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IP is corrupted because investors capture most of the value of the IP development what if instead we [A system in which investors capture most of the value of the IP development].
Why would you even need such a right if IP didn't exist?
Not investors-- consumers. There's a critical difference. An investor doesn't necessarily need or want the end product; they want the chance to perform arbitrage between the producer and the consumer. But-- to use a concrete example-- pharmacies, hospitals, government entities, and charitable organizations would still want new antimalarial drugs even if they can't prevent other people from manufacturing them. Their goal would be to fund the research and production of a certain amount of drugs at a particular price-- and then if other people get the drugs after they do, that doesn't change whatever supply/demand calculus drove their funding in the first place.
There would still be a role for investors in creating financial instruments intended to mitigate e.g. the free rider problem. But after the information is actually created, they wouldn't have the power to extract rents for using it.
You're going to inevitably end up in one of two separate outcomes here.
A substantially less is invested into these searches for new tech
As much is invested and it's done by what is essentially the same apparatus as today.
As it sounds like you want to do away with patents entirely option 1 seems very likely. And this is all very naive about the risk of these attempts to discover new tech not panning out. Every individual hospital is really going to become expert in which new drugs to invest into during the research stage? No, they're going to developed specialized companies.
That's just not what empirically happens. Look, we've effectively already performed a natural experiment on repealing IP law when it comes to art, books, and music. Instead of no one publishing anything, or alternatively the exact same business models persisting, we get Patreon + Kickstarter for the writers and artists, and Soundcloud + Touring/Streaming for the musicians. There are still middlemen involved, of course, but as compared to publishing companies or record labels they're taking far smaller cuts.
You're talking about things that can be done by a single artist for the most part here. Simple media products with little to no logistics necessary and practically no risk. You can't run a drug research program off of kickstarter. You can't build a new airplane internal part by having all the airlines sign up for an engineer's Patreon.
Do you seriously believe there are no possible financial instruments that could result in complex projects being completed without IP law?
Patreon is an an object lessons of how the market adapts to scenarios where IP law stops being relevant. (In this case, to how the internet makes traditional enforcement of copyright law against individual consumers near-impossible.) Kickstarter proves that complex engineering products can be pre-funded directly by consumers, without need for investors. It's true that we don't currently have Biotech Patreon, for example-- but I'm arguing that that's a consequence not of the boundary conditions of capitalism, but of the specific market distortions introduced by government enforcement of IP law. Looking at the current state of things and saying, "this is the only possible system that results in innnovation" is like living in the 1800s and saying, "the royal monopoly granted to the British East India Company is the only possible system that result in trade with India."
I think they won't be anarchism. Plausibly trade secrets if the field lends itself to them. It's not just the complexity, it's also the risk element. Anarchists would do well to remember that the basis of private property to begin with is guaranteed by the state, intellectual property is special case of private property which can be deconstructed in much the same way. Can you build some things without a state protected right to own your tools? Sure. Can you build large scale projects? Maybe, but it'll be much harder than if you can rely on the police to prevent people from riding away with your tractors.
Patreon exists within a context where IP law exists. Most large scale projects for media are completed outside of patreon, in fact the vast majority of media spending operates under traditional IP law frameworks.
I'm not saying you wouldn't be able to produce some small scale projects. I'm saying you're going to have orders of magnitude less resources deployed. much fewer life saving drugs.
I'd love for there to be a realistic alternative to IP law, and as an improvement I think IP should have a much much shorter life span. But replacing it with nothing will cost us a whole lot and you're just hand waving that loss away.
The difference between actual private property and intellectual property is that private property i excludable. If a person other than the owner takes that property to use for themselves, then the owner is directly harmed by their inability to use it. Consequently, it makes moral sense to defend that property because you are defending against an aggressor, and the state ultimately benefits from reducing the cost o violence by taking that responsibility to prevent theft upon itself.
But intellectual property isn't excludable. You are not harmed when another person uses it. You have no moral right to commit violence to prevent other people from innocent use of your ideas. You're raising the "but what if we have less innovation" objection as a practical objection-- but in the natural experiment of the US versus china, the chinese have been out-innovating us as a direct result of their poor enforcement of IP law. The empirical result is that the justification for IP law is fundamentally unsound.
I'm going to need a source for China out innovating us. Certainty they benefit from igniting or copyright and I'm not of the camp that thinks they don't innovate at all. But out innovate us? And China does have IP law.
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