I wish we could validate (or invalidate) the benefits of IP and copyright protection, given people speak about the benefits as if it's fact. Too often I hear garbage along the lines of: Without patents there would be no innovation! Without copyrights there would be no art!
Agree. We need to quantify. Here is a link to an earlier discussion. Articulating a framework.The orders of magnitude are really what's of interest. 100:10:1 etc.
To be fair, there weren't as many per capita as now, and far fewer professionals making them full-time. I'm just not sure that more works each accessible to fewer people (those who can afford to license it) is an overall win.
How much of that is technological copying/distribution? The printing press caused an explosion of bible and other book/flyer distribution, including an amazing new (at the time) work called "the novel". And that's even without copyright type protections.
And music was always available, we just don't know as much about popular music from the old days because documenting it was hard, and the church (major source of writing) sort of focused on the music written by and for it...
There are so many other variables that have dramatically changed over the last 400 years that there is no way to test whether this was a result of ip protection or not.
If patents and copyright never existed, where would society be today? What impact would it have had on the industrial revolution? clock making? pharmaceuticals? material science and genetics?
Would we have been set back a century? A year? Or developed even farther? How much farther and at what cost? Of course nobody knows, all I know is it's useful to remember it goes far beyond Apple and the RIAA... and things will change incrementally as they always have.
