The Technology Liberation Front - Latest Comments in They Were for Cartels before They Were against Them

Re: They Were for Cartels before They Were against Them

Noel Le — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 21:50:36 -0000

I was mainly commenting on the phrase "monopolistic behaviour" used by TechDirt, but yes, youre right, I dId have a knee-Jerk reaction. Misuse of the term monopoly bothers me to no end.

Re: They Were for Cartels before They Were against Them

Tim Lee — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 13:06:39 -0000

Noel, I don't understand what you're responding to here. I didn't intend for this to be a post about patents or copyrights. I agree that they are are a special kind of monopoly that's more defensible than garden-variety government monopolies like the post office.

Re: They Were for Cartels before They Were against Them

Noel Le — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 12:26:49 -0000

Tim, I see where this post is going. But recall your recent discussions with Jim Haper on the differences between real property and intellectual property. One of the important implications for policy discourse is to know which form of property you're talking about, keeping in mind that often you'll use examples from one kind to illustrate the other. Where this is most important relates to the term "monopoly." Sure, you can say that monopolies are govt created, have effects on competition and cite other similarities between monopolies in real and intellectual property, but the economic similiarties are few (does monopoly reduce competition, does monopoly lead to suboptimal levels of innovation, how do you define the extent of a monopoly).

On the other hand, if you don't like things created by the govt, then perhaps you disagree with the patent case law handed to society by the CAFC, or the Defense Department's DARPA wing which initiated a lot of basic research leading up to our modern Internet.

Re: They Were for Cartels before They Were against Them

Steve_R — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 11:54:37 -0000

It's not really that strange, the government is not one entity. If it were, you could say that it suffers from a multiple personality disorder. I believe that many of our ridiculous laws are passed to appease special interest groups. Our elected officials seem to have lost the concept of serving in the public interest.

The issue of public access to the MLS surfaced several years ago. On the radio, a realtor (of course) advocated that the public should not see the MLS listing because the realtors had this important role of "making the market". Utter nonsense of course.

Considering the current abominable state of copyright law, an innovative lawyer NAR may be able claim that this data is "intellectual property" and not subject to public disclosure as a means of sidestepping the monoply issue. The recent issue of "who owns the baseball statistics" raises the concept that data aggregators would be entitled to control the data even after it is released. Ironically, why aren't data aggregators required to pay royalties to the data sources when the data is sold????
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/16/sports/baseba...