Capitalism and monopolism

[Bill Stewart]

At 09:12 AM 05/06/2003 -0700, Major Variola (ret) wrote:
>At 09:51 PM 5/5/03 -0700, Steve Schear wrote:
> >
> >I gave a presentation at a conference a few years back in which I
> > raised the idea that since Intellectual Property (e.g., trademarks) aren't
> >(property), its really a lease, that our society should consider
> > setting limits on the market penetration (say 50%,

...
>A few questions.  First, could this be done under the US constitution,
>or is it fiddling too much with the intent of the prescription that the
>USG support these?  Second, who would judge market penetration?

It's not politically feasible, so the discussion's moot.
It's probably not constitutionally feasible - patents and copyrights are
grants of monopoly for a limited amount of time, and while I suppose they
might be able to get away with "Term of small-N years, extensions available
under such-and-such conditions", it'd be pretty tough to pull that one off.

Writing clear enforceable definitions of terms is likely to be impossible also.
If you've got a patent on producing Unobtanium, then you've got 100% market 
penetration,
but if you've got a patent on some particular method to speed up some 
common process
by some small percent, you might have 1% market penetration because other 
people
have other methods of speeding it up.  The difference isn't the quality of 
innovation,
it's the definition of "the market" implied by the type of innovation.

Trademarks, as Variola points out, aren't really the problem here,
though there are certainly annoying conflicts between trademarks of products
(where multiple types of things can have the same name) vs. domain names
(where there can be only one), and control of DNS by the
trademark forces appears to have been one of the main motivations for ICANN.
(It's not just the control of the namespace - it's the insistence that
everybody who does DNS registration everywhere be required to collect
True Names and True ICBM-and-Subpoena-delivery addresses from registrants
that's the really ugly problem.)

>And this of course assumes that one of Kim's nukular missiles takes out
>Hollywood before Hollywood takes over the USG.

Before?  Sorry, but you're going to have to send Ahnold back in time to do 
that.
We've had the Gipper, Mr. Rogers's Evil Twin Skippy, Elvis with the
sex scandal and The War in Albania (except that the scandal was used to 
cover up
the war more than the other way around), Right-Wing Republican Pod People,
your favorite Kafka-inspired movies, most of the cast of Dr. Strangelove 
popping
in and out of various administrations,  and of course the
Sonny Bono Almost-but-not-quite-Permanent Copyright Extension Act.