Re: copyright

[Louis N Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 12 Jan 1996, Charles K. MacKay wrote:

> _Philosophy and Public Affairs_ a few years back had a long article
> entitled "Justifying Intellectual Property" that had a decidely Marxist
> flavor and basically concluded that the ratio of innovation to "cultural
> background" in any "new" idea was so low that intellectual property,

Louis: This does not treat the question of intellectual property in a
strictly legal sense but it certainly looks at in a manner consistent
with Marxist thought:
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Gar Alpervowitz on Technological Inheritance

"Many times a day," wrote Albert Einstein, "I realize how much my
outer and inner life is built upon the labors of my fellow-men, both
living and dead." The genius of an earlier era saw clearly how
contemporary knowledge and technological advance depend to an
extraordinary degree on the efforts of many contributors, not to mention
a continuing cultural investment in science and numerous other areas of
human endeavor. In fact, very little of what we as a society produce
today can be said to derive from the work, risk, and imagination of
citizens now living. Achievements from earlier eras, including
fundamental ideas such as literacy, movable type, simple arithmetic,
and algebra, have become so integrated into our daily lives that we take
them for granted. What we accomplish today stands atop a Gibraltar of
technological inheritance. Seemingly contemporary transformations
inevitably build on knowledge accumulated over generations.

For example, Richard DuBoff, an economic historian at Bryn Mawr
College, observes that "synthesizing organic chemicals...could not have
been done without an understanding of chemical transformations and
the arrangement of atoms in a molecule. After 1880, this led to the
production of coal tar and its derivatives for pharmaceuticals, dyestuffs,
explosives, solvents, fuels, and fertilizers, and later petrochemicals...By
the early 1900's the new chemicals were already becoming an essential
input for metallurgy, petroleum, and paper."

Present-day entrepreneurs such as Bill Gates, one of the world's richest
individuals with a personal fortune estimated at $8 billion and hailed as
a technological genius for inventing software for the personal computer,
should therefore be seen as beneficiaries of this long and fruitful history
as well as of significant public investment.

The personal computer itself--without which Gates's software would not
be possible--owes its development to sustained federal spending during
World War II and the Cold War. "Most of [the] 'great ideas in computer
design' were first explored with considerable government support,"
according to historian Kenneth Flamm in a Brookings Institution study.
Now a specialist in technology policy in the Department of Defense,
Flamm estimates that 18 of the 25 most significant advances in
computer technology between 1950 and 1962 were funded by the
federal government, and that in most of these cases the government was
the first buyer of new technology. For example, Remington Rand Corp.
delivered UNIVAC, the original full-fledged U.S. computer, under
contract to the U.S. Census Bureau in 1951.

The government's shouldering of huge development costs and risks
paved the way for the growth of Digital Equipment Corp., which
created its powerful PDP line of 1960s computers. In turn, Gate's
colleague [and now fellow billionaire] Paul Allen created a simulated
PDP-10 chip that allowed Gates to apply the programming abilities of a
mainframe to a small, homemade computer. Gates used this power to
make his most important technical contribution: rewriting the BASIC
language, itself funded by the National Science Foundation, to run
Altair, the first consumer-scaled computer. And indeed, Micro
Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems, Altair's developer, could never
have placed a microcomputer of any variety on the market without the
long preceding period of technological incubation.

Thousands of links in a chain of development--our shared inheritance--
were in fact required before Bill Gates could add his contribution. But if
this is so, why do we not reflect more full on why Gates, or any other
wealthy entrepreneur, should personally benefit to such a degree? If we
admit that what any one person, group, generation, or even nation
contributes in one moment of time is minuscule compared with all that
the past bequeaths like a gift from a rich uncle, we are forced to
question the basic principles by which we distribute our technological
inheritance.

(Opening paragraphs from Gar Alperovitz's article "Distributing Our
Technological Inheritance" in Oct. 94, Technology Review)




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