On Giant's Shoulders

Intellectual Property rights allow owners to benefit from the property they’ve created, providing a financial incentive for the creation and investment in intellectual property; or so the assumption goes. Johanna Blakley challenges this justification by presenting the fashion industry as a prime example of a situation where creative innovation and high profit margins exist despite the absence of intellectual property rights. Just in case you already didn’t know: fashion designers can and do copy other fashion designers. It’s part and parcel of how they operate. The fashion industry profits by setting trends in clothing, and then inducing consumers to follow those trends. This ability to create trends is based on designers’ relative freedom to copy. It takes lots of variations on a particular attractive theme to make a trend. So much so that if the law prohibited fashion design copying, then the fashion industry would have a much harder time creating and responding to trends.

Applied to the software industry, without IP protection software programmers wouldn’t have to keep on metaphorically “re-inventing the wheel”. They could simply take existing software make improvements and market it as new. Of course some people might say: if software companies weren’t given IP protection then they wouldn’t have enough incentive to invest the millions of dollars required to make software in the first place. Well it takes millions of dollars, in HUGE part because these companies have to work around the designs of other software makers, essentially making everything from scratch, to preclude suits for infringement. If there were no IP protection software innovation (i.e. having the most functional stable and efficient software) would be their main selling point and not the un-reasonably long artificial scarcity created by IP rights. Copyrights last for the life of the author plus 50 years if the author is a natural person, or for 150 years if the author is a corporation (check here & here). While I’ve stated that the non-existence of IP protection will promote greater innovation in software development I do concede that authors should receive some reward for their efforts. This is why I partly agree with the suggestion of Lawrence Lessig that copyright should last for a mere five years renewable 15 times, except for copyright on software, only renewable once. What reservation do i have? I believe it should be shorter for software - only 5 years, with no renewals. Anyway it takes just about that long for software to be considered obsolete. If a company hasen't rolled out a new version with innovative new features by that time, relying merely on sales and royalties from their same old product, they shouldn't be allowed to stand in the way of others who can take what they've built and turn it into something new. Throughout history human innovation has been characterized by works built on top of the accomplishments of others. Much like the depiction in the painting Blind Orion Searching for the Sun by Nicolas Poussin it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants will we reach the stars more rapidly.

Linus Madamba
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