From a moral standpoint, I don't really see any moral basis for it. The fundamental moral basis of regular property (to me) is that people should get to use what they make. If someone else takes it, the maker doesn't get to use it. That doesn't hold for IP. The common argument that you are denying the content creator the right to profit from it is pathetic - by that line of reasoning it would be wrong to ever compete in business, since every time you compete you deny other people the right to profit (by introducing competing products or services). I do support proper attribution, and it being fraudulent to claim to have created something that you didn't, because "having created something" *is* unique, even with IP. So it is more like physical property.
But I don't believe that all of society should set their rules based on my morality. When evaluating legal policies, I also like to think about economic efficiency. In practice, I think that the economic efficiency of copyright depends on the specific industry. Places like music and fiction, where people just love to create content, I don't think protection is a good idea. Without protection, you will get only slightly less production, but much more consumption. But for expensive things like movies and drugs, producers won't make them anywhere near as much without being able to capture monopoly profits, so you get much less production. You'll get more consumption of what remains, but perhaps less consumption overall due to less movies/drugs being produced.
So an economically optimal regime would have different rules for different industries, protecting some but not others, based on their exactly supply/demand curves.
However, there is a significant final problem, which is the costs of enforcement, both direct costs and costs in terms of making more of a police state. In the modern world, it is literally impossible to prevent pirating of movies without intrusive surveillance which is, in my opinion, worse than losing most of the movie industry. And as biopharmaceutical tech gets better, and drug labs get smaller and smaller, the same will be true of pirating prescription drugs. If a box on my desk just needs a program to synthesize any prescription drug I want, you can't ban pirate drugs without having a police state with the right to search for little boxes on every desk in the country.
So in the end, I think we just need to accept that part of the abundant wealth our world is creating, like powerful networked computers, incredibly cheap storage and reproduction of bits, and low costs of production on more and more items, includes the elimination of monopolies on informational goods. I think that's on net a good thing - that less production will be more than balanced by vastly more consumption, especially as the developing world comes online. But really, it doesn't matter. There is just no fucking way that IP protection is worth the police state it would take to enforce it. And unenforced/unenforceable laws poison society by teaching people not to respect the law.
Therefore I favor accepting the inevitable as soon as possible, so that we can find new ways to compensate content producers.
Profile
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
patrissimo- Patri Friedman
- Patri's World
Page Summary
- dclayh : (no subject) [+0]
- binarybits : (no subject) [+3]
- mcindahouse : My view [+2]
- perspectivism : (no subject) [+0]
- terrencechan : (no subject) [+3]
- grouchyoldcoot : (no subject) [+0]
- candid : (no subject) [+1]
- (Anonymous) : Eelco [+0]
- querldox : (no subject) [+1]
- charleshaynes : (no subject) [+2]
- hiro_antagonist : (no subject) [+0]
- (Anonymous) : Not so fast [+2]
Comments
It's possible that at some point we'll have devices that allow us to copy chemicals as easily as we can now copy music. But those technologies are a ways off yet, and my guess is that it'll be even longer before the relevant technologies are cheap enough to compete with mass production: photocopiers have been around for decades, but photocopying a book still isn't really cost effective. So I think it'll be a while before the police-state critique of patent law will have the same force as it currently does for copyright.
Lately I've been thinking that the solution to the copyright problem might be to dramatically expand fair use so that basically any personal, non-commercial use is legal. This would still leave copyright holders significant profit opportunities, since they could still extract revenues from commercial uses of copyrighted materials, but it would recognize the reality that the law is almost certainly not going to be able to stop people from sharing copyrighted materials.
Lately I've been thinking that the solution to the copyright problem might be to dramatically expand fair use...
That might work. That's essentially the case with much computer software now, right? Microsoft doesn't care about people using Office at home, as long as they pay for the copy at work.
It has to be 100% clear that you can use the software to do whatever you want to, and are free to change it and distribute those changes freely, which is of course why you'd want to use OpenOffice.org or other free (as in free speech) office programs. :-)
Otherwise, "fair" use of the software and different interpretations of what that means could be used as a pretense at any time for a company or government to crack down on somebody they didn't agree with. Even if fair use was dramatically expanded, I'd guess that it would be like today, where the definition is often not objective, and takes expensive litigation to resolve.
Scott Carpenter
http://www.movingtofreedom.org
I think you are on to something in saying the economics of production make a big difference in the morality of IP. There is a theory that legal systems evolve to be wealth maximizing for society. If this is the case record companies need a different model.
Patent abuse seem more troubling to me. A lot of software patents if not obvious then inevitable. How the hell did Amazon get the one-click patent? It would have been discovered by somebody else within months and God knows how much wealth was destroyed by granting it.
The costs of IP enforcement don't seem terrible at the moment. You start downloading a torrent and the RIAA? or MPAA? gets a court order to find out who you are. They don't get to do blanket searches for everything anybody downloads. It's your choice to start the download so live with the consequences. I'm not saying your drug box example is invalid, just that we are a way from that point at the moment.
Alternative ways of compensating producers feel scary to me. Who gets to decide what is fair and who should pay?
So you think the demand curve slopes upward? That would be very unusual.
That is, most demand curves slope downward: the higher the price, the lower the quantity consumed. So more music will sell at a price of zero that at any positive price. Actually, the price without IP is not zero, but it is an awfully lot less than 1$/song. 1c/song, maybe.
If you charge 1$ for a song that costs 1c to copy, then anyone who values the song at more than 1c but less than 1$ will not buy it. So less music will be consumed.
Patents have even more problems than copyright. Why do we award the use of a discovery for years when someone else might have discovered it next month? As you point out.
The costs of IP enforcement don't seem terrible at the moment.
Agreed. But they are getting there. Try reading about Vista - it has all sorts of DRM built in in order to authenticate every media stream. The more people get broadband, and the better P2P gets, the easier it will be to copy. And that means it will be harder and harder to enforce. And that means more draconian measures will be necessary.
Alternative ways of compensating producers feel scary to me
Sure. But scarier than having a tamper-proof DRM checking chip in every computer, every television, every iPod...
Because that is the alternative. At least, I believe so.
You get more consumption of a given song at 1c, but you get less songs being produced - especially if the producer doesn't even get the penny.
...Sure. But scarier than having a tamper-proof DRM checking chip in every computer, every television, every iPod...
Ya that sounds pretty bad. They should stick to prosecuting peer-to- peer users.
Yep. Very complete thoughts.
1) The item being produced is decrypted in use. In other words, you use a movie by seeing the full movie. It must be decrypted to be seen. It is incredibly hard to protect anything that has to be fully shown in order to be used. So you can protect a database, say, that answers people's questions (they never see the whole database). But you can't protect something that is fully revealed in use. No matter what formatting they use, in the end you have signals indicating exactly what pictures to draw on the screen. Those signals can always be recorded.
2) As said below, you only ever need 1 person to crack the item, and that's it. Combined with (1), and DRM is impossible, without being embedded in every computer and OS.
It just happens to be a matchup where the attackers have an overwhelming advantage over the defenders.
Short summary of the relevant part: consumer electronics with bullet-proof DRM costs more to produce and fetches a lower price on the free market than those with poorly implemented DRM, everything else being equal. Hence, not only do attackers have an overwhelming advantage, but defenders also have a powerful disincentive.
Patent law in the US is clearly completely messed up. 20 years is essentially forever for current technologies, and the criteria for non-obviousness have fallen ridiculously low.
--
Also, another drawback of unenforced, universally violated laws is that they can be selectively enforced against political dissidents or other unpopular groups.
The common argument that you are denying the content creator the right to profit from it is pathetic - by that line of reasoning it would be wrong to ever compete in business, since every time you compete you deny other people the right to profit (by introducing competing products or services).
Trade bariers? Unions getting in bed with the government? Appearently this is not as obviously rediculous to everyone, and deserves some more scrunity.
Tarifs are a sort of property right over a market. What unions and the like are arguing for are essentially property rights to their jobs. (property rights over interpersonal relationships, ewww..)
But in general, there is no reason to assum a priori why that wouldnt be possible. As far as i am concerned, whether or not we will respect any claim of property to whatever entity should be judged purely by its merits. Thats seems to be the core of your argument as well.
If we would find it usefull to let a company claim ownership of a certain market, we could. The reason we dont is because there is a stronger interest aligned against it then in favor of it. Although... like i mentioned, we do have trade barriers and unions fending off competition... The diffuse interest is at a strong disadvantage in the monolithic and centralized power structures that we have.
As usual, explicit social contracts to the rescue!
And yes, there are a lot of such that do their work in addition to a "regular" job and/or are poorly compensated for their work but still do it. On the other hand, we've gotten a lot of good work out of people who've been able to do it full time due to such compensation.
But I'm also aware of how the new means of content copying and distribution are causing an upheaval in past practices. Honestly not sure what the best resolution would be, but we may see a change to a "creative tax" which gets distibuted to content creators based on popularity (similar to the program in Britain where authors get a (fairly small) stipend based on how often their books are checked out of libraries) or a return to patronage by wealthy individuals or corporations. Or something I've not thought of or heard proposed.
There are lots of people out there with lots of ideas about replacement systems. I am not one of them :). Just not something I am interested in, because I don't think it matters to the overall argument. Although I can see why for-profit content creators would be interested in the subject :).
This argument seems basically sound to me though there are obvious problems with the current implementation in the US.
Copyright is a little trickier, and I haven't completely thought out my feelings on it. In an inchoate form, I'd say that artists do deserve some protection for works they create, and simultaneously I think we as a society should encourage people being able to build upon each other's work. So there needs to be a balance.
The professional chefs's treatment of recipes, and professional magicians's treatment of tricks are both fascinating examples of how IP can be managed outside of governmental or legal regulation. I don't know if they scale, but both achieve the goals of protecting "authorship" rights while allowing dissemination and improvement.
I fear not.
[cue chanting about "For the Greater Good" ala "Hot Fuzz"]
Much like money, or metaphysics.
I wrote about this over at mises.org once.
The basic argument is that if I own some physical object then you aren't allowed to use it in ways that I don't want. I might let you borrow my car to drive to the store but restrict you from going to Mexico with it. Copying like any other activity requires use of a physical object for some period of time (no matter how fleeting). No matter how easy or cheap it might be to copy something it does restrict the use of my property, and causes wear and tear on that object.
I don't think you'd be particularly thrilled if I was your roommate and you were planning to go out and wanted your CD to play in the car only to discover I told you to wait fifteen minutes because I took it without your permission to make a copy. Or worse yet that I was making a run of a thousand copies and you wouldn't get it back for a week.
I don't see why as a creator I cannot retain ownership of my copies and treat the buyer as a renter or as a co-owner. The voluntary contract need only specify that the originator of the product retains the right to use it in certain ways. It's just like selling land but retaining mineral rights to the land. If you are not aware of this I could explain further.
There are certain implications to this line of reasoning. For one thing it would be impossible for me to "patent" one-click. It's just too obvious an idea to implement. It's highly likely that it would be impossible to prove to a court that someone had both had access too your physical property and also violated any agreement not to copy.
Obviously, if someone were to independently invent something all other inventors would have no claim against him, since the whole definition of independent is that he didn't directly or indirectly use your property without your consent.
One purpose of our patent system is in order to get information out into the public. This same purpose could instead be handled in a more natural way without granted monopolies via private inventors registries. These would be private societies where the members agree to abide by certain rules, pay fees, and abide by certain rules, and agree to particular judicial venues, in order to have access to the works of others. If individuals find this beneficial there is no reason they can privately organize to provide it.
-Brian Macker
As to the issue of secrecy. Of course the law would require that you take reasonable care not to expose or pollute others with information you wish not to be disclosed. It's going to be hard to argue in court that you intended to retain copying rights to an object for which the mechanism is plain for all to see who are not party to the contract. The courts are not going to allow you to widely advertise (essentially doing a forced download into other peoples minds) then turn around and claim they stole your idea by looking at your object without permission. Thats like a porn star walking around nude in church and then insisting she get paid for her services.
At mises I also covered the "what if" issue of a criminal forcibly exposing an idea. In that case a burglar steals a copyrighted piece and sells it to a competitor. I think all works out nicely.
You see when you copy something you are using it as a production input. It acts in a similar manner that a tool or piece of machinery in producing the copy. Imagine some criminal tresspassed at Toyota during off hours to produce a car using their machinery and his own raw materials to produce a car for himself. This is clearly a form of property theft and Toyota is truly part owner in the produced car or cars. The question then becomes which part of the object is owned. Obviously Toyota doesn't own the physical materials since the criminal brought those. It does however have ownership in the physical shape those materials now take because those are the direct effect of Toyotas inputs. Since Toyota is innocent in this mixing of ownership and must be compensated, not only for wear and tear on it's tools, but the value of the product, we must dispose of the product in order to compensate. Certainly the increase in value of a car over a pile of metal due to the automated robots at it's factory is totally due to Toyota.
Thus, a fair judge would say calculate the price of the car when reduced to scrape and not parts (or as the original state of the raw material if more valuable), and hand that over to the thief. Of course after subtracting the costs of adjudication, plus costs of finding and capturing, plus repaying the plaintiff his lawyer fees and lost time and wages. Turns out that it's likely the criminal gets nothing, and the car gets handed back to Toyota.
Even if the criminal had a large stash of cash in order to buy the counterfeit Toyota he produced it should be up to Toyota whether it wishes to sell and at what price. Note that in economics a potato in the field is a different good with a different price than the same potato sitting on the shelf of a supermarket. Likewise a car with copyright restrictions is far less valuable than upon which no such restrictions has been placed. The judge cannot hand the counterfeit car over to the criminal because doing so would be forcing Toyota to sell something they never intended to, and at less than market value.
Rarely, like if someone used your jello mold against your will and their personal stash of gold to produce a golden dessert statue, the value due the plaintiff might be less than the value of the raw materials in which case the criminal gets most of his gold back, less court costs.
-Brian Macker