On Thu, 4 Jul 2002 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >A moment ago you were arguing maximum utility (your public good >argument).
I was still arguing precisely the same point. If the personal decision calculus of the individuals leads them to freeride, it will also lead them to prefer access to old stuff instead of future access to fresh material, when asked individually. But if people are faced with the choice you presented in a setting in which it is clear that either all will pay or all will get free access, not something in between, and consensus is reached, then maximum utility is apparently attained thru copyright abolition, and I have nothing more to say. So, you might be right, as I conceded. The real point was, so could I -- the question about copyright isn't usually posed in this fashion, hence making it difficult to tell the utility maximizing alternative from the other. (The canonical references here would be Buchanan and Wicksell.) >If that convention ceases to be convenient and useful, ceases to have >utility, we should not continue it. Indeed. >And if you are going to argue from long established conventional rights, >copyright has been extended by twenty years every twenty years, so it is >not a long established conventional right. Quite. My gut feeling is that the efficient term for copyrights would be considerably shorter (say, 1-2 years) than the one guaranteed by the Berne convention, and that this fact largely mitigates the loss in welfare likely accompanied by the inefficiency we would get if we repealed copyright law altogether. This makes the moral argument in favor of free speech, against IP, far more persuasive. This is more or less the line of reasoning I use when actually advocating something wrt IP. >As more and more stuff piles up, the production of new stuff becomes a >less and less valuable public good. Unless we assume that information is highly perishable, which I believe most of it in fact is. Yesterday's news is...well...just that. So is any entertainment which has an element of fashion in it, which nowadays covers practically all youth culture. And so on. In the case of perishables there exists a more or less constant efficient level of production and investment in it. >At the same time, as with any "public good", congress (being in the >pocket of state created interest groups) creates greater and greater >incentives to produce more and more of this public good. True. It seems likely to me too that we're currently overinvesting in IP, though less than you propose. >If an anarchic free market underproduces public goods, government >subject to interest groups overproduces public goods, a problem that is >particularly serious with such dubious public goods as "defense", >cultural or racial purity, and so on and so forth. Agreed. As I already said, the really interesting part isn't the public goods analysis, but practical ways of alleviating the transaction costs. In particular, it's far from given that public (non-rival and so on) goods should be produced publicly (i.e. jointly, governmentally) produced. Limited term copyrights and patents are one way to try and deal with the issue via the market, by establishing a property right. We now know this precise approach, though useful, isn't quite as stable as we could hope, so the logical question becomes, what next? Limiting the term, if possible, would probably be a good starting point. Repealing those parts of copyright law which have to do with derivative works would be another. Extending fair use would be a third. And after we know that the market can do without such property rights, abolition logically follows. Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED], tel:+358-50-5756111 student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front openpgp: 050985C2/025E D175 ABE5 027C 9494 EEB0 E090 8BA9 0509 85C2
