The founder of Wikipedia recently posted a thought provoking message on the Wikipedia mailing list: if you had a $100 million budget, what copyrighted works would you purchase and set “free?”
This reminded me of a similar question I proposed about a year ago regarding Google and the legal debacles its book scanning project is currently facing: could they not simply purchase the “copyrights†of those suing them?
This of course, assumes the existence of an IP regime, however, this mental exercise can be instructive.
For instance, a couple of years ago in the Future of Freedom Fund, Stephan Kinsella detailed a creative plan by Jonathan Holdeen (a millionaire) whom “set up a series of trusts that would one day totally wipe out taxes, at least in Pennsylvania.”
Holdeen apparently “set up a labyrinth of trusts in Pennsylvania in the 1940s and 1950s, lasting for hundreds of years, with the accumulated trillions of dollars to be eventually used to endow and completely fund the operation of the government of Pennsylvania.”
Unfortunately for Holdeen, his dream came to a crashing end at the hand of some dubious individuals with the Unitarian Church (and a State judge).
In addition, while Holdeen had a seemingly revolutionary idea for transforming the State, the fact remains that every service provided by the State must be subsidized and financed through a coercive business model (i.e., a “public good” is simply a euphemism for socialism). And it is this same coercive model that an IP regime also maliciously operates under.
See also: Without IP, who would invent? How about everybody.
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Without benefit of patent protection, what would Merck’s business plan to develop a drug look like? Thanks
Well, first off, Merck has an incentive to patent as much as they can, because the payoff can be – and is often times – huge.
By issuing patents, the State is in effect creating and subsidizing a specific type of business model suitable for a static business climate (if that). It also opens up an adverse side-effect of creating a patent troll business, in which you merely patent inventions, and don’t actually manufacture them (see RIM vs NTP in Patent Holder: 1, Innovator: 0).
It is the job of the entrepreneur to develop a viable and profitable business plan, not the taxpayer.
Feel free to contact me after these midterms are over and I’ll try to whip up some kind of business plan (though I still think that misses the point).
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