Sunday, November 9, 2008

Commons and Capitalism

My main argument in this posting is going to be comparing the Commons and capitalism and how they do not mix together. First of all the Commons is a place where people submit their works with their works being open to the public. These works can be made into any form or fashion and the people's originals creator has no rights to the original piece. For instance with the movie we watched in class, one guy took another bands music track and put a different instrument into the songs and it was considered to be a creative art. It is, however this work is really cheap and to me should be considered a low blow, but if one were to look at it in a wider view the work increased utility even more because it took that same track and made it likeable to people who enjoy the instrument he added into the songs. If we were to take these works and implement them into a capitalism world it would never work. Capitalism thrives off of producing products that come with loads of money in return. It focuses solely on the best way to make money however that may be, so to create works that are open to the public completely counteracts what capitalism stands for. This is where copyrights and patents came into effect. One could argue that they came from the constitution that says they are offered to encourage people to create art and science without fear of their work being taken. However another view could be that society is going to create art and science anyways for personal achievement or personal utility. Capitalism could have issued copyrights and patents in order to make sure that they could make money off of the creative arts and sciences that people make. This said there are two observations to ask yourself. Are copyrights and patents issued to make sure capitalism captures revenues off of humans creative works? or Without copyrights and patents would people's creative side still come out and discover and make the arts and sciences that maximize society's utility?

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