Re: thought for the week

On Thu, 22 Jul 1999, Greg Ikonen <gikonen[_at_]venlaw.com> wrote:
>
> With the exception of the copyleft folks, most people acknowledge that
> a copyright protection regime encourages creative efforts, and that
> the promotion of these efforts is a good thing for society.

I think it is clear that copyright protection encourages investment, which is what you refer to below. I think it is debatable as to whether it encourages creative efforts, rather than just channeling the application of those efforts to different ends. Obviously the results will vary depending upon whether one is talking about movies, on the one hand, or software, on the other.  

> The incredible investment in Internet software applications, movies
> and music would, IMO, be decimated without a healthy copyright
> protection regime.

Limiting my remarks to software, I agree that getting rid of coyright for computer programs would reduce investment (and return on investment) drastically, and that, in consequence, Microsoft would no longer present an anti-trust problem. On the other hand, considering the successs of the free/open software movements, it is my opinion that there would be no appreciable reduction in the quantity [except for a drastic reduction in the number of incompatible programs arising from efforts at product differentiation] of programs and that the quality of programs would be greatly improved.

Notice that RedHat in its efforts to turn a five billion dollar business into a five hundred million dollar business is investing considerable money in supporting programmers who are creating free/open software.

It isn't the copyright regime that is encouraging those efforts.

And it wasn't the copyright regime that was responsible for the creation of Linux, Apache, Sendmail (and Qmail), Bind, TCP/IP, C, Unix, Perl, Python, or the World Wide Web.

--
Peter D. Junger--Case Western Reserve University Law School--Cleveland, OH
 EMAIL: junger@samsara.law.cwru.edu    URL:  http://samsara.law.cwru.edu/
        NOTE: junger[_at_]pdj2-ra.f-remote.cwru.edu no longer exists