As an alternative, one of the big drags on the consumer marketplace and business is patent and copyright “farming.” This means that companies who contribute nothing, make their money from the buying of patents and copyright, the sitting on them, wanting royalties from those who want to put them to good use.
Or worse, as with the immense media libraries: sitting on them, not marketing them, but not allowing anyone else to market them.
So the question should be raised: should the government grant or continue patents and copyrights that are anti-competitive, and a drag on the markets?
Comparatively speaking, the General Mining Act of 1872 was perhaps the most pro-business, pro-consumer, pro-industry law ever written.
It said that the mineral rights to land are separate from the ownership of land, and that anyone had a right to stake a mineral rights claim on any land not claimed, and could not be prevented from mining it.
Importantly, it had a “use it or lose it” clause, so that if you struck a claim, you had to either “improve” it to the tune of $500 a year, or sell its ore to the gross profit of $500 a year. If you didn’t, you lost your claim.
Of course, if you mined on someone else’s land, you had to pay negotiated, reasonable royalties. But the land owner could not stop you from mining.
Now imagine if these concepts were transferred to patent and copyright law.
You could patent or copyright your original idea or product, but to keep your government protection, you had to “use it or lose it”, and let others use it.
This is not impossible, and would cause an explosion in the marketplace, of a huge amount of content available to consumers.
It would be a huge shot in the arm to business as well.
Too bad that all too often foreign businesses use this law to extract billions in natural resources from the US without paying any royalties.