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| Rethinking Intellectual Property |
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Islam and freedom of information
Monopoly and ownership of intangible so-called property are anathema to Islam. Political Islam has already drawn a line in the sand by the distribution of a powerful rebuttal to this dogma on the streets of most Arab capital cities in January 2001. Issued as a leaflet by the Jordanian branch of the international Islamic political party Hizb ut-Tahrir it declared that the aim of international intellectual property laws is "to hoard the scientific knowledge and prevent others from benefiting of it … Thus the Muslims are obliged to reject these laws and not adhere to them." Freedom of information is not an absolute concept in Islam, but the freedom to use information that has been published is upheld. In the future it may be an Islamic civilisation that takes an international lead in resisting the ever-tightening net of international intellectual property agreements. The great libraries such as those formally at Cordoba and Baghdad, that flourished during the West's 'Dark Ages', could now make available online every conceivable piece of knowledge, not only to local citizens but also to the whole world.
References
I
Orchard,E.W., Glen,J., and Eden,J. Business Economics. p211.
II
The motivation for this is increasing the marginal revenue obtained from the sale of extra units of output.
III
The DVD industry is trying to keep the markets separate by sabotaging DVDs so that they have region specific codes that will not play properly unless used with a DVD player from the same region and the law courts are a backup for where the technology fails.
IV
Wikipedia free on-line encyclopedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/intellectual_property
V
Millar v. Taylor, 4 Burr. 2303 (1769).
VI
Commons J.R ©1924 Legal Foundations of Capitalism chapter VII p275.
VII
Locke J, Two Treatises of Governemt. 1690. chapter IX section 124.
VIII
World Intellectual Proprty Organization (WIPO) June 2003, "Intellectual Property - A power Tool for Economic Growth" by Kamil Idris, Director General of WIPO obtainable at http://www.wipo.int/ebookshop.
IX
Aoki,K. "(Intellectual) Property and Sovereignty: Notes Toward a Cultural Geography of Authorship," Stanford Law Review (1996) 1293,1297-98. Quoted in Fisher,W.W. "The Growth of Intellectual Property A History of the Ownership of Ideas in the United States".
X
This story is presented with wit in Palast.G, "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy"pages181-189.
XI
More recently the AIDS story has taken a more bizarre turn with Microsoft's Bill Gates' February 2002 appearance on the cover of Newsweek offering $200 million, on a par with his investments in drug company stocks, for helping Africa's AIDS crisis. George Bush has also promised a great increase in financial assistance. This was followed by a reversal of South Africa's policy of refusing to buy antiretrovirals on the grounds that AIDS is not actually caused by HIV anyway. It looks like a game of chicken between the head of a dying nation and the head of a greedy one in which Bill gates has hedged his bets and the American tax payer has split the bill (no pun intended) with the South African tax payer to purchase US drugs at a greatly reduced price, which is still better than no sale at all for the drugs companies who are the only real winners in this story.
XII
Fisher,W.W. "The Growth of Intellectual Property A History of the Ownership of Ideas in the United States".
XIII
Sidney Moss, Charles Dickens' Quarrel with America (1984); Benjamin Kaplan, An Unhurried View of Copyright quoted in Fisher,W.W. "The Growth of Intellectual Property A History of the Ownership of Ideas in the United States".
XIV
Scotchmer,S. "The Political Economy of Intellectual Property Treaties" Revised January 2003. National Bureau of Economic Research Cambridge, MA 02138. Working Paper 9114.
XV
Lawson, N (1978). "Will the Open Society Survive to 1989" published as an essay in "The Coming Confrontation".
XVI
Adam Smith, 1776, The Wealth of Nations, I.vii.26,27.
XVII
Romer, P.M. (1990a), "Are Nonconvexities Important for Understanding Growth?" The American Economic Review (Papers and Proceedings), 80, 97-103.
XVIII
P.M. (1990b), "Endogenous Technological Change," Journal of Political Economy 98, S71-S102.
XIX
Boldrin, M and D.K. Levine. (2002), "The case against intellectual property" University of Minnesota and UCLA.
XX
Boldrin, M and D.K. Levine. (2002), "The case against intellectual property" University of Minnesota and UCLA.
XXI
Boldrin.M. and D.K.Levine (2001), "Perfectly Competetive Innovation" mimeo University of Minnesota and UCLA. "Take the classical and abused case of a software program. To write and test the first version of the code requires a large investment of time and resources. This is the cost of invention mentioned before, which is sunk once the first prototype has been produced. The prototype, though, does not sit on thin air. To be used by other it needs to be copied, which requires resources of various kinds, including time. To be usable it needs to reside on some portion of the memory of your computer. To put it there also requires time and resources. If other people want to use the original code to develop new software, they need to acquire a copy and then either learn or reverse-engineer the code. Once again, there is no free lunch: valuable ideas are embodied in either goods or people, and they are as rivalrous as commodities containing no ideas at all, if such exist. In our view, these observations cast doubts upon Romer's influential argument according to which the nonrivalrous nature of ideas and their positive role in production a fortiori imply that the aggregate production function displays increasing returns to scale
XXII
Paul Festa writing for C|net News.com December 2001.
XXIII
Director's Decision, W3C Patent Policy, 20th May 2003 http://www.w3.org; "Based on overwhelming support of the W3C Membership, consensus in the Patent Policy Working Group and support from interested members of the public, I have determined that the proposed Royalty-Free Patent Policy should become the Patent Policy for W3C. The Policy affirms and strengthens the basic business model that has driven innovation on the Web from its inception. The availability of an interoperable, unencumbered Web infrastructure provides an expanding foundation for innovative applications, profitable commerce, and the free flow of information and ideas on a commercial and non-commercial basis."
XXIV
The detailed history of these events is presented over several paragraphs in; Boldrin,M and Levine.D.K. (2002), "The case against intellectual Monoply", chapter 1.
XXV
Campbell.E.G., et al. "Data Withholding in Academic Genetics." 2002. JAMA 287:473-480
XXVI
This apparently courteous quote was actually an insulting reference to the very diminutive stature of the experimental scientist Robert Hook with whom he was feuding bitterly at the time over who owned the idea of gravity.
XXVII
Barton.J.H. Reforming the Patent System. Science 200;287:1933-4.
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