Posts by Keir Leslie
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Matthew, I really am not disagreeing with you on the technical issues here. I just think that responding to `ISPs make money off downloading' with `o but if everybody actually did that'd be horrible for them' is very much like responding to `gyms make money off people's desire to get fit' by responding `but if people actually did that gyms would go bust'.
I also don't advocate any further actions based on that. The ISPs are in all likelihood right that large scale traffic monitoring is currently a bust and will remain so for at least the near future. But it can also be true there's a strong element of self-interest in there.
Dismissing it as merely "making money from infringement" is really mean-minded.
It isn't merely making money from infringement, but come on. If you think that the utility of the internet isn't improved by the presence of infringing material, well, you've never been to YouTube. And fair enough, maybe you think that that's all fair game and so on, I'm hardly going to denounce YouTube as horrible and immoral. But Google doesn't like people reducing the utility of the internet, and Google (and in fact ISPs) can certainly afford lobbyists, contra the OP.
It isn't that I think they are wrong, it is that I think they are profit-maximising amoral entities who hold positions for entirely self-centred reasons.
I'm not sure this sort of dismissive polemic from your end is any better. The internet works for you precisely because of the kind of people you seem to want to vilify. Can you try and accept that internet engineering types come to these issues with principles every bit as valid as yours?
No. There's a reason engineers are heavily over represented among creationists and terrorists.
OK, that's low and nasty, and a wee bit unfair. But there is a definite view like the one I described above which is quite common in certain circles and it is very important to push back against it. (In the same way that fans/Slans should be stomped on early and often.) And it isn't about being anti-internet, or anti-fan.
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It doesn't particularly matter if ISPs don't rake it in from people downloading Heroes, Lost, and the Fall back catalogue if they either (a) rake it in from people downloading the latest number ones, or (b) rake it in from people who buy Internet connections on the perception that they could download Heroes, Lost, or the Fall back catalogue. Either way, they profit from the perception of downloading as easy and risk free, and will be averse to making it not risk free.
(I don't know empirically if any of the above is true, so yeah. But it's possible for the ISPs to be making money off perceptions that aren't entirely true.)
There are other players who do make money off infringement --- Google etc --- and they really can afford lobbyists.
On the other hand I will be no less inclined to take the word of anyone who screams "the sky is falling" without solid evidence - such as, say, the sky landing on my head - to support their position.
Problem is that there's a certain species of copyfight reformist who sometimes holds a very minimalist view about the effect of technology --- Valenti was wrong etc, so why listen now?, sometimes holds a hugely maximalist `the internet is like nothing ever before you can't spoil it you nasty person I bet you like people better than it!' position, and sometimes holds a moderate in between view where the internet will kill the labels but all the happy bands will dance away into the sunset*. It can be quite hard to reconcile the three positions into a coherent view unless you realise that for a lot of people the first premise is `yay the internet' and then everything follows from that. The Californian Ideology, where it really is the case that the arts can get fucked, look at my ping!
* And it is the happy rock bands with a rather simple view of authenticity that are being thought of; the nerds of the world tend to make Pitchfork look broad minded and tolerant of different tastes in music. Speaking of which, if live performances are the way of the future, isn't that a total betrayal of the promise of the Internet's universality and same-ness? Also that chap who was Mercury (?) nominated and never did live shows, I think a few years back, pity if that sort of formalist purity would be lost.
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But this stuff does get counted towards PBRF, right?
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Why introduce state support now?
Mainly I just disagree with this idea that `state support' is something new here. (Also, I really really disagree with inconsistent use of free market rhetoric, because I think selective use of market rhetoric is deeply immoral.)
Personally, I favour doing nothing at the moment (aside from shortening terms and clarifying fair use) and if things get worse introducing some form of public financing, but that's way away in the future, and we'll see what happens.
But copyright is a state intervention to insure the provision of a public good; if copyright stops working, then we'll have to get the state to intervene in some other way. But that's only if things stop working, which I am not at all confident they will.
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You vaguely imagine a stern line-drawing wandering around saying how we should all go back to trading decorated pots and olive oil, and that'll solve all our problems!
No, a bog-standard orthodox academic economist, the sort that believes in rational actors and efficient markets and all that.
(The problem with your analogy to ptg is that of course the cost of producing another old master is the same as the first; very high marginal costs so really a truly shocking comparison. And anyway you aren't buying the expressed idea, you are buying the object.)
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huh? How can it be a free market if the state must intervene "constantly and drastically"? That speaks to a very un-free market, both by logic and by economic definition.
Watch! Let us consider the case of fish. The state defines a quota --- say, x fish per license. Then, if the state sells those licenses at auction, say, and the licenses are resalable, we then have a free market in fish-catching licenses, despite the fact that the fish-catching is only valuable as a figment of the the state's imagination. Then, let us go even further and observe that without the state's intervention, the fish stocks would be rapidly fished to depletion, at which point the supply of fish would stop*.
To be slightly shorter: free-markets often only exist when The Free Market is muzzled by the state.
This stuff is hardly controversial, it's the kind of rather dull crap that gets trotted out by orthodox academic economists whenever there's a resource management problem: markets in everything!
* in fact i suspect the neo-classical economist would prefer a slightly different set up here, but it'll do as an illustration.
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Um, if copyright wasn't designed to protect scarcity, why would it need to be introduced when the cost of duplicating a book had dropped to a very low value?
No, that's my point. Copyright is a reaction to a sudden plummeting in the marginal cost of books. Matthew's claim that the current copyright regime is outdated because of low marginal costs is the one that has severe issues with the historical record.
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I invoke the free market, for goodness sake, how can it be anything but ideological?
Except you don't even understand your own ideology; there is no free market in fixed expressions of ideas without the continual intervention of the state. We can't leave it `up to the free-market' because the free-market can be proven, and by entirely orthodox neo-classicist tools alone, to be unable to provide these things, unless the state intervenes constantly and drastically.
(If you don't believe in economics, which is an entirely defensible position, all very well, but then you can hardly invoke the `free-market'.)
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Gio, what has been taken? The work is still theirs, still intact, still available for sale. Copyright as it exists now is designed for a system revolving around scarcity. What we have now turns that entirely on its head, because it is entirely possible for effectively limitless numbers of people to have perfect copies of the same song at a near-zero marginal cost. Rules of scarcity do not apply, and trying to shoehorn the old model of copyright into the new reality of digital isn't working out terribly well.
This by the way was why I was so utterly anal about `market' before; it really helps when you start doing economics to know what you're talking about. Almost every single statement of fact in that quote is false.
Copyright is not a system revolving around scarcity, or at least not the way you mean it. Think: when did copyright in books turn up? About the same time the marginal cost of book production plummeted.
In fact copyright is premised on the observation that the marginal costs of distribution may be next to zero*. It is a fundamental part of the economic justification for copyright. What has changed is the difficulty of preventing piracy. That's the difference, not anything about marginal costs and scarcity.
* And it isn't really the marginal costs that matter, it's the fixed costs. See lighthouses.
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I do not think that expecting a consistent use of terminology is at all over the top, especially given that every time you try and define `market' you give it a different definition. I don't like being a bitch about definitions and all that but if you are going to use a term as central to your argument and yet not be able to use it coherently that really is an indication you have a bit of a problem.
I mean, this idea of a `market'? You seem to want to mean an audience, or at least a demand for a certain product, but at the same time you also use it to mean the market in the sense of `let the market decide'. But of course it can't mean both things at once. In particular, the second sense of `market' is deeply problematic when applied to culture, both on a moral and on a purely economic level*.