Hayek was right. Twice.

Sampo Syreeni decoy at iki.fi
Wed Jul 3 02:41:31 PDT 2002


On Tue, 2 Jul 2002, R. A. Hettinga wrote:

>"Rival" means that only one person can own something at once. That,
>technically, is the case with anything digitable.

No. It is the case with the digitized version, but not the work. Nobody
would argue that actual copies aren't normal, private goods. One time,
when copying was difficult, there was even a one-to-few correspondence
between works and copies. Today that isn't the case. Replication and
creation are now neatly separable, and benefits of scale in the former do
not translate to returns to the latter. Copies are still a private good,
as ever, but works are becoming increasingly pure public goods. According
to orthodox public goods theory, that might well be a problem.

In practice the issue is muddled beyond belief, of course.

>Excludable, if you want to go back to your eurosocialst wanker Le Monde
>Diplomatique definition, means that when you've used it, it's useless to
>anyone else.

Did this thread really start with something taken from LMD? The list
really *has* stooped to an all-time low...

>It's price, however, is very, very, small, however, but just because
>it's cheap doesn't mean that you can't do transactions that small.

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?)

Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - mailto:decoy at 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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