On Monday, July 1, 2002, at 01:10 PM, Anonymous wrote:
Brilliant. Let the market solve the problem. Why bother with the auction part, then? If the market's going to solve the problem for the 2nd guy to hold the copy, why not let it solve the problem for the 1st? The fact is, quoting this mantra is simply a way of avoiding the hard issues. You've got to show *how* the market is going to solve the problem. Why would content creators get "a lot of money, cash"? Obviously, only if your #2 guy knows that he is also going to get a lot of money for it. So you haven't taken a step towards solving the problem; you have simply handed the problem off from #1 to #2.
The fact is that the market can't solve this kind of problem. That's right, markets are not perfect. They do fine for ordinary, private goods. But information objects, absent successful DRM restrictions, are effectively public goods. That is, you can't restrict their dissemination. If you try to provide such goods only to a small group of people, you've effectively given them to everyone.
Ideas are not generally protected in any major society. (Certain _expressions_ of ideas are protected in specialized ways through the copyright and patent systems, which vary from society to society. But not general ideas.) People generate ideas. Ideas are usually much more important than specific copyrighted items or even specific patented items are. When someone writes a book, with lines of reasoning, new ideas, summaries of old ideas, those ideas are not protected intellectual property. Likewise, fashion and architecture and styles in general are not protected. (Attempts have been made, especially with the "look and feel" nonsense, but generally anyone is free to copy the "idea" of a miniskirt, or red tennis shoes, or skyscrapers. Could ideas even plausibly be protected? The Galombosians, a fringe subset of libertarians, argue that ideas are protectable in this way. "You were influenced by my paper on crypto anarchy, so you owe me $25."
This idea of digital content as a public good is developed in detail at http://www.tidbits.com/tb-issues/TidBITS-602.html#lnk5.
Ideas are even better examples of public goods. A good idea benefits many people, few or none of whom ever pay for the idea. Good ideas are in fact more important than nearly anything else. This has nothing to do with whether they should (or can) be protected as intellectual property...or subsidized by government, as I'll get to later.
Markets do not handle public goods well. It is a standard theorem of economics that they underprovide public goods. There is no way to charge for goods that everyone can get for free, and ideas like Kelsey and Schneier's Street Performer protocol don't work because of free riders.
Apply this reasoning to the general world of ideas and arguments. Or, more prosaically, to mathematical proofs. Should we start charging for mathematical proofs? Should someone planning to use a chain of proofs pay a fee for the various lemmas and theorems he cites or uses?
The traditional way to provide for public goods is by government.
No it isn't. People paint paintings even when the vast bulk of them never sell anything. (Even well-known painters like Paul Gaugain never made more than a few francs from his paintings...his fame came after his death. Examples like this abound.) Most actors don't make enough money to qualify for their union. Most writers never sell _anything_. Some of these works are used by others, inspire others, even are later sold by others. Altruism? Have I written upwards of 20,000 articles on this list and others. At least some of them were and are useful for other people. And yet was I paid? Was I generating a public good? Should I have demanded that government finance my generation of these public goods?
If we don't get DRM, that's probably what we will end up with: government subsidies of the arts.
About 20 years ago the American program "60 Minutes" did a nice piece on how the Dutch government, using reasoning identical to yours, was paying artists a stipend for their artistic output. Warehouses and warehouses were being filled with the crud generated by these subsidized artists.
Most musicians and other artists won't be able to make enough money to live on even if their works are relatively popular.
So? Not my problem. After all, most would-be writers and actors can't make enough money on their ideas and artistic expression to live on without also working as waiters and waitresses and driving trucks.
The government will have to tax consumers and distribute the proceeds to artists (and the RIAA, etc) in order to protect the content industry.
And to fill warehouses with CDs no one wants, with paintings no one wants, with stages where actors perform plays for each other because the public won't voluntarily pay, and with software programs which the market didn't want.
This is the true alternative to DRM. Anyone who respects the power of markets should understand that DRM is the key to allowing markets to function with information goods. If you oppose DRM, you are working to insure that creative content will become a public good. And if you understand econmics, you will see that this is an outcome to be avoided if at all possible.
I have no problem with Microsoft or Apple or Autodesk attempting to protect their IP by requiring that I buy a dongle from them to attach to my computer, or that I provide a palmprint or retinal scan before their programs run. If they can do it, and get customers to go along, hey, it's a free country! People who are willing to mess with the dongles, or attach a palm scanner, or jump through whatever hoops the vendor is asking for will be doing so voluntarily. Those who won't, won't. Sounds fair to me. (In fact, dongles have been tried. And may be tried again, as USB and FireWire make use of such dongles less awkward. It's a free country, so Digital Datawhack is free to do as they wish along these lines.) However, it is NOT a function of a legitimate minimal government to *require* that I buy a computer with certain features. To the extent the Hollywood-led push to adopt some form of DRM is very likely to also be a government _requirement_ for DRM, we should fight it. From what I have seen, the interests of Hollywood, Redmond, Washington, Beijing, and Moscow in DRM are coterminous. --Tim May, Citizen-unit of of the once free United States " The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. "--Thomas Jefferson, 1787