Against Intellectual Monopoly
client
system is mapped to a purchaser. If so mapped, the server system determines whether
single-action ordering is enabled for that purchaser at that client system. If enabled,
the server system sends the requested information (e.g., via a Web page) to the client computer system along with an indication of the single action to perform to place
the order for the item. When single-action ordering is enabled, the purchaser need
only perform a single action (e.g., click a mouse button) to order the item. When the
purchaser performs that single action, the client system notifies the server system.
The server system then completes the order by adding the purchaser-specific order
information for the purchaser that is mapped to that client identifier to the item
order information (e.g., product identifier and quantity). Thus, once the description
of an item is displayed, the purchaser need only take a single action to place the order
to purchase that item. Also, since the client identifier identifies purchaser-specific
order information already stored at the server system, there is no need for such
sensitive information to be transmitted via the Internet or other communications
medium.29
As can be seen, the "secret" that is revealed is, if anything, less informative
than the simple observation that the purchaser buys something by means
of a single click. Information that might actually be of use to a computer
programmer - for example, the source code to the specific implementation
used by Amazon - is not provided as part of the patent, nor is it required to
be provided. In fact, the actual implementation of the one-click procedure
consists of a complicated system of subcomponents and modules requiring
a substantial amount of human capital and of specialized working time to
be assembled. The generic idea revealed in the patent is easy to understand
and copy, but it is of no practical value whatsoever. The useful ideas are
neither revealed in the patent nor easy to imitate without reinventing them
from scratch, which is what lots of other people beside Amazon's direct
competitors (books are not the only thing sold on the Web, after all) would
have done to everybody's else benefit, had U.S. Patent No. 5,960,411 not
prevented them from actually doing so. Certainly it is hard to argue that
the social cost of giving Amazon a monopoly over purchasing by clicking
a single button is somehow offset by the social benefit of the information
revealed in the patent application.
Schumpeterian Good Monopoly
Although originally not a mainstream view in economics, the Schumpeterian view is now close to becoming orthodoxy in most circles." Schumpeter celebrates monopoly as the ultimate accomplishment of capitalism.
He argues that, in a world in which intellectual property holders are monopolists, competition is a dynamic process that is implemented via the method
of creative destruction. This idea remains widespread today; for example,
Aghion and Howitt in 1992 developed a formal model based on Schumpeterian ideas. The critical principle is that competition is not in the market but for the market; while competition may be good at a given point in time,
as it induces static efficiency, monopoly is good in the long run, these theorists argue, because it brings about dynamic efficiency, that is, innovation.
The innovative winner takes all the market for a while, but threat of drastic
innovation is strong enough to force dominant firms to continue innovating and to make monopolized markets effectively contestable. The idea is
that drastic innovations are frequent, so that the monopolist is only a temporary one. Only monopolists who innovate as fast or faster than potential
competitors remain viable; hence, the system is capable of generating a very
high rate of innovation.
An example of how this might take place is given by Evans and Schma-
lensee.31 They examine four cases of this "frequent policing" of monopolistic positions: (1) the 1990 leader in word processing, WordPerfect, is
overtaken by Microsoft Word in 1997; (2) the 1988 leader of spreadsheets
Lotus 1-2-3 is overtaken by Microsoft Excel by 1997; (3) the 1989 leader in
personal finance, Managing your Money, is overtaken by Quicken by 1996;
(4) the 1990 leader in desktop publishing, Adobe PageMaker, is overtaken
by QuarkXPress by 1997.
There are, however, three features of this data that deserve note.
• Two of the four initial
Weitere Kostenlose Bücher