Comments on: Property Rights, Patents, and American Flag Clip Art

By: grapeapester

grapeapester — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 22:02:27 +0000

Good Blog Sir!

By: LEAK

LEAK — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 16:01:54 +0000

THE US FLAG IS MY PROPERTY AND OTHERS CREATED BY SOMEONE YEARS AGO AND DONATED TO AMERICA, AND ANY USE OF IT FOR COMMERCIAL USE IS AGAINST THE LAW. ITS THE PROPERTY OF WE THE PEOPLE.

By: Patrick Ross

Patrick Ross — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 14:26:10 +0000

Hi Tim,

Thanks for the shoutout, even if it wasn't meant in a positive way. I haven't heard from you in awhile! Nice to see you're still on your property rights crusade; I happen to like that label myself, hope you don't mind if I use it too.

I've never written about Bilsky to my knowledge, and if you read the rather old link of mine you include you'll see I am not attacking fair use, but rather the claim that it is a "right." The law doesn't stipulate it like that; people have a right to view it that way in the abstract, but under current law it is not in fact a right.

That said, I invite you to explore our web site, our writings, our videos, our blog, and you'll see I view fair use as a critical safety valve. All property rights, real and intellectual, have limits on them for the good of society, and I wouldn't want to live in a world without such limits. I just happen to feel that our current balance between rights and fair use is a good one; I recognize many in the digital space disagree with me, even if this isn't something most citizens feel is a critical issue in society right now.

Also, I was intrigued that you took issue with the tone of Klemens' piece (which I have to admit I have not yet read). I strongly welcome your call for civility and enthusiastically support your campaign. You might be interested in my thoughts on the subject here and my commitment to civility: http://blog.copyrightalliance.org/2009/01/dream...

Patrick Ross

By: Ben Klemens

Ben Klemens — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 04:26:45 +0000

Much of my post was dedicated to people who describe a simplified, monolithic source for property rights. Sites like these really do equate property rights with "traditional western moral values". A good number of the people I've met who do insist on never using the term `intellectual property', and a good number of Neoclassicists, also fall into this category, though the assumed monolithic source changes from God to the Constitution to the Market.

You're not in that boat: in your discussion, you manage to describe the source of property rights without recourse to Bible verses (or blinking text), which is why I read the TLF and not the sites I linked to above.

Instead, you describe our rights as an evolution and negotiation among the entire society over what works best and makes the most sense. In that sense, we're on the same page: your essay here stresses the societal evolution of a consensus, while my essay wound up talking more about the next step of legal codification of that consensus. [My version posited that property rights answer the question of what is socially optimal, but didn't say who was providing the answer to that question, or how. I instead just jumped to the concrete legal rulings.] Both the societal beliefs and legal codes are filled with details and conflicts that show how hard it is to write down a single concept of property.

And I certainly agree with you that when the legal codification doesn't match the societal thinking, the law is a lot more likely to have it wrong.

By: Rory Macmillan

Rory Macmillan — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 22:45:45 +0000

The debate gets more interesting as you begin to unbundle the property rights, and indeed it leads to counter-intuitive results. In the telecom field, we are accustomed to unbundling property rights over physical property and regulating them, requiring owners to make property available to competitors in the form of interconnection and network access obligations. The intellectual property community is not as accustomed to this, insisting on protecting the absoluteness of property. Yet IP is an increasingly important driver of today's telecom sector — patents over handset technologies, copyright over applications, copyright over content. Premium content is being recognized in some jurisdictions as a bottleneck or essential facility, e.g., the BSkyB v Virgin dispute in the UK. How long until regulatory thinking unbundles intellectual property rights to the same degree it already has unbundled physical property?

By: André

André — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 20:01:56 +0000

The most important argument is scarcity. Software patents are privileges for an object that is not scarce. For an economist it sounds absurd to apply an incentive system stimulate more “production” of something ubiquitious as software ideas. Indeed, this is how software patents work. Double your patent attorney staff and you can obtain at least twice the patents. Software concepts are meritless. The gap is implementation. As of your criticism of property vs. IP I would say that we need to think about the emergence of the right. A hat is a physical object you can grab and take with you, you can eat an apple. The rights are secondary. IPR put artificial objects into existance and enable us to trade with them as if they were real property. Not unlike the financial bubble. As of copyright our legal fiction is that they emerge from us, the authors. As of patent there is no right prior to the application and subsequent grant, it is property put into existance by the government.