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There’s a raging copyright debate between the entrenched forces of the music and movie industries and a raft of folks who either for market or political reasons want far more freedom in how a user can interact with content. In “Steal This Essay 4: Are We Just Rationalizing Theft?”, I covered some of the arguments against treating unauthorized use of a pure public good like content as theft.

(Separately, I also mention that the recording industry routinely refers to copying music as piracy, trivializing a real crime in which hundreds of people are killed every year on the high seas. Piracy on the seas is violent as a direct result of the fact that physical goods are rival.)

Tim O’Reilly makes a fascinating argument that “piracy is progressive taxation” and that “obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy”. However, I wonder whether his arguments aren’t too focused on “rationalizing theft”.

I think that although morality is almost always linked to economics (generally in terms of torts), they are hardly one and the same. Just because I may not be hurting (committing a tort against) an artist whose music I download (if I would never have otherwise bought their CD), it doesn’t necessarily make it OK if I know (or suspect) that the artist would not want me to use her work in this way.

Instead, I assume a simple cop out in “Steal This Essay 1: Content Is a Pure Public Good”, by taking a “hard technology determinist viewpoint”. That is, whatever the individual moral thing to do might be, if neither prevention nor punishment can stop the behavior (as I argue in “Steal This Essay 2: Why Encryption Doesn’t Help”), then that behavior is going to proliferate and we better figure out how to deal with it.

At the end of the day, I think we need to assume that the vast majority of college students (and almost everyone else) doesn’t care about the morality of using Gnutella, and figure out a system by which artists can be compensated (which is what I discuss, somewhat pessimistically, in “Steal This Essay 3: How to Finance Content Creation”).

In most economics textbooks, lighthouses are considered the canonical nonrival, nonexcludable goods — i.e., pure public goods. I use them as an example in my essay on the death of copyright,
“Steal This Essay 1: Content Is a Pure Public Good”, arguing that content is beginning to resemble lighthouses in being nonrival and nonexcludable.

However, if lighthouses are supposed to be a public good, it’s quite confusing that a number of them in the 18th century were privately owned. Public goods are regularly used as an example of when government intervention is necessary, because private suppliers will provide too few (in the case of lighthouses) or too many (in the case of commons grazing). As a result, conservatives hate public goods and would prefer that they didn’t exist, and liberals would like to see them everywhere, making for quite the idelogical debate. (On a side note, in “Steal This Essay 3: How to Finance Content Creation”, I show government action as just one of four potential ways to fund content as a public good.)

In the case of lighthouses, Daniel Davies (quoted by Brad DeLong) makes the critical point to understand why some lighthouses can be private and why some (even if they’re privately administered), must be funded as a non-excludable public good:

Lighthouses which are built in order to guide ships into a port are not problematic in the slightest. They are a service used only by users of the port, they are paid for by the port authority, and one collects revenue for their upkeep by going round to the ship when it docks and asking for it, bundled with the rest of the services which the port fee buys you…. However… if you want a lighthouse to warn ships away from a hazard of some sort, rather than to draw them toward a port, then you do have a problem in collecting your revenue; if you’re manning the lighthouse on Eddystone Rock, then if you’re in a position to walk over to a captain to deliver your bill, he’s most likely not in a position to pay you, because he’s crashed…. “Lighthouses” don’t form a homogeneous class of capital assets.

Davies goes on to ridicule the idea that “lighthouse services” are not a public good because they were administered by a private entity:

Private lighthouse operators would not negotiate a market price for “lighthouse services” with passing ships. The King gave lighthouse operators the power to demand payment from passing ships. And “…a system under which the government of the day gives you the authority to demand a payment from every ship that enters a port, and which states that failure to recognise this authority is treason (at the time, punishable by death), does not really look to me to be very much like a free market exchange. In fact, in giving the producer of a product the authority to demand on pain of death or imprisonment that everyone in a particular market has to buy their product, would seem to me to be… government involvement…”

So, we should all (even Coase and Samuelson) be able to agree that the textbooks should be updated to say “hazard-avoidance lighthouses are pure public goods”.

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I’ve decided to “republish” some essays here that I wrote last year on the subject of the death of copyright. These will, at the very least, make my linking to them simpler, and may even inspire me to continue the series.

The first essay is titled: Steal this essay, or, why these sorts of essays represent the future of all publishing. (Hint: I’m not getting paid for them).
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What is “The least-watched great show on TV”? Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And, before you chuckle too hard, note the amount of writing that went even into its title, which was designed to capture the three themes of the show — comedy, horror, and action — in just 3 words (plus the the).

As Slate says:

For five years, Buffy has been the least-watched great show on television, the most ridiculed by ignorati who think they’re literati. Like its peers (The West Wing, The Sopranos, ER), Buffy is better than movies because its writer is the most important guy on the set….

Like a comet, the most brilliant monster metaphor knocked the whole show onto a new course: Whedon and Noxon had Buffy lose her virginity on her 17th birthday, and the next morning her kindly boyfriend turned cold and cruel due to an ancient curse. Same thing happened last week, after Buffy’s kid sister Dawn’s first kiss. Nota bene, girls: Boys will be vampires. Buffy is reality programming….

After Willow Rosenberg, the witch, got an enchanted gal-pal, scandalizing viewers shocked by realistic lesbian characters, Whedon spoke out: “I’ve made a mistake by trying to shove this lifestyle — which is embraced by, maybe, at most, 10 percent of Americans — down people’s throats. So I’m going to take it back, and from now on, Willow will no longer be a Jew.” His is the first show truly to master the teen native tongue, sarcasm….

Noxon’s crew valiantly strives to fulfill Buffy’s ambition: “I realize every slayer comes with an expiration mark on the package, but I want mine to be a long time from now, like a Cheeto.”

And here is the NYT with some similar thoughts, more high falutin’ of course:

The central metaphor of adolescence as a supernatural battleground has had a rich yield for Mr. Whedon — who’s a kind of genius at imaginative re-creations of the teen psyche — and for his collaborators. The show finds ways of dramatizing every feeling that, in teenagers, threatens to become an explosion: alienation from the grown-up world and from one another, fear of not belonging, distrust of authority, and the panoply of emotions that accompany our first romantic impulses.

The NYT has this clever analysis of a paper from the Center for Strategic and International Studies titled (really) “Biological Warfare and the Buffy Paradigm”. An excerpt:

Buffy Paradigm: “[An] aspect of the Buffy Paradigm is a lack of any systematic net assessment of the overall nature of the threat. This has been equally true of the U.S. government, and its lack of any clear net assessment of the probable trends in the offensive and defensive capabilities of biotechnology.”

On the Show: “In the episode `Welcome to the Hellmouth,’ we meet Buffy, who believes she can ignore the dangers that lurk around her. She hopes that a recent move to the town of Sunnydale and a change of school will allow her to put her slaying days behind her.”

Finally, here is a book filled with essays by PhD lit-crit types deconstructing the series and a website of the same.

Brad DeLong quotes the Economist year-end double issue, which always contains thoughtful fodder. (A article on the travel industry that I read 10 years ago this week inspired me to start my Internet company, NetMarket, while I was at the London School of Economics, which directly led to where I am today.) Brad says:

The world continues to go to hell in a handbasket. The three big threats that may turn the twenty-first century into an abbatoir are (i) the possible emergence of an expansionist, militaristic Wilhelmine China, (ii) a failure of “transition” that results in the emergence of a Weimar Russia, and (iii) Hindu nationalistic communalism leading to the emergence of a Fascist India–a place where encouraging mobs to kill Muslims and burn their houses wins lots of votes. (The threat of an Islamic Reformation leading to lots of wholesale terrorism and the occasional repeat of what Christians did to each other on St. Bartholomew’s Day ranks fourth.)

BTW, an abattoir is a slaughterhouse, but I’m sure you already knew that.

While I agree that all of the items on Brad’s list are of concern, I personally put both China and Russia on the track of nation-states entering the Western fold through economic development, and with a little good luck, think they both will make it to fully developed market democracies. I put his India and Islam concerns in the larger realm of totalitarian fundamentalism:

Just as the once apparently doomed forces of western liberalism defeated totalitarian fascism in 1945 and totalitarian communism in 1991, we now face a war against totalitarian fundamentalism. (Note that I mean western as a moral appellation, not a geographic designation.)

I took the terms totalitarian fascism and totalitarian communism from one of the best pieces the Economist ever published, where they excerpt a history book from 2992 looking at democracy’s post-1991 failure. What I find so amazing is how different Brad’s and my concerns are from that Christmas 1992 Economist article, which includes the isolationist “Buchanan doctrine” issued by the US president in 2003. (Note also the lachrymose reference to Somalia.) The article is worth reading in full, but I append the opening to taunt you:

THIS was an opportunity of a magnitude the world had rarely seen before. As Chapter 12 explained, the three-sided War of Ideas that had occupied most of the 20th century ended in a sweeping victory for the once apparently doomed forces of liberalism. The defeat of racial totalitarianism in 1945 having been followed by the defeat of communist totalitarianism in 1989-91, the victorious pluralists seemed to have the future at their feet.

The collapse of communism brought universal agreement that there was no serious alternative to free-market capitalism as the way to organise economic life. It was almost as widely agreed that multi-party democracy was the best form of politics; only a handful of authoritarians anxious to preserve their own power — most of them in Muslim south-west Asia — and the old men still running China openly stood aside from a new orthodoxy. To this ideological triumph was added, in the Gulf war of 1991, a military success that appeared to confirm the new balance of power. The pluralist alliance possessed a technological advantage in the weapons of war that could, it seemed, defeat almost any possible adversary.

All this was potentially a greater change in the course of history than Britain’s defeat of Napoleonic France in 1815. That decided who was to be militarily dominant in the 19th century, but it did not put an end to the ideological fallacy that had begun in France in 1789 and reappeared in new shape in Russia in 1917. The events of 1989-91 could also have proved more decisive than the victory of the Reformation in the 17th century. That changed the ideological scene, but it did nothing to decide the military and political balance of power in Europe.

Perhaps not since the battle of Actium in 31BC, which made possible the Pax Romana of the next two centuries, had there been such a chance to remake the world; and in AD1991, unlike 31BC, the central idea on which the remaking would have been based was the victors’ belief in every man’s right to political and economic freedom.

What religious sect has a genesis myth involving being “entertained by voluptuous female robots”? The Ralians, of course. A silly opening to a disparaging blog post, right?

Well, are their founding myths really any more unlikely than converting water into wine, or wine and bread into blood and flesh, a miracle (transubstantiation) that occurs everyday, according to millions (Catholics)?

Further, while it’s irresponsible to clone humans for a few more years until animal studies can show how to avoid congenital defects and other potential hazards, human cloning will and should become just as common a part of modern life as invitro fertilization (IVF), which is a responsible for something like 10% of all children born in the US today. If a couple can’t conceive sexually (perhaps because one parent has a high risk of passing a genetic defect like Huntington’s or ALD to their children), why shouldn’t they be able to raise a clone of the other parent?

My step-father is a clone (identical twin), and he and his brother are not even that much alike.

Evidence for waiting, though: ‘Also, Dr. Seidel said, cloned animals have a high rate of unexplained defects, including malformed kidneys, hearts and lungs, and often die within days of birth. “Ten percent abnormalities might be acceptable for cloning cows,” he said. “But it’s completely unacceptable for human children.”‘

Looking for a screenplay topic where a lot of small, seemingly meaningless science events suddenly cascade into a doomsday scenario (along the lines of Deep Impact or Independence Day)?

How about “The Leap Second” talking about this little known international body, the International Earth Rotation Service (IERS), whose job it is to monitor the miniscule slowdown in the Earth’s rotation due to tidal breaking (and other forces) and to announce leap seconds, which correct for time between the imprecise rotation of the Earth and far more precise atomic clocks.

You see, an amateur would notice that there was no leap second in June and that there will not be one in 6 days (they normally come at the end of June or December). In fact, the last leap second was at the end of December 1998. These 4 years (and counting), then, are the longest period without the introduction of a leap second since the first one was introduced in 1972.

So, it would turn out that the IERS was either a government conspiracy to slow down the Earth in order to cause huge changes (like when Lex Luther wanted to sink California to make Nevada ocean-front property in Superman) or (my preference) an elite groups of scientist/special forces who are Earth’s only hope to prevent massive tidal waves et al caused by natural (but unpredicted) slowing. Since the prediction service of the IERS is run by the Navy, you could do a Peacemaker-style pairing (Mimi Leder again) of a George Clooney-ish Navy Seal and a Nicole Kidman/Denise Richards character (both played physicists, Richards in the role of a Bond chick) as the smart ass scientist who’s also his boss.

To keep current (and environmentally-friendly), maybe they would need to stop the Three Gorges Dam project in China, since dams are thought to affect the Earth’s orientation. Add in the effect of earthquakes (think Superman again), and there’s plenty of opportunity for death, disaster, and redemption.

What launched me on this is that some great background on time keeping and notation (did you know that a tiny C program based on Zeller’s congruence can tell you the date from the day of the week without using a calendar?) is RFC 3339: Date and Time on the Internet: Timestamps.