Response – Benkler

Benkler talks about inventors and /or companies innovating less when they get more protection because protection “increase the costs that current innovators have to pay on existing knowledge more than it increases their ability to appropriate the value of their own contributions. I asked if this was a an issue of less innovation or just a delay in innovation. I think it depends on the situation. Most people innovate to make money, of course there are a few out there that do it out of the goodness of their hearts, but most do it for the money. Pharmaceuticals are a great example. Yes, there are patents so people can make a generic of your company’s drug for X number of years but that doesn’t mean that you can not expand of the idea. For example, birth control pills. I tried to look up how many different brands there are and with a cursory search I found 27 different pills in three categories. All of them once had a patent that has or has not already expired. Thats a lot of choice for women, and these are just the pill form. So just because one company got a patent for one drug does not mean that the other drug companies gave up, or even waiting for the patent to expire, they got to innovating and created more competition. This is interesting because in this case innovation is not hindered by costs, but driven by profits. On the other hand there are drugs that are not being innovated because there is not enough profit involved. Why come up for a vaccine for malaria when the only people who need it live in developing countries? Travelers already purchase pills before they go on vacation so the market where there is profit is already covered. These companies make choices based on profit and I think sometimes this is what hinders innovation.

I think that our discussion of open source was interesting. I do believe that everyone should have access to the internet and to information. On the other hand, I do think that someone has to pay for it. I am a visual journalist and as much as I would like to work and spread perspective through my stories for free, I can’t. I need to make money so I can keep doing what I do. I do give work away and work cheaply for non-profits but I have to balance that with corporate work which is getting harder and harder in this economy. Its great that Benkler gives away his book on the internet but he can afford to do that because he works in academia. No he is not profiting directly from the book but by working at Yale he was basically getting paid to write it. Yale, and all schools, want their professors to be published so they give them time to write and pay them to work at their institution.

I think it is ridiculous that newspapers make so little money from selling the work of their employees and all the new contracts want the freelancer to give full rights to the newspaper. I really think that it would be better to let the individuals profit from their syndicated work. It would create more drive for the individual to do well because doing well could mean bonuses now and then. At the Miami Herald if you are a staffer the newspaper owns all the rights in exchange for a steady (or what used to be) job that pays a certain salary, provides health benefits, pays for expenses, and allows for paid vacation time. Ok, I understand that. You get a confirmed job and they get your content. Now they want freelancers to give up the same rights. Freelancers who dont have daily work with the company, get paid less, have no health benefits, and have to pay expenses. This is out of line. I would argue that when the work of staff photographers is sold to an outside company that the individual photographer at least get a portion of what the images are sold for but they don’t. They just get a pat on the back, which maybe when you are a staffer you dont care as much, until that image is sold for a quarter of a million dollars. . .

Tags: response