Against intellectual property - Brian Martin

Brian Martin makes a case against intellectual property in his books Chapter 3 "Against Intellectual Property".

He argues that intellectual property rights often slow down innovation and exploits Third World countries. He argues that most of the common arguments for intellectual property do not hold up if examined more carefully. He also claims that big part of the products prices these days comes from the IP rights and these costs are hidden usually - consumers dont know actually how much they pay for IP rights - in case of medicine drugs etc.

One of the common arguments for IP is that the authors depend on the royalties. Martin claims that only a few individuals make money for living from royalties - probably only a coupld of hundred writers who could live from royalties in the USA for example. Most of the rewards go to big companies instead. He proposes that the authors should receive some kind of salary instead of royalties, like most scientists do these days.

The other argument for IP rights is usually the argument that protecting authors would stimulate the creativity in the society as a whole. Martin argues that this is not true because most scientists and other creators are creators because of intrinsic motivatiors - the inner drive and natural tendency to be creative, not because it is financially stimulated in any way. Some research even suggests that financial rewards actually slow down the creativity and production in sme cases.

Martin proposes that the whole economic system and the way of thinking needs to be changed along with the IP law and the system to support the creators must be worked out.

Martin proposes several strategies to move from the old system to the new IP system in the world: 1) Change thinking - the awareness of the pluses and minuses of the IP rights in societies 2) Expose the costs - people must be aware of the indirect costs related to the IP rights - such as lawyers etc. This would change the attitudes towards the IP system 3) Reproduce protected works - to copy the protected materials and exploite them as much as possible. It is not possible to change the whole system if all people obey loyally the old IP law system, he argues 4) Promote non-owned information. This means promoting all the information and materials such as freeware software for example. This software distribution usually involves the obligation not to protect the software in any ways and most often also it is prohibitted to re-sell the open source software packages for a price. 5) Develope principles to give credit for outstanding creative innovations. This means that the scientists or other creatoes who have invented something should be credited as the initial innovators - even if the initial ideas and solutions would be distributed freely afterwwards. It could be argued that this is important also because most often the initial innovators get more exposure and have better possibilities to a wealthy life after the initial invention.

I would take the example of the Ruby on Rails programming framework here. The programming language is currently one of the most popular and fastest growing web programming languages because of its ease of use. On the other hand the guy who invented the language - David Heinemeier Hansson - developed it for his company for the project 37signals.com - this was the first case ever where the Ruby on Rails was used for a web project and this is widely known fact in the world. This is a project management software company where the guy works and where he is one of the owners. Although the language itself is an open source framework - Hansson and his company receive much publicity because of the Ruby on Rails. And this helps to sell the product quite well, in fact 37signals is a multi-million dollar company. If you want to get rich also - you might want to watch how Heinemeier teaches the secret of web business.