From: hal@rain.org
Date: Fri May 07 1999 - 10:11:30 MDT
Billy Brown writes:
> Well, after looking back over the archives I can see that we aren't likely
> to come to a meeting of minds on this topic. I think that property rights
> are a necessary precondition of production and trade, and therefore that
> abolishing copyright would lead to a precipitous decline in the production
> of intellectual property. You apparently believe that abolishing copyright
> would actually lead to an increase in such production.
> [...]
> Since you apparently don't accept the arguments from economic theory, or
> from historical precedent, I suppose we'll just have to continue to disagree
> until someone actually performs the experiment.
One of the reasons why this argument has increasing relevence is because
of predictions that the new information technologies will allow violations
of copyright without effective enforcement being possible.
We see this already to a limited extent with the MP3, porn and "warez"
traffic, where the violators are so numerous and widespread that it has
apparently not been practical to enforce copyright. They also are able
in many cases to shield themselves with technological anonymity strong
enough for the purpose.
Theoretically it should be possible to use cryptography to make this kind
of information trading even more secure and anonymous. The crypto wars
are still being fought, of course, and it remains to be seen how it will
all come out, but if cryptographic anonymity is not outlawed then it will
become even easier to share copyrighted information. This appears to be
part of the motivation for David Brin's proposal for his "transparent
society" which would not allow public forms of secrecy and anonymity,
particularly when protected by cryptography; as an author his livelihood
would be threatened if people could freely share his works.
There are countervailing technologies under development. Fingerprinting
marks each distributed document so that if it later appears on the black
market it can be traced back to the original purchaser. Special hardware
could sit in your computer and only allow data to be displayed if you
had the proper key. The controversial Intel processor ID feature was
apparently intended as a step in this direction, although Intel later
tried to deny this.
I suspect that we will see occasional shifts in the balance as this
technological arms race continues. At times the crackdowns will
be relatively successful and the illegal information traffic will be
suppressed, but at other times some new method will be found to get around
the restrictions and we will once again see widespread sharing of data.
So we may have the opportunity to witness both environments over the
next few decades, and it will be interesting to see whether there is
any impact on the rate of production of intellectual property.
Hal
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