Have you read Eben Moglen's writings per chance? Your thoughts?
If you haven't looked into his work, here's something (in line with topic) to get started on: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbcy_ZxXLl8 -- I'd be curious to hear your thoughts. It's 1 hour 11 minutes, but I promise every second is worth watching. Moglen is an excellent communicator.
Near 8 minutes in, he says this:
This is the introduction to the free software movement. This is the purpose of the free software movement. This is the aim not only of the free software movement, but of a large number of the other things we are doing that arise from the fact that the digital revolution means that knowledge no longer has a non-zero marginal cost, that when you have the first copy of any significant representation of knowledge – whatever the fixed cost of the production of that representation may have been – you have as many additional copies, everywhere, as you need, without any significant additional costs.
The non-zero marginal cost quality of all the things we digitize, which – in the society we are now building – is everything we value, because we digitize everything we can value, right down to how we fit in our jeans, right? In the world where we digitize everything of value and everything of value has been digitized, a moral question of significance arises: When you can provide to everybody everything that you value, at the cost of providing it to any one body, what is the morality of excluding people who cannot afford to pay?
If you could make as much bread, or have as many fishes, as you needed to feed everyone, at the cost of the first loaf and the first fish plus a button press, what would be the morality for charging more for loaves and fishes than the poorest person could afford to pay? It’s a difficult moral problem, explaining why you are excluding people from that which you yourself value highly and could provide to them for nothing.
The best way of solving this moral problem is not to acknowledge its existence, which is the current theory. The current theory in force takes the view that industrial society lived in a world of non-zero marginal cost for information – information and the ability to learn had to be embedded in analog things: books, recordings, objects that cost non-zero amounts of money to make, move, and sell. Therefore, it was inevitable that representations of things we value would have significant marginal costs. And in economies operating efficiently and competitively, – or for that matter, efficiently and non-competitively – there would still be some cost that somebody has to pay at the other end to receive each copy of something of meaning or value, unless there is somebody available to provide a subsidy. And since that was the 20th century reality, it was appropriate to have moral theory which regarded exclusion as an inevitable necessity.
The discussion, of course, was about scale. “Ought we to find ways to subsidize more knowledge for more people?”, and the United States became not merely the wealthiest and most powerful country, after the second world war, not merely the indispensable or inevitable country, it became the intellectually most attractive country because it heavily subsidized the availability of sophisticated knowledge to people who could make use of it, even people who came elsewhere from poorer societies, or who had not the money to pay. And after the second world war, in the G.I. Bill, the United States took a unique approach to the age-old problem of how to reduce social disorder after war time through the demobilization of a large number of young men trained to the efficient use of collective violence – a thing which is always worrisome to societies, and which typically produces repression movements post-war, as the society as a whole tries to get back its leverage over those young men – the G.I. Bill was a radical, and indeed productive approach to the problem, namely send everybody to as much education as they want to have, at the expense of the state which is grateful to them for risking their lives in its defense. A splendid system; on the basis of that, and the provision of tertiary and quaternary education to the talented elite of the world, the United Stated government built a special place for its society in the world, as throwing away fewer brains than its power and importance would otherwise have tended to indicate it would do.
But we are no longer talking about whether we can save people, identified as the elite of other societies, from the ignorance to which they might otherwise fall prey, through enlightened federal spending. We are talking about eliminating ignorance. We’re talking about addressing the great deprivation of knowledge of everything of use and utility and beauty from everybody, by building out the network across humanity, and allowing everybody to have the knowledge and the culture that they wish to obtain. And we’re talking about doing that because the alternative to doing that is the persistence of an immoral condition.
He loses me at "zero marginal cost." What is the here or there of the "marginal" part? "Zero marginal cost" is not the same as "zero cost." Since when do people have a right to receive things for their marginal cost? What difference does it make whether that marginal cost is zero or very small?
I love free software. But one of the things I love about the free software community is that it is self-sufficient. It respects that some people don't want to "share" so it shares amongst itself. RMS didn't copy the source code of some commercial compiler and "free it." He wrote his own. Miguel de Icaza didn't copy the source of CDE and put it on Pirate Bay and "free it." He started GNOME and wrote his own desktop.
I see the "free information" people as the antithesis of that. They don't just want to share what they create. They want to share what you create. And I see that as an impingement on freedom.
> I see the "free information" people as the antithesis of that. They don't just want to share what they create. They want to share what you create. And I see that as an impingement on freedom.
I think the way the "free information" people see things is that a free and easy, attractive accessibility of knowledge (or more generally, information) is needed for anyone to truly prosper in their life, and for humanity to progress further as a whole. A physical good (like food) is not reproducible at an effective zero marginal cost -- digital data is. So, when you in fact can provide everyone this resource, and work to achieve a world with true equal opportunity at least in this one aspect (of knowledge) at a practically zero or near-zero cost, you are indeed morally obliged to distribute this good to everyone who will prosper from it. As it stands, culture is no longer free -- to be able to participate you must pay. The more you are able to pay, the more cultured you can be. Books, movies, music -- you can have only as much culture, knowledge as you can pay. Why... when it's finally gotten so much easier to afford everyone culture and information for free, or near-free costs.
Okay, so digital data is reproducible at near-zero marginal cost, and so there is a moral obligation to distribute it for zero cost to anyone who will benefit from it. Let's generalize this principle. There are physical goods that are reproducible for very low marginal costs. Clothes, food, etc, medicine, etc, are all very cheap to produce in large quantities. Is there a moral obligation to provide those goods--not for free but for their low marginal cost, to anyone who will prosper from it? If the answer is no, how do you justify the distinction? The producer is in no different a position if he is obligated to provide something with $0 marginal cost for $0 than if he is obligated to provide something with $3 marginal cost for $3. There is no mathematical discontinuity as the marginal cost approaches $0, as long as the producer is compensated for whatever the marginal cost happens to be.
> There are physical goods that are reproducible for very low marginal costs. Clothes, food, etc, medicine, etc, are all very cheap to produce in large quantities. Is there a moral obligation to provide those goods--not for free but for their low marginal cost, to anyone who will prosper from it?
A physical good (food, clothes) is depletable, and in that way too unlike digital data, which is for all practical purposes undepletable. But if you consider even highly inexpensive physical goods, they have various substantial costs of transportation, inventory, etc. associated to them, and thus they are not truly as fluidly and effortlessly reproducible in the way that digital data is reproducible for zero cost.
You have a network in which it is so convenient to share that it's almost begging you to. There's a lot of fundamental rethinking of commerce here, and I was quite bugged by it all when I started looking into it myself. But when you see how badly the bigger half of people in this world are suffering it's easier to see why this is necessary.
> A physical good (food, clothes) is depletable, and in that way too unlike digital data, which is for all practical purposes undepletable. But if you consider even highly inexpensive physical goods, they have various substantial costs of transportation, inventory, etc. associated to them, and thus they are not truly as fluidly and effortlessly reproducible in the way that digital data is reproducible for zero cost.
Right, that's why I said "not for free but for their low marginal cost." You're hand-waving with the "zero marginal cost" argument without addressing my counter-point. If the fact that something has a marginal cost approaching $0 means you are morally obligated to provide it for a price approaching $0, why is there not a similar moral obligation to provide something that has a marginal cost of $3 for $3?
> If the fact that something has a marginal cost approaching $0 means you are morally obligated to provide it for a price approaching $0, why is there not a similar moral obligation to provide something that has a marginal cost of $3 for $3?
If it were up to me, it would be -- or roughly something like that. But I have supposedly radical views on a lot of things (FWIW I affiliate to a local socialist party). I think a lot of the decisions made by big pharmaceutical companies, retail corporations, etc. are morally reprehensible. To give you a more direct answer of why I do not go down the streets at night shouting for change on this: because it'll be much harder for me to achieve that change. It'll be much harder for me to be an influencing force of bringing about a system I would be happy with. But because I am someone of a technical background, this fight is the fight I choose to participate in. Also, charging something $3 for something that has a marginal cost of $3 sounds kind of lousy -- I'm sure there's got to be a more elegant way of doing that. :)
I disagree with you, but admire your consistency. I think a lot of people pushing for "free information" draw an arbitrary distinction between digital things that are almost free to reproduce and physical things that are fairly cheap to reproduce.
I think the real difference here is not so much that the marginal cost of digital goods is low, but that customers also own the means of reproduction. That is the fundamental difference that leads to arguments over rights, and then to arguments over morals, as these things often do.
If the up-front cost of producing the first instance of the product is paid by society, as is often the case with the type of work published in Elsevier journals, than it does seem fair to distribute the product back to members of the funding society at the marginal cost (which is not quite zero, as hosting, editing, and curating do have costs).
The analogy can be made between scientific funding body and investor, where an investor expects a return on their investment. In this version of reality, the funding body would encourage distribution of the product at supra-marginal cost, with some percentage of that cost funneled back to the funder. This situation is rare in science, i.e. a journal company paying the NSF royalties on subscriptions whose content was paid for by the NSF.
It's not really fair to say that the up front costs are paid by society. First, roughly half of university R&D budgets come from government funding. Second, even if the development of a product is fully funded by government money does not mean the government has fully paid for the result.
E.g. say the government gives me a $1 million grant to pay the costs of developing some military technology. As part of the bargain, I get to keep any commercialization rights. Should the resulting technology be free to the public? No. Nobody sane works simply to cover their costs. The commercialization rights are my profit in the arrangement. If I had known that they would be rendered useless by the government giving away the resulting technology, I wouldn't have settled for a grant that simply covered my costs--I would have bargained for costs + profit.
If you destroy considerable amounts of food to profit off of a reduced food supply that is as reprehensible as using copyright to profit off of an artificially scarce supply of useful information. In general, artificially limiting the supply of any useful good is always unacceptable.
Why do you value the freedom of profit-driven megacorporations to profit off of their exclusive control of intellectual private property over the freedom to share information with one's friends and neighbours?
I could very well twist that and say: I value the freedom of hard-working content creators to make money from their labor over the freedom of teenagers to get free copies of popular movies and video games, but I won't because the nature of the parties in question is really irrelevant to me.
I value the freedom of creators of original works. Without them, there would be nothing to share. I don't care of those creators are profit-driven mega-corporations or starving artists. I think in a digital, connected age, the moral right to one's intellectual creations becomes stronger, not weaker.[1] I'm perfectly supportive of people who chose to share their original work, but I respect that some people don't want to share, or control the terms of that sharing, and that is their prerogative.
[1] Thought experiment: in games like World of Warcraft, weapons, armor, etc, are trivially reproducible. But would anyone play the game if you could just click on someone's weapon that he stole off a dragon (or whatever it is you do in WoW--I've never played it) and have your own copy?
> Thought experiment: in games like World of Warcraft, weapons, armor, etc, are trivially reproducible. But would anyone play the game if you could just click on someone's weapon that he stole off a dragon (or whatever it is you do in WoW--I've never played it) and have your own copy?
Not a very good analogy to demonstrate your point, as the scarcity of resources within the game is a central facet of the gameplay.
rayiner, I often see you as the lone man arguing on these things -- about information being free, journals being freely accessible, etc. You're unconvinced as of yet -- so I want to make the recommendation of two of Lawrence Lessig's books to you: Free culture (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Culture_(book)) and Remix (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remix_(book)) -- both freely available for download on a CC license I should add. :)
You're a great writer and I wish more people engaged with you on the points you raise. If you go on to read the two books, I would be genuinely interested in hearing your thoughts.
"rayiner, I often see you as the lone man arguing on these things "
Probably because it's so futile to argue fundamentalists. I know I have gotten better better at restraining myself from getting dragged into this sort of 'discussions' with people who are not susceptible to any form of reasonableness.
FWIW, it used to be that on this site, the creators were the ones celebrated. Nowadays it seems to have shifted largely to celebrating the freeloaders, or enablers of them.
Huh? WoW goods are key elements in a game specifically designed around their acquisition. IP is a tiny part of a completely different game we call the "economy," a game that was designed and refined around a radically different class of goods with essentially no attributes in common.
Trying to apply market-economic rules to IP is like trying to use a Zamboni as a lawnmower. Sure, it can be done, but you're going to have to force people to do it, and they are going to invent some very creative workarounds.
When you have to force people to follow the rules, it often means there's something wrong with the rules.
This is simply a difference of degree. If first-run movies were available to DVR off basic cable, they would also make far less money. In both cases, we discuss the economics of digital goods that derive value from an extrinsic scarcity.
> I value the freedom of hard-working content creators to make money from their labor over the freedom of teenagers to get free copies of popular movies and video games
I appreciate how you twisted this. This reveals that you take an ageist position against teenagers. When I was fifteen I knew everything I needed to know about the world and I was studying higher mathematics full time in college. Teenagers can be just as intelligent and productive as anyone else. Despite this, you value the right of movie companies like Metro-Goldwyn Mayer, 20th Century Fox, Disney, Paramount, Warner bros, and Universal Studios to make a profit over the freedom of our teenagers to share with one another.
> I don't care of those creators are profit-driven mega-corporations or starving artists.
The existing copyright policies are created by profit-driven mega-corporations rather then individual artists because the big corporations have all the political power, so you are implicitly supporting these corporations over individual artists.
Programmers would greatly benefit from living in a society where all software is free because they would never have to use a program that alienates them from the process of software production. Operating systems could be rebuilt to eliminate the user/produce distinction and to drastically increase programmer productivity. However, profit-driven mega-corporations like Microsoft and Apple cannot allow that because that would destroy their profit model.
Similarly, individual artists would benefit from the freedom to use our accumulated artistic knowledge without being alienated from it by the profit-driven corporations. Mega-corporations don't want that, they want what we have now which is copyright that lasts 120 years after creation.
> Thought experiment: in games like World of Warcraft, weapons, armor, etc, are trivially reproducible.
I don't have much of an issue with participating in a virtual commodity economy for fun and not to make a profit. Blizzard makes its money off of WoW from subscription fees rather then game economy itself. However, some free-to-play games like Maple Story run cash shops for profit and I oppose the existence of such cash shops as much as I do all other markets that sell artificially scarce goods for a profit.
I was told once that the typical paper in my field gets only two serious readers, beyond the reviewers. (The joke is that it gets only two, including three reviewers.)
Of course, it is impossible to know who has read a paper, and that may explain why I've never seen the number written down. Still, it's easy to count citations. In my field, strong papers get perhaps a dozen citations. My guess is that no more than a quarter of citations indicates a thorough reading, so we indeed get a readership that could be counted on one hand.
For an author, a big factor is page charges. A popular [society, noncommercial] journal that I use has a special deal for providing content to readers for free. It "only" costs 3K. At that rate, the one or two potential readers who lack a university subscription could just phone me and I could buy them a ticket to visit, where I could explain the work in person.
That's because that journal is doing it wrong and someone there is getting too much money. You give me 3k and I'll seed a torrent for one thousand papers as long as my Internet is billed per month instead of per GB. I just saw some redditors link a torrent with tens of gigabytes of technical books, so the method appears to work just fine. And if the author's intent is to distribute it wouldn't be violating anyone's copyright.
Yes, exactly. I think people arguing for "freedom" here need to start listing what papers they want to read and why. Most research isn't exactly accessible even if you hand someone a copy of the paper.
If you haven't looked into his work, here's something (in line with topic) to get started on: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbcy_ZxXLl8 -- I'd be curious to hear your thoughts. It's 1 hour 11 minutes, but I promise every second is worth watching. Moglen is an excellent communicator.
Near 8 minutes in, he says this:
This is the introduction to the free software movement. This is the purpose of the free software movement. This is the aim not only of the free software movement, but of a large number of the other things we are doing that arise from the fact that the digital revolution means that knowledge no longer has a non-zero marginal cost, that when you have the first copy of any significant representation of knowledge – whatever the fixed cost of the production of that representation may have been – you have as many additional copies, everywhere, as you need, without any significant additional costs.
The non-zero marginal cost quality of all the things we digitize, which – in the society we are now building – is everything we value, because we digitize everything we can value, right down to how we fit in our jeans, right? In the world where we digitize everything of value and everything of value has been digitized, a moral question of significance arises: When you can provide to everybody everything that you value, at the cost of providing it to any one body, what is the morality of excluding people who cannot afford to pay?
If you could make as much bread, or have as many fishes, as you needed to feed everyone, at the cost of the first loaf and the first fish plus a button press, what would be the morality for charging more for loaves and fishes than the poorest person could afford to pay? It’s a difficult moral problem, explaining why you are excluding people from that which you yourself value highly and could provide to them for nothing.
The best way of solving this moral problem is not to acknowledge its existence, which is the current theory. The current theory in force takes the view that industrial society lived in a world of non-zero marginal cost for information – information and the ability to learn had to be embedded in analog things: books, recordings, objects that cost non-zero amounts of money to make, move, and sell. Therefore, it was inevitable that representations of things we value would have significant marginal costs. And in economies operating efficiently and competitively, – or for that matter, efficiently and non-competitively – there would still be some cost that somebody has to pay at the other end to receive each copy of something of meaning or value, unless there is somebody available to provide a subsidy. And since that was the 20th century reality, it was appropriate to have moral theory which regarded exclusion as an inevitable necessity.
The discussion, of course, was about scale. “Ought we to find ways to subsidize more knowledge for more people?”, and the United States became not merely the wealthiest and most powerful country, after the second world war, not merely the indispensable or inevitable country, it became the intellectually most attractive country because it heavily subsidized the availability of sophisticated knowledge to people who could make use of it, even people who came elsewhere from poorer societies, or who had not the money to pay. And after the second world war, in the G.I. Bill, the United States took a unique approach to the age-old problem of how to reduce social disorder after war time through the demobilization of a large number of young men trained to the efficient use of collective violence – a thing which is always worrisome to societies, and which typically produces repression movements post-war, as the society as a whole tries to get back its leverage over those young men – the G.I. Bill was a radical, and indeed productive approach to the problem, namely send everybody to as much education as they want to have, at the expense of the state which is grateful to them for risking their lives in its defense. A splendid system; on the basis of that, and the provision of tertiary and quaternary education to the talented elite of the world, the United Stated government built a special place for its society in the world, as throwing away fewer brains than its power and importance would otherwise have tended to indicate it would do.
But we are no longer talking about whether we can save people, identified as the elite of other societies, from the ignorance to which they might otherwise fall prey, through enlightened federal spending. We are talking about eliminating ignorance. We’re talking about addressing the great deprivation of knowledge of everything of use and utility and beauty from everybody, by building out the network across humanity, and allowing everybody to have the knowledge and the culture that they wish to obtain. And we’re talking about doing that because the alternative to doing that is the persistence of an immoral condition.
Please watch to see how he continues :)