It is also a question of demand. What would they have done with a pile of metal? They needed swords, shears, knives and plows. That’s about it. And alternative metals existed.

Many family names such as Miller, Cooper and Schumacher testify to the fact that until very recently, trades tended to stay in families. This was because it took long to pass on the skills needed to do the job. For normal people dying on average at age of 35 and wives being lost in childbirth, an education took too much economically active time from their lives. Reading and writing was for priests who dedicated their lives to that. Passing skills down from father to son was quicker, convenient, and more importantly, guaranteed income.

And even if they did write steelmaking skills down. In what language would it be done, on what would they write them and how permanent would those records be? And having done that, how would this knowledge be distributed?

I think you have a simplistic view of the ancient world. Life back then was about survival.

Ideas and methods aren’t scarce. IP law artificially makes them scarce to the detriment of us all.

And it isn’t businessmen who make patent and copyright law.

Jim: The main point of my example is that “valueless steel is far more valuable than valuable steel.” As you say, patents provided a protection so that the knowledge became publicly available. But the concepts of “protection” and “publicly available” are somewhat at odds with each other. What matters to society is the publicly available knowledge. That was the genius of the British patent system: patents produce the incentive to innovate, then expire after a few years so the knowledge passes into the public domain to benefit everyone. The same was true of copyright.

WAS true. Over the last few decades, publishers, (the very people Parliament established the first copyright law explicitly to protect people against,) have been lobbying successfully for a steady increase in the scope and protective duration of copyright law, twisting it into an Orwellian parody of the original concept. The ACTA is a continuation of this trend, and it will make the needed reforms, which mostly consist of reversals of existing laws such as the DMCA, that much more difficult to accomplish.

It needed a time where societies became large enough and could afford to sacrifice enough people to specialize in science, industry and non-food production in general.

As an aside, it will be interesting to see how the world copes with maintaining the entire infrastructure we now take for granted once population numbers begin to fall again.

A better post would have been to outline some of the damage the DMCA has done, and point out how ACTA extends them. For example take a look at this article about the “12 Dangerous and unintended consequences of the DMCA” http://techdirt.com/articles/20100304/0432108414.shtml

DG

How is that in agreement with Xepol? It sounds like you’re arguing my side. Patents and copyrights, as originally conceived, are good because they encourage people to come up with new, useful ideas that can end up benefiting everyone. I agree wholeheartedly with that.

What’s bad and needs to be stopped is the abuse of patent and copyright laws to suppress innovation, competition, and people’s rights, and also the slow scope creep of these laws’ protection periods, which was originally expired after only a few years and is now moving slowly towards perpetual coverage so that nothing ends up in the public domain. That doesn’t benefit society, and it turns the copyright and patent holders from benefactors to parasites.