits to society of copyright law from the benefits to society of mass, cheap reproduction of writeable concepts. It may have helped. It probably helped more in some spaces than in others. But by-and-large, it provided a system for a person to go live the "life of the mind" and exchange art for money instead of something else, and it's unclear to me that copyright did more than, say, the patronage system to that end.
... all of which is divorceable from the concept of, God help us, exclusive rights to perform a work, which is the weird space music lives in. Because we don't even charge by the written copy there; we often charge (to the best of the ability of the copyright holder) for every instance of "reading" the record and re-broadcasting it into someone's ears.
Yes, I think one can build a case that the cost of upkeep, overhead, tracking, and maintenance to move money around in that system offsets the benefit to society. I think it's incumbent upon the rent-holders and copyright owners to explain how, absent their Byzantine system of moving money around, our public spaces would be silent and dead, devoid of creative works.
The history of humanity and our simple desire to sing makes that strike me as profoundly unlikely.
> But by-and-large, it provided a system for a person to go live the "life of the mind" and exchange art for money instead of something else, and it's unclear to me that copyright did more than, say, the patronage system to that end.
There are problems with the patronage system. For example, almost all the people who could live the "life of the mind" were either the privileged few, or the people who appealed the to the privileged. While this certainly is one way to fund works, and I'm a huge fan of Patreon, as well as a Patron of many people, it's also going to only hit a subset of the kind of art we care about, and a very specific subset too (things that interest rich first-worlders that are economically better to target.)
> I think it's incumbent upon the rent-holders and copyright owners to explain how, absent their Byzantine system of moving money around, our public spaces would be silent and dead, devoid of creative works.
The history of humanity and our simple desire to sing makes that strike me as profoundly unlikely.
I don't think anyone seriously makes that claim (or at least, I don't). I think my claims were:
1. On a practical level, this is economics 101 - if we up the reward for creative works, we'll get more creative works.
2. On a moral level, as long as we are in this capitalistic system, I think that one person creating value should have the same reward as another person creating value, and just because one happens to be easily copied and one doesn't, shouldn't make a difference. I can't find a moral reason to say to someone that, should they choose to become an author instead of building furniture, and should they happen to create works that please millions, they shouldn't get rewarded for that.
You make it seem like the rent-holders and copyright owners have never explained why they want the system - but these things have been discussed since the dawn of the IP system. For one thing, have you talked to authors/musicians/etc and asked their views?
I particularly remember reading a British parliament member talking a lot about this issue, including the problems with patronage and the problem with pirating - in the 1800s!
The musicians I've talked to find the current system really inconvenient and spend a lot more time arguing with the payment collection organizations then they would like to.
Seriously, exclusive rights to music creation and reproduction are a pretty new thing; I think humanity will survive this "recent" trend.