Do journals "add value" to articles they publish?

Below I'm just cutting and pasting comments I made in reply to a post at madisonian.net, where I suppose you might as well go. But I'll probably transform this post over time. Note I'm absotively and 100% all-for free-access to journals and the Public Library of Science in particular, but because I also see journals as playing a huge and under-appreciated role beyond publication, I was sparked into verbiage by a suggestion that maybe there is nothing else they're doing at all. It just happens to be stuff that fascinates me.

1. MT Says:
   May 31st, 2006 at 10:41 am

   They add crucial value, which is prestige. Each journal is like a brand and has a prestige rank and vets manuscripts with its own cadre of peer reviewers, not to mention editorial taste. Open access sounds like we just dump all articles in a barrel. How do we recruit a high-powered academic to provide free refereeing for a manuscript that’s a candidate to be just one more article in the barrel? When we look in the barrel, how do we now which articles were stringently reviewed? Without the splash that comes from landing in a high prestige journal, there’s no way to decide which new articles to look at first. The journal branding flags an article as likely to be good and interesting and important. There’s tons and tons of junky and derivative and incremental work being done, creating a din of noise within which to hear the signal. I suppose with modern IT some fast sifting method will arise eventually, but in the mean time, total open access sounds like a wheel in the spokes of how scholarship gets done (or at least science scholarship, which I know better).

2. MT Says:
   May 31st, 2006 at 10:56 am

   I suppose one way the academic market might react to total open access to peer-reviewed articles is with a drastic contraction of the number of articles published. When the barrel is small enough, getting into it will carry enough prestigious that editors should be able to recruit good free referees. Another way the market could react would be to start rewarding referees in some other way than they are rewarded now (affiliation with a prestigious enterprise, early info about the most important work in their subject, and the establishment of a relationship with the editors of a journal they want to get their own manuscripts into). Otherwise I imagine peer review as we know it will disappear and some more social process will determine the relative importance of articles after they are published.

3. MT Says:
   May 31st, 2006 at 11:59 am

   You could also think of a journal as providing an article with a kind of credential. The lack of credentials and authentication online seems a large part of why scholars tend to dismiss it. It sounds like snobbery, but it’s entirely practical. Plenty of people with great ideas write badly. Plenty of people who write wonderfully have bad ideas. Plenty of people assert confidently what they are not confident. And people differ hugely in what kind of evidence and how much it takes to make them confident. So why bother reading any piece of text ever? Descartes may have been saying something worthwhile, but his writing certainly didn’t draw me in. In lieu of a reputation, we settle for credentials, and without credentials (or any credential besides access to the Internet) the potential rewards are far to meager for the effort and/or risk. Scholars earn their living in part by reading text, and so were journals to disappear and were no system for ranking the importance of new articles immediately to replace them, scholars would have no choice but to look for text credentials elsewhere–e.g. whether the purported author purports to have a PhD or a professorship at an Ivy League school (open-access systems still will have to earn reader’s trust for truly and accurately stating authorship and credentials). If we came to rely on this we might end up with even more an intellectual caste system than we have now. People might only read publications out of the top 3 schools. Of course, there’s so much gold to be mined from the publications that come from less prestigious schools that someone will figure out some IT scheme to efficiently extract it. In the meantime though, dissolving journals as I said above I think would be a stick in the spokes. This is just to argue for their value, which the post seemed to call into question. I suppose the actual political proposal doesn’t mean dissolving journals exactly but just preventing them from making money from subscriptions (there’s still advertising).

4. MT Says:
   May 31st, 2006 at 12:01 pm

   Of course, who the hell am I to say?

5. MT Says:
   May 31st, 2006 at 1:01 pm

   I suppose it should be mentioned that there’s a lot of dissatisfaction and skepticism toward the peer review system as practiced now (c.f. For Science’s Gatekeepers, a Credibility Gap, by Lawrence Altman May 2, 2006 NY Times)

The fight for free intellectual property: Extreme edition

I think this project to create Islam-friendly comic books in the Middle East, though perfectly legal under traditional copyright law, nevertheless says something about the stakes over which we fight to liberate Mickey Mouse. "Free culture" is about more than the number of TV channels from which we'll have to chose. It's about how and to what extent culture evolves. Here's an excerpt from the NY Times profile:

The story concerns 99 gems encoded with the wisdom of Baghdad just as the Mongols are invading the city in the 13th century - in his version, to destroy the city's knowledge. The gems are the source of not only wisdom but power, and they have been scattered across the world, sending some 20 superheroes (at least in the first year, leaving another 49 potential heroes for future editions) on a quest to find them before an evil villain does. "To create the new, you have to tap into the old," Mr. Mutawa says of the deep historic connections in the comic.

The prospects look good for our heroes, don't they? Well, watch out! Back to the Times:

The religious dimension is the biggest risk for a product whose main market, like all new products in the region, is oil-rich Saudi Arabia, where religion and entertainment rarely mix. Mr. Mutawa has already witnessed the frustration of having a book banned. "Get Your Ties Out of Your Eyes," a children's book featuring Bouncy, a ball who wears a tie - but differently than others - was banned in Kuwait because it seemed to be commenting on the Koran.

"When you're in a place where Bouncy Book 3 doesn't pass the censors, you have to be very creative," he said.

I guess what captures is me is that a seeming natural intellectual outgrowth of a culture--one seemingly with a broad audience awaiting it--nevertheless could be barred on principle for extraneous reasons. I suppose I usually file "censorship" and "conservatism" and "free speech" in different parts of my brain from issues of "free culture," but this story got them firing at once. It made me think cultural stigma, government censorship and private copyright are all just different ways of protecting some ideas at the expense of others--and in the process restricting what everybody thinks and determining the characteristics of our culture.

Probably I'm sympathetic to comic books. If this were about protecting muslim public school cafeterias from Cheez Whiz, I might not have thought twice about it. But a free market in ideas is a nice idea too.

It isn't just me

Seems there's a Dane, science writer Tor Nørretranders, whose "big idea" (scroll down) contributed to the perennially tantalizing and generally pretty interesting Edge.org end-of-the-year question was a lot like an aspect of what I've been blogging about. Instead of talking in terms of "prestige" and "influence" being prime motivators, Nørretranders speaks of "social relativity." And where I (granted uncharacteristically) extrapolate toward Utopia, Nørretranders extrapolates toward doom. I guess that's sort of the Scandinavian ethos. They do get less sunlight over there.

I offered my off-the-cuff to the Edge answers as a whole in a comment over at the intellectually lofty anthropology blog Savage Minds.

I skimmed them all, excepting a few artists and religiously minded folks, and didn’t find a single idea that wasn’t at least a little familiar, and the redundancy and recurrence of closely related big ideas relating to evolution and the soul and being animals and the unconscious was enormous. What’s going on? I doubt society has become less inventive. I imagine ideas and information now spread far and wide so fast, and theorizing is so professionalized, compared to the 19th-20th century turn, that there might be less diversity of notions or at least fewer surprises. Or are people more proprietary about their ideas than before, so no one with anything worth a book deal would broadcast it in such a forum? Or are people as proprietary as a century ago and this project was doomed undazzling from the start? If none of the above, I’d settle for the conclusion that I’m just exceptionally well read and thoughtful. [I'm not well read, in the sense of having read a lot, but I've read eclectically, make good use of breezy summaries, and I suspect my interests are highly aligned with Edge publisher John Brockman's, because they're fashionable]

"Creativity wants to be authored"

I just offered that as an antidote maxim to "Information wants to free" over at Rob Hyndman's blog. Also in my comment I wrote such a pithy capsule of ideas I've blogged about lately that I wanted to incorporate and offer it here as a summary.

"Creativity wants to be authored" ought to be the maxim, at least to my mind. "Monetarily free" creativity I can imagine. But "authoritatively free" I cannot--or I haven't been able to think of a real precedent for a culture or society that works that way. After all, why do good works if a) no one sees you do them and b) there's no money or title or prize to show others in the abstract that you do good works for a living? I think that generally the desire for prestige and influence motivate creativity and that often creators accept money instead, or they accept it as payment-in-part, because wealth and the things you can buy betoken status and confer prestige and influence. What creators are after in the first place, in other words.

Why not "Google Book Search" in the public library?

If my local library had the money to do it, could they do what Google proposes? Scan print books and make them searchable, but just for the sake of card holders like me? If not, why not?

Right now my library electronically catalogs and lets me search titles, authors and subjects. As is the idea for Google Book Search, they allow this so I can learn where on the shelves I can legally obtain copyrighted intellectual property that suits me. In fact, searching by subject I often arrive at a book I've never heard of and didn't know I was looking for. Just like Google Book Search. At the library this is fair somehow.

Now what if my library were to add to every catalog entry a searchable keyword? Still fair?

What if my library were to add a key paragraph to every catalog entry? Say the first paragraph of the book. Fair?

How about we make it the whole first chapter? How about the whole book?

Why not? My library paid for these books and owns these books. As a card holder I'm allowed not only to check things out but to know and search what my library contains. So I thought at least.

You know, I could make a darn lot more efficient use of my library if my library's catalog just let me search whole books, and I'm having trouble understanding why book publishers and copyright holders would wish to deny me this efficient use, not to mention how legally they might get away with it.

Aren't U.S. citizens supposed to have access to the Library of Congress too?

Cottoning on

O.K., so from links like this and other things that turn up when you Google "prestige economy", I have come to realize that I am not exactly the first person ever online to talk economically about intellectual property and prestige. In fact, for all I know this bender was triggered by recovered memory. But I'm adding value, I know I am. I'll prove it to you too (you hypothetical one or two who can stand reading a post of mine all the way to the end), once I'm a little better read. Off the bat, I'd say what I'm talking about is bigger. Way bigger. Also more mechanistic and explanatory. A lot of the gift-culture and prestige stuff that's been written in the context of open source software and the Web in general seems to be in the vein of "hey, we could just have it be like those guys over there," without explaining where it's coming from, why it works or why we might expect it to work over here, let alone more broadly. Incidentally, I'd sure love to have some comments and/or discussion on this stuff.

Anybody who's a bona fide scholar in any area pertaining to that on which I am spouting should feel free to comment anonymously or under pseudonym, if he or she fears a taint of association with such vulgar dilettantism as I am engaged in here. It doesn't 100% guarantee you anonymity from me I suppose, since my site meter sometimes tells me the institution that people are browsing from and often I peek. But I'm nobody's academic colleague and in no position to deny anybody tenure or a position. I'm recalcitrant, but I am most eminently to be trifled with.

Global prestige & local anonymity

Thinking about prestige and money and the economies in the two seems to bring a lot of other things together nicely. The latest for me is the idea of the "global village." I'm not sure what I used to think the idea was--maybe just that every place and every culture is accessible and becoming familiar to every other. Now to me it seems to mean that geography is becoming irrelevant, which I suppose is just the flip side; except that now I'm thinking the irrelevance is on more than just the global scale. The "global-village trend" looks like it belongs with the U.S. national trends toward suburbs and sprawl, away from neighborhoodliness, toward cross-country migrations for school and job, and into the cyberworld for all kinds of things.

I'm thinking we can blame the whole thing on the invention of money. I blogged before (and Adam Smith pointed out before me) that money serves partly to substitute for reputation. There exist symbolic articles and privileges you can buy with money to establish your prestige and status to others. Meanwhile, services for sale enable you to make others dance around and do your bidding with money alone. So money caters to the desire for prestige and influence alike.

Because the U.S. dollar and other modern currencies work everywhere, your money gives you this same power everywhere. Because you can go in principle and will pay to do so for business and pleasure, inventors and industrialists have provided the technologies to do it in practice--as well as devices to communicate with the far flung friends and acquaintances you make. The communication spreads the symbols of prestige, so that symbols that work one place get adopted by others and the world diversity of symbols (a.k.a. "culture") goes down. Because transportation enables you to commute long distances to work and to the malls, you don't get to know your neighbors and you have no local merchants. Because it's now more sure-fire and easier to find commonality with people online than either next door to you or at your at-will workplace, you have even less incentive to get to know your neighbors and coworkers. You hop a plane to conference with colleagues and to congregate with family and to socialize with friends and to vacation alone or among strangers. Locally you become anonymous and online it doesn't matter where you are.

At least until you have kids, because the global village sucks for raising a child. It's also gotta be a drag to be poor. What are those non-jet-setting folks across the digital divide up to? Watching TV, boozing and bonking? Singing and thumping Bibles? If so, it hardly seems a wonder.

In good company

In his first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), [Adam] Smith argued that the acquisition of money brings no good in itself; it seems attractive only because of the mistaken belief that fine possessions draw the admiration of others.

From "Let There be Markets," an essay by Gordon Bigelow in Harper's magazine (2005)

Soft power

I was skimming a little anthro and sociology online when I suddenly worried that in my blogging about prestige and influence I'd sort of been talking about "power:" "Oh, great," I thought. "I have blogged thousands of words now on how individuals' desire for power really deserves more notice as a force in history."

But "power" is a bad word, and I didn't think I'd been blogging about something inherently bad. I thought I'd been blogging about Madonna and Mom and the Nobel prize. Then I remembered "soft power," which I think I heard awhile back on NPR in the context of a book release by some foreign policy wonk (who's Googlable).

"Soft power" is I guess a recently coined term for distinguishing the nicer way one nation gets another to do what it wants it to do. "Soft power" contrasts with threats, sanctions, embargoes and bombs, which some now call "hard power," and refers to the suasive force that a powerful country can exert, for instance, just by modeling behavior or "setting an example." I was happy to observe, though, that I could just as well apply the term to people.

"Soft" probably ought not to be necessary to rescue "power" from its hard connotations of domination and control, but I bet these senses have shaded every discussion of politics, society and culture I've ever read, heard or participated in. I feel like going back to ninth grade and starting over. Anyway, I'm grateful somebody (Googlable) coined it.

In light of my "prestige" keyword surfing, I now wonder if the influential Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci was characterizing a kinder and less insidious sort of "hegemony" than all those essay authors online seem to take him to have been talking about. The social elite manipulate the lives of the masses subtly, according to Gramsci's paraphrasers, by way of the enormous influence that their prestige grants them. This is how they make us buy Prada, for example.

With this application of "soft power" to individuals I think I may have just invented a new flavor of Utopian social psychology: Allow me to hereby assert that it is human nature to lust for power, but soft and hard satisfy equally. Ergo, all civilisation needs to discover is a way for everyone to exert soft power in some avenue of life, and hard power will be driven extinct. Everybody lives happily every after.

But since I believe entropy demands that every degree of freedom be exercised, in truth I am supposing we'll always have meanies. This may prove though that I'm not being Utopian and this dynamic I've proposed makes a good deal of sense. I don't know. I think. You decide. Then maybe I'll think you're wrong and go on thinking whatever I want.

The Web is a distribution system, not a congregation system. "Free culture" needs both.

For (ammended) reasons previously stated.

Plagiarism is a natural wrong

That's the flip side of supposing a natural right to intellectual property. And another approach to the same conclusion. If the obvious wrongness of theft establishes a natural right to physical property, then the obvious wrongness of plagiarism equally establishes a natural right to intellectual property.

Actually plagiarism is worse than theft. Unlike physical property, owned intellectual property--as opposed to licensed or leased intellectual property--is only superficially alienable. We can fly you by plane half way around the world from your ancient farmland, pave it over and make it a Disney Land. But nothing we can do will make you cease to be the author of your creations.

The only thing so little alienable as authorship is life itself, putting plagiarism in a category with murder. While we think that dispossessing someone of land or personal property can sometimes be right and just, killing someone is never better than justifiable. Same with plagiarism. To whatever extent we might care to waive or suspend the sentence, plagiarism remains a crime.

So I think we ought to distinguish plagiarizing someone who is alive from plagiarizing someone who is dead. The latter is like the desecration of a corpse, which is rightly a lesser offense than murder. The same should go for plagiarizing someone from another world or culture. Note though that opportunities for such lesser offenses diminish as the world becomes more wired and developed. There are perhaps a few native Amazonian and Papuan love ballads you might plagiarize with minimal risk of harm, but most authors alive now would benefit from a share in at least the monetary earnings of their creations. The honorary degree they could care less about.

The ship, the sea & the intellectual sphere

Q: What makes any idea a good one?
A: A context in which it's useful.

Let's call this context a body of thought--a collection of previously installed good ideas. Modern dance is a body of thought. The discipline of chemistry is a body of thought. Commercial fishing and the Spanish language are bodies of thought. Good ideas include new nets, new chemical syntheses and new word usages ("niggah").

A body of thought is bit like a biological species: An abstract thing that is mirrored by and exists in embodiments. An individual velociraptor and its fossil femur embody the species we call "velociraptor." An individual chemist and a molecule she draws each embody what we call "chemistry."

Though these bodies are abstractions, still they have structure. Their structure is in the relationships that the component good ideas have to one another--and shows up in such places as in the table of contents of a chemistry text book and in the grammatical categorization of the words of a language.

As good ideas accumulate, previously installed ideas may no longer work well together, and so cease to be good, leading to removal or refashioning. Though the structure of the body of thought evolves, it doesn't evolve arbitrarily, because it survives only if it functions. So let's think of these bodies as boats, to which our culture adds and subtracts, but doesn't change in a way that makes them not seaworthy. Seaworthiness is survival, and it exerts a selective pressure.

Like species and boat designs, bodies of thought may persist or go extinct or evolve or diversify: Natural philosophy begat physics which begat cosmology and particle physics, etc.

But first the bottom line: We don't get new parts for free. Instead the individuals that sustain a body of thought—the ship's crew--pay for each new part. Before money, payment was in admiration, which elevates a creator's status as it accumulates, and this is still the main currency in scholarship, art, politics, teaching, journalism and the evolution of language. It may seem like no one became famous for "niggah," but you weren't there at the creation. It may seem like grade school teachers enjoy little prestige and influence, but you are not a child.

The closer and more pervasive your admirers are, the more admiration you feel. Yet no culture can be more dense on the ground than about one person per square foot, even if the members are two year-olds. So mass appeal brings distant appeal, which brings diminishing returns on admiration and the perception of influence. Financial statements of booming record sales in Japan don't do it like the cheers of fans in a stadium. Add the fact that the global population is finite and you'll see that status too has an upper limit. There's no higher station than King of the World. This means there's only so much prestige to go around.

Not so money, which governments can go on printing forever, at least in principle. With money and patenting, Ms. Widget gets paid to invent even inglorious essentials she never would have invented otherwise. A moneyed society produces more good ideas and makes them faster. Plus it produces stars who never play stadiums and purchasable status symbols such as Rolls Royces (which get how many miles per gallon?).

The new parts to the ships get installed in port, of course--in universities, in record companies, in patent offices, in news rooms. Their inventors usually work close to the hull, though visionaries may take in much more of the ship. The new contributor may make a part that mates precisely with parts already installed or one that lays on top as collage, paint or ornamentation.

Although a part may fail to suit the ship its creator had in mind, crew that's ashore from another ship may notice it and take it for their own ship. So what at first does not look like a good idea may still turn out to be one. But unless a creator has a patent or the other crew is generous, only the finders receive the payment, whether in respect or money.

Now how about we size up the fleet?

The scholarly disciplines are the delicate vessels that never sail out of sight of the academic harbor—though their heartier offspring the applied arts escape. Religions are the battleships and aircraft carriers: Very big, very robust, defenders and menaces of other ships. They sail the high seas in all weather, but they also ply the bays and harbors and even inland waterways. In the real world they ply the minds of the proletariat and aristocrats and merchants alike.

With religion you get to travel the world, meet interesting people, and conquer them. And as in the navy, wearing the uniform may be ample reward for the crewman, lessening your need to earn worldly distinction. You're part of something bigger after all. Belief in an abstract external reference frame enables one to earn self admiration and self respect from undistinguished, internal and/or unwitnessed creations.

In this ship scheme, the sea of course is the minds of the living. The world the sea surrounds is the intellectual sphere. Some forgotten cultures and dead languages still sit on the dry docks of unvisited stacks in the library, although they may no longer be able to float.

Floating is the main thing about bodies of thought, for this is how they move from mind to mind. Note though that only a very small body of thought fits entirely in one mind; and even if it did, it's mirror image may float on the surface of other minds simultaneously. Meanwhile, one individual may comprehend many ships at once, and perhaps serve on several crews. Yet mental space is finite, leading to competition, predation, symbiosis and an ecology of ships.

Any questions?

Oh, why do I think this is even interesting? For one I wanted to build a bigger picture around my idea of an economy in prestige. Also it's that I think an apt metaphor--like Lakoff's parenting and Dawkins's meme--really explains things, and that it guides thought in the way that a theory or model in science prompts tests and applications. Yes, we already know that religions are like viruses and that genes are like ideas. But as I see these metaphors being used, not enough gets made of the fact that genes and ideas have no fixed or absolute value. In truth their value is contextual--their utility or neutrality or disadvantageousness relates to the system in which they appear. Also ideas do not move themselves around, as simple gene analogies seem to overlook, and virus analogies neglect that other things besides viruses carry genes too. And a final viral quibble: Where are the people who aren't hosting the viruses? What are they up to?

I suppose I could have kept the metaphor 100% biological just by labelling the more cuddly bodies of thought "koalas" instead of viruses. Then I could have placed the koalas into an interactive food Web with other bodies of thought, which would be members of other biological species. But what's our own relationship to such a picture? How are we mutating these creatures of thought, and why?

I think we get answers to these question by moving to the sea and demanding payment for parts. Plus boats are simpler than biological species, "floating" and "sailing" are more vivid than "survival" and "reproduction," and anyway what does koala sex have to do with moving ideas around? In case this new mix of metaphor is non-obvious, original and not utterly clunky or uninspiring, I wanted post it. Just remember you read it here first.

The Web as Heaven

I likened the Web once to a santarium, and I also called the blogosphere a prestige economy, but now reflecting on my footnote about the relationship between religion and the patent office, I realize that really what the online world really is like is Heaven. In the sanitarium, viscerality and the possibility of physical violence remains, the prospect of overcrowding limits how many people live there and who you're liable to meet, and everything is fleeting and temporal. Meanwhile the Web is safe, infinite and eternal. Even after I'm dead people might come here to interact with this expression of myself by posting a comment. Everybody alive now and who will ever live can come, JPEGs of your dog will be there, and there will never be any violence. Seeing how attracted people are to the idea of Heaven, it's no wonder we like the Web.

Note also how still it's marginally easier to squeeze a camel through the eye of a needle than to find an ivory tower inhabitant online. Don't know enough religion to assign a heavenly role to Google, who reunites you with the friends and loved ones of this world. Perhaps St. Peter?

Anthropology of intellectual property law: In a nutshell

My theory:

Intellectual property comes in large part from the instinctive human concern for status and the scarcity of preeminence: Creativity and innovation, like money, aren't things we pull out of our pockets just to get food and shelter (or to get them more efficiently so as to have more leisure time). They're also largely for gaining admiration, power and influence--not to mention a mate. Note that it's easy to imagine societies without personal property but not societies without creativity based prestige--and likewise not a society without symbol-based designations of status, such as the headdresses, soldier stripes, priestly rituals and sumptuary laws. The king owns a sort of design patent or trademark on the crown and scepter and ermine that he wears.

An anthropological perspective on IP suggests why we need IP monopolies in modern society to incentivize innovation even though we didn't seem to need them before: In modern society, cultural and political affiliation encompass millions of people, and yet personal affiliations are remote and dispersed (family, friends and colleagues are not your neighbors). That suggests to me that in the absence of monopoly your innovation won't spread in a way that brings glory to you. It will spread fast, start bouncing off the national borders and soon seem to be coming from all directions-- originating from nobody, least of all you. Also the admiration of distributed fans is more abstract and less satisfying than being the village hero. And so nowadays we want and need our innovations to make us money, which we spend locally on the big home and fancy car that tells the people around us (wherever we drive) that we're special.

This perspective also arguably meshes with the natural poles of "wealth and fame" and Freud's "love and work." It explains why employers don't have to pay people so much money to be teachers and journalists--because such jobs pay a lot in prestige and influence. Scholarship is an almost entirely prestige-based economy that produces primarily IP[1]. Politics seems to be at least a little like this too.

Finally (for now) as I've blogged vaguely about before, I think this means that for "free culture" to work, creators will need to remain associated with their creations in the minds of consumers and somehow earn admiration at a higher margin than they often do in our money-based IP culture. The Web provides free world-wide distribution of creations, but not intimacy between the creator and the audience, and it doesn't actively generate community. It allows exchange with your peers, but it doesn't easily let you feel the admiration of your admirers or show your admirers how admired you are. Britney doesn't see or hear you shout when she shakes it all about. She doesn't even know you're listening. And neither do the other listeners. But once the Web is really up to speed she will and they will. Then, I predict, the monetary cost of a lot more intellectual property will drop to zero.

------
P.S. Murky Thoughts is very proud (albeit not expressly licensed) to relate, "Judge Posner read your post and he says it sounds very sensible to him."

P.P.S. I think of "God" and religion as a kind of patent office, and I think part of why organized religion has been so popular is that it gets people producing in all kinds of ways for nothing. I think it's no coincidence IP law has developed as religiosity has waned.

Tell me again why we don't let manufacturers infringe drug patents to help poor countries where everybody's dying?

It seems like the corporate lobbyists must have framed the debate over drug patent protection as it's talked about in the news. Otherwise, I can't explain why it came to me as a surprise today that actually there's a simple way to look at this, by which hundreds of millions need not die, nations need not collapse and whole continents need not stay perpetually poor--and morality has nothing to do with it. Please recall (those who ever knew), that it's the government of the United States, under Article 1 of the U.S. Constitution, that grants and enforces the monopolies that corporations enjoy on patented inventions such as drug formulas. Article 1 authorizes the U.S. government to do this furthermore for a perfectly explicit and entirely practical reason: To foster innovation and "the useful arts." So patent rights exist and the government justly enforces them strictly to advance a public policy goal. It's not because the U.S. Constitution recognizes a right for white men or anybody else to keep others from copying their clever ideas. Our property rights to land aren't moral and absolute either, you might recall: There's that judicially established principle of eminent domain to evict you when it serves the greater good. So if the U.S. government sees it as in the national interest to save hundreds of millions of people dying from AIDS or the flu, then why the hell wouldn't it just waive the drug's patent protection with regard to manufacture for sale abroad?

I find it hard to believe that anybody but a pharma-funded economist even has an opinion about whether we get more drug R&D by ensuring that Burundi buys a thousand pills for a $10 a pill instead of a million pills at a penny per pill (or god forbid only 999,000 pills, at a loss of $10 in revune). Why should the negotiation of such foreign sales arrangements be at the discretion of the corporate board or CEO of a drug company?

I guess I'm missing something, because I would have thought the people of the United States had an interest in hundreds of millions dying, nations collapsing and the spread of a global pandemic to electoral districts near them. You think you know a people, and then you don't.

On Gladwell on plagiarism & intellectual property

Malcom Gladwell's New Yorker piece on plagiarism and intellectual property set me to thinking. Here are a few of the resulting thoughts.

1) I think this question Gladwell wrestles with about the extent to which an intellectual property maker such as himself is actually victimized by a borrowing and/or theft ties in deeply and perhaps belongs to the matter of prestige and influence.

2) The article took me back to a moment in grad school, when I got really excited that a name I was coining for a technique might become the name by which everybody would eventually call it. I was longing to have my trademark violated, Gladwell might say. The value of the word or name in this case is the idea behind it. By using that name a scientist frames the natural world in a certain way--my way!--and implies that the people in my lab actually invented something (rather than incrementally adapting something else) and so my presitige is enhanced--though nobody may ever know who coined the name.

3) I think you could say a political candidate generates a whole lot of intellectual property in a campaign--"Bridge to the future," "compassionate conservativism" etc--and since campaigning generally pays no salary to the candidate, I feel tempted to say this is stuff that candidates get nothing in return for. But of course the candidate works for "political capital," like the prestige and influence that academics work for.

4) Everybody in modern society has ways they might go about putting a monetary price tag on almost anything, down to their own mother. But we seem to lack an instinctive sense for valuing prestige and influence. That says something about our development as a civilization, I think, but I don't think P&I are any less valuable or intrinsically harder to value than the things we know how to price: P&I get you T&A, among other things, so from the perspective of evolutionary biology, I would think they ought to rank right up there with food, shelter, tools and labor, for which we have arrived at money.

5) So I think by making patenting an article of the consitituion the founding fathers made a natural social advance. That is, to the extent they weren't just copying others.

BTW, when I sent these thoughts to Gladwell, he wrote back that they are "really interesting," so yawn at your peril.


[Postscript: In case point 5 is opaque, it's congratulating the framers for tethering food-shelter economy to the idea-influence economy and so facilitating transactions in the way that the invention of currency advanced us over barter.]