Intellectual property rights are less about the intellect and more
about property. In every single year of the last decade, the global
turnover in intellectual property has outweighed the total industrial
production of the world. These markets being global, the monopolists of
intellectual products fight unfair competition globally. A pirate in
Skopje is in direct rivalry with Bill Gates, depriving Microsoft of
present and future revenue, challenging its monopolistic status as well
as jeopardizing its competition-deterring image.
The Open Source Movement weakens the classic model of property rights
by presenting an alternative, viable, vibrant, model which does not
involve over-pricing and anti-competitive predatory practices. The
current model of property rights encourages monopolistic behavior,
non-collaborative, exclusionary innovation (as opposed, for instance,
to Linux), and litigiousness. The Open Source movement exposes the
myths underlying current property rights philosophy and is thus
subversive.
But the inane expansion of intellectual property rights may merely be a
final spasm, threatened by the ubiquity of the Internet as they are.
Free scholarly online publications nibble at the heels of their pricey
and anticompetitive offline counterparts.
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