blurb on the IP/commerce problem
While tooling around in a comment thread of a recent slashdot story on Stallman’s rejection of the Creative Commons licenses, I ran across an interesting little comment succinctly analyzing the problem of trying to make the concept of intellectual property viable within a capitalist model.
Znork writes:
Reproduction, copies of information, cannot be usefully sold as it lacks scarcity. That essentially puts it outside of the functional realm of property; any scarcity is purely artificial, and introducing artificial scarcity in an economy basically undermines and damages the economy as a whole. Creating artificial scarcity is more or less the economic equal of wholesale destruction of wealth and property.
We could put a huge glass bubble over a country, bottle all the air and force people to buy it. That would undoubtedly employ a lot of people, even increase the GDP, but for any sane definition of wealth, one would have to be truly warped to claim that would benefit the wealth of the society, or the economy, as a whole. And as an aside, in comparison with countries where the citizens were not forced to pay for bottled air, workers would cost more, with predictable effects…
[IgnoramusMaximus is] right, of course, the propaganda blanket attempts to throughly confuse the issues. Artificial scarcity is unacceptable, and extra incentive systems must build on methods compatible with a free market. It’s not like it’s hard to do, there are any number of incentive systems that governments around the world use for various purposes. The monopoly systems of copyright and patents are grotesque abberations, not the common standard.
