From: Charlie Stross (charlie@antipope.org)
Date: Thu Dec 23 1999 - 04:42:29 MST
On Wed, Dec 22, 1999 at 08:56:30AM -0800, Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
> > On the one hand; it appears obvious that we need to encourage
> > inventions. Inventions ultimately enhance everyone's quality of life.
> > Figuring out a way to give inventors a financial advantage over imitators
> > encourages invention; if they have no edge, and are also handicapped by
> > having to fork out R&D costs that imitators are exempt from, invention
> > is discouraged.
>
> Why is it obvious that we should "encourage" anything? Isn't the
> whole point of capitalism and free markets and all that that we just
> let the system work naturally without encouraging anything?
No, it isn't. The point of markets is that they're a useful tool for
resource allocation -- not the only tool, but the most efficient one
for certain types of problem domain. So we deploy them where appropriate.
They're not magical, they're not universally applicable (there are some
areas where they exhibit pathological problems), they can't cope with
certain types of problem at all ("tragedy of the commons"), and we
should _not_ blindly insist that capitalism and the free market will cure
all ills.
As I think I've said before, I am not a libertarian. I'm a liberal (in
the narrow sense of being a member of the UK Liberal party). I happen
to believe that human societies exist to benefit all their members,
not just those who're best at grabbing resources. This doesn't mean
automatically punishing people for being greedy; greed is an important
motivational factor in producing wealth. What it _does_ mean is that
greed is bad when it damages other people. This is a fundamental value
judgement on my part, and I accept that many people disagree with it;
I'm not going to preach at you, as long as you don't make assumptions
about me (such as "everyone on the list is either a libertarian or an
eeevil tax-everything communist").
> Why not
> let the inventors' edge be just the fact that they are creative and
> talented individuals who will be in demand by producers?
This is a good starting point for discussion -- why not, indeed?
Let's try and answer it by considering copyright.
Copyright originated in law in the very early 19th century/late 18th
century. It would be meaningless as a concept any time before the
invention of the printing press, and not very useful until the emergence
of mass literacy and people with enough disposable income to buy books
or club together to run private libraries.
Up until that point, authors wrote stuff and printers printed and sold
it. There was no control over who printed what, nor any concept that
the author had a right of control over copies. In general, there wasn't
enough money in the field for it to be important.
Once mass primary education and literacy took off and a book-buying
public began to appear (around the time of the industrial revolution)
authors began to run into problems. The problem was that unscrupulous
printers could copy a book they'd produced at their own expense (authors
paid printers for a print run in those days, then sold their own
product), and reap their own sales. The printer had no creative overheads
and could focus on the chunk of the job that produced money -- printing
and selling books, as opposed to writing them.
(Hence the legislative creation of copyright: the idea that some abstract
value inhered in the authors work, and they had the ability to sue
someone for "stealing" it by making unauthorised copies.)
It was nevertheless possible for authors to work in a no-copyright
zone. One option was the serial novel; the author would dole out a
chapter a week. It would take more than a week for an imitator to
typeset and print a copy, therefore printers who tried to freeload
would perpetually be out of date.
(From this example we see that real-time information may have more
value than information with a delay in the pipeline.)
Over the next century, however, things changed.
Printers were replaced by publishers. Publishers did a lot more than
just print books for authors who paid them; they commissioned new works,
gave authors big loans (advances) and a commission on sales (a royalty),
employed editors to polish up the final manuscripts, salesmen to sell
the books to shops, and so on.
As the distribution chain developed and became more sophisticated it
became harder and harder for an individual author to reach their market
directly. In fact, these days 'vanity publishing' (paying a printer
to typeset and print your book, then sell it) is looked down on -- the
author isn't an entrepreneur originating new inventions and bringing them
to market, but a client who supplies content for the real entrepreneur
(the publisher) to use to make money.
The point? Maybe that authors got lazy -- but I think the truth is rather
more that authors (who invent new work) are not commonly good at sales
and marketing and the logistics of production. A programmer who spends
all their time shoving manuals and disks into boxes and posting them to
customers is not a productive programmer. But a programmer who focusses
on writing good code/composing good music/writing good books is not
going to make money because they aren't paid for the process of creating
new work, they're paid for the process of disseminating existing work.
What this system has evolved into is one that effectively prevents
authors with non-standard, non-commoditized work from reaching the market,
because the entrepreneurial corporate publishing world is unwilling to
take a gamble on something radically new or different; it's much more
profitable for them (as redistributors) to stick with tried and trusted
formulae for commercial success than risk a failure (that has maybe a 2%
chance of being a new formula for success). The result is that a system
of protections for authors has enriched big corporations rather than
authors, and has made it hard for new and experimental stuff to break
through into the market. But without such a system of protections, there
will be far less money available to authors -- royalty-free republication
will be rampant and most authors will be even worse off than under the
existing system, bad though it is.
Free markets don't always work. Worse: in those areas where they don't
work, protectionism or regulation -- which sometimes _does_ work -- may
equally well compound the problems.
-- Charlie
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