The 'intellectual property' oxymoron

Agreed that there's no entitlement to laws or monopolies. And I grant you that some ultra-libertarians oppose any restriction on their personal economic freedom, citing moral reasons.

But society sometimes decides, for pragmatic reasons, that it's a sensible bet to grant limited-term monopolies [1], in the hope that over the long term everyone will benefit. We see that in the Writings and Discoveries Clause, article I, section 8, clause 8 of the U.S. Constitution.[2]

EDIT in response to comments: Just what monopolies to grant, and for how long, is of course the $64K question. It's been my observation that this is one of those issues where, for many people, where you stand depends on where you sit (or is it the other way around?)

[1] Technically, "monopoly" is a misnomer when applied IP rights in the general case. In economics, the term refers to someone having a lock on access to goods or services for which there's no 'viable' substitute. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly.

[2] http://topics.law.cornell.edu/constitution/articlei#section8

The Internet and personal computing technology indeed add "roll-your-own" options to publishing and completing a work that did not exist beforehand. But, at this point, they certainly have not replaced the need for the (sometimes creative) work done to support the work of authors. Things like: editing, typesetting, music production, video post-processing etc.

What happens when the publishing model is dead? Look at poetry. Poets still write, and some of it is decent. However, big publishers won't touch a poetry book that isn't a classic or a guaranteed sale anthology. Smaller imprints will usually only bother if the book has won a prize. In a number of cases authors pay a reading fee to enter contests, and the fee pays for the publishing of the book in a near break even scenario. In the case where poems are published on the internet, there's a small but arguable respectable audience, however there's no money changing hands whatsoever. Poets have second jobs, I know some who just gave up, who went into finance and law. I'll grant that lack of market is more of an issue as copying in this case, but publishers can help make markets. It should be easy to see how the effects are related. That is to say:

What's the difference between a bitcoin and a poem? You can buy food with a bitcoin.

Not everyone wants to be a sustenance farmer for a living.

There are about 10,000 books that make any measurable money at all, at any given time, and only a small fraction of those earn the authors enough to live on. Even famous authors of widely read books often have a "day job."

Books I have co-authored are "pirated," mainly in markets where wages are lower than would support a local edition at local pricing. My publisher does not use DRM on e-books, and e-books still rapidly outpaced paper books.

If you do the thought experiment, lack of copyright protection or a significantly shorter term of copyright, or some other variant, like a publishers' agreement not to trespass on other publishers' author relationships for some term, would not change my direct income from book writing very much.

Publishing would adapt: Books might be serialized so that subscribers get first access on a continuing basis. Or frequent editions (which you might see anyway, with e-books) might become the norm.

Apart from the handful of authors of "blockbusters" the book publishing economy would not change that much. We have made, and are protecting at great expense a novel result: A small number of authors, musicians, motion-picture makers, etc. can make big money through mass-reproduction of their works.

Is that an advancement of civilization worth subverting all the potential for free expression the Internet provides, or not?

Let's imagine a world without copyright. Suppose I spend a year writing a novel. This novel is great; it has the capacity to become the #1 bestseller, provided the right marketing is there. I go to my publisher and enter into a contract saying that I'll let them read my manuscript in exchange for them promising not to publish or sell it until we've worked out a deal.

So far so good. Contracts keep me protected in the world without copyright. I give them the manuscript, they love it, and they publish it.

All is well until a huge publishing company notices my book and starts printing and marketing it, without paying me or my publisher a dime. They manage to sell 100 times as many copies as my publisher, because mine is a small, independent operation, and the big company has a sophisticated and well-funded marketing machine.

This is one area where intellectual property laws, if properly designed, would protect smaller entities against larger ones. And that's where I think the real value of (hypothetical) intellectual property laws lies.