Moisés Naím’s Illicit—a postscript

We can just hope that Moisés Naím’s recent book Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers, and Copycats Are Hijacking the Global Economy, Doubleday, 2005 helps to open up a long overdue debate on some very important issues related to intellectual-property rights that have been considered almost sacrosanct. For instance, when society awards intellectual-property rights and is thereby expected to invest scarce resources enforcing them, there is an implicit assumption that these rights are to be reasonably exploited. When then one of these manmade property rights is violated, as happens through the pirating of CDs, this might be the market answer to a lack of regulatory control over the monopoly. In this respect, under some circumstances, pirates and counterfeits could indeed perform a useful regulatory service to the society, as when vultures do the cleaning.

As the temptation-ratio to use a pirated good, defined as the potential savings in relation to the income per capita, is obviously larger in poor developing countries than in the rich developed countries, does this fact mean that the poor countries should have to invest relatively much more in fighting piracy?

Also, though you need an original to create a fake parasite, who is to tell us that the original is not sometimes well served by the very existence of its fakes? Might not the value and the number of buyers of truly original Louis Vuitton handbags in fact be larger because all the rest of the world has to settle for fakes? Should the pirates have a right to a fee in such a case? Finally another related issue that needs much discussion is whether society is well served by criminalizing behaviors that are in themselves not exposed to any significant