A “Promoting Progress” Data Point

by on March 9, 2006 · 4 comments

In an earlier post, I made a normative criticism of the fact that the Rambo franchise transferred more than a billion dollars from consumers to producers. (And I will now kill myself for using the pretentiously scholarly word “normative.”)

My opinion is that creation of that character and associated entertainment was not worth a billion dollars. And I think it’s OK to have this opinion because the Constitution’s copyright/patent clause calls for policy judgments about the extent and scope of intellectual property protection.

I came across some discussion today about how much money the Mozilla foundation makes off the Firefox browser. The gossip is that they made $72 million dollars. It may be more; it’s probably less. And it’s interesting that Mozilla folks come across as defensive about making money. (That’s consistent with the IPCentral theme that open source and free culture people are anti-capitalist. OK. So what? Free to be wrong.)

So, while trying to avoid one, the Mozilla folks have stumbled into a new(ish) content business model, advertising-supported software. The difficulty with this business model is that a LOT of people have to like your product, and you don’t get paid Microsoftnormous amounts of money when they use it. Sounds suspiciously like life in a . . . competitive market.

Because Mozilla is not relying on copyright, I think they’re entitled to earn based on marginal value. But I see the income from the Firefox browser as potential evidence (among much more that is needed, and not itself definitive) going to where the copyright balance should be struck when we make that policy judgment.

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About Jim Harper

Jim Harper is the Director of Information Policy Studies at The Cato Institute, the Editor of Web-based privacy think-tank Privacilla.org, and the Webmaster of WashingtonWatch.com. A Poli Sci major at the University of California at Santa Barbara, Jim served as Editor-in-Chief of the Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly in his final year at Hastings College of the Law. Prior to becoming a policy analyst and advocate, Jim served as counsel to committees in both the U.S. House and Senate. He avoids genuine life experience by watching lots and lots of reality TV.

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  • http://www.blindmindseye.com MikeT

    Could you be a little more explicit about what you mean by “don’t rely on copyright?” They actually do rely on copyright law to preserve their ability to restrict the licensing of their code to the GPL and MPL licenses. Without copyright law, there would be no way that they could force people to abide by their open source license. Microsoft could have come along and taken their rendering engine and used it as a free basis for a replacment for MSHTML for operating system development (still using MSHTML for IE so that way, web browser problems don’t expose the whole OS).

    I think you are right that many of these fanboys are anti-capitalism, but then a lot of them have never written code or supported it either. A lot of the poison was sewn by the big software companies who made their EULAs seem more like sharecropping agreements than a way to effectively distribute sold copyrighted goods at certain prices.

  • http://www.blindmindseye.com MikeT

    Could you be a little more explicit about what you mean by “don’t rely on copyright?” They actually do rely on copyright law to preserve their ability to restrict the licensing of their code to the GPL and MPL licenses. Without copyright law, there would be no way that they could force people to abide by their open source license. Microsoft could have come along and taken their rendering engine and used it as a free basis for a replacment for MSHTML for operating system development (still using MSHTML for IE so that way, web browser problems don’t expose the whole OS).


    I think you are right that many of these fanboys are anti-capitalism, but then a lot of them have never written code or supported it either. A lot of the poison was sewn by the big software companies who made their EULAs seem more like sharecropping agreements than a way to effectively distribute sold copyrighted goods at certain prices.

  • http://www.cato.org/people/harper.html Jim Harper

    Good catch, MikeT. I should have been more specific and said that they’re not relying on copyright in the program.

    They are relying to some degree on copyright in the source code. It would be interesting to study just how much copyright protection is actually needed to get done what they want to get done. But that’s a big, brain-busting issue that’s too much for me to fathom right now.

  • http://www.cato.org/people/harper.html Jim Harper

    Good catch, MikeT. I should have been more specific and said that they’re not relying on copyright in the program.

    They are relying to some degree on copyright in the source code. It would be interesting to study just how much copyright protection is actually needed to get done what they want to get done. But that’s a big, brain-busting issue that’s too much for me to fathom right now.

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