The Right to Read is a story set in the future but presented as a historical article. The main conflict of the story comes from the protagonist’s dilemma of whether or not to help the girl he likes by letting her borrow his computer for a midterm which in turn would put him at risk of being caught by the Software Protection Authority for failure to prevent a crime as a computer owner. The regulations and laws of the 2040s are compared with how things were back in the 1900s when libraries existed. To avoid Central Licensing from detecting the breach and SPA from automatically catching them, Dan decided to give Lissa his password. She doesn’t report him and his kind gesture eventually leads to their marriage then move to Luna as a couple to read into the history of copyright and flee from SPA. In 2062, the Tycho Uprising began and led to the universal right to read.
The question that this story raises is whether patenting and licensing are becoming too restrictive to creativity and freedom of information. If the amount of incentive needed to create the invention is surpassed by the insulation from competition that the patent protection provides with, market prices increase above efficient levels and cause distortions in the allocation of resources. In this day and age, it is already hard to afford school, if regulations such as those mentioned in the story are implemented, textbooks and supplies would become much harder to buy and not many would be able to afford being in school. Another impact this would have on society is that it would cause people to be constantly paranoid and live in fear of accidentally performing infringement. Another thing is that if someone would like to express their creativity and publish their hard work, it would have to be truly unique for it to take and get money.
On the other hand, producers and content developers would greatly benefit from this and will be constantly encouraged to come up with novel ideas, which is the opposite of what the previous argument proposed. It would allow for different ideas to collide and improve cohesion. Besides, nowadays, most software innovation is incremental – they’re created by dev teams at a modest cost and are quickly improved and replaced. The different components that make these up could be patented and create rich opportunities for trying to cripple competitors by suing for infringement.
I believe the current legal system is good at the level it is right now because it brings fair value to the creators of content, giving them credit for their work. It preserves their hard work and rewards them for their efforts to invent something new. It also allows for a database of distinct ideas and encourages people to think differently, which leads to innovation and creativity. It is unfortunate that there are people that currently exist who try to cheat the system by buying off patents and using it for their own benefit.
Rumsha Rafi CP373 Blog 