-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 At 12:41 PM +0300 on 7/3/02, Sampo Syreeni wrote:
No. It is the case with the digitized version, but not the work.
What is a CD but a copy of a work, Sampo? Record companies sell *records*, right? A copy on my hard drive is *my* copy. I can, in fact, sell you a copy of my copy (I love recursion....), but then the space, occupied by your copy, is *your* copy. It's rival.
Did this thread really start with something taken from LMD? The list really *has* stooped to an all-time low...
:-). I'm not the yokel who started this fight quoting LMD, I'm just the guy who's finishing it... The non-rival, non-excludable thing is standard academic econ-talk, though. I was jerking his chain a bit about quoting a eurosocialist rag, like you seem to be doing. The part about it not being applicable is close to being right, thought. Or at least that even if one applies the non-rival, non-excludable double negative nonsense one still gets the right answer with private transactions involving all digital goods and services.
The point in copyright wars is about incentives to authors vs. the right to copy privately, not about the ease of copying. Sure, microtransactions are a possibility. But when the yield does not go to the one who created the master copy, why should anyone create anything, anymore? (Or, more realistically, why should people create at an efficient level?)
For me, this is all about Coase's theorem, transaction cost, Coase's observation that you can't have a market without property, and the fact that, of course, if transaction costs were low enough, if we had a working bearer cash economy on the net, for instance, the definition of property would not be a legal one involving "intellectual property", but a physical one, about encrypted bits, protected not with laws, but with strong financial cryptography protocols. Cheers, RAH -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP 7.5 iQA/AwUBPSL1u8PxH8jf3ohaEQK0JQCgvEOEsTIGXNOzEWgcvsO4eUmzjkAAoPAC 1tHGCoKRd/zJM4vj+6ihuKoL =4uQY -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
On Wed, 3 Jul 2002, R. A. Hettinga wrote:
For me, this is all about Coase's theorem, transaction cost, Coase's observation that you can't have a market without property,
Quite. Coase's reasoning demonstrated that any initial allocation of property rights is equivalent (both in the allocative and distributive senses) when transaction costs amount to nil. So, if we look at the distribution side of the information industry, you're absolutely right. The smaller the transaction costs the better -- rivalry applies to any particular copy, as it does to services involved disseminating the bits. Any trades required are bilateral, competition does its job and everything is just dandy. But if we look at the creation end, that's a different story entirely. Anyone eventually receiving a copy will benefit roughly equally from the efforts of the artist/author. If copying and distribution are exceedingly cheap, as we'd expect them to be in the future, the number of people for whom acquiring the information would be profitable easily grows to the tens or hundreds of millions. Since any copy released will be widely disseminated, the deal between the original author and the public with an interest in his work will be multilateral in the extreme. It cannot be reduced into a bunch of bilateral trades as in the case of private commerce. This means that we get sizable transaction costs. IP is there to force the economy into something approximating the conventional, material one, and so internalize externality otherwise generated. (No, it does not solve the problem. But limited term copyright could still strike a near-optimal bargain.) If something, Coase's original point is behind copyright, not its antithesis. That's why I rarely use economic reasoning to argue for IP abolition, even when I consider IP a bad idea. Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - mailto:decoy@iki.fi, tel:+358-50-5756111 student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front openpgp: 050985C2/025E D175 ABE5 027C 9494 EEB0 E090 8BA9 0509 85C2
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