For the first post of 2010, I want to go back to the problems of patents and copyrights.
Although copyrights have their roots in publishing in England in 1662, It was mostly in the latter part of the 20th century that we saw these laws being abused by capitalists.
We now fund a whole industry of lawyers, leeches and venture capitalists who all want their piece of the action. They are all "Value Destroyers" and create no value. I suggest that first of all governments should fund inventors, start-ups and research and not allow it into the hands of the vulture capitalists. The vulture capitalists want total control of the finished product for many decades, plus a piece of the action in the company, plus the product due to the high cost of licensing may never be used in combination with other products.
If the government starts to fund research, inventions and start-ups, the results can be listed and labeled as public goods. free to be used and modified by everyone and covered in law by something similar to GNU General Public License.
More people could use combination of products to produce new ideas and products and accelerate research. The current "Pay the Vulture" system limits the full development of any invention beyond what it was invented for because the licensing costs are too high.
Imagine you have a brilliant idea for making a wonderful new product, however to make the product you need to incorporate 3 other products that are protected by patents and copyrights. This wonderful new product may never be developed and marketed because the licensing costs are too high, and the owners of the core products may not want to license them due to vested interests.
Take General Motors for example. It is quite well known that GM in the 1970's and 1980's went around buying up every patented and copyrighted idea for the electric car. Had they perused the ideas we could be driving around in 2nd or 3rd generation electric cars by now. However, old money, old wealthy American family money, large shareholders of GM stock made it clear that it was in their interests not to develop the electric car. A lot of this old American money was heavily invested in oil, and they were oil barons themselves.
I firmly believe that if a person owns land or a ranch that sits above mineral wealth whether it be oil, gold, uranium or whatever. These goods should be classed as public goods. Enabling the government to force and seize and develop these assets after fairly compensating the landowner for the inconvenience, plus a reasonable premium to move house, home and expenses etc. The land owner should also be given the option to stay there so long as he does not impede the development.
The old money and "Vulture Capitalists" must learn that you cant own genes. You cant own oil reserves. You cant own gold mines. These are all public goods. They were created by exploding stars and billions of years of history. They were not created by an Ivy League wide boy on Wall Street.
The "Vulture Capitalist" will squeek " Without our investments, no one will ever start a company or invent anything". Well excuse me. I beg to differ. Before the modern crazed system of over-protection. People still invented and discovered things that changed our world. The telephone, Steam and internal combustion engines, Radio, Television. We didn't have greedy "Vulture Capitalist firms in that era, but we still had inventors that invented computers, modern medicine. We can live without the vultures, it is just we have forgotten how to. People still wrote great music before the invention of the gramophone and therefore the Tin-Pan-Alley vultures.
If every discovery and invention was in the public domain, for public use and the public good imagine how quickly society would advance and what a better place for mankind this planet could be. We could easily fix our planet's environmental problems, find cures for currently incurable diseases with cheap and easy to produce medicines. Make energy self sufficient homes, Have our farms produce an excess of food cheaply and efficiently with machines creating the wealth without the "vulture Capitalist" tax.
Our governments will never make a profit. Neither should they. The government is also a public asset and it should be used by all for the public good. We should ensure that governments invest in everyone's future, not just those with money.
In the future we will need philosophers, artists, musicians, inventors, engineers, scientists, medical specialists and many more. People will be able to work shorter hours for the same if not steadily improving standard of living and more of us will leave the poverty zone for good.
However we must grasp this idea and make it happen. If a government doesn't want to work for the people, then let them resign. Politicians are "public servants" i.e people that work for the people, the mass populous, everyone.
The human race is truly on a precipice. We can either reach out to the stars and become a peaceful, advanced race having mastered Artificial Intelligence, fixed all the problems on our planet and travel to the stars. Or we can allow the laws of the jungle to rule and let dog eat dog, and I guarantee there will be only one man left standing at the top of a mountain of paper money. A worthless struggle to accumulate a worthless paper mountain.
Will the last vulture on Earth please activate the "Nova Bomb"
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