Peter Leeson has a fantasy about pirates and their utility. as promoters of socially useful values like freedom, equality, liberty, and democracy back when monarchies were tyrants link here.

The George Mason economics professor writes in respect to the Somali pirates , but his point is worth thinking about in terms of IP piracy as well. IP pirates promote a greater social good, once one gets over the illusion that IP enforcement facilitates innovation. And as good economists, they deliver the product at its marginal cost, either nothing or close to it.

Bennett is right. IP protection does not spur innovation, it stifles it. The best example is the pharmaceutical industry. Much money that could be spent on research is spent on political contributions and legal fees to extend patents that should have already expired. The ability to protect older products from competition reduces the incentive to create new ones. The ability to extend patents past their originally-intended expiration compounds this "anti-innovation" trend even more.

And when Big Pharma can't extend its patents further, it buys out its competitors. There were dozens of pharmaceutical manufacturers 10 years ago. Now there are only a handful. And that handful is committed to buying out any generic competitors. This is why some drugs that have been around for a decade or more still are priced 10-1,000 times the actual cost of production. There simply is no competition.

IP "protection" is one of the biggest con-games around. It works directly against both innovation and competition.

Economic Populist Forum