[boplicity]

> It's a wasteful aberration that strangles innovation with red tape

This is a strong claim, without any evidence to support it.

In fact, a look at the historical record, as others have pointed out, very much shows an extremely strong correlation between intellectual property rights and technological development. Sure, this is merely correlation, but that's certainly better than a strong claim without any evidence.

I'm curious though, if intellectual property was no longer a thing, which industries would need to be completely restructured. Some rather important ones, I would say. Journalism, in my mind, being at the top of the list. Not that it would be impossible, but the implications would very much be profound. I'm not sure what such a world would look like, but the transition would likely be rather difficult. Maybe it would work out better in the end? Who knows!?

[mightybyte]

The book "Against Intellectual Monopoly" by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine has a decent overview of the arguments supporting this claim.

https://annas-archive.org/search?q=against+intellectual+mono...

[boplicity]

Thanks for the reference. I downloaded the book, and looked up the parts that talked about newspapers, in particular. I found the arguments to generally be counter to what the industry has figured out, in terms of actual survival.

From the late 90s to the early 2010s the news industry was very pro-active about making their work freely available to everyone. This made enforcing copyright on news articles not really a thing. Coinciding with this the news industry rapidly shrunk, and is now a shell of what it used to be.

Interestingly, the trend of "free" reporting is now strongly reversing. Many publications now put most of their work behind a paywall, no longer freely giving away the material they produce.

From the book:

"The distribution of news on the Internet makes an interesting contrast to the distribution of music. While the RIAA has used every imaginable legal (and in some cases illegal) strategy to keep music off the Internet, the news reporting industry has embraced the Internet. Most major news agencies have a Web site where news stories may be viewed for, at most, the cost of a free registration. Far from discouraging the copying of news stories, most sites invite you to "e-mail a copy of this story to a friend." In fact, news is available so freely over the Internet that it is possible to create an entire newspaper simply by linking to stories written by other people. An example of such a "newspaper" is the site run by Matt Drudge, which consists almost entirely of links to stories on other sites. Yet the incentive to gather the news has not disappeared. According to intellectual monopolists' preaching, this should be impossible: to report from the Sudan requires the huge cost of going there in person, but copying that same report is as cheap as it can possibly get. So, why are highly paid journalists traveling to the Sudan to get the news?"

What the authors of this book don't state is that, the ramifications of this shift to "freely shared" news has meant that far fewer journalists are out there actually reporting. (The layoffs have been massive.) They go on to say, just a few sentences later that "the news industry has been thriving, profitable."

Obviously, this is just not true. The news industry is struggling. The layoffs have been massive. This type of pain in the industry was happening in 2008, when the book was published, and continues still.

With the authors missing such glaring (and important) facts, it's hard to take their arguments seriously.