The Founders were perceptive enough to grant Congress, among a limited number of powers, the ability to protect the property rights of authors and inventors. Intellectual property is a wonderfully abstract concept, but it's still property, pure and simple. Property belongs to the rightful owner, to lawfully use as he or she sees fit.
Richard T. Mikus
Newark, DE
As a former CD store owner I found Boldrin and Levine's ideas very interesting. I think that the way the music industry operates is inefficient at best and that there has to be a better way. File sharing is not going to go away.
I do have a problem with their solution for how to pay writers. If it were easy to predict which songs will generate the most future earnings, the music industry would be a lot better off now. A lot of money is spent developing and marketing acts that go nowhere, and many hits come from completely unexpected sources. So it would be impossible to set a fair market value of a song before the market has a chance to listen to it. Many times it takes months for a song to catch on.
What if I get paid $1,000 for a song that ultimately goes multi-platinum, and then I am never able to repeat that success (a one-hit wonder), whereas Britney gets paid $600,000 for a song that tanks. Does that seem fair? This would place even more power in the hands of music executives. The only way to rectify this would be to ensure somehow that artists/writers get at least a portion of all future sales or use of their work. The "somehow" is the difficult point.
Kirk Miller
Weed, CA
I am somewhat dismayed by the debate chronicled in "Creation Myths." It gives the field of economics an importance that it does not deserve. Like most other social sciences, many schools of economics have fallen into the trap of using unrealistically narrow research and artificially constrained assumptions to generate publishable material.
Paul Romer, for example, in his distinction between rivalrous and nonrivalrous goods, completely ignores the real and well-known additional costs -- over and above the production costs -- incurred by anyone seeking to capitalize on an invention. For example, the cost to produce a copy of software is negligible. But the software is not what customers buy; we buy the support behind it and many other extended attributes of the good over and above the good itself (as any competent marketer knows). Supplying these extras means very real and extensive costs that the seller must bear. Romer likewise ignores the transaction costs associated with any economic exchange. Thus his distinction is both naive and completely unrealistic -- yet it is treated as some kind of breakthrough.
Likewise, Romer's objection to Boldrin and Levine's thesis, in which he points out that their proposed first-sale rights would be an empty promise, is entirely correct and is certainly a fatal flaw in their work -- one that was completely and immediately obvious to me (a noneconomist) early on in the article. Why then spill any more ink to pursue their fatally flawed "model"?
Economics is not a science in the same way that physics is a science. Economics, rather, is applied science, in the same way that electrical engineering is applied physics but not physics itself. Science is held to the standard of truth, while engineering is held to the standard of relevance and usefulness. The mental masturbation of many modern economists and other social "scientists" fails both tests.
More important, the entire debate is about the wrong subject. The article discussed whether or not inventions should be protected. Instead, the debate should be about whether or not that protection should ever be revoked! Libertarians stand for nothing if not for property rights. Likewise they stand for the belief that the fruits of one's labor belong to one...period!
Ralph Mroz
Greenfield, MA
I was glad to read about Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine's work on an economic model without the distortion of copyrights and patents. I find it unfortunate that one method successful in the past at providing a substantial financial incentive for invention and technological application has virtually disappeared: the prize.
In 1714 the British Board of Longitude offered the very substantial sum of �20,000 to the individual who devised a way to determine longitude accurately. Result: John Harrison produced the first marine chronometer. His enormous improvement in timekeeping had very wide-ranging benefits.
In 1908 Lord Northcliffe's Daily Mail newspaper offered a �1,000 prize to the first pilot to fly an airplane across the English Channel. In 1909 Louis Blériot claimed that prize. The improvements in aviation and engine technology that were the direct result of the Daily Mail competition were highly beneficial to all early aviators and aircraft makers, and not coincidentally to newspapers.
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