More on the concept of commons when it comes to physical property
Today's part of my research involves reading about "commons." I just ran across this, which should be relevant here.
The Volokh Conspiracy -- Elinor Ostrom and the Tragedy of the Commons: "Ostrom's theories are often seen as an alternative to traditional libertarian thought, which emphasizes the importance of private property and markets. However, it actually fits well with libertarianism defined more broadly as advocacy of the superiority of private sector institutions over government. In some respects, Ostrom's norm-based approach to dealing with tragedies of the commons is actually less dependent on government than the more traditional libertarian approach of relying on exclusive private property rights. The latter, after all, often depend on enforcement by government. Even where private property rights exist, it is often easier and cheaper to solve some collective action problems by norms rather than relying on the law."
The thing is there are a lot of trolls on techdirt and I used to think you are one of them. But now it seems like you aren't.
I really don't feel strongly about IP one way or the other (other than the fact that I agree there are some obvious abuses of the system).
I'm a writer and I have worked with musicians. With the cost of content going down, traditional sources of income pay a lot less money than they used to or have disappeared altogether.
So I definitely know the Internet has changed things. But I don't think it is worth the hassle to sue people. Whether or not writers or musicians like having the cost of content heading toward zero, that's the way it is.
I also think a lot of jobs will continue to shift overseas. Do I want them to? Not necessarily, but that's the way it is. We've got to get used to the fact that people in India and China can do the same job for less money. One possible response is to belt-tighten and see if you can get by with less, which I see happening in the US.
If there is a commonality in my Techdirt postings, it's usually from a pragmatic point of view. I'm looking for ways to deal with whatever exists now, rather than spend a lot of time on what should be.
Many times when I respond to something on Techdirt, I realize I want to explore the topic more fully, and then it becomes a blog post of my own. My goal is primarily informational, so I'll try to present whatever I find. If something I think should work isn't working, I'll be honest and say that. Usually I have a lot more questions than answers.
But pointing at the fact that some pro IP people are communistic is like saying that some people who believe in gravity are Christian and others are Muslim.
Actually that's not what I have been talking about. I know a lot of you are primarily concerned about IP laws, but I have been researching gift economies. Hyde is quite well known for a book he did on the subject.
The gift economy concept is much broader than IP laws. My question was, "How accurate is it to describe any system today a gift economy (a term that has been used for various exchanges online, including music and software)? And what would it take for a pure gift economy to exist?"
I'm primarily interested in how people in a variety of fields get paid. In some cases the work they do is very worthwhile, but not highly compensated. Childcare workers and artists tend to fall into this category.
I've tossed what I am finding into this discussion on the assumption that some people (and they may be lurkers) would like to know what is out there. Once I finish my blog posts, I can provide links to those. I'm currently going through between 100 and 200 articles about gift economies.
The problem is that IP is not necessary for ideas and invention to occur and the evidence shows that it only hinders advancement. If you want it to exist the burden is on you to justify its existence, not on anyone else to justify the lack of its existence, and the problem is that no one has yet to justify it.
My guess is that enforcement of copyright will disappear before the laws do. Much of the new content being made available is by people who are happy to have their content freely used.
Many of the companies that hold legacy content are disappearing and as they go, so will the lawsuits they fund.
As digital distribution increases, you'll likely see more scientific and academic papers freely uploaded online, available for viewing by everyone.
Although there are cultural artifacts which are in limbo at the moment, I suspect the number of people that impacts is actually rather small. The number of people who want to go back and read older books and listen to older music isn't that great in the greater scheme of things. Archivists will likely continue to make preservation copies of what they have to insure that the content doesn't disappear, and then if and when the laws change, they will be made available. But quite honestly, I don't see culture being impeded tremendously in the meantime.
When a lot of legislation in Washington isn't happening as it is, I think it will be a big challenge to get legislators to make copyright reform a priority, but certainly the people who care most about it are welcome to try.
Sometimes government money can move more quickly than the free market
China to Invest in Electric and Hybrid Vehicles - NYTimes.com: "Beijing said that over the next three years, 500,000 energy-efficient vehicles would reach the market each year and that more-efficient vehicles would soon account for 5 percent of passenger car sales in China. This year, analysts expect vehicle sales in China to reach about 17 million."
If this makes everyone better off then this "out-group" (or really the in group of collection societies and patent trolls that produce nothing, do little work beyond filing for patents and suing, are unneeded, and sue those who do work and would otherwise profit from the work they produce) should find another job if they don't like it. Why should society spend the resources necessary to enforce laws that are unneeded and make everyone worse off.
The far left folks would also argue that the rich who own capital and don't work as hard as their employees are also taking advantage of the system. That's why they want to end corporate ownership so that wealth either goes to everyone in society equally or goes to those who put in the most physical labor, or mental labor, etc. (A more modest proposal, not advocated in what I am reading now, but has been discussed in business forums, would limit compensation to CEOs so there isn't so much spread between the top of the corporation and the bottom.)
I'm not a Marxist, personally, but that's how you get the copyfarleft thinking. They feel it is not enough to make IP free. They feel you have to make the tools of production free, too.
As for the scarce goods idea, they feel that there would be more abundance, or at least more equitable use of resources, if those resources weren't concentrated in the richest one percent of the population. Of course, that kind of thinking led to the French Revolution, and I'd rather not see something like that again.
You probably aren't trying to equate the two but you are trying to more closely associate the two together so as to associate IP abolitionists closer to an extreme category as to argue that this closer association makes IP abolition more extreme in an unacceptable way.
Umm. No, actually all I was saying is that I've been reading about gift economies, which Hyde happens to have written about, and that physical property has come up in some of those articles. And the reason I mentioned physical property is that someone brought it up in the very first comment.
I'm totally immersed in the subject right now and thought that some Techdirt readers might actually be interested in hearing about it. I'm actually in the process of writing my blog post right now.
I think what I was doing is called conversation. The world really isn't all black and white and I like to explore the shades of grey.
and to compare land to IP is disingenuous. Land has genuine scarcities, which is why we have rules to govern its allocation, ideas do not have the same limitations that encourage these rules.
But there are people who believe consumerism and private property are a plague on civilization.
Some people want to expand the concept of "commons" to include everything, not just culture. I'm not trying to convince anyone here as to whether it will work. I'm just saying that's been my reading material lately.
To those that have extended it as you describe they have either misunderstood that copyleft, in the software sense, is a copyright license not a total abandonment of IP.
I haven't been researching copyright, so I haven't been zeroing in on those discussions. Copyright and copyleft have come up, but I've been looking at "gift economies" and exchange systems. So what I have been reading has been more about how people, particularly artists, will be paid. There are some who believe that if people get over the desire for accumulation of wealth and property, and start giving it all away, then the world's needs will be met and we'll have much less waste. So if you advocate that everything should be freely available, then obviously you'll be against IP laws as well.
In other words, the papers I have read don't really concern themselves with copyright laws because they are much more concerned with basic survival needs. In the utopian ideal, there will be a place for artists, farmers, dressmakers, and the pleasant and unpleasant work wouldn't fall disproportionately on anyone.
Then, by that definition, charity is a gift economy. What's wrong with that
Nothing. I think charities are great things and I encourage people to donate to their favorite causes.
I'm researching gift economies. I didn't say whether I was pro or not. I was just curious how advocates envision them. Some believe in combining a gift economy with a market economy and others believe in replacing a capitalist system entirely with a gift economy. They feel this can be done now because of the Internet and the ability to match needs and production in a waste-free manner.
Do you have anything in particular you would like to discuss. Any criticisms in particular?
If this was directed to me, I was responding to this comment:
Just wait until he discovers how much property rights have locked up our shared land and all our shared goods made at our shared factories!
As it turns out, that's exactly what I am researching right now. I've been reading lots of papers on gift economies, commons, copyleft, copyfarleft, etc.
So it's a topic with a lot of depth, though many people may not realize it. Even the concern about politics, right or left, seems a little odd considering Richard Stallman coined the word "copyleft." If people freak out about the term "left" when it comes to copyrights, blame Stallman.
There's quite a bit out there, and I'm trying to pull it into an organized fashion, but here's a basic look at open source as a gift economy. It looks a some of the networking, open source, and piracy movements of the past few decades.
But the lack of IP is not a gift economy, in fact the existence of IP is a gift economy.
Actually many people have described the open source community as a gift economy. People contribute free labor and ask for nothing in return.
I'm looking at the gift economy and the arts and looking at proposals for short term and long terms sustainability. Hyde wrote a famous book on the arts and gift economies and said that artists should give away their art. For income, they will either have day jobs, have patrons, or do commercial work which would fall into a separate category than their art.
and shared governance, that's called a democracy. What do you know. We all share the government already, and we share our ability to impact the government through voting.
Some of the proposals I'm reading right now would eliminate the concept of state. Again, it would be based on one big network.
I've been researching gift economies and have been looking how people would handle distribution of resources. Some of it is pretty far left, but not all of it.
Collectives. Elimination of money. Reduction of consumerism. Etc. Kind of like a permanent Burning Man scenario.
Some of the more radical economics would extent common property to everything. I've been going through some of the literature on gift economies and some are proposing getting rid of money all together. And there wouldn't be a public/private division of property. All public lands would be common property, not necessarily globally, but within each community. The idea is that networks now make it possible for everyone to weigh in on everything and work out some sort of agreed upon plan for use of property.
Just wait until he discovers how much property rights have locked up our shared land and all our shared goods made at our shared factories!
I'm going through all the literature on that very subject now. Some of the groups advocate not just a common culture, but also common property and shared governance. Here's one such source:
Europe's high-speed rail revolution may spread to U.S. | Philadelphia Inquirer | 08/08/2010: "In Europe, national governments and the European Union are pouring billions of euros into high-speed rail networks that are to almost triple - from 3,800 miles today to 11,000 miles by 2025. High-tech new tracks are traveled by ever-faster trains, with the latest generation designed to make trips of 620 miles in three hours.
In Asia, a similar boom is under way in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and, especially, China. China has more than 6,215 miles of high-speed rail in operation or under construction.
'This is what the rest of the world is doing,' said Robert Yaro, an urban planning professor at the University of Pennsylvania and president of the Regional Plan Association, a New York-area research group. 'We're behind not only France and Spain and the U.K. and Japan and China and Korea, but now Morocco and India and Vietnam are building high-speed rail. This is what we have to do.'"
It's also been my impression that the reason railways haven't as well in the US is lack of government support. Most Department of Transportation money has gone to roads, not railways. I'll pull some info.
On the post: New Book Shows How Our Common Culture Has Been Locked Up Via Copyright
More on the concept of commons when it comes to physical property
The Volokh Conspiracy -- Elinor Ostrom and the Tragedy of the Commons: "Ostrom's theories are often seen as an alternative to traditional libertarian thought, which emphasizes the importance of private property and markets. However, it actually fits well with libertarianism defined more broadly as advocacy of the superiority of private sector institutions over government. In some respects, Ostrom's norm-based approach to dealing with tragedies of the commons is actually less dependent on government than the more traditional libertarian approach of relying on exclusive private property rights. The latter, after all, often depend on enforcement by government. Even where private property rights exist, it is often easier and cheaper to solve some collective action problems by norms rather than relying on the law."
On the post: New Book Shows How Our Common Culture Has Been Locked Up Via Copyright
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
I really don't feel strongly about IP one way or the other (other than the fact that I agree there are some obvious abuses of the system).
I'm a writer and I have worked with musicians. With the cost of content going down, traditional sources of income pay a lot less money than they used to or have disappeared altogether.
So I definitely know the Internet has changed things. But I don't think it is worth the hassle to sue people. Whether or not writers or musicians like having the cost of content heading toward zero, that's the way it is.
I also think a lot of jobs will continue to shift overseas. Do I want them to? Not necessarily, but that's the way it is. We've got to get used to the fact that people in India and China can do the same job for less money. One possible response is to belt-tighten and see if you can get by with less, which I see happening in the US.
If there is a commonality in my Techdirt postings, it's usually from a pragmatic point of view. I'm looking for ways to deal with whatever exists now, rather than spend a lot of time on what should be.
Many times when I respond to something on Techdirt, I realize I want to explore the topic more fully, and then it becomes a blog post of my own. My goal is primarily informational, so I'll try to present whatever I find. If something I think should work isn't working, I'll be honest and say that. Usually I have a lot more questions than answers.
On the post: New Book Shows How Our Common Culture Has Been Locked Up Via Copyright
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Actually that's not what I have been talking about. I know a lot of you are primarily concerned about IP laws, but I have been researching gift economies. Hyde is quite well known for a book he did on the subject.
The gift economy concept is much broader than IP laws. My question was, "How accurate is it to describe any system today a gift economy (a term that has been used for various exchanges online, including music and software)? And what would it take for a pure gift economy to exist?"
I'm primarily interested in how people in a variety of fields get paid. In some cases the work they do is very worthwhile, but not highly compensated. Childcare workers and artists tend to fall into this category.
I've tossed what I am finding into this discussion on the assumption that some people (and they may be lurkers) would like to know what is out there. Once I finish my blog posts, I can provide links to those. I'm currently going through between 100 and 200 articles about gift economies.
On the post: New Book Shows How Our Common Culture Has Been Locked Up Via Copyright
Re: Re: Typical.
My guess is that enforcement of copyright will disappear before the laws do. Much of the new content being made available is by people who are happy to have their content freely used.
Many of the companies that hold legacy content are disappearing and as they go, so will the lawsuits they fund.
As digital distribution increases, you'll likely see more scientific and academic papers freely uploaded online, available for viewing by everyone.
Although there are cultural artifacts which are in limbo at the moment, I suspect the number of people that impacts is actually rather small. The number of people who want to go back and read older books and listen to older music isn't that great in the greater scheme of things. Archivists will likely continue to make preservation copies of what they have to insure that the content doesn't disappear, and then if and when the laws change, they will be made available. But quite honestly, I don't see culture being impeded tremendously in the meantime.
When a lot of legislation in Washington isn't happening as it is, I think it will be a big challenge to get legislators to make copyright reform a priority, but certainly the people who care most about it are welcome to try.
On the post: Should We Be Interested In 'Saving' Any Industry?
Sometimes government money can move more quickly than the free market
On the post: New Book Shows How Our Common Culture Has Been Locked Up Via Copyright
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
The far left folks would also argue that the rich who own capital and don't work as hard as their employees are also taking advantage of the system. That's why they want to end corporate ownership so that wealth either goes to everyone in society equally or goes to those who put in the most physical labor, or mental labor, etc. (A more modest proposal, not advocated in what I am reading now, but has been discussed in business forums, would limit compensation to CEOs so there isn't so much spread between the top of the corporation and the bottom.)
I'm not a Marxist, personally, but that's how you get the copyfarleft thinking. They feel it is not enough to make IP free. They feel you have to make the tools of production free, too.
As for the scarce goods idea, they feel that there would be more abundance, or at least more equitable use of resources, if those resources weren't concentrated in the richest one percent of the population. Of course, that kind of thinking led to the French Revolution, and I'd rather not see something like that again.
On the post: New Book Shows How Our Common Culture Has Been Locked Up Via Copyright
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Umm. No, actually all I was saying is that I've been reading about gift economies, which Hyde happens to have written about, and that physical property has come up in some of those articles. And the reason I mentioned physical property is that someone brought it up in the very first comment.
I'm totally immersed in the subject right now and thought that some Techdirt readers might actually be interested in hearing about it. I'm actually in the process of writing my blog post right now.
I think what I was doing is called conversation. The world really isn't all black and white and I like to explore the shades of grey.
On the post: New Book Shows How Our Common Culture Has Been Locked Up Via Copyright
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
But there are people who believe consumerism and private property are a plague on civilization.
Some people want to expand the concept of "commons" to include everything, not just culture. I'm not trying to convince anyone here as to whether it will work. I'm just saying that's been my reading material lately.
On the post: New Book Shows How Our Common Culture Has Been Locked Up Via Copyright
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
I didn't say "Everyone who advocates the elimination of intellectual property advocates the elimination of private property."
What I said was, "Everyone who advocates the elimination of private property would also want the elimination of intellectual property."
On the post: New Book Shows How Our Common Culture Has Been Locked Up Via Copyright
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
I haven't been researching copyright, so I haven't been zeroing in on those discussions. Copyright and copyleft have come up, but I've been looking at "gift economies" and exchange systems. So what I have been reading has been more about how people, particularly artists, will be paid. There are some who believe that if people get over the desire for accumulation of wealth and property, and start giving it all away, then the world's needs will be met and we'll have much less waste. So if you advocate that everything should be freely available, then obviously you'll be against IP laws as well.
In other words, the papers I have read don't really concern themselves with copyright laws because they are much more concerned with basic survival needs. In the utopian ideal, there will be a place for artists, farmers, dressmakers, and the pleasant and unpleasant work wouldn't fall disproportionately on anyone.
On the post: New Book Shows How Our Common Culture Has Been Locked Up Via Copyright
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Nothing. I think charities are great things and I encourage people to donate to their favorite causes.
I'm researching gift economies. I didn't say whether I was pro or not. I was just curious how advocates envision them. Some believe in combining a gift economy with a market economy and others believe in replacing a capitalist system entirely with a gift economy. They feel this can be done now because of the Internet and the ability to match needs and production in a waste-free manner.
On the post: New Book Shows How Our Common Culture Has Been Locked Up Via Copyright
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
If this was directed to me, I was responding to this comment:
Just wait until he discovers how much property rights have locked up our shared land and all our shared goods made at our shared factories!
As it turns out, that's exactly what I am researching right now. I've been reading lots of papers on gift economies, commons, copyleft, copyfarleft, etc.
So it's a topic with a lot of depth, though many people may not realize it. Even the concern about politics, right or left, seems a little odd considering Richard Stallman coined the word "copyleft." If people freak out about the term "left" when it comes to copyrights, blame Stallman.
Copyleft: Pragmatic Idealism - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation (FSF)
On the post: New Book Shows How Our Common Culture Has Been Locked Up Via Copyright
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The Hi-Tech Gift Economy by Richard Barbrook
On the post: New Book Shows How Our Common Culture Has Been Locked Up Via Copyright
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
On the post: New Book Shows How Our Common Culture Has Been Locked Up Via Copyright
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Actually many people have described the open source community as a gift economy. People contribute free labor and ask for nothing in return.
I'm looking at the gift economy and the arts and looking at proposals for short term and long terms sustainability. Hyde wrote a famous book on the arts and gift economies and said that artists should give away their art. For income, they will either have day jobs, have patrons, or do commercial work which would fall into a separate category than their art.
On the post: New Book Shows How Our Common Culture Has Been Locked Up Via Copyright
Re: Re: Re:
Some of the proposals I'm reading right now would eliminate the concept of state. Again, it would be based on one big network.
I've been researching gift economies and have been looking how people would handle distribution of resources. Some of it is pretty far left, but not all of it.
Collectives. Elimination of money. Reduction of consumerism. Etc. Kind of like a permanent Burning Man scenario.
On the post: New Book Shows How Our Common Culture Has Been Locked Up Via Copyright
Re: Re: Re:
On the post: New Book Shows How Our Common Culture Has Been Locked Up Via Copyright
Re:
I'm going through all the literature on that very subject now. Some of the groups advocate not just a common culture, but also common property and shared governance. Here's one such source:
Open and Shut?: P2P: The very core of the world to come: "The P2P dynamic has created the three new social processes I mentioned: peer production, peer governance and peer property."
On the post: Should We Be Interested In 'Saving' Any Industry?
Re: Re: Re: Re: Railways?
In Asia, a similar boom is under way in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and, especially, China. China has more than 6,215 miles of high-speed rail in operation or under construction.
'This is what the rest of the world is doing,' said Robert Yaro, an urban planning professor at the University of Pennsylvania and president of the Regional Plan Association, a New York-area research group. 'We're behind not only France and Spain and the U.K. and Japan and China and Korea, but now Morocco and India and Vietnam are building high-speed rail. This is what we have to do.'"
On the post: Should We Be Interested In 'Saving' Any Industry?
Re: Re: Re: Railways?
Here's one place.
U.S. Transportation Subsidies
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