[p2p-research] Fwd: [fcforum] Fw: iPad DRM is a dangerous step backward. Sign the petition!

[Kevin Carson]

On 1/31/10, Ryan Lanham <rlanham1963 at gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm not sure there is a "movement."  It isn't political.  It's just a
> phenomenon of social technologies.  I used to think about P2P as a movement,
> etc.  But Michel actually convinced me that historical forces were the
> point...not politics.  If something isn't "ripe," it is altogether better
> for humanity if it doesn't emerge.  True emergeance isn't political.  It is
> social.  We don't need leaders.

I think it's at least fair to call P2P a cluster of more or less
closely related movements, to the extent that there are free culture
advocacy groups and organizations that have one programmatic agenda or
another.

But your point re historical forces and emergence is well taken.

One of the central historical forces currently in play is the growing
uneforceability of IP law, and the inability of proprietary content to
compete with free.

Ultimately I think the Apple model of monetizing content is doomed,
because no matter how popular Jobs' gadget designs are, the content he
makes available through iTunes is going to have to compete with free
versions available through "illegal" (but highly popular) channels.
In the end, what he can charge (and distribute part of to the
"artists," aka the industry) will be limited to the rents attendant on
convenience.  People (at least middle class people with a moderately
high opportunity cost of time relative to money) will pay a small
amount to avoid the inconvenience and transaction costs of finding an
authentic, complete copy of the song they want.  But that amount is
not as much as Apple could get from rents on proprietary content as
such.  So in the end, the cost of the content will be driven down by
competition with zero marginal cost, and will tend toward a value
comparable to that obtainable under Anderson's "Freemium" model.  The
only difference is that, ceteris paribus, the DRM will make the
product less attractive and reduce the convenience advantage over the
"pirated" stuff somewhat.  That means IMO Apple will eventually give
up and remove the DRM on everything.

> Yes, if the net employment was positive and that was what consumers wanted.
> To me, it is all about what is compelling. If consumers want it, it's
> better.  If post-scarcity cannot be compelling, it's crap.

The problem with the "what consumers wanted" thing is that laws like
IP restrict what consumers are legally allowed to choose from.

> > How about if somebody had managed to save
> > the buggy whip makers against Henry Ford?  If somebody comes up with a
> > Star Trek replicator that can produce any food or consumer good at
> > zero marginal cost, will it be a good thing if somebody figures out a
> > way to "save the food/clothing/appliance industries" by enabling
> > manufacturers to keep charging for them?

> Same answer.  If people want something, it is better.  Apple can't force
> people to buy DRM.  People choose it.

The Post Office can't force me to buy stamps.  I choose to buy them.
The only problem is, if anybody besides the USPS tries to sell first
class mail delivery, the government will throw them in jail.  So I
"choose" within a coercive framework that criminalizes some forms of
voluntary exchange in order to guarantee the legal monopoly of
privileged classes.

People "choose" DRM in an environment where copyright law artificially
restricts the range of other choices available to them.  "Pirated"
content is ubiquitous, but the transaction costs of verifying
authenticity and completeness of a copy are artificially increased by
IP law, because of the difficulty of organizing open and aboveground
authentication services.  My hope is that as darknet use spreads, P2P
counterinstitutions will emerge for providing such authentication
services; the counterinstitutions may be officially "illegal," but
will still become the normal means of vouching for quality and
authenticity for a growing share of the public.

In any case, even if such counterinstitutions do not emerge to make
"pirated" content fully competitive with proprietary content, there
will be enough competition on the edges to drive down the price of
proprietary content in the way I described above.  In that case, the
competition will simply be less perfect and the public's "choice" will
be between an artificially constricted range of alternatives.  But I
don't think that state of affairs will last.

>  To me, opposition to intellectual property is a death knell for progress.
> People need to control their own outputs.  If they cannot, there is no hope
> of having a gift/free economy.  That is the ultimate slavery.

People do control their own outputs.  I don't allow anybody to steal
unpublished manuscrips off my hard drive, or grab hard copy drafts off
my desk.

A legal restriction on copying digital information that's been made
public, on the other hand, is a restriction on everybody else's
control of their own property.  A society of EULAs, in which I never
own anything I pay for, and can only pay for content on the monopoly
terms set by copyright liegelords, is the ultimate slavery.

> > And again, as I understand it the open movement is about the ultimate
> > value of eliminating artificial scarcity.  So while some accommodation
> > to IP as an interim measure may be consistent with this, it is still
> > in some way a compromise of the fundamental culture of the movement.

> Artificial scarcity is the politicized term for abundance.  Abundance is
> about capacity. Raise capacity and the reasons for scarcity go away.  The
> answer isn't so much to attack scarcity as it is to find mechanisms to raise
> the capacity for abundance.

No.  The "reason" for artificial scarcity is to PREVENT abundance from
lowering the income of rentier classes.  It doesn't matter how
abundant technological potential is, if a class of privileged
monopolists have a deadlock on the right to sell the output and set
prices on it.  And the main way for abundance to defeat their
artificial scarcity is to make the rules on which artificial scarcity
depends (including IP) unenforceable.

> > The problem is they're "competing" in an artificial ecosystem defined
> > by "intellectual property."  Capitalism won because the playing field
> > was tilted.  If I lived in Virginia in 1850, I wouldn't say that slave
> > cotton plantations must be better than free ones because they
> > outcompeted in the market.  I'd question the basic structural
> > preconditions of the market.

> Playing fields are set by what is ultimately compelling.  Power works only
> so long if it is not advantageous.  That's the lesson of the Soviet Union,
> of China, increasingly of the Arab World, Persia, Africa and South America.
> What kills this capacity is people who fight democratic institutions,
> markets, and human rights.  It is all about capacity.

There is no such thing as a unified social interest.  There is,
rather, an "advantage" for the lion and an "advantage" for the lamb.
Power works to the advantage of the privileged by disadvantaging the
non-privileged.  Power is a zero-sum game.  To those who benefit from
zero-sum relations, total capacity (the size of the pie) matters less
than the size of their own slice.  What happened in the Soviet Union
was not that "society" decided the system was no longer working to
everyone's advantage, but that (thanks to destabilizing technology and
their own mismanagement) the ruling class lost its ability to control
the pie.

> If open systems and P2P cannot find a way to be compelling for human
> capacity, they will die off. I see nothing blocking them now in most free
> systems.  To call counter models cheaters is probably not going to help the
> cause much.  In fact, slavery was well known to be dying under its own
> weight--even in the South.  There are numerous economic and historic studies
> of it.  It couldn't compete with machinery, etc. in the same way slave labor
> today doesn't compete for very long in attractive markets--like those that
> require skills.  Skills always win.  China is the proving ground for that
> now as labor gets more and more skilled by the decade.

> The answer is to push advancement and skils, not to attack other systems qua
> systems.  That is outmoded politics that simply leads to stalemates.   The
> "right" answer is technical achievement, abundance, innovation and change.
> The wrong answer is planned outputs, political fights against status quo's,
> and "movements."  At least that is my view.

The problem with all this is that power can, at least temporarily,
control the terms of competition between capacity/advancement/skill,
on the one hand, and outmoded forms of production like slavery on the
other.  The old will, for as long as it is able, use the power of the
state to regulate the terms of competition with the new--and that's
exactly what IP law is.  Ultimately the kind of technical achievement
and innovation that will break the stalemate are improvements in the
technical means of circumventing IP and other forms of artificial
scarcity, and making them unenforceable.

-- 
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html
Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html