[775] in libertarians
Re: Intellectual property rights
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Kevin THEOBALD)
Mon Feb 27 15:42:06 1995
From: theobald@duke.cs.mcgill.ca (Kevin THEOBALD)
Date: Mon, 27 Feb 1995 15:34:26 -0500
In-Reply-To: Raymie Stata's message [Intellectual property rights] as of Feb 27, 13:42
To: Raymie Stata <raymie@larch.lcs.mit.edu>, libertarians@MIT.EDU
| Second, regarding fairness, it seems to me that the possibility of
| other people employing your own ideas more effectively than you do is
| an integral part of doing business, and I don't understand why the
| inventor has been signled out for this special kind of fairness in
| this regard. In a business venture, the person with a new marketing
| idea or a new distribution idea is as important and sometimes _more_
| important than the person with a technological idea. Why should the
| inventor get protection for ideas where these other people do not?
| Where's the fairness in that?
OK, you're in the business of selling drugs. You see a potential market
for a drug that could cure disease X, but this drug does not exist. It
will probably take a lot of effort to discover and invent. You will need
to devote much of your lab resources to this project, and pay big salaries
to a staff of biochemists. You can only recoup these costs by making
large profits from the sale of the drug.
So you invent the drug, after much trial and error. I buy one of the first
batches, and take it back to my lab to reverse-engineer the formula. I pay
a few scientists for a week, and pretty soon, we have a clone product. I
come out with my product, at a price barely above the marginal cost of
producing the drug. You have to match my price, and we end up splitting
the market. I make a small, but acceptable, profit, while you go bankrupt
because you can't pay off the debts you incurred during the development.
Fair?
Kevin
