Bad Idea of the Day

As Sam Boyd says, the drive in congress (apparently led by the increasingly-pissing-me-off Chuck Schumer) to provide intellectual property protection to fashion designers is a good case study in how far thinking about IP rules has strayed from the core purpose.

The idea of copyright is not that creators deserve your money, but that you, the citizen, deserve a world in which creators have incentives to create. The fashion industry is perfectly vibrant as is. The world is full of high-end fashion designers, low-end ripoffs, national and global middlebrow chains, endlessly shifting whims, stores and boutiques of all sort -- everything a person could want. Absolutely nobody is sitting around the house saying "I have all this money to spend on clothing, but there's just nothing new out there to buy."

We're doing fine. I'm tempted to say "what's next, licensing fees for recipes we use at home" but I'm afraid congress will pass a law mandating licensing fees for recipes we use at home. I call copyright on the idea of "scrambling" eggs.