Against Intellectual Monopoly by Michele Boldrin;David K. Levine Page B

were not patentable in
1833; Day's innovation spread like fire to the whole country, including in
New York City itself. Yet, despite the competition from his imitators, Day
became one of the most important publishers in the United States and,
by 1840, the Sun and its direct competitor, the Herald, were the two most
popular dailies.
    Notice that Day's innovations were very costly, as he had to change
completely the whole distribution chain for the newspaper and set up and
train an entirely new sales force to acquire advertisements. At the same time,
copying him was only apparently easy: the idea was quite straightforward,
but implementing it was not so cheap. It involved roughly the same set up
costs that the Sun had to face in the first place.
    "And this is where your anti-intellectual property stance is revealed to
be just anti-business!" would-be Bill Gateses are thinking at this point -
but, equally probably, not Bill Gates himself, as our earlier quote of his own
words suggests. You see, without any "intellectual property" protection,
brave inventors will try out expensive new things, while parasitic imitators
will sit out, letting the experiments run their course, and then imitate only
successful practices. In this way, as the RIAA constantly reminds us on its
antipiracy Web site, "The thieves ... go straight to the top and steal the
gold,"" bringing the recording company to economic ruin.
    This argument may sound smart and "oh-so-commonsense" right when
you hear it the first time - but pause for a minute, and you will realize
that it makes no business sense. Picking only winners means waiting until
it is clear who is a winner. Well, try it: try getting somewhere by imitating
the leaders only after you are certain they are the leaders. Try ruining the
poor pop star by "pirating" her tunes only once you are certain they are big
hits! Excuse us, we thought that "being a hit" meant "having sold millions of copies." Try competing in a real industry by imitating the winners only
when they have already won and you have left them plenty of time to make
huge profits and establish and consolidate their position - and probably
have not left much of a market for you, the sleek imitator.

The World Before Copyright
    Movies and news, not to speak of software code, are relatively new products.
Music and literature go back to the dawn of civilization. For at least three
thousand years, musical and literary works have been created in pretty much
every society, and in the complete absence - in fact, often under the explicit
prohibition - of any kind of copyright protection. For the economic and
legal theories of "no innovation without monopolization," this plain fact is
as inexplicable a mystery as the Catholic dogma of virginitas ante partum is
for most of us.26 To see the actual impact of copyright on creativity, let us
start with some history. Copyright emerged in different European countries
only after the invention of the printing press. Copyright originated not
to protect the profits of authors from copyists or to encourage creation,
but rather as an instrument of government censorship. Royal and religious
powers arrogated to themselves the right to decide what could and could not
be safely printed. Hence, the right to copy was a concession of the powerful
to the citizenry to print and read what the powerful thought proper to print
and read; Galileo's trial was nothing more than an exercise in copyright
enforcement by the pope of Rome.
    Later on, and mostly in the eighteenth century, in parallel with the diffusion, for the same purpose, of royal patents, copyright concessions began to
be used as tax instruments. Selling a copyright, exactly like selling a patent,
amounted to giving monopoly power to someone in exchange for bribing
the royal power. The creation, in the United Kingdom, of the Stationers'
Company, with virtual monopoly over printing and publishing, is probably
the