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Patently Mythological

Wednesday, 28 June 2000

.....

Riley (with scorn): Dreams! The illusion of something for nothing. No wonder the country is going to the dogs. Personal enterprise sacrificed to bureaucracy. No pride, no patriotism. The erosion of standards, the spread of mediocrity, the decline of craftsmanship and the betrayal of the small inventor. --Tom Stoppard, Enter a Free Man

In all fairness (not that I care about fairness), I am warning you, dear reader, that I haven't done a lick of research for this article, don't even have a main link (which shows that I didn't bother with a trivial search), and actually feel free (though I probably won't indulge) to make some stuff up without regard for the purposes of writing articles for MonkeyFist, for the general welfare, or even for what has already been said or written on this topic.

Hey, if it's good enough for the patent office, it's good enough for me.

Patents are simply a horrow show, and copyright isn't much better. They amount to a tax on most of us for the sake of mega-corps, and as a tool of the mega-corps to screw over the producers of patentables (i.e., "inventors"). Patents are monopolies, exactly the same as those English royalty types (Elizabeth? Who knows. Do your own research!) granted. Want to make and sell beer (why beer? my eighth grade history textbook rears its ugly head)? If you aren't granted the monopoly from the crown (for which you paid dearly) or were licensed by the monopolist (for which you paid very dearly), you just weren't allowed to. Find another business, buster, and let us enjoy our fine beer-and-horse-piss "blends".

And let's not forget that there is no "natural" or "inalienable" rights, in our legal system at least, which serve as the basis of intellectual so-called "property". Intellectual property is property by analogy, and property itself is a complicated, evolving concept. But the point is the we establish these monopolies for the sake of the general good. Clearly, granting a monopoly requires changing the distrubution of goods---a monopolist doesn't have to compete (though I'm not so very big on competition), and the monopolist can set prices pretty freely (there's linkage in there, sure). So, people wanting to produce the monopolized good and those wanting to purchase it both tend to do worse, while the monopolist does better. This can be justified only if there is, in general, more overall benefit to society from this arrangment---perhaps such as which follows indirectly by having a monopoly.

For beer, the benefit presumably was the finacial support of the Crown and government. It was taxation where the taxes were collected privately, sparing the state the expense of an IRS. What then is the good supposedly generated by patents?

The presumed good is an increase of inventive activity, or, to use the current hype term, "innovation". After all, both patents and copyrights are limited term monopoly grants. Presumably, after the grant expires society as a whole can enjoy the benefits of the inventions. (I suspect the most common experience we have of this phenomenon is when a drug patent expires and all of sudden a medication becomes affordable.) Supposedly, if not for the incentive of a monopoly, the invention would have been longer in coming, or maybe never have happened. Thus, we reward the inventive, and give them both incentives and support for their generally beneficial activities.

I've finally come to see that patents are nothing more than the monopolies of yore, and that they fail miserably in their appointed task in our society. And with that shift on my part, I had a little epiphany about the two reasons why patents, in general, seem, contrary to the obvious, pervasive evidence available, to be such a good thing.

There's the myth, which I allude to above, that patents are necessary to make the "enormous expenditures needed" to produce, for example, new and vital medicines in a vaguely profitable manner. The example was not randomly selected: the drug companies are the most disgusting purveyors of this myth. Even if it were impossible under normal captialist conditions to successful churn out useful drugs, there are other answers than patents. Government support of research, for example. Oh, we have that too? Hmm. But without monopolies pharm-corps can't garner obscene profits at the expense of sick people! I do find this a compelling argument, but not for patents.
There's the myth of the little inventor. This myth has two aspects: the "win the lottery through hard work" bit, wherein a brilliant but neglected genius scrabblex in her little workshop and invents an amazing doodad that will change the shape of our lives. Supposedly, such a person should make a mint. Then comes the second part, the idea that without patent protection, a rapacious corporation can come along and steal the invention! And the person who did the real work, the inventor languishes in poverty and eventually must sell her children in order to keep up her Popular Science subscription. What's odd about this one is that, in fact, the big corps almost always win (lawyers, y'know) and the big corps in general benefit in wild disproportion to 1) the little inventor, and 2) the rest of us. Thus, the "patent rags to riches" idea works the way the lottery does--to make large numbers of people feel comfortable with massive taxes on them which then go to subsidize big corporations. Indeed, the patent tax is more direct, and harder to divert, than the lottery tax.

We, as a people, need to look past these, and other, myths in order to make sane decisions about how we are going to structure our laws, our lives, and our beneficent lies in order to support a rich (in all ways), free, and just society.

This is Patently Mythological <http://monkeyfist.com/articles/587>