The Case for Infosocialism
When Ed Felten says you’re wrong, you are almost certainly wrong. For those of you who don’t know, Ed Felten is a computer scientist and technology policy guru who, along with my friend David Robinson, runs Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy. I just wrote a short piece for Slate advancing the decidedly unpopular Terry Fisher notion that the feds should compensate copyright holders directly for the use of creative works through a kind of music tax. This is an idea I first toyed with here at TAS, and it received some withering, very sound criticism from fellow _TAS_er Tim Lee during at informal chat at my first soup party.
To Felten’s concluding question,
This is the fundamental problem of copyright policy in the digital age. It’s easy for people to get copyrighted works without paying. So either you forgo payment entirely, or you give somebody the mandate to collect payment. Who would you prefer: record companies or the government?
I have a couple of first-cut responses. First, as Tim has suggested, I think forgoing payment is not the end of the world. I allude to alternative revenue streams (live performance, Kevin Kelly’s brilliant notion of the 1,000 True Fans), and this may well be the future. Second, I tend to think the government would be preferable to the record companies — at least in theory, we have some degree of democratic accountability. Perhaps that is naive of me, and I’m more liberal than that implies (classically liberal, that is). My secret agenda, an agenda that would have taken too long to situate and explain in the piece, is what the RPG Transhuman Space calls “nanosocialism.”
Only at The American Scene will you hear such insanity. Bear with me. I feel the need to stress this in part because some may have mistaken me for a Big Music of pro-copyright patsy, which couldn’t be further from the truth.
Nanosocialism, in the Transhuman Space world, is an offshoot of infosocialism.
The core of the ideology is that information is very different from material goods in that it can be given away without the former holder losing anything. And since information can be used for the good of humanity no one should be able to claim the rights to an idea. Simply put – if someone figures out a cure for cancer, every cancer patient has the right to it.
In an ideal world, every idea would belong to humanity as a whole. Since this is impossible as it is an infosocialist would argue that ideas should be owned by the government or an overreaching entity that could make sure that anyone got the info they needed. This same entity would also pay the thinkers who come up with the ideas/write the songs/write the theses.
I’d add that we’d want copyrights to lapse very quickly, as in The Economist‘s excellent proposal. The reward system would pay out for the life of the copyright. I must say, I’m also sympathetic to the David Levine view.
If I produce a cup of coffee, I have the right to choose whether or not to sell it to you or drink it myself. But my property right is not an automatic right both to sell you the cup of coffee and to tell you how to drink it.
Read the whole essay — Boldrin and Levine quote Heinlein, which is always a promising sign.
I think my core ideology is a marriage free market economics in stuff and infosocialism in ideas (using Fisher-style reward systems and other unconventional methods). To the extent we want to engage in meliorist projects, we should try to get prices right. Given that the government is bad at getting prices right, we should be very humble about the effort, and very reluctant to pursue carbon taxes, etc.
“But Reihan, these schemes are unworkable!” You could be right, for now. We need to think creatively about institutional design.
So why does it have to be a flat fee? I dislike flat fees on anything from Internet access to all you can eat buffets — they take too much money from some folks and too little money from others. How about a music/entertainment fee that is based on total bandwidth downloaded? This, in turn, would pressure ISPs into tiered pricing systems based on the users’ number of downloads. This could even be done monthly — if you download nothing this month, your DSL bill goes down, but watch out the month that you download 40 movies.
— Stuart Buck · Apr 26, 10:26 PM · #
“In an ideal world, every idea would belong to humanity as a whole.”
Well, that’s an ideal, not the only one, and it smells bad to me.
“an infosocialist would argue that ideas should be owned by the government or an overreaching entity that could make sure that anyone got the info they needed”
If any entity has this power it would have all power. “We’re from the entity and we’re here to give you what you need.”
What is the alternative to a formal systems of property rights for information? In the past it was secrecy, the exact opposite of what dreamers imagine when they say that “information can be used for the good of humanity”. Rights systems for ideas increased openness and so the greater good.
Information and ideas could always be spread by word of mouth. Once an idea is expressed it’s out. But oral communication is unreliable so there was value in faithful copies, printed and recorded. This is now cheap and easy, no longer a choke point.
What this highlights is that ideas weren’t the only thing of value: people who have ideas are valuable, and that value rises as the rate of change increases. In the past this was obscured by time and distance. An individual could not be broadcast, and the rate of change was comparatively slow. Now ideas and performances spread rapidly over great distances, but they age and decay rapidly. It isn’t the milk we want, it’s the cow . . . so to speak. The milk goes bad quickly.
“Alternative revenue streams” are the only sensible response. The extreme version is the “venture altruist”, one who gushes ideas and performances with no thought for exacting a fee, but, if truly valuable, is rewarded by grateful beneficiaries.
Someday we may all be buskers.
— back40 · Apr 26, 11:27 PM · #
I underestand (and admire, and applaud) your endeavor to think creatively about big questions, and I certainly wouldn’t want you to stop, but I just don’t buy that one.
In an ideal world, ideas should belong to everyone. So the government compensates those who have ideas in exchange for, essentially, turning them over (mandatorily!) to the public domain. Everyone’s happy.
Now what is it about this argument that doesn’t apply to, say, arable land? Surely food, like cancer cures, should belong to everyone? I think it wouldn’t be a mischaracterization of your views to say you don’t support the collectivization of agriculture.
The argument that people can give an idea away without depriving themselves of anything, unlike a material good, is just not true. Ask anyone on Wall Street how much a good idea for a trade is worth once everyone is aware of it. Much less.
What about, say, the first iteration of the Google search engine, in 1998? How much would it have been valued by the government? Probably less than $10 mil, the price Yahoo! wasn’t willing to pay for them. Maybe Sergey and Larry would have been pretty happy to have that $10 mil, since even they didn’t realize (or so official Google lore has it) the tremendous business potential of their product, they could’ve bought themselves a nice beach holiday and a nice house to go with their tenure-track jobs. But how much better off would we have been, with a government-run and dispensed 1998-era Google? Not much, I’ll wager.
The problem is that ideas ARE goods, they ARE susceptible to property rights, and now they’re the most valuable (and growing) part of our economy. Socializing them just ain’t gonna work.
— PEG · Apr 27, 07:53 AM · #