Re:Question growing from your philosophy (Score 1)

As I asserted originally I just think we should be consistent between intellectual and real property. We allow people to bequeath, upon their death, real assets. I think the ownership of intellectual property should work in the same way in that the author or creator could pass those assets to his heirs.

To be honest, I'm actually not opposed to a 100% death tax in which all of one's assets, real and intellectual, would pass on to society at death. I don't believe that a son or daugther has any greater moral claim on the assets of their parents than the rest of society does. Hence, I would eliminate the income tax in favor of a 100% death tax. In this instance upon the death of an author the government could continue to reap the royalty revenue and use that revenue to offset government expenditures, the government could auction the intellectual assets off to the highest bidder and again use the proceeds to offset expenditures, or lastly the government could make the intellectual property public assets with no further enforcement. Of these I would probably favor the last one because it eliminates the monopoly that you reference.

But even in the abscence of a 100% death tax I think it is consistent and not unreasonable for the author and his chosen heirs to continue to reap the royalty revenues into perpetuity. Of course many of the discoveries you mentioned have been known to man since time immemorial, so it would be hard for anyone to make a credible claim to those discoveries.

I don't think that society ever has a claim over the author. As I conceded with the death tax example I think one can argue that society's claim is not much worse than an heir's, and for the expediency of providing funds for workings of government the death tax may be an acceptable solution. But society's claim cannot ever extend to the author himself in my view.

You imply that the author is somehow stealing from society by extracting monopoly rents. Firstly, individuals in society purchase the author's creation of their own free will. One must conclude that these individuals are extracting more value from the creation they borrow than what they pay, for if it were not so they wouldn't purchase the invention. Hence, I don't think anyone is being exploited.

Secondly, I think you can only make the argument of exploitation if the creation is of society and not of the creator. It is the argument that the creator was just lucky, or at least more devious than the rest of society in getting his name on the patent. If Hendrix didn't write 'Hey Joe' someone else would have, and hence Hendrix has no greater claim on that creation than the rest of society because he came up with it first. Given enough time even an ape with a type-writer will write all of Shakepeare's sonnets.

I reject this argument because it is inheriently dehumanizing. It separates the creation from the creator. Man is not just the randomly chosen receptical of invention. A real and great mind is making these technologies and works of art. We can't reject them. We can't reject the nobility of that creation by dehumanizing it and reducing it to just another random event in the history of time. I view these authors and inventors as Man's greatest heroes. We should treat them as such, not like apes in a cell with a type-writer. - J McLane