however they do result in flows of capitals feeding into otherwise unfundable enterprise like R&D; science and engineering, or culture; writing, music, art. Where's the ROI if you invest millions into R&D and your competitor invests $0 and can then just reproduce your works with their logo ontop of yours? To sack off IP and copyright would significantly narrow innovation and result in many artists, scientists and engineers having their income severely suppressed if not eradicated. Instead that money would temporarily go to a bunch of hacks that do nothing but copy and chase the bottom, before vanishing into thin air as the works become entirely unprofitable.
I don't think its as simple as calling them immoral. Rather the immorality comes on them being poorly regulated. With regulated term limits on patents and copyright we create a world where an artist can create licensed product and protect themselves during the course of their career, and people are them able to riff on their works after some decades or after they pass on.
> I think if behavior needs to be regulated by government in order to be moral, then it's immoral behavior by default
Regulation is creating rules for businesses to run within. This goes back to rule of law. You can't tell a group of children to "behave" and walk away and expect good results and then call the children "bad" when they fail to behave.
Rather, you must give them systems to understand, to channel their energy, productively, in a way that matches the desires of the parent (government) and their strategies. Then you have to meaningfully punish those who intentionally break the rules in order to give those behaving the knowledge that they have chosen the good path and they'll be rewarded for it.
Free markets are not about "morality"/"immortality", its about harnessing an existing energy to make a self-sustaining system. A system a state is less good/interested at keeping going or unable to act quickly enough to move in. But part of creating that system is putting in guard rails to prevent the worst sort of crashes.
The regulation is what makes it worth while for people to invent/write. Patents/copyrights have been a net benefit for society with a smaller negative downside.
The situation has changed quite a lot with digitalization. When copyright was developed, giving up the right to copy something had low cost - you needed to have a printing press. Now you can’t even read a book without making multiple copies, so the cost of giving up copy right is a lot higher. The benefits to society of securing an exclusive right to control copies is possibly unchanged, or perhaps less as the writings can no longer be retelling of common stories (e.g. Disney movies from Grimm brothers; Shakespeare mixing popular stories into brilliant plays). I suspect making the timelines of copy right protection be shorter (as culture speeds up) rather than longer as we have done, due to the weirdly long lifetime of corporations, would fix most of the issues. Invention would be rewarded without the creation of IP monopolies and the restriction of mixing existing stuff as a creative method, and the loss of the right to copy stuff you have paid for all lessened.
If I come up with an invention I don't have the capability/finances to bring it to market. Without patents, I have no incentive to show it to possible investors/manufacturers because they can just steal it and keep all the profits. So my idea that could have helped society dies with me. So it costs society nothing to give me protection, but society get's nothing without the protection versus efficiency, safer working conditions, better health, whatever benefit from my invention.
Without copyright it was hard to assemble high quality educational books/manuals, because they take a lot of effort with relatively little reward/return. In fact the first 'modern' copyright act in 1701ish was titled something about improving education.
Without copyright it is not worth it for authors to spend nights/weekends flushing out plot ideas for complete sharable works, so you end up with less/lower quality literature as no one can be a professional author. Which has better quality on average, published books or self published? Self published tend to be the 'passion projects' you would still have without copyright, published books tend to be what get's created when authors are compensated for their efforts. Society can't lose from copyright because without it the works would never have existed. If I say 'I'll bake a cake if you will buy a piece' and I bake a cake and sell a piece, society didn't 'lose'. If I don't bake a cake because no one would buy a piece than society was a little sadder, a little plainer that day. There is only upside, there is no downside. Anyone that would release if copyright didn't exist is still free to waive their copyright protection. So having it is the best of both worlds, those that want to release just to release can, and those that want to try and create something that can be sold can.
Without copyright there are no big budget movies, only passion projects because no one is injecting millions when the work will just be copied no sold/screened/rented.
Without copyright the world has less joy, less discussion, less contemplation, less entertainment, less education. Without patents the world has less productivity, less safety, worse health, less food, worse/much less clothing/housing, less free time. The systems in their current forms have been abused and are unfit for the original purpose but when kept to the original purpose with reasonable protection periods they are a HUGE net plus for society.
I think it's a little more nuanced than that. Certainly IP is regularly abused to try to suppress competition/innovation, own our shared culture, create artificial scarcity, etc. However, there's also a need to protect artists and other creatives from having their work scooped up and profited off of by mega corps.
What about compound interest? After all, inheritance is merely letting wealth continue to compound across generations. But at first glance, the same arguments against inheritance would apply against letting a single person earn interest.
How is inheritance bad? Imo, estate taxes are more immoral. Why should the state be allowed a cut of my private assets? Gift taxes are also immoral. Why should I have to pay taxes for giving away assets?
To me the giver paying taxes is wrong mindset. Maybe they should be collecting them. But paying taxes on earned money seems reasonable and has long history. It can be earned from work, or inheritance or gift. Actually maybe paying income tax on inheritance would be best.
The argument is that taxes were already paid when the relevant work was performed. Transfers of ownership that don't involve work (ie economic activity) shouldn't be subject to government interference.
The obvious issue is that if you don't tax gifts it becomes far too easy for people to dodge taxes (or at least much more convoluted to enforce payment).
Inheritance is much more complicated and controversial. There's an argument to be made that it results in social ills if left unchecked, an argument that estate taxes fail rather spectacularly to address those ills, and an argument that the ills tend to be self righting given how easy it is to lose money. And probably several others.
I suppose because we're wired this way. Can't think of any group or society that didn't have some notion of private property that wasn't just a huge (and brief) humanitarian tragedy.
Yes, private property enables human civilization, all the good and the bad. Before the agricultural revolution led to protected and exploited stores of grain, we were far smaller tribes of hunters and gatherers with far less technology
Those smaller tribes were continuously at war over resources... It's exactly the behavior we observe in nature whenever resource scarcity presents.
A world without private property leads to a world of pure lawlessness. Sure... We could do that, but it would quickly devolve into forever warfare where only might wins, and even that for only fleetingly small timeslices.
History's progression has proven that exploited workers still prefer to exist in that system vs one of continual peril.
My life, yes, but my genetic lifeline exists up to and including eternity if luck and good decision making are on the side of my generations of offspring.
Let's consider the most basic form of ownership: that over one's body. By your logic, my life is a spec on the eternal timeline, so why make it a crime to harm or murder my physically?
> Imo, estate taxes are more immoral. Why should the state be allowed a cut of my private assets?
To prevent family dynasties from building more and more economic power over time and threatening the state in the future due to the forces of compound interest. To be fair, most family dynasties don't do this, but others can wreck exceptional havoc just by wanting to, due to the generational power they've amassed. The damage they can do is further accelarated by them lacking understanding of how people without generational wealth live.
We already see this happening in our society as most media organisations are run by billionaires or multi-millionaires. News organisations are run less and less by journalists or normal people and the headlines are set more and more by people with very keen and niche vested interests.
This specific issue is being played out in real-time in the Murdoch succession as he attempts to leave the propaganda firm in the hands of his most idelogically similar successor. Yet the majority of his children see the world differently from their father and are challenging this. On one side we have natural break up and change occuring due to generational shifts, and on the other the strong desire of the ancestor wanting their legacy to remain unspoilt after their death.
