The alternative’s abolition of copyrights and patents solves better for innovation.

This is Richard Wolf from Democracy at Work responding to another Ask Prof. Wolf, question from our Patreon community. This one comes from the nadir family. And it's a question that has been raised before and deserves an answer. The question concerns patents and copyrights, that legal arrangement in modern capitalist societies, which allows someone who invents a new product are a new technology, or writes a new piece of music or a new kind of published book, etc, to get a privacy control over it. In other words, to say to the rest of the world, I invented this, I did this, it's mine. And if you want to make use of it, you have to pay me and I can charge whatever I want. And if you don't pay, you can't use what I've developed. Okay, interesting. What does it mean? Well, one of the things it does is create a direct link between innovation on the one hand, and making money on the other. The idea behind it, those who defend it, is that you wouldn't get as much innovation and invention. If you didn't give people a big monetary incentive to do it. Those who have been critical have quickly pointed out that by allowing the inventor of something or the originator of something, to withhold it from wide public use, you are depriving large numbers of people of the benefits of whatever it is, the inventor has produced, even if it's limited by time, 10 years or 20 years, and then the copyright lapses or the patent disappears. And that's typically how it's arranged. Even if it's a matter of time for those years, you'll effectively have denied the people of the world, the free use of what you have invested in your time and your innovation, what it produced. And this, especially if you charge a lot could mean the rest of the society is deprived. And these critics then point out that whatever it is you invented, depended on the education, you got the influences on you, from the time you were born to the time that you made the innovation, and that 1000s of people contributed directly and indirectly, more than less to whatever capabilities you brought, and that they all in some sense, deserve access to the benefits of what they all indirectly produced. Why should you the last in a step of processes that resulted in the innovation? Or the new article or the new song? Why should it all accrue to you the one with the last step? It's as if we were all handing each other a sandbag, to prevent the flood? And the last one who put it down, gets to have his or her house saved from the flood. Everybody else? treads water. Okay. How does a socialist society, a worker coop based economy? How would it handle it differently? Well, that's of course speculation, in the sense that we don't have that kind of economy. We have portions of the economy that are set up that way. Mondriaan in Spain, Emilia Romagna, and Italy, and so on. But we don't have a whole national economy that has yet been worker, Co Op, based that could then develop its own laws. So we can answer the question, how would us a socialist society of that sort do it. But let me speculate as a way of concluding, clearly, what we want is to get the benefit for everybody of all the innovations and pretty much as quickly as they are developed. That's the way we maximize the social benefit of individuals coming through with breakthroughs in what they produce or how they produce. And indeed, since those individuals have been educated, raised and developed by the larger community, then in a way it's pay back and a socialist society would be committed to that. But let's give some credit to the notion that there is some monetary incentive that may help us all get the benefits of innovation by giving some sort of monetary reward to the inventor, the last one in the step that led to the invention. But there's no need for it to be done in that way we do it now. Why all the discretion to the individual who becomes individually wealthy from an invention? That's not socially useful? And how does he do it? Or she do it by withholding it from the rest of this society, forcing more and more money, the more urgent a society needs that innovation, that seems unjust, unequal, and downright cruel, when you're talking, for example, about medical inventions, or all kinds of other inventions that can save or improve our lives, a socialist society would presumably not want to go down that road. Well, then what could we do? We could offer a modest reward. Yes, a government agency could keep track of all the inventions, the way patent and copyright offices in the Library of Congress and elsewhere in Washington do now you can register your innovation, it's recorded that you did it in this way on that time and with the specifications. And we can require that people who make use of it get permission, all of that we can continue. And that would be good, because we'll give us a record of who's actually doing what, and that's useful for many purposes. But how much money you give a person, that's a completely different matter. That doesn't have to be linked to this at all. But it gives you proof. Number one, many people will do things because of their social value, because they appreciate the praise, they get the love, they get the appreciation they get. And they don't need a whole lot of money. In American academia, for example, professors routinely write papers and publish them in journals, they don't get any money for that, or certainly not an appreciable amount. But they do it anyway. Because it's part of being a professional, contributing to the literature of your profession, helping to develop understandings, becoming a better teacher, and so on. There are plenty of benefits from doing things creatively, that academics find adequate, they don't get money for the specific inventions, they are engaged in most of the time. And if we still want to give people some money, give them something honorific. In fact, let's use the word honorarium, it's still used, a kind of recognition modest, that there is some kind of reward, we want to get it that's really important. Let's give it a modest one. But let's give it to a person who has made an important breakthrough. Without constricting the use that society can make of that breakthrough. There's no need to deprive society of the benefit, even if you want to give the individual inventor, a reward a financial reward. The way the system works, now, of course, also has a terrible cost that I need to mention. You are skewing invention. By profit, you are leading inventive minds to go to where they think the profit is. And that is not the same as going with a need is an esoteric mega medicine for a disease that afflicts 20 people each year may be profitable, if you can charge a lot. But solving the problem of the common cold may be much more of a social kind of invention. It would be important to have democratic decision making over where the funds and support for innovative research go in terms of the broad notion of social benefit, rather than the narrow notion of private profit being such a powerful influence as it is today on what kind of research is done, where it is done, and what use is made of it. This is Richard Wolff for Democracy at Work.