“US International Trade Commission Learns That ‘Piracy’ Claims From Industry Are Bunk”

TAM was right, there was more to this “industry claims are bunk” story and it shows that industry claims are even worse than what we had thought before.

hxa7241,
Your views are juvenile and error ridden. Let me enlighten you.
First, you say, “copyright is a government granted monopoly. It is effectively a subsidy, paid by the public, supporting a particular sector of companies.” This is called missing the point: all property rights are government-granted monopolies, (a.k.a. “exclusive rights”) to the use (or some uses) of valuable resources. Market-oriented economists from Milton Friedman to Richard Epstein to Posner and Landes all acknowledge that a copyright is a “government granted monopoly” in precisely the same sense as any legally protected property right. I corrected TechDirt ignorance on these basic points long ago. Here is the link:

http://weblog.ipcentral.info/archives/2008/11/techdirts_backf.html

Your tirade against “government granted monopoly,”( a.k.a., legally protected private property rights), leads to your next error: you find market economics and copyrights incompatible. Newsflash: property rights (aka “exclusive rights to uses of a valuable resource” or “government granted monopolies”), are indispensible predicates to what economists call “market competition.” Consequently, if you want to use market mechanisms to encourage the private production of expression, then you need to grant tradeable exclusive rights in expressive works. Granted, you could produce expressive works through some system of cross-subsidization, (e.g. artist selling t-shirts), but then, you are using market mechanisms to encourage production of t-shirts—expression is just a not-very-efficient means to that end.

In short, if you think that Milton Friedman, Richard Epstein, Kenneth Arrow, and Posner, Landes, and many others are all betraying the cause of free markets by strongly supporting copyright protection, your quarrel is with them, and market economics generally, not me.

Next, you say “copyright is not the natural order of things, neither would it make sense to be so.” Let me acquaint you with basic American History. Copyright protection predates the Constitution; copyrights and patents are the only private civil rights expressly mentioned in the original Constitution; and America has always had copyright protection since the first American copyright Act was drafted by members of the First Congress like James Madison, and signed by President George Washington. How wise you must be to be so much better at perceiving “the natural order of things” than Madison, Washington and the rest of the Framers.

And by the way: as a system of cultural production driven by private producers and private audiences, copyrights have been stunningly successful. If you deny that, it is merely the triumph of ignorance over reality. The United States is now the world’s leading producer of a vast array of expressive works mostly because copyrights enable us to invest more, on average, in the work of our creators than other countries—by investing more in expression, we tend to beat out those who invest less. Those investments are driven by copyright protection.

Finally, please note that it is not clear to me that you did manage to read the entire one-page summary of my paper. None of your random observations are in any way relevant to the issues addressed in my paper. If you wanted to read a different paper, one not focused on the logic and meaning of the GAO report at issue, that is not my problem.

Thank you for your thoughts. –Tom