Steal This Book!

I should preface this by noting that, as most of you probably know, I work in the music industry, specifically for a music publisher—my salary is paid by revenues from intellectual property. Having grown up like a good little boy under the shepherding shadow of the industry, I have always considered IP to be an important product protected under U.S. and international law. This is the preconceived notion with which I approached this book.

So I figured I'd start this blog off with something guaranteed to be quite controversial. I have a book review/recommendation for everyone: Against Intellectual Monopoly, by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine. It's a sturdy, 300-page tome of applied economics (I know, a real page-turner, right?) detailing exactly what's wrong with intellectual property (everything), and what can be done to fix it (nothing). Okay, it's not quite so drastic as that, but they are certainly on the far edge of the spectrum when it comes to IP reform. But they aren't your run-of-the-mill teen pirates espewing such trite clichés as, "Information wants to be free, man" while taking a toke off of whatever rolled leafy substance happens to be handy; this is one of the most comprehensive, heavily-annotated references I've seen in quite a while.

Michele and David are both theoretical economists, and admit without reservation that theoretically, the reasons normally posited by the pro-IP crowd seem correct. For this project, they decided to branch out and actually look at real-world data for once (what a concept!), only to discover that, when taken out of the world of theory and into the world of empirical data, quite the opposite is true. Their findings are so exhaustively well-researched that I, at least, have had my opinion almost completely changed. Every argument is examined, and shown to be lacking. They have tremendous amounts of evidence that the costs to society of intellectual monopoly far exceed the benefits, and they aren't afraid to use it. I won't go into any details here, for this post would triple in length were I to do so; suffice to say that if you have questions and doubts, as I'm sure you do, it's well worth a read. Despite being an economics book it's written toward the educated layman, so as opposed to wading through the impenetrable economic jargon that most practitioners use, anyone with a reasonable amount of intelligence should be able to read and understand this book. And I highly recommend you do.

Although Against Intellectual Monopoly can be purchased at Amazon and a few other places, it isn't the cheapest place to obtain it—it would, of course, be intellectually dishonest for them to make such outrageous claims and then charge $30 bucks for their book, so you can download it for free here in PDF form, in addition to reading a few reviews, blog posts, etc., and their brief summary of their work:

It is common to argue that intellectual property in the form of copyright and patent is necessary for the innovation and creation of ideas and inventions such as machines, drugs, computer software, books, music, literature and movies. In fact intellectual property is a government grant of a costly and dangerous private monopoly over ideas. We show through theory and example that intellectual monopoly is not necessary for innovation and as a practical matter is damaging to growth, prosperity and liberty.

Boldrin and Levine are able to show that, instead of being a necessary evil, intellectual monopoly is just plain-old-everyday evil. Hopefully when you read how your inalienable rights have been trampled all over you may actually get upset enough to take action. I realize that this is perhaps a tenuous position to take, considering my current employment situation. I'm sure several people with whom I work, or in my industry, will get pretty upset with it (I've actually already had this happen a couple times). But it rings false to me to believe that your basic principles are being violated, yet staying silent—or worse, espousing the alternative—simply for the sake of self-preservation. So if you start ranting about bittorrent or some alternative, you might not want to ask me to join in...what comes out my mouth may surprise you.