Welcome to Orcmid's Lair, the playground for family connections, pastimes, and scholarly vocation -- the collected professional and recreational work of Dennis E. Hamilton

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Open is Different than Stolen: The Importance of Social Trust in Honoring IP

IPcentral Weblog: Coming Soon: Son of Grokster!  James DeLong makes a fascinating observation around social trust that also invites us to understand the basis for reciprocity and building of social capital:

“The principal sufferers from illicit file-sharers are consumers; someone must pay for the movies or they cannot be made, and the file-sharers are free-riders on the payments made by the responsible segments of the viewing community. In the end, an expression of collective disapproval of chiseling by that viewing community is a crucial part of a successful system of Internet distribution.”

{tags: intellectual property economics free riders reciprocity social contract orcmid}

I think that attitudes and stories about free-riders are important to pay attention to.  It was, after all, our built-in assumption of the fundamental defect in communism and socialism that was common currency in the US during the earlier stages of the cold war.  This argument also shows up in contemporary discussions of social welfare policies, health insurance provisions, and social security and Medicare programs, with “moral hazard” being the tip-off expression.

Calling a producer a free-loader.  What I find fascinating is that Richard Stallman’s argument in favor of the GNU Public License is that it prevents closed-source ventures from free-riding on the freely given work of others (except if it is truly a gift, what are all of these strings attached to it).  It also creates an IP regime, by someone who simultaneously refuses to grant standing to the term “intellectual property.”  It is also the case that illicit file-sharing is justified by the argument that the producers of mass media are free-loading on the backs of the artists (although so is the file-sharing community, big time).   The other popular rationalization is that the consumer gets to fix the price and the currency of exchange and the producer doesn’t have any say in the matter.  We have some odd ideas about the social contract on both sides of that deal.

Flavors of reciprocity. Although I disagree that open-source development and distribution are insane ideas, I do think that DeLong’s earlier commentary on reciprocity is also important:

“Emphasis on reciprocity as a dominant value is right. It is a word used often here at PFF to describe the workings of the IP system, and to explain why unauthorized P2P violates the social contract. …

“[It is] an awfully limited view of reciprocity [that] insists that code can only be traded for code. This may do in a research context, but once one enters the world of affairs, not even the most primitive barter economy trades like for like. Og the Cro Magnon traded meat for a finely crafted club, or a log canoe for a tent.  …

“The market is a giant reciprocity machine. Why is this a hard point?”

The free-rider in the punchbowl.  It is useful to recall that Microsoft was driven to an OEM-based licensing regime and effective DRM on the software (e.g., Microsoft Basic in ROM) because of nearly going out of business with the hobbyist community (and hardware builders) ripping off Microsoft software like crazy.  Microsoft seems to have solved its problem, but we haven’t come to grips with ours.

I mention this because it is striking how much distrust of free-riders figures in our justification for various arrangements, including ones that appear to be diametrically opposed to each other.  You can extend this to the political and economic climate as well as the on-going concerns about culture, creative arts, and intellectual property of various kinds.

 

posted by orcmid at 2/24/2006 11:04:44 AM