Re: Re: Re: Re: Notes on a talk I will give on Wed.

[Jim Devine <jdevine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Michael wrote:
> If the production of knowledge is left to the profit maximizing
> corporations, then
> they probably need something like a patent in order to induce them to do
> anything.

I posted an article to pen-l awhile back where the author argued that
instead of giving a patent-type monopoly to the patent-holder, the latter
should be rewarded according to an auction process. It was more complicated
than that, but the idea was quite capitalist in intention, to create the
incentive to invest in inventions while opening up the flow of information.
If you want, I'll look for it.

> However, knowledge and information are inappropriate candidates for
> commodity status because of the difficulty of enforcing profit rights.  As
> Kenneth Arrow, among others, has shown, the idea of markets implies some
> rationality, but rationality implies that consumers are informed.  But to
> be informed about information is equivalent to owning that information.

In the case of the patenting of an industrial process or of the inner
mechanisms of some mechanical device, it doesn't do the consumers any good
to know the content of the patent, since they lack the capital to put the
knowledge into practice. (There are   other cases like this, no?) Instead,
the patent protects the patent-holder against its competitors, who might
have sufficient capital.

Jim Devine jdevine@xxxxxxx &  http://liberalarts.lmu.edu/~jdevine