

Did Germany experience industrial boom in 19th c due to absence of copyright? - afschar
http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,710976,00.html

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akgerber
China probably wouldn't be growing as quickly today if it strictly respected
copyrights.

Copyrights favor established industrial producers because they hold the IP.

~~~
DanielN
It is arguable that this has only become true in the past ten years. For a
long time lack of IP controls was a big barrier to international trade for
China.

~~~
bediger
I'm not asking this to be snide, or sarcastic, but...

Do you have a source for that? I'd be interested in seeing such a thing.

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10ren
The US had lax copyright early on. It makes sense for a net importer of IP.
It's a great way to _catch up_. But what about the originators of the
industrial revolution? Would they have done even better without copyright? I
don't know, but the industrial boom in Germany isn't evidence of it.

An interesting present day case is the ACM charging for academic papers. Some
papers are available from the author's website for free, but some are not.
Although the fee is affordable (around $20-30), do publications that are free
lead to better propagation and thus more/better research?

I think it's very hard to judge this, because I think what happens in practice
is that unknown academics give away their papers - it helps them to get known.
Whereas the ones that you _have_ to pay for are the massively famous ones with
(eg) 700+ citations. Their knowledge is already out there in the community,
and their reputation probably further promotes their research much more than
the small fee retards it. In addition to this, you're probably better off
reading a free review/summary/interpretation of the famous work than reading
it in the original - so the ideas keep promulgating.

~~~
kragen
The ones that aren't on the author's website are mostly the ones whose authors
aren't active on the internet at all. Of course, papers become more highly
cited over time, and authors die and retire, so many of the most famous papers
are in this state.

Traditionally, journals would send a few printed copies to the author so that
the author could send them to people who wrote them asking for a copy, a
custom that continues to some extent today. Putting the final version of the
paper on your web site is simply an extension of this approach.

Copyright is pretty much irrelevant as an incentive for production of academic
work. In nearly all fields, authors don't get paid by journals for writing
papers. In many cases, in fact, they have to pay for the privilege of writing
those papers. Academic books aren't net cash-flow negatives in the same way as
journal and conference papers, but the total earnings per hour are very low.

In academic publishing, copyright has historically served as an incentive for
_printing_ academic work. Given our new methods of printing, using laser
printers and computer screens, that incentive is no longer relevant. The main
issue today is to prevent the last copy of an old paper from being lost, and
ensure that it can be found easily so that it can be copied. Libraries are
better suited to these purposes than printing companies. Copyright in its
current form is a serious menace to that kind of preservation.

Non-academic publishing may be a different ballgame, of course. I don't know.

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zeteo
Arguably the patent system in Britain also had consequences that slowed down
industrialization. From this article (<http://mises.org/daily/3280>):

"During the period of Watt's patents [1775-1800] the United Kingdom added
about 750 horsepower of steam engines per year. In the thirty years following
Watt's patents, additional horsepower was added at a rate of more than 4,000
per year. Moreover, the fuel efficiency of steam engines changed little during
the period of Watt's patent; while between 1810 and 1835 it is estimated to
have increased by a factor of five."

~~~
kragen
Wouldn't you expect both efficiency and total capacity to increase
exponentially in the first half of a sigmoid adoption curve without taking
into account any exogenous factors? Today most electric power plants are still
run by steam engines, so it's likely that that exponential increase is still
continuing.

~~~
zeteo
Electric power plants are run by steam _turbines_ today (invented by sir
Charles Parsons in 1884). I don't think there are any steam _engines_ in
industrial operation.

Regarding the logistic curve, yes, your point is valid in general; however,
the article cited makes it clear that Watt's patent dramatically slowed down
the adoption rate by delaying essential improvements for 25 years. In
particular, the adoption of high-pressure steam (an idea Watt simply disliked)
proved essential for locomotives and for improving the fuel efficiency to a
level where steam engines were practical in more than a small corner of the
British economy.

~~~
kragen
The steam turbine (invented by Hero of Alexandria in the 1st century BC, and
improved dramatically since then by Parsons, among others) is a kind of steam
engine. With regard to _reciprocating_ steam engines, I don't know of any in
current use either, but I would be surprised if there weren't at least a few
niche uses.

You are certainly correct about high-pressure steam being essential. Did
Watt's patent make it illegal to develop high-pressure steam engines, or just
uneconomic?

~~~
zeteo
The (practical) steam turbine is one of the fundamental, yet unacknowledged,
bases of our material civilization. Parsons based his intricate design on the
equations of thermodynamics; he succeeded in a very complicated task where
many others had tried, and failed. His work is about as many orders of
magnitude more complex and demanding than Hero's aoelipile as a modern race
car is compared to a spring-powered toy cart.

That said, I agree that the terminology is flexible and the steam turbine can
be considered a kind of steam engine; it is, however, very different in its
principle of operation from the Watt-type steam engine (which it displaced in
the XXth century). Regarding high-pressure steam, as far as I know Watt's
patent precluded anyone from using a condenser in their steam engine, which is
an essential component. Thus only engineers affiliated with Watt himself were
able to produce commercial steam engines during the 25 years he held the
patent, and he refused to let them work with high-pressure steam (despite a
good deal of interest).

For a more thorough, and much better documented, discussion of these issues, I
recommend chapter 3 (Internal Combustion Engines) of Vaclav Smil's book
"Creating the Twentieth Century".

~~~
kragen
It certainly is a very important invention, but I'm not sure what you mean by
"complex and demanding"; you can build a perfectly good steam turbine with one
moving part plus a high-temperature thrust bearing.

A condenser is not an essential component for a high-pressure steam engine. It
can be useful (modern power-plant steam turbines use condensers because
they're quite sensitive to lime deposits, so the water has to be expensively
purified before use) but e.g. steam locomotives did not normally use them.

It is not the case that there were no non-Watt commercial steam engines built
in England during Watt's patent; a good number of Newcomen-type engines
continued to be built. But thank you for explaining that Watt refused to
license his patent.

Thank you very much for the book recommendation! It sounds like a book I've
been wanting to write. Maybe Smil has saved me the trouble.

It's interesting that reciprocating engines are quite common in the modern
economy outside of the steam department. There are even commercial electric
power plants driven by reciprocating engines. But they're internal-combustion.

~~~
zeteo
The concept is relatively simple (once someone thought of it...), it's the
execution that's difficult. (For a simpler example, let's look at breech-
loading firearms: the idea appeared almost as soon as gunpowder, but it took
until the 2nd half of the 19th century to achieve cheap, practical designs.)
In the Parsons turbine, the shape of the components is much more complex than
the piston plus cylinder of the Watt engine (see <http://www.leander-
project.homecall.co.uk/turbines.html> for a diagram). All the little blades
and such also need to hold up to high pressures and temperatures.

I'm not entirely sure about the condenser bit, but I do remember Smil
addressing the issue with references and all. His books are quite amazing,
it's quite a pity they're not better known.

~~~
kiba
Who is Smil?

~~~
zeteo
Vaclav Smil - a professor who writes wonderfully detailed books about the
history of technology, among other subjects.

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pavlov
Perhaps the RIAA can spin this into a campaign: "absence of copyright
responsible for two world wars!"

~~~
eru
Cancer is responsible. If only Friedrich Wilhelm I would have survived on the
throne for more than 100 days, say a few decades.

~~~
ugh
Friedrich III, right? I was confused there for a moment.

~~~
eru
He was the third King of Prussia with that name, but the first Emperor of
Germany. So both numbers are correct in their context.

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pointillistic
Very interesting article, especially in contrast with the English claim that
the copyright was the key to the industrial revolution:
<http://www.economist.com/node/16789318?story_id=16789318>

I would be cautious about explaining such complex event by a single reason, as
alway there are many factors involved.

~~~
kiba
Actually, there are claims that patent monopolies delay the industrial
revolution, rather than advance it.

Too bad the book in question isn't free to read, otherwise, I would be able to
add more knowledge about the other side.

The abolitionists on the other hand, cheerfully made their work freely
available when they can. They also happens to make a few bucks off of it too.

------
_delirium
One could argue (and probably someone has) that the web boom of the past 10-15
years also benefits from weak intellectual property. Imagine the pace of
progress if, for example, Experts-Exchange were able to sue Stack Overflow for
cloning their idea, or Quora were now in litigation over Facebook Questions.

~~~
jamesbritt
... or if there were no View Source browser option.

------
warfangle
It does seem that the faster knowledge can spread, the faster industrial and
technological development happens.

One would think, then, that economic strength is related to not how much money
publishers make - but to how thoroughly knowledge is distributed throughout
the country.

Given this, could a valid economy be built where there are no copyright laws?
Where writers, researchers and other creators of works to be published are
paid by how many people read them - but not directly by the people who read
them?

Getting the government involved would likely lead to rapid politicization of
what gets published. What entity would step up to fund this, then?

In other words:

If spreading knowledge without the encumberance of copyright law enhances the
economy and makes everyone richer (except, presumably, the artist whose work
will be copied), what system could be put in place to make sure the
artist/researcher/scientist/inventor is compensated for his contributions to
the growth of the economy?

~~~
kiba
_If spreading knowledge without the encumberance of copyright law enhances the
economy and makes everyone richer (except, presumably, the artist whose work
will be copied), what system could be put in place to make sure the
artist/researcher/scientist/inventor is compensated for his contributions to
the growth of the economy?_

In the past, there has been example of American publishers paying more money
to British authors than they receive in royalty in their own land even though
USA didn't recognize foreign copyright at the time.

Even though there was no copyright, the same thing happened to America as it
did to Germany. There was increased literacy built on the back of (in some
case well-compensated) British authors.

I am sure artist/inventors/researchers/scientists can find business models
that substain themselves.

~~~
eru
It should have been relatively easy to transplant the British literature to
America. Do you know how much transfer there was to Germany?

~~~
kiba
No. The book I read contain case study on British-America copyright regime but
nothing that I can remember dealing with Germany-British copyright regime.

------
ugh
If this is indeed true then there is an ironic aspect to it. The continued
non-existence of a German state until 1871 – here presented as the reason for
the lack of effectiveness of copyright law in the German states – is one of
the canonical reasons why the German states were lagging behind in their
economic development. (It’s hard to be all that successful when your company
has to ship its product through half a dozen states [+] – all with customs and
different laws – just to get it from Cologne to Munich.)

It’s certainly nice to see attempts at explaining why Germany caught up with
and to some extent even overtook England. I don’t think that the canonical
explanations (which to me always seem to include a lot of handwaving) are very
convincing.

[+] Map:
[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e9/Deu...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e9/Deutscher_Bund.svg/2000px-
Deutscher_Bund.svg.png)

~~~
StuffMaster
It also doesn't cover correlation/causation. Did the book boom cause their
industrialization, or did the mass industrialization cause the book boom?

~~~
notahacker
It seems far more plausible that there was an exogenous factor causing the
book boom in Germany: the number of Germans that actually knew how to read

The article hints at this when it suggests a German earned more in royalties
(without effective copyright) for a treatise on leather tanning at the
beginning of the century than Mary Shelley did for Frankenstein. Either UK
publishers were exceptionally bad at maximising revenue (or sharing it with
authors), or there was a much greater demand for books in Germany which had
little to do with the supply of cheap copies

A highly plausible explanation is that German appetite for reading was driven
by compulsory state-sponsored primary education, contrasting with the part-
time, parochial education available in the UK at the time.

Despite low literacy rates the UK did a pretty impressive job of
industrialising in the 20th century; to argue otherwise is to ignore the rate
of absolute progress in favour of dubious relative metrics in the manner of
Wired's recent "web is dead".

~~~
ugh
Oh, the UK’s industry was and still is impressive. But the German states were
far, far, far behind in the 19th century. It’s just surprising that they could
catch up at all.

~~~
Gormo
It's not really that suprising. Industrialization originated in the UK, and
emerged gradually from the economic and cultural situation there without any
intentional design. When the Germans began industrializing, the UK's industry
was mature and well-developed, which provided a very detailed practical
example to reference.

19th-century Germany and Japan and modern China have all had the ability to
work directly toward a goal, rather than having to wait for industrialization
to emerge naturally from within their own economies (although if they had, it
would probably have produced a set of customs and practices much more suited
to their own cultures and economic conditions).

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eru
German original: <http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/0,1518,709761,00.html>

~~~
eru
With an interesting alternative title.

~~~
Ardit20
What is the alternative title in english?

~~~
eru
German: Explosion des Wissens

English: Explosion of Knowledge

The title itself isn't very interesting. The change is.

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grandalf
A superb book on the economic history of intellectual property legislation
around the world:

[http://www.amazon.com/Lever-Riches-Technological-
Creativity-...](http://www.amazon.com/Lever-Riches-Technological-Creativity-
Economic/dp/0195074777)

