Posted by
"Happy" Jake Greene on Wednesday, June 10, 2009 10:51:06 AM
Another example of why not to emulate the European Left:
In a perfect example of the Left’s disdain for private property rights, the EU parliamentary elections resulted in one seat being won by Sweden’s “Pirate Party.” The aims and goals of the Pirate Party, you ask? Well, the Pirate Party is to intellectual property law what the gay privileges movement is to marriage: take a long-established tradition and scrap it because your lifestyle doesn’t jive with conventional wisdom. Specifically, they want to loosen copyright law and do away with patents. Of course, the consequence of that would be disaster.
Here are the basics of intellectual property. Everything costs something to produce, whether it’s money, material resources, energy, time, or some combination. The value of the product is based not in what it cost to produce, but what its purchaser will pay for it. It could cost, say, $50,000 per unit to produce a 1987 Yugo, but no one would pay more than $5,000 to purchase that car. Therefore, not only is the value of the car only $5,000, but because of that, the seller would be foolish to try to market the car. It would cost him $45,000 in losses for each vehicle, and you’d be left in a situation where you lose more money by selling more product.
Intellectual property, whether copyrights, patents, or trademarks, work the same way. It takes time, effort, and money to write a book and produce it in sellable quantity. So much time, that fiction writers frequently do not have “day jobs” and rely on the proceeds from their sales to live. The best talent (that is, the ones who sell the most books) live very well off those proceeds. The same is true for patents. Individuals or companies invent things that may be marketable. Often, particularly in technology and pharmaceuticals, the purpose of a business is to invent new solutions to problems, and the research and development into new products costs money. Viagra, for example, costs $10 per pill, a cost the consumers will support, and an income level the producers can accept. The reason the price is high, though, is that it cost Pfizer a lot of money to research the drug, and they needed to recover the costs. In fact, marketing it as a vanity drug (as I call Viagra and its cousins), has kept the costs down for those who actually need Viagra for cardiovascular problems (for which it was originally intended).
Copyrights have been around for centuries. Copyright litigation is known from the 6th century, AD. Modern copyright law began in Britain in 1709. This isn’t some new construct of modern man. Patent law is even older, dating from at least the 5th century BC, with modern patent law dating from 1474. Again, not something peculiar to modern man.
Human society is based on incentives, both positive and negative. Punitive law is intended to give a disincentive to commit crime. Free-market economies are based on the monetary incentives gained when a product is sold. If you sell enough product you make money. If nothing was gained in selling products. If you only sold products at cost, not making any profit, businesses would not exist. Patents and copyrights are a way for inventors and authors to make money selling their product. It is that income that provides the incentive to write or invent. Civilization existed for almost 6,000 years without the automobile, the airplane, the personal computer, the television, the DVD player, the refrigerator, the train, the radio, the electric light etc. Those contrivances exist not because of a need, but because they are profitable. Think about the “format wars” that have occurred in the last 30 years in portable media. Eight-track vs. four-track cassettes, VHS vs. Beta, HD DVD vs. BluRay. In each case the one consumers would purchase is the one that won, not necessarily the higher quality option. Without patents, none of them would exist, because the inventors would have no incentive to invent them.
The world the Left wants is a world where everyone gets everything they need and no one lacks for anything. “From each according to his talent to each according to his need,” as Marx’s saying goes. They want to eliminate incentive and ensure everyone gets an equal share (with the Leftist elites getting a “more equal” share than us proles). What they don’t get is that without incentive, nothing is accomplished. If you get the same result regardless of whether or not you work hard (or at all) at it, what’s the incentive to work? Sure, there are a few who do what they do because they love it, and would do it free of charge if their basic needs (food, water, shelter, clothing, healthcare) were taken care of. But that small minority cannot support the other 99.5% of us who need something more than job satisfaction to get up at 0400 every morning to come in to work.
The elimination of patent and copyright law eliminates any incentive for innovation. Writers won’t write if they can’t expect to see the fruits of their labors. The same holds true for potential inventors. Businesses such as the entertainment and media industries would suffer greatly with a loss of intellectual property rights. The end result would be the government swooping down to fill the void of information dissemination and invention. The days of state-run media and entertainment, and state controlled inventions would be inevitable without patents and copyrights. That’s a world I’d just as soon not see.