brentashley

Patrick Murphy recalls some lessons in economics:

Classic public goods display two characteristics:

1) Inexhaustible – Non-rival in consumption; i.e. my consumption doesn’t reduce others’ consumption.

2) Non-excludable – Difficult (costly) or impossible to exclude non-payers from consuming.

This definition has not been applicable to intellectual property — until recently.

He offers “Light from a Lighthouse” as an analog to the difficulty that copyright holders have in controlling the use of their works.

Light from a lighthouse, though, is received passively. It does not require an act of “taking”. Downloading files requires action on the part of the recipient. It requires intent. Once the lighthouse is turned off, you can’t go home and light up your back yard with it at your own leisure.

It’s not as though the copyright owner wants you not to have her work. It’s on the radio for all to hear. It’s played in concert. It’s in a movie. She released it for the express purpose of having as many people as possible hear it as often as possible.

Not all publishing industries are facing the same challenges – or at least their reactions are different.

Why is it that art and photography, while just as copyable and distributable as music, doesn’t have the same problems? Why is there not a print publishing industry wooing and pressuring congress to outlaw high speed quality laser and inkjet printers and to require printers to report our social security numbers back to them before printing each page? Why is the industry association not urging universities to storm dorm rooms looking on hard drives for scanned pages of textbooks? Why is nobody trying to fill the “personal darkroom” analog hole and call for a levy on all paper and ink to compensate authors for the piracy of their works?

Let’s all analyse this deeper and try to understand what it is about the music and film industries that makes them different.

Is it that the other media are harder or more expensive to replicate faithfully but that technology has evolved to Music and Film’s detriment? What’s next on the technology timeline? When holographic concerts become widely available, live performance won’t even be exclusive. What can we look back at that was once easy to control but now is so freely usable without permission that the industries surrounding it have crumbled?

No answers today, just more questions.

Doc Searls comments on my recent piece on Exclusivity and Ownership and quotes Ernie the Attorney talking about the media industry’s long history of greed-based maneuvering.

A good start against these sorts of abuses of financial (and therefore political) power would be legislation like the proposed Canadian laws limiting political contributions.

My west-coast friend, erstwhile colleague and semantic sparring partner Ian Marsman has been quite astute about the impending Iraq Attack. Just watch and see if he isn’t right on the money.

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Who names these viruses? The MS-SQL Server virus from this past weekend seems to be called “Slammer” or “Sapphire” or “SQ Hell”. I’m sure the author is wearing that like a badge of honour (although not too openly, one should think, if they want to remain anonymous). Maybe it would be useful to provide some disincentive by naming viruses differently – how keen would a haxx0r be to be known as the guy who wrote the “Author has a Tiny Dick” virus?

Bruce Baugh responded to my copyright ownership post (in the comments) with a good lesson in human nature. No matter how ethereal the notion of ownership, it’s real to those who feel it, and to attempt to deny anyone that which their brains tell them is theirs is a tactic doomed to failure. He also points out that ownership is less the issue than use. I suppose that even with physical property there’s a philosophical argument that no object is ever really owned, but we are simply assigned an exclusive right to its use.

Doc‘s call to arms was for us to find a way to stem the tide of misaligned property analogy as pressed by the media interests; a way to get people in general to “get it”. What pervasaive meme can we come up with that will be strong enough to counter the powerful theft/piracy images? Let’s all blog aloud and get the juices flowing, shall we?

Ownership of physical property implies exclusive use. I own my lawn mower, it’s in my posession, in order for you to use it I must relinquish its use to you. You shouldn’t loan it to your neighbour in turn without my permission, especially as that extends my inability to make use of it. If you take it from me, I am left without its use altogether. I can ask to be compensated for the loss. I lose a physical entity, and therefore control over its use.

Ownership of intellectual property does not imply exclusive use. You can play my music without depriving me of it. You can loan it to someone else without affecting my use, although you should ask my permission. I never lose my ability to have full use of the work. What I lose when you use my work without my permission or recompense is control over its use.

Obviously these are two very different concepts. Yet they’re both called ownership. Concepts of theft and piracy of intellectual property just don’t fit. How have such ill-fitting analogies come to permeate our conciousness?

Doc’s got the right end of the copyright argument stick.

I’m getting tired of the media companies’ rhetoric and extended imagery that their copyrights mean that the works are their property. The copyright is (or at least should be meant to be) a license granted by law that loans the rights of copy (and use) of a work from its perpetual owner, the public domain, to the creator of the work for an initial limited period, in order that the creator may realize some gain from his effort, thus encouraging creators to create. At no time should the copyright holder become the owner of the work itself, just the temporary benefactor of its commercial value.

The EFF has a new blog called Cruelty To Analog, wherein they plan to chronicle attempts by the “content” industries to plug the analog hole.

Have a look at the draft charter of the Copy Protection Technical Working Group.

Tell me this – how do you get a roomful of sufficently technical people who swallow this crap enough to dedicate a chunk of their working life to it? Honestly, I can’t for the life of me think of one technical person I know who’s worth a single shit who would care to be involved with such a ridiculous project. It reeks of knee-jerk protectionism and shortsightedness, it’s doomed to failure and circumvention – DMCA or not – and it would stink up your resume so horribly that prospective employers who really care about technology would laugh you out of an interview. That being the case, the willing candidates for the job must be either devoid of the technical and moral values that would make them worthy of the task or motivated by greed to the extent that they’re likely pretty useless buggers on the whole.

Maybe they hire from the Tobacco industry.