50 Things That Made The Modern Economy with Tim Harford

In January 1842, Charles Dickens arrived on American shores for the first time. He was greeted like a rock star and Boston Massachusetts, but the great novelist was a man with a cause.

He wanted to put an end to cheap, sloppy pirated copies of his work in the United States. They circulated with impunity because the US granted no copyright protection to non-citizens.

In a bitter letter to a friend, Dickens compared the situation to being mugged and then paraded to the streets in ridiculous clothes.

Is it tolerable that besides being robbed and rifled, an author should be forced to appear in any form, in any vulgar dress, in any atrocious company?

It was a powerful and melodramatic metaphor from Charles Dickens, what else would one expect?

But the truth is that the case for what Dickens was demanding, legal protection for ideas that could otherwise be freely copied and adapted, has never been quite so clear cut.

Patents and copyrights grant a monopoly. A monopoly is a bad news. Dickens' British publishers will have charged as much as they could get away with for copies of Bleak House.

Cash-strapped literature lovers simply had to go without. But these potential fat profits encourage new ideas. It took Dickens a long time to write Bleak House.

If other British publishers could have ripped it off like the Americans, perhaps he wouldn't have bothered.

So, intellectual property reflects an economic trade-off, a balancing act. If it's too generous to the creators, then good ideas will take too long to copy, adapt and spread.

If it's too stingy, then maybe we won't see the good ideas at all.

One might hope that the trade-off would be carefully weighed up by benevolent technocrats, but it's always been coloured by politics.

In Dickens' day, American literature and American innovation were in their infancy.

The US economy was in full-blown copying mode. They wanted the cheapest possible access to the best ideas that Europe could offer.

American newspapers filled their pages with brazen copying, alongside their attacks on the interfering Mr. Dickens.

A few decades later, when American authors and inventors spoke with a more powerful voice, America's lawmakers began to take an increasingly fond view of the idea of intellectual property.

Newspapers, once opposed to copyright, now rely upon it, and we can expect to see a similar transition in developing countries today.

The less they copy other ideas, and the more they create of their own, the more they protect ideas themselves.

There's been a lot of movement in a brief time. China didn't have a system of copyright at all until 1991.

The modern form of intellectual property originated like so many things in 15th century Venice.

Venetian patents were explicitly designed to encourage innovation. They applied consistent rules.

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