Against Intellectual Property Law

I wrote a book.  It is based on what I learned from others.  I wrote it so others could have the information.  

I wrote a second book, again to get the information out there.  From the first book I learned writing is a good way to get paid for my time spent thinking.  Putting ideas down in writing is a good test to see if the ideas make sense.  A lot of ideas are not so good when one actually writes them out.  If you do actually write them out, well, sell them too, if they are good.

I took out a copyright, to make sure no one else could keep me from selling my ideas, because intellectual property rights (IPR) are about control through monopoly. If I wrote something, created something, designed something, but someone else got the IPR, then I would be stopped from selling my idea. I don’t want anyone to have a monopoly on ideas, especially mine.  Even me.

I do not believe intellectual property law is good.  I do not believe I have any such thing as an “intellectual property right.”  I do understand we have IPR laws in USA, and they are legally enforced.

I don’t care if anyone else copies and sells my book with my name on it.  I don’t care if anyone sells it with their name on it.

People who want my ideas want it in a form they can use.  A book or Kindle.  For me to provide it in such a form, I have to arrange to have the books printed, and distributed.  I charge a markup for my time to do so, because I need to make somewhere between $100 and $250 an hour for my time.  At that pay for my time, I make enough to have enough leisure time to work on what I want. It is a challenge to design products and things I sell so that I get that money when I work.  But that is all up to me.

Sometimes I am paid practically nothing, indeed sometimes I work for nothing, not for the money, but for the experience.  I want to learn something, so I present myself for the work.  The pay has nothing to do with it.  But I decide.

If someone wants a free copy of my book to read online, they can have that, because it costs me nothing.  But in superior forms, book or Kindle, they have to pay for that, because there is time and money on my part associated with the provision thereof. If someone wants to read my book for free on Googlebooks, that is fine with me.  If my candle is lit, and someone wants to light their candle from mine, what have I lost if they have light too? (In fact, when I started giving my book away for "free" on Google, my sales shot up from the exposure.)

(I stole that candle idea from Thomas Jefferson.)

If they find my book on Google books and copy it, print it, that is fine with me, since I did not make any effort to copy and print it.  If they copy it and print it and sell it, go ahead, since I did not make any effort to copy and print it, and sell it in that instance.  They did the work, let them make the money. But they can buy a real copy cheaper and faster than that.  Nonetheless, I can see from Google reports people do take the trouble to “steal” what they can have cheaper and better elsewhere.  Go figure.  Why would I want to take my time to stop people from being silly?

Back when my book was first published by Barnes and Noble, it was under their Print on Demand system.  Occasionally it was out of stock on Amazon.com.  On those days, people would offer my book for $200, since it was not available anywhere else, or anywhere at all. I could get it for them at $26 in two weeks, and so could the person offering it for $200. I was not interested in selling at that $200.  If they get $200, good for them.  Of course there was nothing to keep me from doing the same, except I thought it was wrong to take advantage of people that way.  Eventually I ended my experiment with B&N and print on demand, and became a publisher myself.  (O!, and you can read my book about all this for free at www.perishyourpublisher.com.)

Today, since I am the publisher my books are never out of stock on Amazon. People undercut me on my book on Amazon.com with used books, but who cares? 

What if I find someone undercutting me with new books?   My source is the best in the world.  You cannot get my quality at a lower price.  So if someone were to buy a worse quality book and sell it against me at a lower cost, their ratings on Amazon would be bad.  They would not last.

But what if this is not true?  What if the person undercutting me is doing very well?  At that point he paid to teach me about my market.  I would simply find the same quality printer at the lower cost and proceed to sell my books myself at a lower price.  People prefer to buy, all things being equal, from the author.  I would crush this “pirate.” 

I do compete against myself on Amazon.com at 33% off retail, by selling dinged books.  I learned about this from people who were doing it.  I now own that price point on Amazon.com. I crush people trying to sell against me at a discount.

If someone wants to print my book and sell it elsewhere, where I do not sell it, why should I care?  Those customers never occurred to me, and I do not care to reach them.  Let someone else do it if they so desire.  If the “pirate” proves it is good business, I will go take it.  I would send the pirate a free copy of my book in gratitude for showing me a new market.

What if someone prints the book I wrote with their name on it? What do I care?  I do not want to sell a book I wrote with someone else’s name on it, so I would ignore this.  (Of course, if there was a good market for my book but with say “Written by Brad Pitt,” for the author, I suppose I could sell such a book too.) If they copy it, change the name of the author, and print it and sell it, go ahead, since I did not make any effort to copy it, change the name of the author and print it, and sell it.  They did the work, let them make the money.

People who have a monopoly, or believe in intellectual property rights, find these situations and call a lawyer.  I prefer to find these situations, and make money.  Not spend it on a lawyer on a fool’s errand to stop people from buying my book.

Why should I have a cut?  I am contributing nothing to the deal.  I wrote the book, but so what?  All books are written by someone, and something like 78% of new books sold in bookstores are under no copyright whatsoever (Shakespeare, Plato, Ibsen..)  Publishers make their money on marketing their edition of Plato, not from monopoly on Plato.

Some people do not want to read my book on Google, but do want a .pdf.  Someone offered my book as a .pdf, so now I do too. Since I have to host and manage that, I charge $10.  But now Amazon with Kindle has made that easier and better.  $2.99.  Kindle is now 10% of my revenue.  Amazon pays me for Kindle sales not because of intellectual property rights, but because they do not want me to sell it at $2.99.   Amazon gets $1.99, I get a buck.  I’ll take a buck for doing nothing.  If Amazon gave me nothing, I’d see there is a market and do it myself.  So would a million other authors.  I can get the Kindle reader from the same source Amazon does, or one close enough.  Amazon’s supplier and I have had discussions about me importing the readers to brand them with local independent bookstore names, and so individual bookstores could do what Amazon.com does.  If Amazon messes with me, I will.  I did it to Barnes and Noble, and they are going out of business.  Now, please do not think I believe I can or did bring down a business.  Amazon and Barnes and Noble do not fear John Spiers, they fear the one million John Spiers (authors, collectively) who would do what I can do.  Amazon knows I and the others will take a buck for doing nothing, even though they are making $2.  It is not intellectual property law that guides them, but marketing and contract law.

I did not write a book so I could spend time worrying about whether I am getting my “cut.“   if someone figured out how to make money off my book in a way that did not occur to me, or targeting a market I do not care to pursue, why should I get anything?  Because I wrote it?  The writing is sunk cost.  It is marketing after the writing that matters.

What if the person with the other market for my book begins to do very well?  Well, then he is an idiot to sell my book, because just when it gets good for him I will come into "his" market and compete.  If people want cheaper copies that fall apart, and the pirate teaches me that, well, I know where to get books that fall apart.  I will crush him.  But the customers do not want such a book.  (I bought  a John Grisham novel in an airport before a trans-pacific flight.  It fell apart before I landed.  On the way back I showed the vendor.  Who knows what happened, but I am pretty sure a grieved bookseller made trouble all along the distrbution chain. In any event, that kind of practice does not last.)

The idea that someone can steal your idea is delusional.  It is grounded in the delusion that you can “own” an idea.  I own the books in my warehouse, not the ideas contained therein.  There may be a “law” that says I own the ideas therein, but I think I would be foolish to believe that.   Why, I might try to protect my idea, when I cannot possibly protect what does not exist.  And worse yet, I would not sell anywhere near as many books, at such wide margins, if I believed in monopoly instead of markets.  It is inevitable that humans get lazy when they get power.

All this IPR fighting reminds me of a book by Gogol, called Dead Souls.  Gogol looks at people fighting over ownership of something that can not be owned, that is dead souls. It is historically accurate, and a pretty funny book.   In time IPR will seem as strange.

I found my class on the internet, packaged and sold by somebody who charges $180 for it.   You pay $180, they send you a CD.   Hmmmm...  Maybe there is a market there...

Designers want their items sold.  I do not need to control a design to get a license to sell it.  Selling dinner plates, I no more cared about “owning” or controlling a design than with a book. I want customers.  There is nothing in a functioning economy that requires intellectual property rights.

Designs are created, produced distributed, sold, paid for, and die out with no IPR whatsoever.  This is true of almost everyting for sale, and for most of history. And the strange fact is most IPR covered goods never go anywhere.  Every day we see new examples.  If anything, IPR correlates with failure.

Yes, we live in an IPR  regime so work with it, but do not be fooled into believing in it.  We want market, not monopoly.  We want our suppliers to sell our items to others, even our competitors, as much as possible, for the reasons I lay out in the text, and under those conditions.

80% of new businesses fail in the first five years, all larded with conventional wisdom. Particularly prone to failure are those with IPR.

I need to make money if I am going to sell books, but I don’t think I need to make ALL of the money.  There is a point of diminishing returns, where it is counterproductive to me to concern myself with others selling “my” ideas.  IBM, the #1 patent holder in USA, is open-sourcing its patents so it can make more money off its ideas.

I never steal ideas from others not because it is wrong (it is not wrong) but because I have better things to work on.  If I am not the best I what I do (I am), then I am the only one.  There is not enough time in life for me to work on all of the good ideas I have.  Why would I waste time working on someone else's idea?  Mine are all better.

This is true of you too.  Sadly, particularly in the USA, awareness of personal creativity is grounded out of people.  Part of being self-employed is a personal rediscovery of your creative, passionate, joyful self.

There is not a single instance in the history of mankind where someone stole another's idea and got rich.  At the same time, no one has ever had an idea that was not a blend of many ideas before.  Shakespeare re-wrote Plautus. Jobs emulated Xerox. Edison set up a system to gather, test, prototype and market ideas.  He also took out patents and spent much time fighting legal battles about them.  He was successful for the former, not the latter.

People who violate this made up idea of intellectual property rights can be arrested and jailed for what they do.  (This does not mean what they do is wrong, it just means they can be arrested and jailed.)  If they resist arrest, their resistance can be met with force.  If they resist enough, they can even be killed.  This happens often in situations where the intellectual property in question is drugs.  This strikes me as crazy, using state power to protect a silly idea.  Jailing people over it.  Even killing people for it.  Crazy!

I am just not interested in that to begin with.  But far more important, I like to make money for my work.  The best way to do so is to be free of the “intellectual property rights” error.

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