Cliff Richard and Intellectual Property Rights
During the summer I researched a little bit on the idea of Intellectual Property Rights and also wrote a small essay on the TRIPS-Regime of the WTO seen from the Chinese perspective. The interest was spurred through my own discussions during my candidature for the European Parliament in 2004. During that time I was often confronted with the Copyright issues in European law – and had to find my own position on this issue.
And recently, during a seminar on Political Economy with Prof. Zöller, I rediscovered the issue. Basically we argued about the following standard idea of economists: that property rights (of any kind) ensure that property is better used – in other words ownership is needed to create quality. I argued that there are lots of counter-examples such as Open-Source-Software, Wikipedia etc. The debate goes on and I will try to post some of my thoughts at a later point in time.
Anyway: here is an interesting article that I found about Cliff Richard and Intellectual Property Rights. It counters the argument that long periods of copyrights protection are needed to spur artistic creativity!
Oktober 31st, 2006 at 01:08
I noticed you’d left a comment over at my blog.
On the issue of Intellectual Property, its important to distinguish between intellectual property rights in general, and patents/copyrights in the TRIPS/TRIPS+ regimes as a specific institutionalization of those rights.
Two arguments can be made against the economists support. First, creativity does occur in the absence of property rights. In fact, the US did not accept foreign patents for several years, and Switzerland only accepted them in the 70s. So property rights are good so long as they are local, but its ok to imitate (India’s pharma industry).
Second, one can argue that patents go much further than general property rights, much to the detriment of innovation. Instead, they create an incentive not for creativity but for trying to preserve those exclusive rights. Again, the pharmaceutical industry is an excellent though somewhat extreme example.
On the specific issue of pharma patents see my previous article:
The Failure of Pharma R&D, or the more general healthcare category.