CS33b: Internet and Society
Intellectual Monopolies

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Eary History of Intellectual Monopolies in England

The printing press was invented by Johannes Gutenberg around 1450. This was a system involving movable metal type.

By 1557, King Philiip and Queen Mary had created a printing guild, Stationers' Company and granted them a monopoly on printing and empowered them to enforce the monopoly through book burning and imprisonment, so as to prevent the publication of Protestant propaganda. Thus, the initial copyright laws came about as a form of censorship and authoritarian control of knowledge in printed form. Moreover, author's were not allowed to self-publish and were not paid royalties.

In 1710, the Statue of Anne was enacted and it greatly limited the printing monopoloy to a period of 21 years (for books already in print) and a period of 14 years (renewable once by the author) for book not yet published. It also transfered the publication rights to the author rather than the Stationers' Guild. It did how ever require publications to be registers by the Stationer's Guild for copyright to become effective, and provided a fee for registration to be paid to the Stationer's guild. It also required 9 copies of each book to be created and sent to specific National Libraries.... The full title of the act is "An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or purchasers of such Copies, during the Times therein mentioned." There was considerable legal wrangling over the enforcement of this act throughout the 1700s.

The Key Arguments in the debate on copyright included:

  • Provisioning innovation: the proper use of limited or perpetual monopolies to compensate authors
  • Information goods as property: the issue of what rights authors retain after publication of a text
See (LCP,2003) for more

The US Constitution grants congress the power to establish copyright and patent monopolies for limited terms so as to assure the progress of arts and sciences. The US Code on copyright further limits those rights by providing exclusions based on fair use and also limiting what can be copyrighted (e.g. addresses can not).

Cornell Law School's website has compiled many online legal documents, including copyright-related ones.

Copyright has greatly expanded the monopolies over the past 200 years as can be seen in this chart.

Patents

Boldrin and Levine describe the history of James Watt's Steam Engine patents in Chapter 1 of their text Against Intellectual Monopoly. The main point they illustrate is that patent monopolies introduce inefficiencies in the economy which actually thwart innovation in a number of ways including
  • preventing the development of superior add-on designs so as to eliminate competition with the original inferior design
  • consuming the inventors time in seeking rents for his monopoly rather than in pursuing inventions and production
  • discouraging other inventors from trying to improve the original design since they won't be able to commercialize it for 20 years
  • allowing the rich and powerful to obtain overly generous monopolies by skillful manipulation of the political process
Curiously, James Watt was prevented from improving on his own engine by a patent on a crank system. One of his biographies states that he derided that patent as "obvious". After Watt's patents expired, there was a great explosion of innovation in Steam Engine technology which contrasts with the relative drought of such innovation while the patent was enforced.

Licenses

Copyright and Patent Law grant the holder of the monopoly the ability to give or sell licenses which allow others to use their work under various restrictions (e.g. paying royalites, paying a one time fee, etc.)

Creative Commons license movement

Creative Commons is an organization that has developed some licenses which allow authors to relinquish some, but not all of their rights. This can make their ideas disseminate more rapidly. In particular, author's can prevent others from commercializing their ideas without explicit permission and contractual agreements...

Software Licenses

There is a wide variety of software licenses. From the extremely restrictive "End User Licensing Agreements" of proprietary software companies like Microsoft to the user-oriented open source licenses like the GPL.... Here is an interesting comparison of the Microsoft EULA and the GPL, and other open source licenses (like the zlib/png license)

Advantages of Open Source Licensing for Software

Discussion Questions

  • Is granting a monopoly the best way to encourage creativity and innovation? What are some other ways that a society could encourage artistic creativity and/or scientific/technological innovation without granting monopolies? How could one determine the relative effectiveness of these various approaches in a rational, unbiased manner?
  • What would be the effects of eliminating copyright monopolies on the popular music industry?
  • What would be the effects of returning to the pre-"Statue of Anne" regime where RIAA would be granted worldwide control over all music distribution? Is this the direction we are heading in?

References

2004 © Copyright Tim Hickey, Some Rights Reserved