Shareware - the future of Intellectual Property?

Way back last year sometime James Graham wrote an insightful piece about Intellectual Property - the big 21st century faultline?. As readers will know, as a mutualist, like other libertarian and anarchist descendants (part of the debate amongst whom James highlights), I regard patents and copyrights as one of the four great monopolies that have to be crushed before we get a truly free world and a genuine advance in the conditions of labour. It's not one that I major on because I don't understand it enough yet to make decent arguments - particularly it has to be said against those who tell me that pharmaceutical life saving advances would be jeopardized by any change to this protectionist mechanism.

But as well as obviously following the debate about digital rights/restrictions the subject recently came up at a university board meeting where we were discussing the outrageous economic rent stolen by publishing houses from academics in return for organizing a peer review system that things like Technorati rather prove unnecessary to my mind.

Anyway, I just thought James, if he hasn't seen it already, might like to see this analysis at the Ludvig von Mises Institute blog of the Radiohead album giveaway "stunt" and how it might change the playing field as the CD version of the album goes on sale in the US today:

There are two issues here that are getting mixed up. One relates to copyright, the mercantilist law that forbids the perfectly peaceful action of spreading around a good of infinite supply, whether that good is a sequence of notes or an arrangement of letters or pixels in an image. The second issue relates to an empirical question of what constitutes good marketing and entrepreneurship.

What's been happening up to now is that copyright issues have encouraged and spread what is essentially an entrepreneurial mistake: the failure of many publishers and studios to take full advantage of electronic media as a means of marketing their wares. They have believed that giving stuff away kills the market for sales, when the reverse might actually be true.

I'll probably be returning to the whole subject of IP during the next few months as the issue about academic publication really caught my interest. I agree with James that IP may well turn out to be a big issue in the coming years and decades, not least because we are now exposed more than ever before to a globalized market in which not every culture thinks the same way as western capitalists. For example the "group think" of the far east seems to an extent to understand ideas as collective property. Islam has specific doctrine on how the gifts of the creator, however humanity discovers them, should be distributed.

But for now I thought the Mises article was an interesting insight as a call to the "culture" industry to grasp the nettle.