Against Intellectual Monopoly

policy quite different from that which they
actually followed. Most of the firm's profits were derived from royalties on the use of
engines rather than from the sale of manufactured engine components, and without
patent protection the firm plainly could not have collected royalties. The alternative
would have been to emphasize manufacturing and service activities as the principal source of profits, which in fact was the policy adopted when the expiration date of
the patent for the separate condenser drew near in the late 1790s.... It is possible
to conclude more definitely that the patent litigation activities of Boulton & Watt
during the 1790s did not directly incite further technological progress.... Boulton
and Watt's refusal to issue licenses allowing other engine makers to employ the
separate-condenser principle clearly retarded the development and introduction of
improvements.8

    The Industrial Revolution was long ago. But the issue of "intellectual property" is a contemporary one. At the time we wrote this, U.S. District Judge
James Spencer had been threatening for three years to shut down the widely
used Blackberry messaging network - over a patent dispute.' And Blackberry itself is not without sin: in 2001 Blackberry sued Glenayre Electronics
for infringing on its patent for "pushing information from a host system to
a mobile data communication device."10
    A similar war is taking place over copyright - the Napster network was
shut down by a federal judge in July 2000 in a dispute over the sharing of
copyrighted files." Emotions run high on both sides. Some civil libertarians
promote the anticopyright slogan "information just wants to be free." On
the other extreme, large music and software companies argue that a world
without "intellectual" property would be a world without new ideas.
    Some of the bitterness of the copyright debate is reflected in Stephen
Manes's attack on Larry Lessig:
    According to Stanford law professor and media darling Lawrence Lessig, a "movement must begin in the streets" to fight a corrupt Congress, overconcentrated media
and an overpriced legal system.... Contrary to Lessig's rants... "Fair use" exceptions in existing copyright law... are so expansive that just about the only thing
cut-and-pasters clearly can't do legally with a copyrighted work is directly copy a
sizable portion of it. 12
    Certainly Lessig is no friend of current copyright law. Yet, despite Stephen
Manes's assertions to the contrary, he does believe in balancing the rights of
producers with the rights of users: his book Free Culture speaks repeatedly
of this balance and how it has been lost in modern law.13
    Like Lessig, many economists are skeptical of current law - seventeen
prominent economists, including several Nobel Prize winners, filed a brief
with the U.S. Supreme Court in support of Lessig's lawsuit challenging the
extension of the length of copyright. Also like Lessig, economists recognize a role for "intellectual property": where lawyers speak of balancing
rights, economists speak of incentives. To quote from a textbook by the two
prominent economists Robert Barro and Xavier Sala-i-Martin: "It would be [good] to make the existing discoveries freely available to all producers,
but this practice fails to provide the ... incentives for further inventions.
A tradeoff arises between restrictions on the use of existing ideas and the
rewards to inventive activity."" Indeed, while many of us enjoy the benefits
of being able to freely download music from the Internet, we worry as well
how musicians are to make a living if their music is immediately given away
for free.

    Although a furious debate rages over copyrights and patents, there is
general agreement that some protection is needed to secure for inventors
and creators the fruits of their labors. The rhetoric that "information just
wants to be free" suggests that no one should be allowed to profit from his
or her ideas. Despite this, there does not seem to be a strong lobby arguing
that, though it is OK for the rest of us to benefit from the fruits of our labors,
inventors and creators should have to subsist on the charity of others.
    For all the emotion, it seems both sides agree that "intellectual property"
laws need to strike a balance between providing sufficient incentive for
creation and the freedom to make use of existing ideas. Put differently,
both sides agree that "intellectual property" rights are a