How to Unf★ck Intellectual Property

Dean Baker tells the dirty secret of the great billionaires of the modern age: they wouldn’t exist without intellectual property (IP), that is the copyright and patent monopolies guaranteed to private actors by the government.

IP laws have been expanded and strengthened in recent years, making patent & copyright monopolies longer and stronger and enabling the vast fortunes of billionaires in computers, software, pharmaceuticals, medical equipment etc. Baker diagnoses the role of intellectual property (IP) in the accumulation of wealth for pharmaceutical companies and how that translates to excessively high drug prices, and wasteful spending on marketing and lawsuits. IP laws were intended to subsidize innovation for social benefit, but they have been transformed into tools to accumulate and protect enormous private wealth. The modern protections of IP have become excessive and may not be the most fruitful producer of research and development beneficial for society.

What's the fix? Dean’s proposals include direct public funding of open research & development, rather than rely on IP alone, which will allow the development of generics. He proposes the introduction of a Copyright Tax Credit to support innovation and creative work as a temporary alternative to copyright. Meaning creators and artists could sign for a tax credit to fund their projects but forego copyright for a set number of years.

☆ How to Unf★ck America ☆

This series is all about solutions.

Over the last four decades, the US economy has done quite well for the top 1%, but it has been stagnant for most Americans. This was not an accident, nor the natural workings of the market and certainly not an inevitability. US policies have been deliberately structured since 1980 to redistribute income upwards. In other words, the system has been rigged.

Dean Baker shows us how public policy can be deployed to #UnfckAmerica. Over six episodes, Baker illustrates how even minor changes in public policy can help change our trajectory dramatically. It just takes the political will to recognize that the current situation is not insurmountable, and that change is achievable.

Credits: Dean Baker, Matthew Kulvicki, Nick Alpha, Gonçalo Fonseca, Kurt Semm

[rabokarabekian]

The thing free market capitalists hate most is truly free market capitalism.

[leftykeys]

Once again we have something Congress can do... but won't.

[imulchapeach]

Public funding: NSF, NIH, DoE, DoD, DARPA, NEH, etc. We (the taxpayers) already provide funding, but receive no benefits. In the case of public companies, easy solution: preferred shares. No buybacks of common shares until preferred shares are repurchased at an agreed-upon premium. Or the people hold all patents funded by the state, and receive licensing /royalties.

[Mr.Nichan]

5:23 "Suppose that all compute software could be freely reproduced. ..."
I like how you combine this with screen recordings of the applications those of us for whom this is already basically use.

[paranadasimple]

If you are for capitalism, then you would always have capitalists trying to kill competition for higher profits. You would also have capitalists lobbying for neoliberal policies to strech the profit rate. However and this sucks btw, if you compromise profitability, growth is compromised and that also sucks. So capitalism has its intrinsic flaws. It doesn't matter how you accommodate it

[moisesmaciel]

Another idea (which I believe to be more efficient):

Patents: Implement a tax for those who decide to protect technologies, formulas, and methods. But not just any tax, rather a specific type of tax created by Arnold Harberger. This tax is a self-assessed property tax with forced sale. The owner determines the value of the taxed property themselves and pays tax based on that value. This might seem easily prone to fraud — owners could simply declare a low value to pay less tax. However, the forced sale provision addresses this issue; anything taxed can be forced to be sold, which encourages owners to increase their property values.

Copyrights: A concept similar to Baker's, but without any tax deductions or the creation of charitable institutions. The government establishes an entity (let's call it the Artistic Works Fund). Artists place their works in this entity, forfeiting the ability to register copyrights on them. Once registered with the entity, these works can be freely funded by the public, who receive a voucher exclusively for financing artworks registered in the Artistic Works Fund. This voucher would be funded by a Citizen's Dividend, meaning money the government collects through ad valorem taxes on natural resources, akin to what Alaska does.

[falsificationism]

lol "Private military contractors DO develop good weapons..."

F-35 say what?

[yusofplayed]

Fantastic, as an attorney in the field this is the subject I wanted to learn about most

[vagabondwastrel]

All you have to do to fix a lot of the economic issue is to remove "person hood" from corporations. That fixes all of the real problems of intellectual property.

The real problem in general is socialist policies to try to regulate capitalism creating monopolies.

[gopisuvanam]

great video.. whats your view on open source medical research?

[earthandstraw]

Its not just intellectual property patents that creates monopolies. The money creation monoply, using credit/debt for money instead of using money for money, is usury, and that our money is a store of value allows for the massive accumlation of it. If you want money to be an effective medium of exchange it must not be a commodity.

[kassistwisted]

I think he makes some great comments on Patent Law. But I do not understand how he thinks copyright works. I make a living from my copyrighted material. If I decided to take a govt subsidy of $200 back when I began writing and could therefore not claim copyright for five years, what would keep someone else from publishing my work and making money from it? What would prevent them from copyrighting my work? I would love to live in a world where I could put knowledge out into the world and not have to charge for each copy nor defend my ownership. But this scenario does not protect the artist. Artists are being taken advantage of every day by mego-corps that use their art without licensing it. So the little guy would make $200 (is that per artwork?) but your song will be in the new Disney film and you'll get nothing because "you got the tax credit". Think again. This is not a solution for Copyright.

[olisorenson]

a few good arguments in here, but axing IP will only make capitalists move to other ventures. we need to get rid of capitalism and the culture of private gain

[billthompson]

Yep. Not using the constitution as a patent for transubstantiation might be a good move 😜

[aman_chandravanshi]

How to profit from Free market. By making it NOT free.

[russ]

Some interesting thoughts here, but re the last few minutes: I doubt you’d have many artists after that. Want to talk about corporate greed? A lot of artists typically lose and technically don’t have rights to much of their own work anymore, anyway—they don’t own the means of its mass production or its distribution and a lot of said ownership they would have otherwise possessed is signed away just to get the work disseminated. Some still do pretty well, but they’re a dying breed (perhaps, the idea of that makes others happy; perhaps others like the idea of a songwriter who works as a waiter singing a song written just for them while being served their dinner ‘cuz that’s the singer/songwriter’s *real* job). But for eg: if you could protect the work of a musician from a distributor, then some of those ideas *might* work to an extent.

[mudmessiah]

Back in 2005 I developed a mental construct I named authenticity as a effective way of living authentically in the moment.. moment by moment. Facebook uses it without my permission. The idea of living authentically is attractive and empowering to new age groups many of them use the product without employing the method. I want to protect this process. Without access to attorneys I have no idea how to do this.

[hederatize]

But, but the all the money created to motivate others to work in cooperation for everything, was created by the government, for the benefit and use of the greater good, for all the people. The belief in that the accumulated money is used to hold indiscrete value, able to exchange for anything, is the failure. Money is now created by the debt, how is the token of debts can buy, the priceless, unpriced?

[nevadataylor]

I have no idea why people cant see what a stupid world we live in. There is nothing intellectual about intellectual property.

[ScottDunnC]

Yeah, Dean! Thank you! I laughed throughout because you make the system we have sound so absurd! Whew!