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# 8211 ; The Demise Of Intellectual Property Essay, Research Paper Sam Vaknin # 8217 ; s Psychology, Philosophy, Economics and Foreign Affairs Web SitesThree old ages ago I published a book of short narratives in Israel. The publication house belongs to Israel? s taking ( and extremely affluent ) newspaper. I signed a contract which stated that I am entitled to have 8 % of the income from the gross revenues of the book after committees collectible to distributers, stores, etc. A few months subsequently, I won the desired Prize of the Ministry of Education ( for abruptly prose ) . The choice money ( a few thousand DMs ) was snatched by the publication house on the legal evidences that all the money generated by the book belongs to them because they own the right of first publication. In the mythology generated by capitalist economy to lenify the multitudes, the myth of rational belongings stands out. It goes like this: if the rights to rational belongings were non defined and enforced, commercial enterprisers would non hold taken on the hazards associated with publication books, entering records and fixing multimedia merchandises. As a consequence, originative people will hold suffered because they will hold found no manner to do their plants accessible to the populace. Ultimately, it is the public which pays the monetary value of buccaneering, goes the chorus. But this is factually untrue. In the USA there is a really limited group of writers who really live by their pen. Merely choice instrumentalists eke out a life from their noisy career ( most of them rock stars who own their labels? George Michael had to contend Sony to make merely that ) and really few histrions come near to deducing subsistence flat income from their profession. All these can no longer be thought of every bit largely originative people. Forced to support thie rational belongings rights and the involvements of Big Money, Madonna, Michael Jackson, Schwarzenegger and Grisham are business communities at least every bit much as they are creative persons. Economically and rationally, we should anticipate that the costlier a work of art is to bring forth and the narrower its market? the more its rational belongings rights will be emphasized. See a publication house. A book which costs 50,000 DM to bring forth with a possible audience of 1000 buyers ( certain academic texts are like this ) ? would hold to be priced at a a lower limit of 100 DM to reimburse merely the direct costs. If illicitly copied ( thereby shriveling the possible market? some people will prefer to purchase the cheaper illegal transcripts ) ? its monetary value would hold to travel up prohibitively, therefore driving out possible purchasers. The narrative is different if a book costs 10,000 DM to bring forth and is priced at 20 DM a transcript with a possible readership of 1,000,000 readers. Piracy ( illegal copying ) will in this instance have been more readily tolerated as a fringy phenomenon. This is the theory. But the facts are tellingly different. The less the cost of production ( brought down by digital engineerings ) ? the fiercer the conflict against buccaneering. The bigger the market? the more force per unit area is applied to clamp down on the underground press enterpriser. Governments, from China to Macedonia, are presenting rational belongings Torahs ( under force per unit area from rich universe states ) and implementing them tardily. But where one mill is closed on shore ( as has been the instance in mainland China ) ? two sprout off shore ( as is the instance in Hong Kong and in Bulgaria ) . But this defies logic: the market today is immense, the costs of production and lower ( with the exclusion of the music and movie industries ) , the selling channels more legion ( half of the income of film studios emanates from picture cassette gross revenues ) , the speedy recouping of the investing virtually guaranteed. Furthermore, buccaneering thrives in really hapless markets in which the population would anyhow non hold paid the legal monetary value. The illegal merchandise is inferior to the legal transcript ( it comes with no literature, guarantees or support ) . So why should the large makers, publication houses, record companies, package companies and manner houses worry? The reply lurks in history. Intellectual belongings is a comparatively new impression. In the close yesteryear, no one considered cognition or the fruits of creativeness ( art, design ) as? patentable? , or as person # 8220 ; belongings? . The creative person was but a mere channel through which godly grace flowed. Texts, finds, innovations, plants of art and music, plan? all belonged to the community and could be replicated freely. True, the chosen 1s, the conduits, were honoured but were seldom financially rewarded. They were commissioned to bring forth their plants of art and were salaried, in most instances. Merely with the coming of the Industrial Revolution were the embryologic precursors of rational belongings introduced but they were still limited to industrial designs and procedures, chiefly as embedded in machinery. The patent was born. The more massified the market, the more sophisticated the gross revenues and selling techniques, the bigger the fiscal bets? the larger lo omed the issue of rational belongings. It spread from machinery to plan, procedures, books, newspapers, any printed affair, plants of art and music, movies ( which, at their beginning were non considered art ) , package, package embedded in hardware and even unto familial stuff. Intellectual belongings rights? despite their baronial rubric? are less about the mind and more about belongings. This is Large Money: the markets in rational belongings outweigh the entire industrial production in the universe. The purpose is to procure a monopoly on a specific work. This is an particularly sedate affair in academic publication where small- circulation magazines do non let their content to be quoted or published even for non-commercial intents. The monopolizers of cognition and rational merchandises can non let competition anyplace in the universe? because theirs is a universe market. A plagiarist in Skopje is in direct competition will Charge Gates. When selling a pirated Microsoft merchandise? he is striping Microsoft non merely of its income, but of a client ( =future income ) , of its monopolistic position ( inexpensive transcripts can be smuggled into other markets ) and of its competition-deterring image ( a major monopoly continuing plus ) . This is a menace which Microsoft can non digest. Hence its attempts to eliminate buccaneering # 8211 ; successful China and an arrant failure in legally-relaxed Russia. But what Microsoft fails to understand is that the job lies with its pricing policy? non with the plagiarists. When faced with a planetary market place, a company can follow one of two policies: either to set the monetary value of its merchandises to a universe norm of buying power? or to utilize discretional pricing. A Macedonian with an mean monthly income of of 160 USD clearly can non afford to purchase the Encyclopaedia Encarta Deluxe. In America, 100 USD is the income generated in mean twenty-four hours # 8217 ; s work. In Macedonian footings, hence, the Encarta is 20 times more expensive. Either the monetary value should be lowered in the Macedonian market? or an mean universe monetary value should be fixed which will reflect an norm planetary buying power. Something must be done about it non merely from the economic point of position. Intellectual merchandises are really monetary value sensitive and extremely elastic. Lower monetary values will be more than compensated for by a much hello gher gross revenues volume. There is no other manner to explicate the plagiarist industries: obviously, at the right monetary value a batch of people are willing to purchase these merchandises. High monetary values are an inexplicit tradeoff favoring little, elect, choice, rich universe patronage. This raises a moral issue: are the kids of Macedonia less worthy of instruction and entree to the latest in human cognition and creative activity? Two developments threaten the hereafter of rational belongings rights. One is the Internet. Academicians? fed up with the monopolistic patterns of professional publications # 8211 ; already print at that place in large Numberss. I published a few book on the Internet and they can be freely downloaded by anyone who has a computing machine or a modem. There are electronic magazines, trade diaries, hoardings, professional publications, thousand of books are available full text. Hackers even made sites available from which it is possible to download whole package and multimedia merchandises. It is really easy and inexpensive to print in the Internet, the barriers to entry are virtually nil, excuse the wordplay. Web references are provided free of charge, authoring and printing package tools are incorporated in most word processors and browser applications. As the Internet acquires more impressive sound and picture capablenesss it will continue to endanger the monopoly of the record comp anies, the film studios and so on. The 2nd development is besides technological. The oft-vindicated Moore? s jurisprudence predicted the doubling of computing machine memory capacity every 18 months. But memory is merely one facet. Another is the rapid coincident progress on all technological foreparts. Miniaturization and coincident authorization of the tools available has made it possible for persons to emulate much larger scale organisations successfully. A individual individual, sitting at place with 5000 USD worth of equipment can to the full vie with the best merchandises of the best printing houses anyplace. Compact disc read-only memory can be written on, stamped and copied in house. A complete music studio with the latest in digital engineering has been condensed to the dimensions of a individual package. This will take to personal publication, personal music recording and the digitisation of fictile art. But this is merely one side of the narrative. The comparative advantage of the rational belongings corporation was non to be found entirely in its technological art. Rather it was in its huge pool of capital and its selling clout, market placement, gross revenues and distribution. Nowadays, anyone can publish an visually impressive book, utilizing the above-named inexpensive equipment. But in an age of an information oversupply, it is the selling, the media runs, the distribution and the gross revenues that used to find the economic result. This advantage, nevertheless, is besides being eroded. First, there is a psychological displacement, a reaction to the commercialisation of mind and spirit. Creative people are repelled by what they regard as an oligarchic constitution of institutionalised, lowest common denominator art and they are contending back. Second, the Internet is a immense ( 200 million people ) , genuinely widely distributed market with its ain selling channels freely available to all. Even by default, with a minimal investing, the likeliness of being seen by surprisingly big Numberss of consumers is high. I published one book the traditional manner? and another on the Internet. In 30 months, I have received 2500 written responses sing my electronic book. This means that good over 75,000 people read it ( the industry norm is a 3 % response rate and my Link Exchange metre indicates that 160,000 people visited the site by February 2000, with good over 630,000 feelings in the last 15 months entirely ) . It is a text edition ( in abnormal psychology ) ? and 75,000 people ( allow entirely 160,000 ) is a batch for this sort of publication. I am so satisfied that I am non certain that I will of all time see a traditional publishing house once more. Indeed, my following book is being published in the really same manner. The death of rational belongings has recently become copiously clear. The old rational belongings industries are contending tooth and nail to continue their monopolies ( patents, hallmarks, right of first publication ) and their cost advantages in fabrication and selling. But they are faced with three grim procedures which are likely to render their attempts vain: The Newspaper Packaging Print newspapers offer package trades of subsidised content ( sold for a nominal sum ) and subsidising advertisement. In other words, the advertizers pay for content formation and coevals and the reader has no pick but be exposed to commercial messages as he or she surveies the contents. This theoretical account # 8211 ; adopted earlier by wireless and telecasting # 8211 ; regulations the cyberspace now and will govern the radio cyberspace in the hereafter. Content will be made available free of all monetary charges. The consumer will pay by supplying his personal informations ( demographic informations, ingestion forms and penchants and so on ) and by being exposed to advertisement. Therefore, content Godheads will profit merely by sharing in the advertisement bar. They will happen it progressively hard to implement the old theoretical account of royalties paid for entree or ownership of rational belongings. The venerable ( and expensive ) # 8220 ; Encyclopaedia Britannica # 8221 ; is now to the full available online, free of charge. Its largesse is supported by advertisement. Disintermediation A batch of ink has been spilt sing this of import tendency. The remotion of beds of brokering and intermediation # 8211 ; chiefly on the fabrication and selling degrees # 8211 ; is a historic development ( though the continuance of a long term tendency ) . See music for case. Streaming sound on the cyberspace or MP3 files which the consumer can download will render the Cadmium obsolete. The cyberspace besides provides a locale for the selling of niche merchandises and reduces the barriers to entry antecedently imposed by the demand to prosecute in dearly-won selling ( # 8221 ; branding # 8221 ; ) runs and fabrication activities. This tendency is besides likely to reconstruct the balance between creative person and the commercial users of his merchandise. The very definition of # 8220 ; creative person # 8221 ; will spread out to include all originative people. Everyone will seek to separate oneself, to # 8220 ; trade name # 8221 ; himself and to auction her services, thoughts, merchandises, designs, experience, etc. This is a return to pre-industrial times when craftsmans ruled the economic scene. Work stableness will disappear and work mobility will increase in a landscape of switching commitments, caput hunting, distant coaction and similar labor market tendencies. Market FragmentationIn a disconnected market with a myriad of reciprocally sole market niches, consumer penchants and selling and gross revenues channels # 8211 ; economic systems of graduated table in fabrication and distribution are meaningless. Narrowcasting replaces broadcast medium, mass customization replaces mass production, a web of switching associations replaces the stiff owned-branch system. The decentralized, intrapreneurship-based corporation is a late response to these tendencies. The mega-corporation of the hereafter is more likely to move as a collective of start-ups than as a homogenous, unvarying ( and, to confederacy theoreticians, sinister ) steamroller it one time was.