Against Intellectual Monopoly

idea. Still, one should pause.
Realizing that intellectual monopoly is a kind of cancer, we recognize that
simply cutting it all out at once may not be a good idea. Because intellectual
property laws have been around for a long while, we have learned to live
with them. Myriad other legal and informal institutions, business practices,
and professional skills have grown up around them and in symbiosis with
them. Consequently, a sudden elimination of intellectual property laws may
bring about collateral damages of an intolerable magnitude.
    Take, for example, the case of pharmaceuticals. Drugs not only are
patented but also are regulated by the government in myriad ways. Under
the current system, achieving FDA approval in the United States requires
costly clinical trials - and the results of those trials must be made freely
available to competitors. Certainly, abolishing patents and simultaneously requiring firms that conduct expensive clinical trials to make their results
freely available to competitors cannot be a good reform. Here patents can be
sensibly eliminated only by simultaneously changing the process by which
the results of clinical trials are obtained, first, and then made available to the
public and to competitors in particular. We will come back to the specifics
of the pharmaceutical industry later, when listing some of the good things
one can reasonably consider doable even in the short run.

    What this example suggests is that abolition must be approached by
smaller steps, and that the sequencing of steps matters. Gradual reform is
necessary both because of the need for other institutions, such as the FDA,
to reform in parallel and because it is a political necessity. The number of
people prospering thanks to intellectual monopoly is large and growing.
Although some of them have accrued so much wealth that one should not
really worry about Tom Cruise's pauperization in the wake of intellectual
monopoly abolition, for many others this is not the case. For many ordinary
people intellectual monopoly has become another way of earning a living
and, while most of them would be able to earn an equally good or even
better living without it, many others need time to adjust. Further, and again
in analogy with trade barriers, although the number of people who would
benefit from the elimination of intellectual monopoly is large and growing,
the gain each one of them expects as likely is small. In spite of the big
brouhaha surrounding the pirating of popular music and movies, the direct
personal savings from copyright reduction or even abolition would not
be substantial, as music, movies, and books are a tiny share of household
consumption. In the case of medicines and software, consumers' potential
savings may be more substantial but harder to perceive. Finally, and most
important, if in the 1950s or 1960s the average citizen of the world could
hardly forecast the tremendous improvement in her standard of living that
free trade would have brought about within thirty years, even harder it is
now to perceive the incremental technological advances that a progressive
elimination of intellectual monopoly could bring about in a couple of
decades.
    In summary, dismantling our intellectual property system faces a set of
circumstances that the literature on collective action has identified as major
barriers to reform. A few well-organized and coordinated monopolists are
on the one side, bound to lose a lot if the protective barriers are lifted. A very
large number of uncoordinated consumers are on the other side, expecting
very small personal gains from the adoption of freer competition. For a
long time then, the battleground is going to be one of competing ideas and
theories aimed at convincing the public opinion that substantial gains are possible from the elimination of intellectual monopoly. In the mean time,
there is a vast clutter of ideas both for greatly expanding intellectual property
and, in the opposite direction, for useful reform. In this, our concluding
chapter, we try to sort these proposals into the bad, the good, and the just
plain ugly.

The Bad
    Despite the fact that our system of intellectual property is badly broken,
there are those who seek to break it even further. The first priority must be
to stem the tide of rent seekers demanding ever-greater privilege. Domestically, within the United States and Europe, there is a continued effort to
expand the