Against Intellectual Monopoly

project; in the
lawsuit, it accuses Google of violating fair use and of infringing upon its
copyrights. Trying to prevent the very damaging effect that the lawsuits
could have on its overall finances (Google has become a very rich company,
in recent times), Google seems to be caving in to all kinds of incredible
requests, modifying the Book Search product accordingly. Anyone who has
used it both in 2004 and 2006 can appreciate the difference. The original
Google Print was a wonderful tool for bibliographic research that made us
purchase very many useful books; the current Google Book Search is an
emasculated and frustrating program whose social value and marketability
are unclear, to say the least.
    Now, what did Google Print plan to do? It planned to scan all books in a
number of large university libraries around the world and to allow people
to search their content via the Internet in the usual "Google style." Once
an item is searched and results are found, Google Print would have allowed the user to see about one or two paragraphs, sometime a few pages, from
the scanned book in which the item is mentioned or referred. It would also
have linked users to various sites where they could easily purchase the book.

    That is all. Instead of spending hours going to the library trying to find out
which books discuss the Dilbert factor, one can just enter "Dilbert factor" at
http://books.google.com and find that dozens of interesting books discuss
it.41 On Google Book Search, one can, for example, find amusing little texts
such as When Did Ignorance Become a Point of View, by Scott Adams, and
purchase it from one of the many online bookstores linked to the same
page, as we just did. Why? Partly to compensate the Authors Guild for the
dramatic loss of revenue that our book will cause them, and partly because
one of us got interested by Adams's proposal of a new way of making
presidents of powerful countries accountable to their own people when
using their mighty military power. Alternatively, one can avoid spending
money purchasing bad books, such as After the Y2K Fireworks, by Bhuvan
Unhelkar, reading one page of which was enough to convince us that there
is more than one way to contribute to human understanding of the Dilbert
factor. Finally, you may search Google Book Search for "Authors Guild" and
spend an afternoon browsing tons of interesting books suggesting that it
was once a society run by smart people and not a shill for Disney.
    One can hardly think of a better advertising-cum-shopping tool for
books. This service is to be offered, absolutely free of charge, to authors
and publishers alike. Still, not to allow the motion picture industry to outperform it in monopolistic blindness, the Authors Guild has sued and the
publishers' lobby followed soon after.42
    We have no reason to think that monopoly makes people unusually
incompetent and hateful of others. So, the reader may wonder: why are
incompetent monopolists more dangerous than, say, incompetent hamburger flippers? Simply put, competition tends to weed out the incompetent. Beyond this, a relatively simple mathematical result known as Jensen's
inequality shows that whereas one in ten firms in an industry run by an
incompetent is short-term amusement for the rest of the industry, one in
ten industries run by an incompetent is a social catastrophe.
Errors in Patenting
    A man "has a right to use his knife to cut his meat, a fork to hold it; may a patentee
take from him the right to combine their use on the same subject?" - Thomas
Jefferson43
    The private sector has no monopoly on time-wasting. Government bureaucrats are notorious for their inefficiency. The U.S. Patent Office is no exception. Its incompetence increases the cost of getting patents, but this is a small effect, and, perhaps a good thing rather than a bad thing. It also issues many
patents of dubious merit. Because the legal presumption is that a patent is
legitimate unless proved otherwise, this is a substantial legal advantage to
the patent holder, who may use it for blackmail or other purposes. Moreover, although some bad patents may be turned down, an obvious strategy
is simply to file a great many bad patents in hopes that a few will get through.
Here is a sampling of some of the ideas the U.S. Patent Office thought worthy
of patenting in recent years.44

    • U.S. Patent No. 6,080,436: refreshening bread in a toaster operating
between 2,500°F and