WI: No Intellectual Property Rights

What if the concept intellectual property rights hadn't developed and there wouldn't be anything like copyrights, trademarks or patents?
 
[obligatory]Atlas Shrugged[/obligatory]

In all honesty, I can't imagine it would do much for the advancement of mankind...not unless you somehow have a communal mankind from birth...and I'd love to see a PoD for that one.

(Attack of the bee people! AHHHHH!!!)
 
Ideas are cheap, but because intellectual property rights in America are so weak most of us don't bother to patent anything or develop it.
And they are a lot stronger than they were before Reagan (and congress) brought back patents when they set up a new patent judge system and told it to ignore all the decisions that other judges had used to emasculate the patent system.
 

Neroon

Banned
Patents can stifle creativity as much as promote it. Because once you invented something and patented it, there is little motivation to improve it due to the monopoly situation and no one else is allowed to.
The best example for this is powered flight. The Wright Brothers in the US came up with it 1st, but a few years later (yes even before WW1 kinda boosted that tech) Europe was the leader in powered flight technology, because only in Europe where the the brothers patent didn't apply could anyone improve it to begin with.
Buying patents only to get them of the market to make sure inventions cannot be used at all is most certainly not helping "inventioning" things either.
Would LOTR ever have been written if the copyright for Ring of the Nibelungs was still valid in Tolkiens time?
 
It would have a huge impact on distribution channels. Before patents, inventions were kept secret to ensure the inventor's profits. Before copyrights, authors would make the bulk of their money from speaking, reading, directing stage versions and teaching, composers from concerts. That places comparatively less value on the finished product and more on face-to-face services associated with it. Books would likely still abound, but music and film would be radically different without the upfront investment available to make a big production. You could not have anything like a studio, though you might have cinema chains making movies for their sole use.
 

Susano

Banned
Before copyrights, authors would make the bulk of their money from speaking, reading, directing stage versions and teaching, composers from concerts.
And it seems to go the same way again in music. At leats, thats what I heard, that in many cases the music labels make more money with concerts than with their products.
 
Technology, especially technology originating in capitalist nations would be back a century or two

take away the incentive and...
 
Technology, especially technology originating in capitalist nations would be back a century or two

take away the incentive and...

There'd still be incentive. In production technologies anyway.

In consumer products not necessarily so much, since there would probably be less incentive to launch new kind of consumer products.
 
Technology, especially technology originating in capitalist nations would be back a century or two

take away the incentive and...

I dont know about this. Many people argue that patents haven't advanced technology at all. For example, the telephone. In the early days, Bell held a patent in the most important markets. They forgot to patent it in Sweden however. Some guy called Ericsson took the opportunity and founded his own phone company. Unlike bell, ericsson didn't sell the phone AND the service, they just sold a phone. Also, due to competition with Bell, they had to make it better and cheaper.

When the Bell patent finally ran out, Ericsson expanded. A few decades later they were the leading phone-related producer in Europe.

Now, if the patents of the day would have been enforced as strongly as today, in all countries, then Ericsson would never had existed, and development of the telephone may have been retarded for 20 years...
 
And it seems to go the same way again in music. At leats, thats what I heard, that in many cases the music labels make more money with concerts than with their products.

Actually, as I understand it, the record labels make most of their money off of record sales, and the artists themselves make (relatively) paltry sums off of album sales, and make most of their money through concerts and sales of merchandise (t-shirts, etc).
 
Good point.

But still, people are greedy. They work better when there is hope for their name in lights and large monetary benifits.
 
There'd still be incentive. In production technologies anyway.

In consumer products not necessarily so much, since there would probably be less incentive to launch new kind of consumer products.

More factories, less clappers.

Sounds great.
 
Would LOTR ever have been written if the copyright for Ring of the Nibelungs was still valid in Tolkiens time?

I'll answer you if you can answer me who'd own it :D

Seriously: Aren't there some countries without such laws? If yes, which ones? (I think China or Japan may be, but I'm not sure.) And how do they manage things like inventions?
 
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