Hollywood is Lobbying Government to Put You in Prison for Common Online Activity

I observe that most people desire to be honest and will pay for something if it is easy enough to put the transaction through.

I think you're right.
There've been several times where I'd go out and buy a game/anime/movie/book that I've seen/used [libraries are great] in order to support them — on the other hand, I am fully cognizant that aside from direct/semi-direct marketing the actual producers (e.g. authors for books) get very little. (Direct publishing the creators can get a lot more, though you have to be careful. Amazon, for instance, takes a huge chunk.)

And I was not talking nomenclature either. As a believer in Constitutional copyright and patents (sort of like Constitutional carry for the protection of writings instead for the bearing of arms), I object to the reification of a government granted monopoly as “property” that can be bought or sold. The Founders’ language admits no such interpretation — to authors and inventors it says — and current copyright law is as much an abuse of the Constitution as FDR’s National Recovery Act or Obamacare.

The ability to buy and sell IP is exactly how it can be exploited. The “exclusive right” is what guarantees the inventor (for example) the ability to recover costs and make a profit from research and development, or whatever work, time, energy, and other expenses are incurred to invent something.

Further, inventions almost always exploit other inventions in order to be useful, and often the other inventions are under patent protection. So, in order for an invention to work, there must be a system of protections for the inventor. The ability to license or transfer a patent is essential to the ability to exploit it.

Take, for example, the intermittent windshield wiper. Without cars, it is a useless invention. But the largest market for the invention was new cars rather than as an aftermarket upgrade. This meant that the greatest potential financial benefit to the inventor required licensing to car manufacturers that also owned or licensed many other automotive inventions that represented the latest and best technology at the time.

Even if it were possible for the inventor to exploit inventions directly, the ownership would need to be transferred to a corporation or LLC to protect the inventor from financial liabilities. This is essential business practice. What if the inventor needs to raise money to exploit the invention? This also requires transferring ownership or licensing to a company.

Without IP law and the ability to license or sell inventions, the only ways to exploit an invention are to keep how it works a secret and use the first-to-market advantage to get a competitive edge.

Licensing and selling IP is constitutionally valid law. The way it is implemented is somewhat questionable. It allows software companies to form essential monopolies (not based on free markets and competition but on using legal loopholes in IP law) without actually fulfilling the whole purpose of IP law: “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts”, and without the boundaries of “for limited Times”.

I really cannot imagine any way to implement this constitutional provision without allowing the ability of owners of copyright and patent protections to sell those rights or license them.

Over several years I have always noted your posts to be well-informed, so I am wondering if somehow I have missed your real point.

Yes, licensing, for a fee, by the holder of exclusive rights allows others to produce a copyrighted work or build a patented device or incorporate a patented device/process in another while the author or inventor is paid for allowing this. But to so this it is not necessary either to reify the monopoly rights as “property” or to allow the rights to be alienated from the author or inventor.

The arrangement “I made something new and have exclusive rights to it (for a limited term) and will let you use what I made under such and such terms, in exchange for such and such remuneration” does not require the exclusive rights to be property, and is in accord with what the Founders wrote in the Constitution.

The arrangements (actually harmful in many instances to authors or inventors and both science and the useful arts) “I made something new and have exclusive rights to it, and I’m going sell those rights to you for such and such remuneration” or “I have rights to this invention I bought from the inventor I’ll sell them to you. . .” or “I have rights I bought from the inventor, so I’m going to sue you for making a product similar to what I have rights to even though I’m not using the rights to make any products at all,” all treat the rights as property. All are objectionable to me because they are harmful to the advancement of science and the arts and to market competition. They are also contrary to what the Founders wrote in the Constitution, since the sale of the rights means that someone other than the author or inventor is being secured exclusive rights, which is not what the Constitution permits Congress to do. Nor are they what the Founders meant, as becomes clear when one considers the legislative history of both pre-Independence British and Federal period American copyright and patent law.

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