Against Intellectual Monopoly

I wanted to really give this book a higher rating but I feel in all honesty that I cannot. The problem here is that the book reads too much like a prosecuting attorney's case, starting from the premise that IP is an outrageous, rent-seeker's grab, that we could have lots of good stuff without IP, and that lots of things have indeed been invented and produced without IP. To a degree, the authors provide a great deal of evidence for their case, but I also was irritated by the sometimes strident tone adopted here. And some of the examples they give of how creativity works without IP are laughable. For example, on page 30, they write: "For at least three thousand years, musical and literary works have been created in pretty much every society, and in the complete absence - in fact, often under the explicit prohibition - of any kind of copyright protection". Well, to focus on books, such things only began to be produced on any significant scale (at a time when adult literacy was negligible) after the invention of the printing press. Copying of others' literary efforts would have been almost impossible outside the confines of a few learned aristocrats and monks. For a large chunk of human recorded history, the only stuff that got produced was produced in relatively tiny numbers and read by an equally relatively tiny number of people. Okay, that does not necessarily invalidate some of the points being made, but it is striking that the authors don't mention this rather obvious point.

In another example seeking to prove how successful publishing can occur without IP, the authors (page 24) give the example of the 9-11 Commission Report, and the fact that Norton did not pay for the publishing rights. Well, for a start, the 9-11 Commission was a government, tax-funded body, so unlike a private author hoping to make a living in a free market, the book was actually produced with tax dollars. This hardly seems a very good counter-example to use in smacking down copyright.

And another odd example is provided, this time about patents, on page 51, describing Eli Whitney's non-patented firearms and the success of their sales - to the government! Again, this is an example of business that did well without IP because of government-funded purchase of its products. If this is meant to show that non-IP business models work, it seems an odd example to use in the context of a broader free market attack on IP, which is how Levine and Boldrin present their book.

There are other, better examples of how we could get by without IP, and there are many examples also of the absurdity of taking technologies and creations that came to being without IP (like software and fashion). This is persuasive. But the authors are at times so keen to prove their case that they produce examples of the kind I mention that just don't seem to "work" in the way they intend. This is a shame. My general conclusion is that the case against IP is a strong one but not quite as crushing as the authors would have us believe. Another problem is that the authors tend to overlook the issue of the moral right of a creator to be able to exclusively charge for it for a period of time before his work filters out into the public domain. There is a normative argument - as expounded recently by Robert Merges in his book Justifying Intellectual Property - that these authors don't seem to consider. If I write a novel and it can be immediately copied others can get my efforts for almost free, is this really just? Okay, some people like to write novels as a hobby, but if we remove copyright protection, we will need to revert to the days when artists needed the financial backing of patrons, or worse, subsidies from the state (which raise all kinds of issues in terms of political influence, etc.) And in getting rid of copyright, some authors and publishers will want to come up with alternative ways of capturing an income stream from their work, but why reinvent a perfectly serviceable wheel? What's the point?

Also, another issue is how the very word "monopoly" is used here. If a person creates something genuinely new and original, has he created a "monopoly" since he has not taken something in the public domain from the public but added something new to it. This issue is a very complex one but the authors don't seem to deal with it very much. And there is a lot that can be done to remove the most egregious failings of the patent system, for example, by disallowing patents on broad categories such as business methods, or reducing the timespans on patents (to discourage "trolls") and facilitating more efficient licensing. intellectual property

The book makes a strong case on economic, consequential grounds that IP is bad, but not quite so strong as to make me feel we can or should get rid of it entirely. If IP is really so bad, then it seems hard to reconcile this with the extraordinary fecundity of today's business and artistic world. If the world is suffering a dearth of human creativity, I haven't seen it.

More reviews at Against Intellectual Monopoly