# intmon: no to intellectual monopoly!

by intellectual monopoly (intmon) i mean a government mandated monopoly for specific ideas or creations. i mean mostly copyright and patents. trademarks are fine since they are for protecting specific identities so that the consumers can trust the actual product.

abolishing them has lot of upsides: more content and products, lower prices, etc. you can easily mix and match content and share it with everyone without repercussions. you can freely invent new things and not worry about patent trolls pestering you.

on the other hand intmon seems one of those things that people simply cannot imagine life without. but i'm quite convinced that if it wouldn't exist and you wanted to introduce it, it would be met with huge resistance. in an intmon-free world completely different business models would have emerged.

# copyright

in the copyright case i'd expect people wouldn't be selling the actual content but rather their self and their brand. this is already happening with youtube creators. they are not selling their videos, those are free. if they have a large number of subscribers (high influence) they sell that to sponsors by mentioning their products in their video. and most of them do this in a sensible manner: they review the product themselves which actually makes me want to watch through their sponsored section. it's not the insensitive random annoying ads that the internet is full of.

lot of book authors these days have a blog with large following. they could publish their writing there first and once they have enough content, they could bind it into a big book. or if they have a popular book already, they could be touring and talking about it with people like how musicians tour and give concerts.

i'd expect more demand for customized content: what if a vocal group really likes a fanfic of a popular tv show? now small scale studios can create that on demand. and if people can get their wishes created rather than choosing from a selection, i'd expect people would be happier with the content, and pay even more, further exacerbating the demand. perhaps content would be paid beforehand rather than after like it's done currently.

and in case of copyright i acknowledge that there would be less aaa games and movies because big studios couldn't justify spending millions in creating something that will be free in the end. but i think that's fine. those millions of moneys and human hours saved can go to more useful things like research, infrastructure maintenance or humanitarian causes.

# patents

on the patent side the most common counterargument is about the research. who will do the research if not big companies who do it in exchange for patents? drug companies are the most common example where a drug needs lots of millions of dollars to develop but very easy to produce once the r&d is done so the r&d company needs some protection to recoup costs.

but this assumes that it's companies who need to do this complex research. academia has not even a chance because these companies poach all the researchers from it. i'd expect that without patents maybe drug companies wouldn't invest that much into research but rather they would fund academia where researchers could now stay and earn good pay. and because academia is open and independent, a global community could work on the more important things rather than drug companies developing yet another antidepressant drug. but it's hard to tell what would happen but i'm quite convinced that research would still happen, researchers wouldn't disappear into thin air.

another argument is that lack of patents encourage secrecy and complexity to maintain the secrecy. but what companies can keep a secret today, they already keep that as a secret. patents are used mostly for easily reverse-engineered or replicated products. sure, it's a risk that the r&d develops something easily replicable. if a company doesn't like that risk, maybe it shouldn't do such r&d in the first place. i don't find it a compelling reason that private r&d should be rewarded like that. i'd rather see more open research done in the academia instead and ensure that any r&d fruits can be immediately enjoyed by everyone at the lowest cost.

# other thoughts

for reference i've run this idea through r/changemyview: https://old.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/ofdnn1/cmv_a_copyrightpatentipfree_world_is_nicer/. it didn't really make any change in my views. most commenters assumed that we would continue to use the current business models in the intmon-free world and then explain how that wouldn't work ("people would just steal your work and sell it cheaper"). well duh. that's not what i'm arguing here. i couldn't really get into the details because discussions on r/changemyview are incredibly exhausting. i'd probably need to divide my views into subpoints: lack of aaa content, no drug patents, secrecy, etc. but i'd expect discussing even the subpoints would be exhausting. i'll expand my thoughts about r/changemyview in general in an upcoming post.

in practice, while i respect the right of others, i assume any of my output is public domain. i don't really care how people use it. but i'm not producing any meaningful content really so it doesn't really matter anyways.

edit: note to myself to ask this question next time i'm discussing this topic: what's the difference between "roads" and "drug research"? why is that "roads can be provided only by the government" while "drug research can be provided only by private companies"?

published on 2021-07-12, last modified on 2012-07-14

to the frontpage