Some interesting takes. Unfortunately the authors present a lot of questionable "evidence" that is mostly anecdotal and often outdated. For example, they argue that the book market in the 19th century worked fine with no copyright laws, and use that as "proof" that today's copyright laws are hindering the free market.
I also don't like the name-dropping where the authors use quotes from famous people to prove their point, e.g. "According to Bill Gates - hardly your radical communist or utopist - 'if people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today.'"
I could not finish the book because it got tedious. Most arguments were heavily biased and the rhethoric was often questionable.
Review of 'Against Intellectual Monopoly' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
This is a challenging book to recommend, but it absolutely must be recommended. Why challenging? Because I think there are a lot of things about the style and language of this book that will be off-putting.
On the level of technical writing, the authors have a tendency to provide long pages of multiple examples illustrating a single point; of mixing which paper or study they are discussing at any given time; or occasionally of not clearly identifying the relevance of what they're discussing to their overall point. If you expend some extra mental effort to keep a hold of all the information they're presenting, it makes sense, but they don't make it as easy as they could.
And on a discursive level, the authors' voice is one that will rankle a lot of people, especially progressive-minded people. There's some definite Boomer energy here, the phrasing or thought experiments presented are …
This is a challenging book to recommend, but it absolutely must be recommended. Why challenging? Because I think there are a lot of things about the style and language of this book that will be off-putting.
On the level of technical writing, the authors have a tendency to provide long pages of multiple examples illustrating a single point; of mixing which paper or study they are discussing at any given time; or occasionally of not clearly identifying the relevance of what they're discussing to their overall point. If you expend some extra mental effort to keep a hold of all the information they're presenting, it makes sense, but they don't make it as easy as they could.
And on a discursive level, the authors' voice is one that will rankle a lot of people, especially progressive-minded people. There's some definite Boomer energy here, the phrasing or thought experiments presented are of a very 20th-century-white-academia slant, and most unfortunately of all, the authors liberally invoke a lot of specific language that will trigger alarm bells in a lot of people's brains - they talk about "free trade" and "innovation" and "competition" with clear positive valence, and for a lot of progressives those terms and others are powerfully negatively coded, so I fear progressive-minded people reading this will quickly conclude the authors are their enemies.
But if you actually look past the surface-level issues and the voice of the book, and engage with the data and the ideas presented, you'll find the book presents a powerful, sweeping, and compelling case that intellectual property is a serious social ill. The authors don't use the words, but they describe the ways in which intellectual property is a colonialist project that serves to project colonial power onto disenfranchised groups and extract wealth from them. They describe the ways IP is used to accumulate wealth and power and to maintain a stranglehold on that power, in a pattern that slowly and exponentially builds on itself, creating massive inequality. They describe the absurd excesses of the marketing and advertising industries; the way byzantine legal systems are exploited by the wealthy or the well-connected to attack smaller businesses or individuals; the capitulation of public legal bodies to corporate lobbies and interests; the systemic problems that allow and encourage all kinds of misbehaviour in the pharmaceutical sector.
In short, they describe a lot of the fundamental problems with what people have taken to calling "late capitalism."
And what's more, they make a convincing case from multiple angles that one of the legal system that enables and propels all this - intellectual property - not only causes great social ill, but provides very little benefit to society in return. They do not claim that IP is entirely responsible for the problems of our economic system - but it's clear, after reading this, that it's a system that supports predatory corporations to the detriment of almost everyone else. Thankfully, they provide a fairly wide-ranging list of thoughts for improving on the system, and ways to capture or preserve the few benefits IP does yield without actually keeping this noxious system in place.
There are certainly a few little issues here and there with the content of the book. I wish they had the self-awareness to address in depth the fact that the book itself is copyrighted, for example, though they only address this a few times in a tongue-in-cheek way. Some of the passages on the intersection of copyright and digital media would have benefitted strongly from case studies or even just thought experiments, since those seem like areas where readers will immediately start thinking of "what-about" scenarios that the authors never properly address.
But overall, stylistic issues and details aside, the overall argument of the book is powerful and compelling. At the very least I hope to see another author revisit this in more modern times, to engage with some of the changes we've seen with digital and biological technology. More importantly, though, I hope somebody, somewhere, is slowly building a movement to begin dismantling a system that seems to primarily serve the consolidation of power and wealth at the expense of all else.
