Positive Liberty

From James V. DeLong’s “Defending Intellectual Property,” in Copy Fights: The Future of Intellectual Property in the Information Age, p 31:

Reportedly, 19th century thinker Herbert Spencer invented “an excellent invalid chair,” and in an excess of charitable zeal declined to patent it. As a result, no manufacturer was willing to risk making it. If the chair failed, the manufacturer would bear the entire loss, whereas if it succeeded others would enter the market that the pioneer had developed and he would, again, be unable to recover the costs.

Let’s grant that for industrial products, manufacturing costs may or may not be recouped depending on the strength of the patent. If this is the case, then a strong patent regime is necessary to preserve specialization of labor in the area of idea-creation: There’s no sense specializing in something that will never pay, like unpatentable ideas, for just the reasons given above. Manufacturers who have new ideas won’t want to risk trying them out, and they certainly won’t want to risk hiring someone full-time to be the guy who just thinks up ideas all day long.

The situation seems very different with copyrighted works, however, because these nowadays are easily “manufactured” by copying them from an original – or even from a copy – onto a uniform medium, and because individuals have since the dawn of time created artistic works just for the sheer joy of doing so.

Thus, the sellers of tangible items, considered as a class, shouldn’t feel nearly as afraid of open-source music as they were of open-source invalid chairs. It might even seem that the opposite is true for intellectual workers vis a vis the manufacturers of media – The weaker copyright law is, the more manufacturers stand to benefit, since we will buy their blank media and carry out the last step of the manufacturing process ourselves, deriving an equal or even greater pleasure from it than we would from pre-printed media that are more expensive to them.

Or does the very existence of copyrighted products help guarantee the distribution chains, the marketing, and the general hype that keeps Madonna’s music selling? In a world without copyright, would we consume more or less media storage? (And would it even matter, given how rapidly storage technologies are improving?)

And then there’s Ponoko, which threatens to do to manufactured goods what computers have already done to the arts:

Ponoko is the world’s first personal manufacturing platform. It’s the online space for a community of creators and consumers to use a global network of digital manufacturing hardware to co-create, make and trade individualized product ideas on demand.

Were Herbert Spencer alive today, he might have simply uploaded his design.

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