Anonymous said...
Please elaborate on how services are treated differently from property under the law and why you think intellectual property would be more aptly administered as intellectual service? In exactly what way would this be an improvement?
7:30 PM
Certainly. The main difference between property and services under the law is that property can be 'rented', whereas services are either performed or not, and any future actions resulting from the performance of services without rental of property do not necessarily need to be controlled by law.
The reasons I think this would be an immense improvement are many. One is that it is much easier to enforce a model based on treating intellectual 'property' as a service. Currently we have very complex models for trying to describe intellectual property in ways which differ from tangible property such as having expiry times on patents, allowances for 'fair use' requiring legal judgments on 'artistic value' and the 'obviousness' of abstract concepts, uncertain status of intellectual property between jurisdictions, unclear action in the case of simultaneous discoveries, punishment for coincidental but not derivative innovations, etc. By contrast, when describing intellectual 'property' as a service, all this complicated law can be boiled down to a simple economic incentive program where the government allows a certain entity the exclusive right to perform a service, or, in the event that such an incentive is deemed unnecessary, research can be funded by private entities with vested interests in the results or by donations after the fact from people who benefit from the innovation, all of which is simple to legislate and enforce. By contrast, when viewing abstract ideas as 'property' one is forced to try and monitor, for example, all data transferred over the internet, or all communications between people, which is not a feasible task.
An important feature of this new structure would be that the government would be able to remove these incentive programs in areas where they are no longer necessary to encourage innovation: for example in the area of computer software where technological advancements will soon render the human programmer an irrellevant component. Currently, because all intellectual 'property' is treated the same, the government is forced to spend enormous resources essentially enforcing private entities' particular business models' viabilities when in fact some of those models may be ready to be replaced in the market because of their inefficiency. These alternate models may be much better suited to a digital, interconnected world but currently we have no mechanism for selectively targeting our incentives in the areas that need the most development.
Possibly the most important advantage would be that treating the transfer of abstract ideas as a service rather than a transfer of property is much better suited to the digital world, which is becoming increasingly important as computers become part of every part of our lives. From a computational perspective, there is no difference between a mechanic reconfiguring the parts of a car from a less useful state, say where it doesn't drive around, to a more useful state where it does, and a programmer reconfiguring a computer from a less useful state, say where it can't manipulate text documents, to a more useful state where it does. The same thinking, in the language of the digital world, would apply to a builder reconfiguring a pile of raw materials into a house, or a doctor reconfiguring a person with a badly broken leg into a person with a good chance of recovery. Thinking in the language of information theory, it is easy to see that the idea of services translates well to the application of intellectual 'property' and that the idea of education, or teaching, translates well to the transfer of abstract concepts. When a student learns something in school, they are allowed to tell other people about those things. In the same way, unless the government chose to intervene with an incentive program or something, when information is transferred to a person or their computer, it would be their choice as to whether or not to 'teach' it to another person or their computer. The difference in the digital world? Computers are much better and faster at 'learning' from each other than humans are. Think of the benefit to society.
Another important note is that treating intellectual 'property' like this would help ease the problem of transferring abstract ideas, such as software, to developing nations where people cannot afford the premiums we currently charge. This would no doubt speed industrialization of these regions, significantly boosting the world economy.
Finally, as an aside to any and all critics, I am reasonably convinced that any sort of 'protection' currently offered for intellectual 'property' could be easily implemented under this alternate system if it was deemed necessary or useful to the function of society. It would, however, be much simpler in law and in enforcement, if one can manage to put up with such a difficult inconvenience.
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