I read this blurb over on Slashdot about a good article entitled "Does innovation require intellectual property rights?":

In a paper that has gained wide attention (and caught serious flak) for challenging the conventional wisdom, economists Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine answer the final question with a resounding yes. Copyrights, patents, and similar government-granted rights serve only to reinforce monopoly control, with its attendant damages of inefficiently high prices, low quantities, and stifled future innovation, they write in "Perfectly Competitive Innovation," a report published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. More to the point, they argue, economic theory shows that perfectly competitive markets are entirely capable of rewarding (and thereby stimulating) innovation, making copyrights and patents superfluous and wasteful.

The basic reason, they argue, comes down to time. As long as there is some short period of time in which the creator can recoup their costs, then perfect competition will increase the amount they can charge during that time to the first buyers, who the creation is likely to be worth more to, as they intend to copy and re-sell it.

It's an interesting read, and makes some amount of sense. What's funny, is that the arguments against it (at least the ones listed in the article) basically say that they should have done more analysis on what happens as you vary that amount of time, but they fail to comment that until this paper its been ignored completely. So that argument is just as viable against the status quo as against this paper.

Empirically, I think it makes sense too. Let's say that, hypothetically, you were to increase the amount of monopoly time granted to a creator to infinity. Assumedly, this entity is able to create due to either extraordinary skills or greater resources (such as money) that others do not have. By making this monopoly grant infinite, they have less incentive to risk more of those resources in the future for further creation. They now have a cash flow that they can sit on theoretically forever (yeah, I know about substitutes, and that all this is a vast oversimplification, but isn't all economics? :) )

If the monopoly protection, however, were to end sooner, then they need to keep investing those resources in further creation to find the next source of cash flow. This force would seem to move against the traditional argument of the protection working as incentive to create, meaning that depending on the slopes of the two lines, there's a nice curve here somewhere.

One of my long-standing thoughts about web business models, has been similar to that process. If a site (like, say, Goats) charges for all content, then there's no way to prove the quality of the site. But if we make it all free, we go out of business. Now, we have our subscription system which is one way around this, but unfortunately entails us making lots of new stuff for the subscribers, which keeps Jon busy. Another way to accomplish the same thing is just to time delay everything. That way we have archives for new readers, and free stuff for the search engines to index and create links based on, but we also have the most recent stuff as a pay only model. People who really like us can pay to see the strip a week sooner than those who don't think we're worth it.

This only works with time based content, and for Goats, the temporal relevance is probably not sufficiently important, but for news sites, analysis and opinion based blogs, and finance information, I think this makes some amount of sense. It also seems to fit right in with what this paper is saying...and I'm always happy if other people can do the work to back up my outlandish assumptions.

So as part of my last semester of my current educational endeavors I'm taking a class called "Money & Power in the Western World: 1700-2000". I'ts being taught by Niall Ferguson, author of "The Cash Nexus", which is actually the book we're using for the class.

In last week's class, we were discussing one of the correlations he's found in the course of his research, which is that voter turnout seems to fairly closely follow the percentage of a population paying income tax. Historically, as more people have "grown" into sufficient brackets to start paying direct taxes, voter turnout has followed it. The causative assumption is that the act of direct taxation, motivates you to get your otherwise lazy ass out to the polls. For the sake of argument, let's just assume that this argument is true.

The Democrats, in current history at least, are the party that has tried to fight for the less-well-off. In over-simplified terms, they have tried to ensure that those with sufficiently low incomes can eliminate as much tax burden as possible. These people also make up a not-insignificant portion of the population that identifies itself as democratic. So the question is whether in doing so, and given the assumption above, are they actually working to convince their own voter base to not show up?

I assume this will be another case, like the 2000 election, where the Supreme Court give a "Do as I want, not as I say" type of case...

as an aside.....David Neiwert posts this quote from Florida Republican Porter J. Goss, chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence talking about attacks on abortion clinics:

"That's criminal law enforcement," Goss said. "But it would fit most broad definitions of terrorism because the purpose [of those attacks] is to scare people."

I wonder which part of the word "terror" in terrorism, he doesn't equate with scaring people?

So...school has started, which slowed down my already glacial pace of posting. One of the "more different" classes I'm taking, at least for an MBA program is called "Online Privacy" and is being taught by Lorrie Cranor of AT&T, who was also the chair of the W3C P3P working group. I'm probably going to put together a privacy policy for Goats while I'm taking the course...I figure it'll be a sort of exercise in progress.

There'a a fun argument going back and forth about Prof. Michael Dini at Texas Tech who's criteria for writing letters of recommendation includes a scientific answer to the question "How do you think the human species originated?"

CalPundit has a good list of links of other comments about this here. He also includes a somewhat in depth explanation of possible scientific answers, or not, to the question. What he misses is the larger picture. Dini ays this criteria is for those applying to "graduate or professional school in the biomedical sciences". If someone showed up, and argued creationism as a valid scientific answer, it would demonstrate a lack of knowledge of the processes of science. Science is about generating testable hypotheses, an then testing them. A hypothesis that a super-natural all-powerful did something about 6000 years ago, isn't testable. Creationists arguments come down to refuting evolution because this all powerful being could have planted all the evidence we see of evolution.

The advantage of testable hypotheses, is that a corollary of being testable is that it can be used to make predictions about the world around us, and therefby further our knowledge of science. If a student doesn't understand that, they have no business going to graduate school to study science in any field.

I spent part of the morning between watching space shuttle footage and flipping between blogs. As usual, Dave Winer has a good collection of links regarding the accident.

A couple of links deep, I ran into this which seems to have irritated folks because he didn't start his post by offering condolences. However, it offers what I would agree is good advice. Meanwhile, Dan Gillmor states that "Space is humanity's destiny, if it has one. We are an exploring, expansionist race. We must go on." I just hope that when we go on, it's in developing a space program that can get real people out there, but in a way more effective than the Space Shuttle ever was.