Let’s say you go to a restaurant and have a lemon cheesecake. You love it, so you reverse engineer it in your mind and make it at home to serve a Tupperware party. As soon as the party starts, jack-booted thugs arrive wielding guns and drag you away as a criminal for stealing a recipe. The cook is dragged away, same as a real thief or murderer.
That is the short version of what has happened to the food and agriculture industry over the last 30 or so years
Jeffrey A. Tucker, of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, explains “agri-patents”.
Not exactly how I would describe the way things stand, but then, I haven’t had to tussle with the jack-booted thugs of the intellectual property rights owners. Not even in a movie. ((About “a new method of growing corn,” apparently, or possibly “a new genetic corn that will grow in the desert,” or something. Can you tell I haven’t seen it?.)) Nor, I suspect, has the author of the piece, whose logic, I have to confess, I found somewhat hard to follow. Plant patents etc. are “not an evil of the market; they are an evil of government intervention,” and as such “have handed socialists the best case they’ve ever had to rail against capitalistic exploitation”. Maybe there’s another way of looking at these things?
This is one of Mises etc. big issues, an old debate about how best to thwart the evils of monopoly. The Marxian method is brute force appropriation of everything by government. The competing idea is competition, advocated by anarchist thinkers such as Josiah Warren and Pierre Proudhon. Patents rest on authority and create monopoly and so must, in anarchic thinking, be eliminated.
You can own your own thoughts, all agree, but once you express them they become public. You can keep a secret, but you can’t use brute force authority to deny the use of public knowledge, anarchists argue, since that empowers authority and that brings monopoly.
Our world would be very different without intellectual property. One argument for such property that vexes me is that there would be no incentive to do R&D if there was no patent protection to allow the fruits of such research to earn back the costs of research and development. Progress would be stifled.
However it is my experience that the knowledge that some thing is possible spurs further innovation to accomplish similar objectives in novel ways that do not infringe on intellectual property. The issue then is the cost of competing innovations: how much does it cost to bring a competitive product to market using non-infringing ideas?
Not a simple subject.
Not a simple subject indeed, and the old arguments about patents offering a respite against competition in exchange for making the information available do seem to me to carry some force. Plants (and to a ;esser extent livestock) do pose particular problems though. And people who are gung-ho for patents in the US (and other modern economies) today often forget that those economies got their start by ignoring the patents of others.
Hmmm… One of the things about IP is “the devil IS in the details”. For example, a problem I have with the quote from Tucker — no “jack-booted thugs” will drag you off to jail. No, instead — if there are patent rights over ‘something’ about/in this lemon cheesecake, then the owner of the rights will have to start a process to charge you with infringement, etc. — long and boring (and expensive to the patent holder). (We could talk a bit about trade secrets and criminal charges, enforcement is a bit different and you can reverse engineer with no probs…)
Whoops, never mind, I can see your eyes glazing over…quick! SEX, SEX, SEX.
Ahh, now that you’re back for a sec. Just think — as Jeremy indicated, you could get the recipe from the patent written description and just make it in another country where there aren’t any patent rights over the cake, or wait (at a max) — 20 yrs and make it with no fuss wherever you are.
The Mises Institute is a right-wing crank organization specializing in libertarianism and Austrian Economics. That site usually opposes all intellectual property.
If you want to read criticisms of these, check out my web site:
Critiques Of Libertarianism.
Thanks. That’s an awful lots of links — and it isn’t obvious which addresses IPRs on plants. Can you help?