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Well, they made a whole book about this :) They argue that the "first mover" advantage is actually large enough to take care of the problem in the case of both books and pharmaceuticals; music isn't actually a problem as people actually making it earn close to nothing from reproduction anyway; software wouldn't be so much different than it is now, etc.

They take the quite extreme point of view that all intellectual property should be completely abolished. They make IMO a definitive point on the complete uselessness of patents in general; the case against copyright and trademarks is somewhat less clear.




> Well, they made a whole book about this

Sure, I skimmed it a bit, but don't have time to read it at the moment.

As for the summary of their points, thanks for posting them - I think there's ample room for debate, and that each thing is probably a bit different - software patents are different from drug patents, for instance.


What arguments do they make about patents that do not apply well to copyright? Do they take any position on trade secret protections?


Patents has been used exclusively to stifle competition and have a very bad record of actually hampering progress. Even the canonical case of pharma is debunked thoroughly.

For copyright, the case is quite clear too, though it may still be possible that a short copyright (14 years, for instance) may still be better than nothing at all.

Trade secrecy are treated page 188. Basically, it is much more used than patents, so suppressing patents won't change things much. Revealing secrets through patents is very inefficient anyway.




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