Darned corporate marauders and their exploitive vision of not-so-transformative use (or whatever).
Articles by Solveig Singleton 
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Musings on Nick Carr’s latest book, from Jim Delong. Pertinent to various Google controversies.
Hanging out with an old friend over the weekend way outside the Beltway, he was asking me about copyright, and told me that the RIAA was coming out with a theory that copying music from CD’s that one owns to an iPod was now a target. I found that hard to imagine–it didn’t sound like an issue that RIAA would find it worthwhile to pursue, and indeed they’ve argued against liability in such a case on a few occasions (once on the theory that a license to do so was implied). And, indeed, the Washington Post has now pulled the story.
That such a rumor would spread points to deeper problems with press coverage of the music industry’s problems as a whole. Advocates have created an image of aggressive copyright holders proceeding without regard to their own long run interests in their own audience. By and large, journalists have bought into this. That the music industry and consumers have a *real* problem to solve–the difficulty of creating new business models without enforceable boundaries to keep out free riders en masse (not every single one)–has been neglected. That it is simply not plausible that an entire economic sector has mysteriously been populated by mean, short-sighted people is likewise ignored. Alas, some of us on the free-market side have bought into this, folks who one would expect to think in terms of the big picture and the long run, not personalities. Ah well.
Yesterday was “pretend to be a time traveler” day. I particularly like this suggestion, from the distopian future section:
Take some trinket with you (it can be anything really), hand it to some stranger, along with a phone number and say “In thirty years dial this number. You’ll know what to do after that.” Then slip away.
Time travel hypotheticals, along with teleportation, mindreading, and other such exploits are great for thought experiments involving rights theory in a classical liberal tradition. Two treatments of thought: In one, new abilities that create potential new types of conflicts or that upset existing institutions or rule arrangements are best left alone, dealt with by contract; if the old rules don’t cover ’em, it’s inconsistent with freedom to impose any new ones. In another, one takes a step back, more or less leaves things alone, but if conflicts arising in a certain area seem to be creating systemic problems with long-run consequences, try some new rules and institutional arrangements and see how it goes. Or eventually let settled and customary expectations evolve into the default rules. Rather like IP today. Or infanticide in past centuries. Fun to be had by all.
Benefits of computer games for kids evidently include learning how to deal with an attacking moose. Do follow the link and read the comments, too… I especially like “maybe his nub sister body pulled” and the comment to follow.
From Music Row Law, a review of two studies now supporting the view that P2P downloading actually increases sales of physical media; the downturn in CD sales through music stores is thus a result of other factors (such as the rise of Walmart).
I remain skeptical. In analyzing this data, assumptions are key. Many other studies show harm.
The earlier study, by Strumpf, professor of business economics at the University of Kansas Business School and Felix Oberholzer, seemed to operate on some peculiar assumptions (one being that downloads of popular tunes have the same impact on sales as downloads of more obscure ones). However, their data is not available for re-analysis.
Stan Leibowitz has a concise critique of the Canadian study as well as a paper in the Journal of Law & Econ. His use of data is extremely careful.
Among other things, he concludes:
All the papers that I have seen by other economists, except for one notable exception, find some degree of harm (to record producers) caused by file-sharing. These include papers by Blackburn, Hong, Michel, Peitz and Waelbroeck, Rob and Waldfogel and Zentner. The lone exception, but the most heavily publicized, is a paper by Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf, which I believe is littered with errors and disingenuousness as discussed in greater detail below.
His critique of the Canadian study notes:
I found here a peculiar set of arguments, directed against Solveig the Social Calculator, Solveig the Rampant Utilitarian, Solveig the Anti-Individualist. Who is this Solveig person? Oh, wait, it’s me. I have to wonder if this critique is by the same character who has been going around posting on blogs that I am a defender of Scientology and an erotic model. No, these posts aren’t anonymous.
1) The classical liberal recipe for freedom incorporates the principle that one’s freedom stops where it runs into another’s rights. We may disagree about what those rights ought to look like–and history shows that those rights are likely to change somewhat over time–but if my
package differs somewhat from someone else’s, well, sorry, the argument that this makes me a “regulator” is no more to the point than the argument that the someone else is an “anarchist.” Very silly rhetorical flourishes that fail to join the main issue: what should the rights be?
2) There are perfectly respectable utilitarian arguments for free markets and property. This is not a grand venture into social calculus, it’s common sense. How long would freedom, property, and contract be defensible as institutions if there were a better way to raise standards of living, to get more clean water to more people, to generate wealth so that cleft palate babies can have surgery instead of being left in orphanages, so that a musician from Ghana can quit his day job waiting tables and do what he really loves and others can listen to him? No, I do not know what the socially optimal level of created works to be produced is, or grain, or houses. On the whole, people would rather have ground rules that support the creation of such things. If one is going to up-end those ground rules, one’s case against them had better be pretty strong.
3) Concern for enforcement is not an endorsement of “regulation.” Not even arguably. A defense of freedom includes supporting the fair enforcement of contracts, property rights, voting rights, or any other right that has a proper place in an advanced civilization. Again, we may disagree about what those rights are, but that has nothing to do with enforcement. Now, to the details: Is my view that copyright penalties should be lighter “regulatory”? Is the view that it is unfair to single out a few random individuals and let the majority of infringers’ off, and that this is ineffective for deterrence, “regulatory”? No. Not even close.
In short, teach your grandmother to suck eggs. There are arguments to be made here along these general lines about copyright and regulation that would need to be considered more carefully (see Tom Palmer, Tom Bell, Jerry Brito, etc.) … but you ain’t makin’ ’em yet. If there were a fundamental, easy-to-spot disconnect between classical liberal fundamentals and my views on IP, I’d have noticed some time in the last twenty years. The more subtle tensions I’m way ahead of you on. (For the love of pete, I’m on the record on what I think on all these things–enforcement, and how strict, and copyright as regulation, and so on–you don’t need to make up what you think my position is and then critique the lame result).
Recently, there are reports of more compulsory licensing for 20 more drugs in Thailand; and a conference is announced to celebrate this strategy.
Hence this series of links and clips.
On April 11, http://www.africasia.com/services/news reported on a plan that seems to implicitly suggest that African states might set aside an array of patents (sorry, no present link):
“We need to produce (medicines) in Africa. We have the potential, why do we want to take them from outside when we can take it in Africa?” Mamadou Diallo, chief pharmacist in the AU commission’s medical services directorate, told AFP.
“The main objective is to identify which kinds of medicines we are going to produce, essential drugs we need for Africa, and who is going to produce these drugs.”
Many African countries currently rely on India and China for imports of affordable generic drugs, but both countries are subject to patent laws which threaten Africa’s access to the medicines.
According to Diallo, Africa has all the resources and capacity at its disposal to manufacture essential medicines for the opportunistic infections like tuberculosis, malaria and HIV/AIDS which plague the continent.
It is sad that the plan to produce the drugs in Africa apparently does not extend to actually inventing and developing more such drugs in Africa–or then the patents would be important.
Contrast Alec Van Gelder’s article on African medicines:
The UN Economic Commission for Africa endorses fears that “drastic trade liberalization, particularly substantial reductions in tariff, could entail, for instance, loss of tariff revenue hence fiscal difficulties.” The anti-globalisation group Oxfam issued a 128-page document in 2005 called “Why Developing Countries Need Tariffs”, as part of the Trade Justice Movement coalition.
All of this means that many religious, aid and international organisations think incomes for bureaucrats matter more than prices for citizens. They also believe that tariffs protect local industries and allow them to grow up into competitive industries.
Thus Tanzania imposed on 26 July a 10 per cent tariff on imported medicines, to protect what it called its “infant medicine industries.”
What about real infants? The immediate effect of this new tariff will be deadly. “Low income of the majority of the Tanzanian population hinders their accessibility to health services as medicines and other services are unaffordable,” according to the World Health Organisation. The average Tanzanian earns US$744 annually–a 10 % increase in the cost of medicines can make the difference between life and death for the 21.7% of the population that suffers from malnutrition.
While few of the world’s poorest–and least healthy–countries have any viable pharmaceutical sectors, a shocking number apply similar taxes and tariffs on medicines. A 2005 American Enterprise Institute study revealed that over 33 countries impose levies higher than the new Tanzanian rate.
Good. Musician makes good. There’s an interesting article with some ideas in Spin magazine–though no clear direction emerges. Potentially useful for new artists, not so much for encouraging the re-release of Led Zeppelin (soon to be on iTunes) or old blues. If the thought of entanglement of music in a web of marketing schemes is not entirely appealing, but, well, that’s not a policy concern. What becomes of artists from unsophisticated backgrounds in this might well be… professional sports all over again?
On the prospects for live music, from Richard Morrison. (And I confess another non-policy consideration, I detest live music–one sacrifices consistent sound quality to leave the privacy of one’s home to sit or stand in crowds flaunting their absurd subcultures–but I will make grudging exceptions for metal concerts, classical guitar, and live jazz). But this, too, has its limits as a business model.
Also less encouraging is Radiohead’s experiment in whatever-it’s-worth pricing, with many electing a price of zero; the link is to Bill Rosenblatt’s report. Barry Shrum offers his perspective.
In the end, it will all get worked out. But there is no end in sight for the usefulness of copyright and technology as a tool for defining obligations in new relationships of goods, services, and persons, or as a substitutes for traditional enforcement. Continued competition of free goods with paid goods would reduce anxiety about whether producers are sensitive to consumer demand for flexible and friendly protection technology.
Two distressing trends in the overall debate, though, might well be with us forever. One is the tendency of some to see the glass of new technology as almost entirely empty, the other to see it as almost entirely full. But where old boundaries don’t hold up, new lines will be found and somehow enforced; markets go on. And where the status quo gives way, one ends up with not an end to the limitations on human endeavor peculiar to one set of economic circumstances, but a whole new set of limitation peculiar to the next. On the whole, people don’t do well without lines drawn in the sand, and will draw new ones when the last set is erased.
I excerpt below from an Investors Business Daily oped by Philip Stevens:
[A] powerful group of ideological nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs . . . abhor profit in medicine and are pushing the World Health Organization toward a global treaty that would completely change the way drugs are researched and developed…
This Medical Research and Development Treaty, proposed by Brazil and Kenya, would have a central U.N. bureaucracy deciding what diseases to research while allocating funds, contracts and prizes accordingly. Its expert scientists would ensure that all diseases are given appropriate resources, including the handful of “unprofitable” tropical diseases in poor counties…
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