'Stealing' Ideas: the Murky Waters of Copyright and the Piracy Debate

Piracy:

The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates

By Adrian Johns, University of Chicago Press, 591pp.

Reviewed - Canberra Times' Public Service Informant 6 March 2010

If intellectual property piracy is a form of theft, then legitimate owners must be robbed of their property. Is “intellectual property” an oxymoron? To what extent can an idea be someone’s property?

Professor Adrian Johns of Chicago University provides an illuminating history of the debates, wrangles and occasionally violent struggles that have characterised the development of intellectual property rights and their enforcement.

Since the european Enlightenment, economies generally have developed away from monarchic patronage, and toward monetized markets based on private property. Printing and later communication technologies have enabled markets for information of every kind, with ever cheaper unit costs of reproduction and distribution. Governments have long recognized that creators of valuable ideas, or valuable expressions of ideas, should be compensated for their effort and investment. But there is no natural barrier to replication and appropriation of their work in a free market for information.

Patents (for a design) and copyrights (for a reproducible expression) are in fact private monopoly privileges. They descend directly from monopolies handed out by kings (published in “letters patent”) in return for money or loyalty. 

A state-granted intellectual property right is a defined opportunity to use (or authorise others to use) a created work in particular ways, in particular places, and for a particular period of time. Like other “rights”, without enforcement by state authority it is worthless.

Johns’ account shows that the conflicting interests and arguments, the commercial and political tactics, have barely changed over the centuries.

Creators seek recognition and reward for their efforts. Entrepreneurs seek maximum market profits in publishing or other commercial exploitation. A public interest seeks maximum access at minimum cost, the freedom to appropriate and develop on others’ ideas, and trust in the authenticity of information and products. And politicians try to balance these irreconcilable demands, buffeted by vociferous lobbies and frustrated by often literalist courts.

Over the centuries it has been the entrepreneurs – not the creators - who win most arguments about intellectual property. The case for extending or enforcing property rights is usually promoted as supporting creators, but for the most part the commercialisation of creative effort delivers only trivial dividends to those original creators. 

The “piracy” theme of this book highlights the defiance of information monopolies that was to some criminal, to others heroic, and to most simply pragmatic. 

Johns wonders how intellectual property rights can survive this Internet age of borderless, instantaneous and apparently uncontrollable exchange of information. Despite current rhetoric and propaganda stunts, governments may be losing the ability, and perhaps the will, to defend exclusive rights in a global market.

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Richard Thwaites has worked in book publishing, journalism, the National Office for the Information Economy, and on international negotiations on trade in services.