Ed Felten's Pizzaright Principle

Ed Felten has come up with a novel way of testing the provinence of proposed expansions in intellectual property law. He calls it the Pizzaright Principle test.

"Pizzaright — the exclusive right to sell pizza — is a new kind of intellectual property right. Pizzaright law, if adopted, would make it illegal to make or serve a pizza without a license from the pizzaright owner.

Creating a pizzaright would be terrible policy, of course. We’re much better off letting the market decide who can make and sell pizza.

The Pizzaright Principle says that if you make an argument for expanding copyright or creating new kinds of intellectual property rights, and if your argument serves equally well as an argument for pizzaright, then your argument is defective. It proves too much. Whatever your argument is, it had better rest on some difference between pizzaright and the exclusive right you want to create."

He goes on to "apply the Pizzaright Principle to two well-known bogus arguments for intellectual property expansion", the extension of copyright term and the granting of extra IP rights to broadcasters (as proposed under the WIPO broadcasting and webcasting treaty). Wonderful. Read the whole post.