[lbo-talk] Dumb QOTD: What kind of labor produces intellectual property?

SA s11131978 at gmail.com
Fri Sep 2 12:51:45 PDT 2011


On 9/2/2011 3:44 PM, Doug Henwood wrote:


> On Sep 2, 2011, at 8:28 AM, Charles Turner wrote:
>
>> Could someone point me to an answer to this?
>>
>> Reading Z's _End Times_, and in his chapter about political economy, he mentions the three classical divisions of income: labor, capital, land ownership.
>>
>> So what is a royalty? Is it a rent? Is an intellectual property a kind of capital? What kind of labor produces intellectual property?
> Royalty on what? If it's for a musical composition or work of prose collected by the writer, it's a payment for labor. If it's on a patent, it can be a kind of rent - a return above "normal" profit created by a monopoly over the technique. Depends on the situation, really.

You're talking your book there, Henwood.

Copyright on music or prose creates above-normal profit just as much as a patent on a machine does. In both cases profit is higher because the inventor/writer is given a monopoly on production.

That's no reason to oppose either, incidentally.

SA



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list