Intellectual property ≠ free market

The always interesting Robert Darnton has an interesting piece in the New York Review of Books entitled Google & the Future of Books, in which he essentially argues for a reigning of copyrights, combining the ideas of a shorter term (28 years after creation is what Darnton believes is the platonic ideal, as opposed the current 70 years after author's death) with some wishy-washy democratic platitudes that I can't seem to shake much concrete meaning out of.

It's an interesting essay, though he makes a very common mistake, in automatically associating intellectual property rights with free market ideals:

But we, too, cannot sit on the sidelines, as if the market forces can be trusted to operate for the public good. We need to get engaged, to mix it up, and to win back the public's rightful domain.

In a perfectly free market, clearly there would be nobody to enforce intellectual property rights. Though as Boldrin and Levine explain, content creators still have a significant advantage over the imitators, and innovation in an IP-less world doesn't look like it would suffer.

Pharmaceutical patents: not so necessary after all?

Intellectual property is topic on which it seems that the vast majority of people – economists, politicians, and laymen – agree: patents and copyrights are necessary for innovation, and without copyright or patent protection, people who have no reason to innovate because they could not charge more than the marginal cost of production (i.e., the cost of stamping a CD or producing a pill, as opposed to paying the artist to sing the song or the researchers to discover the drug). The copyright argument is being put to the test right now with the internet making enforcement impossible and forcing music artists, TV creators, and filmmakers to compete in a world with significantly weaker copyright protections out there for creators.

Patents, though, are still alive and kickin', and are even expanding their reach based on international agreements whereby rich countries foist IP laws on developing countries in exchange for access to Western markets. Probably the most beloved of all patents is the pharmaceutical patent. Everybody gets pharmaceutical patents, right?

Wrong. Michele Boldrin and David Levine, in his book entitled Against Intellectual Monopoly (free online!), make the case against pharmaceutical patents based on the historical case of Italy, which was the last major industrialized Western country to institute patents for medicine (here is that chapter). Long story short, not only did the pre-patent area have more innovation (not just imitation, but actual research innovation), but there were many more small firms competing before the institution of patents than after. Boldrin and Levine also make the argument that this diminishing level of competition among pharmaceutical companies is the reason for the steady rise of drug companies marketing to consumers and doctors ("marketing" being a very charitable way of putting it, in the case of doctors). They also cite a study towards the end that's pretty damning to the modern American drug industry's defense of patents, where they find that the costs of these patents in terms of cost and innovation far outweigh the protective benefits of giving the patent holder monopoly power of their invention.

I look forward to reading the whole book, but considering I just read the chapter dealing with the most difficult issue for IP opponents (pharmaceuticals), I expect good things from it.

75th anniversary of the end of Prohibition

Today is the 75th anniversary of the repeal of alcohol prohibition in the United States, and lot of libertarians and anti-drug prohibition advocacy groups have taken the opportunity to remind the public of the fundamental sameness of 1920's era alcohol prohibition, and modern day drug prohibition. Radley Balko has an article up at Reason commemorating the day and relating it to our current prohibition, and he makes a point that I hadn't thought of before:

But there's one positive thing we can say alcohol prohibition: At least it was constitutional. The prohibitionists built support for their cause by demonizing alcohol from state to state, winning over local legislators one at a time. When they'd built a sufficient national movement, they started the momentum for a constitutional amendment. Congress didn't pass a blanket federal law, Constitution be damned. They understood that the federal government hasn't the authority to issue a national ban on booze, so they moved to enact the ban properly.

When America repealed prohibition, we repealed it with a constitutional amendment making explicit that the power to regulate alcohol is reserved for the states. Even today, when Congress wants to pass federal alcohol laws (such as the federal drinking age, or the federal minimum blood-alcohol standard for drunk driving), it can't simply dictate policy to the states. Instead, it ties the laws to federal highway funding, a blackmail that while distasteful, at least carries the pretense of adherence to the Constitution.

Contrast that to drug prohibition, where Congress (and the Supreme Court, when it upheld it) made no attempt to comply with the Constitution in passing the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 (CSA), the law that gave us the modern drug war.

For more on our modern day war on drugs and why it's so inevitably doomed, I suggest buying and reading Cop in the Hood by Peter Moskos, who joined the Baltimore police force for over a year and wrote a book about what it's like being on the front line of the war on drugs. Basically his conclusion was that the whole thing is a big sham, and that both current techniques and the entire idea of prohibition in general is hopeless. The writing style is very accessible, and I highly recommend the book.

Mao: The Unknown Story

I just finished a fascinating biography of Mao called Mao: The Unknown Story. I hadn't known much about Mao or Chinese history, so it was pretty enlightening. The book was apparently pretty controversial when it came out, with some people calling it brilliant, and some calling it an example of lazy research. I haven't looked too far into the critical claims about the book, but I find it difficult to believe that it's poorly cited, given the hundreds of pages of notes at the end, and the incredibly comprehensive list of very famous world leaders that the authors interviewed. In any case, I highly recommend the book. Here are some things that I learned from it that I hadn't even heard of before:

• For most of the Long March, Mao was carried on a litter and was comfortable enough to read.
• The Communists' success during the Civil War had everything to do with the Russians having planted sleepers among the Nationalists during the heady days of the Wampoa Military Academy, and nothing to do with the Communists' military skills.
• The Second Sino-Japanese War was started by Stalin when he activated a sleeper who was the commander of the Nationalists' garrison around Shanghai and Nanjing and had him incite the Marco Polo Bridge incident which began the conflict. The Japanese and Chiang Kai-shek had no intention of fighting that war at that time, but Stalin wanted to draw the Japanese into China proper to avoid them invading the Soviet Union from the east.
• The two Taiwan Straits crises in the '50s were engineered by Mao to provoke the US into threatening nuclear war, which would then compel the Soviet leadership to hand over to Mao blueprints for atomic weapons (the reason for the first incident), and missiles capable of carrying them (the reason for the second).
• Much (if not all) of the deaths by starvation in the late '50s and early '60s were due to Mao's generous support of would-be allies abroad. China became the biggest donor of foreign aid history has ever known, and was exporting food to Eastern Europe (places which barely knew food rationing, much less death by starvation) at a time when millions of Chinese laborers were receiving fewer calories than those at Auschwitz. Mao even exported food to the USSR while his own citizens were starving despite the pleas of the Russians not to.

The irony of African culture in the Americas

I've been reading William Bernstein's A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the Word, and though just about every page has a part worth blogging about, I found this part explaining black Americans' relative lack of African culture compared to blacks in the Caribbean and Brazil:

Death on the plantation was sugar's constant companion, and those colonies that relied most heavily on cane had the most trouble maintaining their slave populations. The black population of British North America, which grew little cane, increased nearly as fast as the white population. The one exception to the pattern of lower mortality among slaves in North America was found in the southernmost parishes of Louisiana, one of the few places on the continent that grew cane. Conversely, one exception to the high mortality among slaves in Brazil was found in the province of Minas Gerais, which was more dependent on "easier" labor: coffee and dairy production.

The deadly face of "sugar demographics" is easily seen today in the cultural differences between the black population in the United States and Canada and that in the rest of the hemisphere. British North America, because of its vigorous population growth, required ever-smaller infusions of African slaves. After 1800, the relatively high fertility and low death rates among slaves in the United States meant that southern plantation owners simply did not need to import more Africans. The American prohibition of the slave trade in 1808 easily passed trhough the southern-dominated Congress for just this reason: the Americans' abolition of the slave trade crippled their Caribbean and Brazilian competitors. By 1808, almost all North American slaves were native-born, and by the Civil War, relatively little culture member of Africa remained. The Caribbean islands and Brazil, on the other hand, required a constant flow of Africans; well into the twentieth century, the Yoruba language flourished in Cuba, the last bastion of the New World plantation society, and African influences still pervade Caribbean culture.

Voltaire: a detriment to public health, safety, and welfare

Robert Darnton has an article in the New York Review of Books about the history of written information, and in it he discusses textual stability and the weak de facto intellectual property rights of authors. Apparently, even the best engaged in and profited from what America's two biggest cities say is "detrimental to the public health, safety, and welfare":

The most widely diffused edition of Diderot's Encyclopédie in eighteenth-century France contained hundreds of pages that did not exist in the original edition. Its editor was a clergyman who padded the text with excerpts from a sermon by his bishop in order to win the bishop's patronage. Voltaire considered the Encyclopédie so imperfect that he designed his last great work, Questions sur l'Encyclopédie, as a nine-volume sequel to it. In order to spice up his text and to increase its diffusion, he collaborated with pirates behind the back of his own publisher, adding passages to the pirated editions.