And is not surprising when you realize that it is basically the government going around granting monopolies to private entities, and what incentives that creates (the main incentive is to expand the monopoly power rather than to create and innovate, innovation is contrary to monopolies).
The article is very light on details about how the "study" arrived at their conclusions and figures (I hesitate to call it a study, because it didn't actually test any hypotheses).
The report is published by a group that lobbies for "copyright reform that enables fair access to content", with a membership is predominantly tertiary institutes.
They argue that a number of industries are dependent on some "limitations and exceptions" to copyright law. These industries include: research and education, publishing, broadcasting, film, music, ISPs, and the performing arts. The industries currently employ some people, make some money, and contribute some amount to GDP. Their extend of this dependence on copyright limitations is not quantified by thre report and is quite vague (focussing mainly on quotation, citation, and critique).
It concludes that if Australia implements "better crafted limitations and exceptions", these industries can increase their job/income/GDP metrics, and reduce the amount paid as licensees of copyright protected works to foreign companies.
The methodology of this report is a joke. For example, to come up with the $600 million figure, they say:
"We simulated an increase in productivity growth in the exceptions using industries of just one one-hundredth of its otherwise experienced growth in the three years from 2007 through 2010 – a very conservative estimate of
additional growth."
i.e., they pulled 1% (net) increase in growth out of the air, and then simply calculate the economic benefits of that hypothetical increased growth.
Meanwhile, creativity—far from being stifled without more copyright laws on the books—is currently thriving. There’s been a market increase in the amount of movies, music, and books produced over the last decade, as this comprehensive study done by CCIA and Techdirt’s Mike Masnick shows.
That's a poor argument for loosening copyright restrictions - it makes it seem as if the status quo is OK. I personally think existing copyright terms need to be significantly shortened, and that a legal challenge might succeed on the basis that Congress is empowered to grant copyrights for 'a limited time.' Insofar as copyright terms exceed the average human lifetime, they are effectively endless for all but the longest-lived members of society, promoting a creative gerontocracy.
Technological advancement (eg: music software, cheap HD cameras, etc.) and significantly better distribution platforms (eg: the internet) can account for an increase in production... they need to account for that, otherwise its kinda nonsensical to say what they say.
But then, it seems this is ideologically driven from the beginning.
It is much like the "studies" in the 1990s, published by microsoft (and you see them now from google) that say Microsoft (or android) is winning. (despite, for instance, Samsung never giving sales details, and when they were forced to by the recent lawsuit, it turned out they were pitiful... so you have press claiming huge sales to further and ideological position that "Android is winning" (and thus "open" works, even though Android is no more open than iOS) using essentially made up data and then other sources repeat it to the point where large numbers of (frankly, uninformed) people believe it.
...even though Android is no more open than iOS...
Wait a minute. We all know from reading your comments on which side of the Apple/Google divide you fall, but how on earth do you come to that conclusion? Can you download and redistribute the complete source code to iOS?
I'd like to see a quantitative study on the effects of ridiculous patent laws. Most HNers know that US patent law, and the entire patent system here is broken, but a quantitative study might be able to convince people who otherwise wouldn't pay any attention to the issue to give it some thought.
The US Patent law, and the "entire patent system" are not broken. A lot of very vocal HNers like to go on ideological rants along these lines, but when pressed for specifics they generally cannot back them up (eg: they haven't even read the patents in question, or don't know the difference between a utility patent and a design patent, or even what design or utility patents cover.) In fact, I have yet to meet someone who opposes the current patent system who understood what patents are.
Anti-IP propaganda claiming that the patent system is "doing damage" by measuring the enforcement of patents against people will be good for ideological arguments but actually be pointless.
Because it comes from that lack of understanding of the benefit patents provide. Patents incentivize the publication of inventions so that others, who may not have been up to speed on the state of the art, can come up to speed and start competing.
They also disincentivize the need to obfuscate or protect your inventions using physical or technological means, which improves repairability and in fact, enabled the entire standard-component industrial sector we have that has allowed integrated circuits to be such a big part of our lives.
Without patents, technological progress would be severely restricted-- not because there "would be no incentive to invent" (a straw-man that anti-IP people seem fond of knocking down) but because there would be vastly less communication and understanding of how other people's inventions work.
And like Global Warming and "Quantitative Easing" and other nonsensical, anti-scientific, ideological positions, the proponents, rather than make or defend logical arguments for their positions, tend to use signaling like "most HNers know the US Patent law... is broken". You just presume your conclusion, and a lot of others do as well, which is why they can't make arguments and instead are forced to downvote or shout down those who make counter arguments. Since having a good argument (with well researched citations) is not a defense against downvotes on HN, your claim becomes self fulfilling-- anyone who might challenge the ideology of anti-IP with facts, logic or reason, is downvoted so you don't have to see them.
Which, ironically, is why I'm posting this here. Becuase I really, really, hate to see the single mindedness, and cheering that groupthink.
So, if you want to claim that the system is broken, feel free to make an argument, and feel free to account for the factors I briefly touched on.
In fact, I have yet to meet someone who opposes the current patent system who understood what patents are.
Are you talking about meeting someone on HN? How about HN user grellas, a Silicon Valley business lawyer? I doubt his arguments against the status quo are made in ignorance:
Without patents, technological progress would be severely restricted-- not because there "would be no incentive to invent" (a straw-man that anti-IP people seem fond of knocking down) but because there would be vastly less communication and understanding of how other people's inventions work.
It is difficult to accept this argument when the majority of software patents we see in lawsuits are written as obtusely as possible. Software patent language is the antithesis of "communicat[ing]... how other people's inventions work."
Your response is exactly what I'm talking about. You believe, but you don't know. You can't make an argument, you point to someone else, and advocate faith.
Imagine if a religious person had used that kind of "argument" to you, and referenced a priest regarding the law?
It is ok to not know. And it is ok to take things on faith. The problem is, when people think that their faith means they are right and people who make arguments they can't counter are "Wrong" because it goes against their faith.
Claiming that nobody who disagrees with you knows what they are talking about is also a symptom of religious thinking. You sound exactly like your description. Have you made any arguments yourself that don't beg the question by saying that patents are good because they were intended to be?
You said you've never met someone who knows what patents are and still opposes them, implying that nobody who knows is opposed to patents. I provided a proof by counterexample of someone it would be difficult for you to argue doesn't know what he is talking about.
And you haven't. Instead you claim that I don't know what patents are. I do know the difference between a design patent and a utility patent (and a trademark, and copyright). I've seen good and bad examples of each. Yet I still oppose software patents, support reduced terms for all of the above except trademarks, and want to see a much higher burden of proof for a patent to be granted, and higher still for a lawsuit to proceed. I also argue that independent invention should be a defense against patent infringement that doesn't require an army of lawyers to raise. Yet somehow you will try to claim I don't know what I am talking about.
The real test to distinguish rational from religious thought is the willingness to change one's mind. I'll tell you what would change mine: a plethora of incontrovetible, scientifically sound studies that prove that the harm done to and risk imposed upon small innovators and market competition is worth the benefit to society; or a solid implementation of the changes I'd like to see, that subsequently results in a collapse of innovation (collapse of any business alone does not count as a collapse of innovation). What would change your mind?
Congratulations. You've finally convinced me that an ignore list would be a good feature on HN.
Listening to you rail against single-mindedness and groupthink when you're probably the single most self-righteous and closeminded and ideologically intolerant frequent poster on HN is surreal. It's really not easy to find people that are so reliably certain they have the answers to everything. You're certainly the first self-professed anarchist I've met that's a staunch proponent of patent and contract law.
You will only brush off any rational argument I care to make.
But let's play: you claim to be an anarchist yet are strongly in favor of patent and contract law. Explain how you can reconcile these two beliefs. Who do you imagine will enforce these laws and how?
I'm not an expert on patents in the least, but the system feels broken when a company can be awarded $1B from a patent infringement lawsuit.
From what I've read (I'll add sources as I find them), the patent process takes more than two years on average to get approved, patent examiners are given patents that they don't have domain expertise in, and they don't get enough time to review patents.
It seems, on the outside, that lots of money and time is spent on patent lawsuits and purchasing patent portfolios and none of it really leads to the advancement of anything besides lawyers and lawsuits.
Do you think the patent system is fine how it is, or is there reform you would like to see?
In ARM's case, patents serve a valuable purpose: they allow a separation of concerns. The company that designs the microprocessor does not have to be the company that builds things using the microprocessor. Allowing ARM to focus on what they do best--designing microprocessors, and allowing say Samsung to focus on what they do best, manufacturing things, helps everyone. The patent in this case is simply a legal device that allows people to transact in terms of a design.
Also, looking at the outlier damages award from a patent infringement isn't really meaningful, in the same way that looking at the damages award for medical malpractice isn't really meaningful. Occasionally, you'll have a jury that awards someone $10m for a stubbed toe, but if you look at comprehensive studies of medical malpractice suits you'll see that: 1) most of the time the jury is right; 2) the actual overhead of the system is 1-3% of a $1.5 trillion industry, which is tied to a profession that is otherwise almost entirely self-regulated. People tend to focus on the damages awards and think "oh that's costing the economy money" but obviously damages awards just shift money from one place to the other. The "cost" is in the litigation fees and how the law changes peoples' incentives, and that's much harder to evaluate than just looking at a big $100m judgment.
This doesn't make sense to me. Are you saying that, without patents, ARM couldn't license it's designs to Samsung? Why not?
Or are you saying ARM wouldn't be able to stay in business because Samsung would just steal their designs? I don't think that is true, for the exact "expert" reasons you mention: ARM is great at designing processors. If Samsung wants reasonable updates to stay competitive with other manufacturers, they would need to pay for those experts.
Consider how ARM might initiate a licensing transaction with Samsung. Don't you think Samsung will want its engineers to go over the design extensively to see how it'll work with their manufacturing process, etc, before committing to buy? Without IP protection, how does ARM give Samsung the blueprints without giving up any leverage they have in the transaction? What's to stop Samsung from just taking the blueprints and not paying? What keeps Samsung from turning around and selling the blueprints to other people at a lower price?
Moreover, sure ARM might be better at designing microprocessors, but once ARM does the heavy lifting, it's much easier for Samsung to hire its own people to do updates. They might not be as good as ARM's people, but its hard to argue with free.
I worked for two tech companies that sold only IP. We were in the business of developing the software that was incorporated into heavy-duty networking equipment and military radios. Our customers were companies like Raytheon, etc. Our competitive advantage was our expertise and our size. We could do experimental stuff much quicker than the big companies with more internal bureaucracy and more risk aversion. But there is no way we could match their manufacturing, distribution, and sales expertise. That wasn't up our alley. It's very difficult to conceive of working relationships like this without being able to transact in IP. The type of work we did was kind of like crypto in the sense that it took years and millions of dollars to figure out what worked, but it was pretty straightforward to verify the working solution. Without being able to patent the product of that research, we'd have no leverage against the companies that had the big manufacturing muscle. As soon as we showed them our designs they could just run with it. If we shipped them binaries, they could easily just reverse engineer them.
I think peoples' opposition to IP really stems from the fact that most of the patents people are exposed to are pretty crappy. It causes them to think of the average software patent as something they could stumble onto accidentally. But that's more of an opposition to the bar used for software patents rather than an opposition to the concept. Realize that highly complex inventions like OFDM are the subject of patents too.
Contract law is perfectly adequate in that situation - Samsung signs a contract with ARM which specifies the exact terms under which they can use ARM's designs.
It's not perfectly adequate. E.g. ARM can't let Samsung see the design until Samsung signs a contract. It makes it difficult to shop the design around. Also, a contract that provided the protections similar to a patent would be an ad-hoc informally specified version of patent law, and we'd replace patent litigation with more contract litigation.
It also provides no recourse against third parties. What if someone reverse engineers the design from one of Samsung's products? This is not theoretical--there's a major Chinese networking company that used to copy the designs of a major US networking company down to the silk screening. It also prevents ARM from publishing details in trade journals and forces them to keep documentation and designs under lock and key. It makes industrial espionage tremendously more valuable. Sub licensing, transferability, etc, become a huge hassle.
And to what benefit? Consider one suit wildly maligned on these boards: Oracle v Google. Without copyright, that lawsuit still would have happened more or less along the same lines, except it would be about whether Google violated its contract with Sun about how Google was allowed to use Sun's code. And t would have been longer and more expensive because the parties couldn't speak the common language of copyright law.
With the important difference that a truly independent reimplementation is not covered.
It also provides no recourse against third parties. What if someone reverse engineers the design from one of Samsung's products? This is not theoretical--there's a major Chinese networking company that used to copy the designs of a major US networking company down to the silk screening. It also prevents ARM from publishing details in trade journals and forces them to keep documentation and designs under lock and key. It makes industrial espionage tremendously more valuable. Sub licensing, transferability, etc, become a huge hassle.
Is this US networking company you speak of still profitable? Looks like ARM are fairly heavy-handed with defending their designs at the moment, so you'll forgive me being skeptical of patents encouraging the sharing of IP: http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4042770/Student-s-AR...
It's not perfectly adequate. E.g. ARM can't let Samsung see the design until Samsung signs a contract. It makes it difficult to shop the design around. Also, a contract that provided the protections similar to a patent would be an ad-hoc informally specified version of patent law, and we'd replace patent litigation with more contract litigation.
It also provides no recourse against third parties. What if someone reverse engineers the design from one of Samsung's products? This is not theoretical--there's a major Chinese networking company that used to copy the designs of a major US networking company down to the silk screening. It also prevents ARM from publishing details in trade journals and forces them to keep documentation and designs under lock and key. It makes industrial espionage tremendously more valuable. Sub licensing, transferability, etc, become a huge hassle.
And to what benefit? Consider one suit wildly maligned on these boards: Oracle v Google. Without copyright, that lawsuit still would have happened more or less along the same lines, except it would be about whether Google violated its contract with Sun about how Google was allowed to use Sun's code. And t would have been longer and more expensive because the parties couldn't speak the common language of contract law.
Your 'publication of ideas' argument applies only to things that can be hidden.
But the patent system applies to a super-set: things that are plain, too.
Therefore, by your own argument, the patent system is operating beyond its justification, and so could indeed be described as 'broken'.
In any case, the patent system is a trade-off -- of increasing production against restricting access (see: the standard economic model of it). If it is badly calibrated, the net effect is negative. And the current state of economic knowledge is that no-one knows whether it is set correctly (see: 'The economic structure of intellectual property law'; Landes, Posner; 2003. Conclusion, p422, s3.). When there is a whole big system, of various obvious costs, and you do not even know the net effect is positive, the sensible thing is to stop doing it (probably by phasing out), until something proves otherwise.
The patent system doesn't apply to things that are "plain", though this word is a bit broad, so it isn't clear if you mean it the way I take you to mean it. Further, I didn't say that this was the justification for it, I said that this was one of the advantages of it, and thus, even if you disagree with the advantage, that doesn't ipso facto, make the system broken.
>When there is a whole big system, of various obvious costs, and you do not even know the net effect is positive, the sensible thing is to stop doing it (probably by phasing out), until something proves otherwise.
Your argument also applies to government, in fact, from an economic perspective, government has a clear negative return (to the tune of $70 Trillion in the USA roughly).
Get rid of the patent system by getting rid of government, and you'll have my agreement.
If you think it is ok to have government but not a patent system, then there's contradiction in your positions.
USC 35 is freely available on the internet. You would be making a mistake to think that all the people who disagree with you do so because they know nothing about it. Especially when there are more than just design & utility patents out there -- http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/ido/oeip/taf/patdesc.htm
To be fair, most of the "trolls" that are abusing the system readily admit to not really understanding it either. They pick their targets without understanding the business of those targets solely based on the fact that they "look like companies we usually sue". They often name multiple patents with dozens of irrelevant claims hoping there's something in there that will stick.
Clearly something in there is broken. I think the real contention on HN is whether or not there's a big enough baby in all that bathwater to be worth saving.
> A lot of very vocal HNers like to go on ideological rants
Quite.
> because there would be vastly less communication and understanding of how other people's inventions work.
You must be familiar with the term 'reverse engineering'. There isn't much that can't be unwound. If secrecy of how things work was an effective protection there wouldn't be a patent system to begin with. Once you release something 'how it works' will be evident to anyone determined enough to find out.
People on HN have this view that the whole world is software. Reverse engineering may be practical and indeed trivial in software, but aren't for the circuits buried in an F-35. And publication is tremendously valuable for inventions that have cross-disciplinary value. Not many people working on artificial hearts would have the time or think to reverse engineer mechanical equipment used in a factory, even if there might be applicable inventions.
Reverse engineering has been applied to all the fields that you cite. The F-35 is a funny example in the sense that if there is one item that would be reverse engineered in its entirety down to the last transistor then it probably would be that plane if one accidentally made its way to China somehow. Nothing motivates more than a perceived gap in weapons systems ability. Reverse engineering of electronics is a solved problem, even though it may be a lot of work.
Is there some proof that someone got a useful idea on how to make an artificial heart out of a patent published about mechanical equipment used in a factory?
If you want to keep something secret, keep it to yourself. Monkey see, monkey do!
It has been applied, but it's much less practical in those fields than it is in software. I'm just saying people on HN tend to see everything through the lens of software, and other engineering fields aren't the same.
This is a point that has also been made by German historian Eckhard Höffner[1]. He claims that one of the main reasons for Germany's rise as an industrial power during the 19th century was its very lax copyright regulations that allowed a rapid distribution of pirate prints of publications to every corner of Germany, thus creating a very large reading public that would later flock to universities and engineering schools and fuel Germany's innovative economy.
So far there hasn't been an English translation, although Ars Technica, Wired and the English edition of the Spiegel carried good reviews/summaries[2][3][4]
[1] Eckhard Höffner: Geschichte und Wesen des Urheberrechts. Verlag Europäische Wirtschaft, 2010, ISBN 978-3930893164 (2 Tomes).
Hardly surprising, the less government interference there is in the market the better the economy does. Look at the industries that are tanking such as finance, manufacturing, education, healthcare, airlines and you'll find no end of regulation and interference.
For heaven's sake, extension of copyright terms comes at the behest of the publishing industry. Governments would likely welcome the increased economic activity and lower administrative burden of lower copyright protection, but publishers are going to support whatever politicians promise them the most revenue protection. Your various comparative examples are driven by wildly different factors (not least demographic ones) and don't support your argument.
> For heaven's sake, extension of copyright terms comes at the behest of the publishing industry.
This is known as regulatory capture, and is what is to be expected once the government starts to grant monopolies: instead of competing and innovating, corporations dedicate themselves to much more lucrative rent-seeking.
When the government is the one who decides who can do business and how, it becomes much more lucrative to put your energy in lobbying the government for rules favorable to you, than to put the energy in competing and pleasing consumers.
Without patents the only thing that matters is execution: pleasing consumers, with patents all that matters is how you can milk the system and use it to crush your competitors that might have more competitive products.
You're assuming the government initiates regulation. In reality, merchants and artisans tend to form into guilds and then demand new entrants to that market be licensed. Adam Smith noted this phenomenon in The Wealth of Nations in the famous passage: 'People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary.'
Are you sure that the finance industry is tanking because of too much government regulations? I am not sure if the housing crisis (leading to a poor economy) came about as a result of over-the-top government regulations and interference as per your argument.
Would you also say that lack of government regulations/interference (Affordable Care Act) would have improved the healthcare scenario in the long term?
The housing crisis did, in fact, come from over the top government regulation. Further, the reason health care is so expensive is government regulation.
In the 1990s the democrats decided that the banks were not lending to blacks out of racism... later studies that accounted for ability to repay the loans showed this wasn't the case, but at the time the Clinton administration imposed regulations that basically said banks had to loan to people who couldn't repay, and that fannie mae and freddie mac woul buy up those bad loans.... this literally created the housing crisis that blew up 10 years later. It wasn't wall street, it was clinton (and a bush as well, for keeping interest rates artificially low).
Milton Friedman found that over the past 100 years government regulations drove up health care costs 26 fold and reduced availability. So that $100,000 operation that would bankrupt you now would only cost $5,000 without government regulation-- you could put it on a credit card.
The ACA is destroying the health care industry and will dramatically make the situation much worse.
But most people are never told these things. They are told political lies spread via propaganda that blames Wall Street (or "Glass Steegall" - I can't tell you how many times peple have evoked that phrase, people who obviously know nothing about what that law did).
Most people are ignorant and believe propaganda, and that makes them easier to control, which is what politicians like to do.
Further, the reason health care is so expensive is government regulation.
No, healthcare is expensive because there are multiple layers of middlemen, each trying to earn an increasing amount of profit, and because healthcare treatments are performed without regard to efficacy by profit-motivated private medical service providers.
Healthcare costs have increased far more rapidly than the increase in healthcare legislation; indeed, the only metric that has increased alongside costs is profits earned by HMOs and other insurers. By the way, "profits" is just the net revenue the insurers earn, after deducting from income the insane, multi-million dollar yearly bonuses they pay to the C-suite officers and board members.
If government were the driving force behind healthcare increases, the rest of the world would spend significantly greater sums of their GDP on healthcare than we do, yet they spend far less--and have comparatively better results for the amounts they do spend.
The worst thing to happen to healthcare wasn't government; it was the corporatization of health care.
Healthcare in the US is expensive because it doesn't follow a normal market economy. The people using healthcare generally aren't paying for the services out of pocket, so they have no incentive to try to keep costs low. The government has encouraged this through tax deductible insurance. The system has gotten so bad that it is nearly impossible to find out how much a procedure will cost before you have it. Of course, it's all made worse by America's belief that there is a pill for everything and somehow, if you visit doctors enough and have enough procedures done, you won't die.
This is why many companies like health savings plans: they put the consumer back in touch with how much healthcare costs. The consumer has an incentive to understand and reduce costs.
Healthcare in the US is expensive because it doesn't follow a normal market economy. The people using healthcare generally aren't paying for the services out of pocket, so they have no incentive to try to keep costs low.
I'm just curious -- can you point to a country in which healthcare does follow a "normal market economy", and which therefore has a more efficient healthcare system?
I don't think this surprises anyone - the problem is that the people who stand to benefit the most in the short term from copyright regulation staying the way it is are those who have the most political power.
The real question is how we can change that situation from the outside.
Nah that's absolutely the wrong question, and the very question those in power want you to ask. Putting different people in charge won't fix it either. The problem is fundamental to human nature, we're not accustomed to being free. Kings used to fear democracy because they were worried that we'd become free, instead as soon as we were free we started electing new kings. Even in the good ole' US they wanted to elect George Washington dictator for life.
You should instead ask, how can I setup my environment so that I am not subject to the will of others... Don't ask the government for your freedom, take it from them.
You're right and it is typical of HN that you're getting downvoted for making an argument.... but the ironic thing is, I am pro-IP and I agree with you-- government will never give you freedom. (get rid of government- I'm an anarchist- and you'll still have IP, it will just be enforced with contracts.)
> (get rid of government- I'm an anarchist- and you'll still have IP, it will just be enforced with contracts.)
That's got to be one of the funniest things on HN ever. So, get gid of the government and you will use contracts at the same time?
Contracts can be made between consenting parties and that's all fine and good as long as they both live by the terms. But as soon as one party thinks the other one does not then you will need some mechanism of arbitration, in other words a judicial system. And that sooner or later leads to authority vested in - you've guessed it - a government.
You can't be an anarchist and be pro-IP at the same time, the cognitive dissonance is huge.
No surprise that reducing copyright protections drives economic growth. It acts like a reduction in cost for the raw material of other creative and distribution businesses. What is not as clear is the impact on long-term innovation--in particular the very capital-intensive kind.
The Lord of the Rings movies would have been less expensive to make if they did not have to pay for the rights to use the story and characters. But would the studio have given the green light to such an expensive shoot if they had a lower expectation of return?
Why should they expect a lower return? While I understand that value in being unique, I can't imagine a high quality production of a public work would be damaged that much by low quality productions of a similar work unless it's just profanely overdone. And in that case, why would they have sunk that much money into it?
I mean, every time a zombie film comes out, three cheaper ones come straight to video. The new Dawn of the Dead did fine. And even in copyright, Snakes on a Train was in video stores three days before Snakes on a Plane came to theaters!
Sure, they may have had to think of a unique name to identify their product to fans (even just "Peter Jackson's LotR",) but I'm not convinced that they would've suffered, had lower quality renditions been widely available. It may have made them stand out more.
http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/against.h...
And is not surprising when you realize that it is basically the government going around granting monopolies to private entities, and what incentives that creates (the main incentive is to expand the monopoly power rather than to create and innovate, innovation is contrary to monopolies).