[p2p-research] Fwd: analogue copying

[Michel Bauwens]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Eric Hunting <erichunting at gmail.com>
Date: Sat, Jul 31, 2010 at 11:37 PM
Subject: Re: analogue copying
To: Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>


 ...with Tomahouses having built nothing in at least two years and Jeriko
House/Shawn Burst falling silent after the market melt-down, Utilihab may be
the last hope for this building technology.

Anyway, here's my take on the article you noted.

Analogue Copying and the Relevance of Patents

In two recent articles from Computerworld UK (
http://www.computerworlduk.com/community/blogs/index.cfm?blogid=14&entryid=2961
http://www.computerworlduk.com/community/blogs/index.cfm?blogid=14&entryid=2971&pn=1),
writer Glynn Moody discusses the implications of digital fabrication for
manufacturing's intellectual property models and gets into some very
interesting debates with some of his readers. Moody's general assertion is
that the advent of analogue copying will have the effect of making the
formal patent irrelevant and that a return to reliance on trade secrets and
trademarks will emerge based on the notion of value based on product
provenance keyed to brand identity. This seems a quite reasonable and
logical suggestion and I'm in general agreement. It has been clear to many
for a long time that the patent has become an anachronism at best and at
worst a quagmire of casual government bureaucratic corruption and a tool for
some of the most egregious forms of corporate manipulation of the free
market in modern times. Long before the advent of digital fabrication,
movements have emerged among engineers and technology entrepreneurs for the
reform or outright abolition of the current patent systems because of the
severe obstacles to basic innovation they have been allowed to create. And
though there has been a general ambivalence among political representatives
afraid to expose their ignorance on the subject, consequences are plain;
nations with weak/simple patent systems often outpace in rate of
technical/industrial innovation those that are subject to strong, complex,
overly-comprehensive, and commonly abused patent systems. This could be one
of the important factors in the steady decline of western industrial power.

But there is an interesting soft spot in Moody's argument; the nature of
perceived value by provenance. Moody suggests that the superior value of an
'authentic' product rests in the product safety implied by that
authenticity. Authentic products are subject to a level of 'testing' that
insures their quality, which is implied by the reputation of the brand.
Sounds reasonable except that quality control isn't based just on
post-production testing. In fact, in the manufacturing world it rarely is.
Quality control is vested more in engineering and production technique than
post-production testing -which tends to be limited to just a check of basic
integrity of a product. (ie. does it turn on? Are there obvious cosmetic
flaws?) Large scale assembled goods, like cars, are repairable in-plant and
so one can ameliorate lapses in quality control on the back end of
production by intercepting them in post-production testing. And thus cars do
have a fairly extensive amount of unit testing compared to other goods. But
a great many products depend on quality control on the front-end because the
end-product is not so repairable or comprehensively testable. (you can't
really test the full integrity of an IC after its soldered to a circuit and
hermetically sealed in some molded case. All you can really check in that
case is if the product works and passes internal diagnostics if any) If
quality control in production has failed, the product comes out junk and is
discarded or recycled.

So there's a question here of where -and to what degree- quality actually
lies. How much is in the engineering/design? How much is in the materials?
How much is in the production technique? I don't think this invalidates
Moody's argument but it's an interesting complication of the situation that
brings up the question of how product value is perceived in the present and
how rational that perception is. One of the problems associated with the
general industrial illiteracy in our contemporary culture is that we don't
have a very rational basis for the perception of quality and economic value.
You really can't know the quality of something if you don't know where and
how it's made and where its materials come from. And so we already do, out
of ignorance, generally rely on brand-associated reputation. As a general
rule, profit is based on a disparate perception of value. In a truly open
market, if everyone had a complete understanding of the value of everything
they exchanged, profit would be impossible. There would be only barter. This
is where digitally-assisted commodities exchange is ultimately heading -the
deliberate vagaries of national currencies the only thing preventing this.
This may be why the contemporary consumer culture has maintained industrial
and financial illiteracy and an over-specialized workforce. The more you can
compartmentalize workers' skills and knowledge the less ability they have to
communicate trade secrets when you lay them off and value knowledge to the
general population. And so, in ignorance, everyone depends largely on
brands, whose 'quality' is not so much based on the actual product quality
in the present but on the reputation associated with products produced in
the past -since that's the only empirical evidence we have to go on.

Manufacturing in general is on a trend toward demassification. Most consumer
goods are not made in branded central factories anymore. They're produced in
anonymous 'job shops' in various places around the world. Following the
trend established by the computer industry, an increasing number of products
are the result of geographically dispersed production that 'fans in' up
hierarchies of sub-system dependency to high-lever assembly near the point
of consumption. In the near future, cars will begin being assembled on
demand in the showroom -if for no other reason than that its more energy
efficient/carbon reduced in product transport. Increasingly, the brand of a
company has little association to the nature of production of products
because, increasingly, that production is outsourced and dispersed. Brands
are becoming more associated with aesthetic styles and lifestyle models
-look at Apple. All this tends to force the vesting of quality control
farther and farther toward the front-end -into the engineering/design aspect
of the product. We have already begun to assume that this aspect of
production will become digitally encoded and portable, the essential quality
of the product now reduced to portable data. This reinforces Moody's
suggestion of the resorting to trade secrets but, as the music industry has
demonstrated, this is an arms race the Goliath's tend to lose.

So there's a lot of interesting and unexplored depth to the proposition of
analogue copying. We have a lot of interesting discourse on this to look
forward to in the future.

Eric Hunting
erichunting at gmail.com



On Jul 22, 2010, at 6:17 AM, Michel Bauwens wrote:

> HI Eric,
>
> I haven't heard from you in a long long while, I hope things are okay,
>
> I would like to ask a favour, i.e. that you would comment on the issue of
analogue copying for us,
>
> see
http://www.computerworlduk.com/community/blogs/index.cfm?blogid=14&entryid=2971
>
> --
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>
>
>
>




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