It’s like the Boy Who Cried Wolf – they spend so much time lying, cheating and falsifying information that on those occasions when they might actually have some legitimate grievances, nobody cares enough to listen.

It’s even worse than the article suggests.

Grocery stores, for example, would employ more people without IP. Without trademark, in particular, brand premiums would disappear. Beyond basic staple foods, demand for groceries is moderately elastic, so a drop in prices would increase volume. They might lose one or two trademark lawyers on retainer, but they’d gain a fair number of clerks, loader/unloaders, shelf-stockers, etc. to service the increased volume of product being moved.

Musical instruments is another clear growth case. A much larger amount of public domain music would make the instruments more valuable. Also, institutional buyers such as schools would have music department budgets that suddenly no longer had big expenses in licensing or purchasing extremely overpriced sheet music, and no more ASCAP/BMI/etc. fees. All that freed-up budget might well be folded into buying more useful things for the students, and newer/better instruments could obviously be expected to capture at least a part of that money.

More generally, we should expect that the removal of monopolies of any kind would increase employment. Consumers stop paying the hidden tax composed of the monopoly rents on anything they buy that has monopoly rents folded into its price, and that freed-up money will, by and large, be spent somewhere, often on more of the same things — meaning the more “IP-intensive” a sector likely the more job growth in that sector if IP were abolished. Certainly, everything with elastic demand and a price tag concealing substantial monopoly rents would grow, and employment in its manufacture and distribution would grow correspondingly.

Another cost imposed by IP and similar government-granted monopolies is less direct than the monopoly rents: the lawyers’ fees. Even if you buy a generic product with no monopoly rents hidden in its price whatsoever, the manufacturer (and the middlemen in the distribution chain) probably employ some IP lawyers to deal with patent trolls, DMCA notices, trademark disputes, and/or other types of incoming IP-related complaints, threats, and suits, baseless though these may be. They may also be paying now and again to quietly settle a patent suit or to license a questionable patent, in particular, and to obtain defensive patents and to obtain and maintain trademarks (even while not leveraging their marks to charge a name-brand premium, which would constitute a monopoly rent).

Without IP, all of these costs that inflate the prices of generic products would disappear as well as all IP-enabled monopoly rents. And those vanishing costs would also result in volume increases in cases where demand was elastic.

Or, the tl;dr version: “Monopoly makes a thing scarce, dear, and bad”. By implication, its removal makes the thing less scarce, i.e. increases volume. Increased volume, not increased price, is what drives increased employment. Employment increases when they do more work, not when they do the same work but make more money. The latter just results in fatcats pocketing more money and poorer, less active consumers suffering under higher unemployment.

If I had the power I would abolish all IP in a heartbeat — not just because of the free speech, innovation-hindering, access-to-lifesaving-medicines, and other issues IP raises, but because our economy is in dire straits and we clearly need a lot more of two things in particular: jobs and consumer confidence/spending power. Getting rid of IP is something that would give a substantial boost to those things at a stroke of a pen, at least after weathering a brief period of fairly serious upheaval.

And because of the innovation-promoting effects of competition and lack of chilling effects from patent trolls, in particular, it would be the gift that kept on giving. A more vibrant startup economy would keep producing new jobs at a higher rate than now.

Want to fix the economy? Abolish IP.

Maybe amend the definition of fraud to clearly include passing off one product as another — if I pay for Coca-Cola and get Bob’s Cola instead, I’ve been ripped off (unless Bob’s cola is better, anyway). Certainly I haven’t gotten what I paid for. That should suffice for everything trademark law was ever good for on the consumer-protection front, and would move the right of action from the company being mimicked to the state and complaining consumers and consumer organizations, the parties actually potentially harmed by deceptive labeling.

As for patents and copyright, I’m convinced by now that they’re all bathwater, no baby.

Want to bail out the economy? Abolish IP.

“Before the report came out, the White House had reached out to me…”

That explains why they are so hopelessly backwards on IP issues. The only thing you know about patents is you don’t have any.

“patent reform”…America Invents Act, vers 2.0, 3.0…

?This is not a patent reform bill? Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA) complained, despite other democrats praising the overhaul. ?This is a big corporation patent giveaway that tramples on the right of small inventors.?

Senator Cantwell is right. Just because they call it ?reform? doesn?t mean it is. The agents of banks, huge multinationals, and China are at it again trying to brain wash and bankrupt America.

They should have called these bills the America STOPS Inventing Act or ASIA, because that?s where they?re sending all our jobs.

The patent bill (vers 2, 3, etc) is nothing less than another monumental federal giveaway for banks, huge multinationals, and China and an off shoring job killing nightmare for America. Even the leading patent expert in China has stated the bill will help them steal our inventions. Who are the supporters of this bill working for??

Patent reform is a fraud on America. This bill will not do what they claim it will. What it will do is help large multinational corporations maintain their monopolies by robbing and destroying their small entity and startup competitors (so it will do exactly what the large multinationals paid for) and with them the jobs they would have created. The bill will make it harder and more expensive for small firms to get and enforce their patents. Without patents we cant get funded. In this way large firms are able to play king of the hill and keep their small competitors from reaching the top as they have. Yet small entities create the lion’s share of new jobs. According to recent studies by the Kauffman Foundation and economists at the U.S. Census Bureau, ?startups aren?t everything when it comes to job growth. They?re the only thing.? This bill is a wholesale destroyer of US jobs. Those wishing to help fight this bill should contact us as below.

Small entities and inventors have been given far too little voice on this bill when one considers that they rely far more heavily on the patent system than do large firms who can control their markets by their size alone. The smaller the firm, the more they rely on patents -especially startups and individual inventors. Congress tinkering with patent law while gagging inventors is like a surgeon operating before examining the patient.

Those wishing to help fight big business giveaways and set America on a course for sustainable prosperity, not large corporation lobbied poverty, should contact us as below and join the fight as we are building a network of inventors and other stakeholders to lobby Congress to restore property rights for all patent owners -large and small.

Please see http://truereform.piausa.org/default.html for a different/opposing view on patent reform.
http://docs.piausa.org/

Ha ha ha, no. Stop flooding threads over the Internet with this stuff. Hurricane head’s going to fight with you for air time.