La música es mía

A veces hay que tener cuidado de los payasos…

Morsita, ese huevón de Massé confunde papas con camotes… La propiedad intelectual no es igual a la propiedad de un terreno… Lessig lo dice clarito…

Differences between physical property and intellectual works

Tangible goods are rivalrous goods

For one person to gain some tangible item, another person must lose it. For one person to gain the ownership of some piece of land, the previous owner must surrender ownership. This is the ordinary state of physical property, and the laws around physical property are designed around this fact. Property taxes, zoning laws, and similar legal constructs are examples of how the law relates to physical property.

Intellectual works are non-rivalrous

Intellectual works are ordinarily non-rivalrous. It is possible for someone to teach a work of the mind to another without unlearning it himself. For example, one, or two, or a hundred people can memorize the same poem at the same time. Here the term “work of the mind” refers not to physical items such books or compact discs or DVD’s, but rather to the intangible content those physical objects contain.

Because of the non-rivalrous nature of intellectual works, the possibility is higher than with rivalrous goods that an unrestrained market for new works will fail. The initial publisher of the work, who pays the author, has the first-to-market advantage, but this might not be enough to compensate for the second-comer’s advantage in not having to pay the author. Note that failure in an unrestricted market for non-rivalrous goods is not inevitable. In 1998 the Kenneth Starr report on the Monica Lewinsky affair was offered by three competing publishers, and all seem to have enjoyed good sales. But that was a case of a work for which there was certain to be a high demand, and for which no author had to be paid. In other cases demand will be high enough to encourage second-comers, but not high enough for the first comer, the one who pays the author, to recoup. Publishers will tend to hang back, waiting for someone else to take the chance on paying authors, so that few authors will be able to sell their new works; or the publishers will collude, creating a de-facto form of private copyright without the limitations and accountability of statutory copyright.

Statutory copyright tries to prevent this sort of market failure by stabilizing the market for new works that must be purchased from their authors. A publisher who takes a chance on a new work will, if the work be successful, have a limited period of monopoly control over the title. This temporary freedom from sharp competition acts as an encouragement to publishers to seek out new works from authors, and to offer them to the public.

Claro.