indessed roscivs

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they’re never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. If you think about all the different ways our genes could be permuted, you and I are quite grotesquely lucky to be here. …We are privileged to be alive, and we should make the most of our time on this world.

—Richard Dawkins, courtesy of Dinosaur Comics.

(Continuing yesterday’s post.)

Another important difference between physical and intellectual property from the utilitarian standpoint is what I call the “public domain trade-off”. If every patentable or copyrightable idea or work from the beginning of time was patented or copyrighted, with no time limits or expirations, it would be nearly impossible to create new non-infringing works. Nearly everything we see today, from Disney’s Little Mermaid to The Toys’ “Lover’s Concerto” would be derivative works of at least one, if not more, previous creations. And it’s not just a simple matter of finding the copyright owner (perhaps Bach’s great-great-grandnephew) and licensing their content, which would already be prohibitive for most authors and creators. If your work derives from multiple different works, this requires the agreement, cooperation, and licensing of all of them in order for your work to be legal.

Physical property has no such trade-off. When I create a new piece of physical property, I know exactly what other physical property I need to purchase in order to create the new piece, the purchase is a one-time transaction that requires no further records or maintainance, and I can’t accidentally fail to realize that I need something additional to complete my work legally but obtain the physical item anyway. (At least, I have never heard of “accidental theft” being used as an excuse for physical property violations.) It’s simply not a difficult matter to create new, non-infringing physical items, even if every physical item on the planet is privately owned.

But the most vital and most important difference between physical property and intellectual property is the marginal cost of production. According to economic theory, the market price of a good is exactly equal to the marginal cost of production, given a perfectly competitive market. This means that very elastic^[2] goods, such as wheat or beans or generic widgets, are sold for nearly exactly what it costs to make another one, package it up, and get it to you.

The marginal cost of production for copyrighted works, especially in the digital age, is very, very close to zero. Once you have created the work, it costs nearly nothing to make another copy of it. Whereas physical goods require work, labor, and resources to make more of them (they are intrinsically scarce) intellectual works are trivially duplicatable, intrinsically plentiful. Because it’s so easy to make copies (and therefore difficult to exclude people from enjoying the creative work) economists call this a “non-excludable” good. Furthermore, while physical goods are “rival” (to use another economic term)—meaning that if I’m currently using a shovel or a truck or a house, you can’t be simultaneously using that object—creative works are almost always “non-rival”. My having a copy of a song, or a book, or a poem, doesn’t affect your ability to enjoy it.

Economists call things like this—both non-rival and non-excludable—”public goods”. The problem from a utilitarian perspective isn’t trying to produce enough for everyone to have, as it is with physical goods. That’s trivially easy for creative works. The problem is in encouraging people to create new works. Why would I spend my time writing a novel or composing a symphony if I can only sell it for the marginal cost (i.e. nothing)? I’d rather spend my time and effort on physical labor that will reap real monetary rewards.

There are a lot of solutions to the general problem of public goods (also called “the free-rider problem”), and a good list can be found at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good#Possible_solutions. Note that “Legislated exclusion,” or the system we have today with copyrights, is only one possible solution. Many others are possible, and in my opinion should be more thoroughly explored.

But whatever the solution, the important thing is to realize that creative works are fundamentally different from physical goods, and thus should have (and have had, in every society in history, including this one) a significantly different set of laws governing their creation and duplication.

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2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_elasticity_of_demand

Libertarians are most often seen as those who want small or no government, where enforcing property rights and contract law are its only role. The idea of one’s property as almost sacrosanct is a common theme. But why have property rights at all? Why are they a foundation upon which a society should be built? Surely they’re not innate or natural, but rather a government-created fiction. So why should “intellectual property” rights, which are also a government-created fiction, be any different?

First of all, this doesn’t pose a problem at all for the libertarian of the Randian persuasion, who are mostly in favor of intellectual property. The foundation of this movement is the moral principle of “non-initiation of force,” which means that the use of force or violence is only justified in retaliation for theft of property. They tend to believe that this is equally true for intellectual property as for physical property—violation of either is grounds for retribution (such as monetary damages, prison time, etc).

The libertarian who believes in the non-initiation of force principle but not in intellectual property does have a bit of explaining to do. Why should the use of force be justified in cases of violating physical property, but not in cases of violating intellectual property?

I personally don’t believe in the non-initiation of force principle as a moral absolute (at least not in the way that many libertarians believe it), so I can’t offer a compelling explanation for this viewpoint. I’m a utilitarian, so I look at the question of physical property and intellectual property from a utility standpoint: does invoking force to protect physical property have more utilitarian value than invoking force to protect intellectual property? I believe the answer is unquestionably yes.

The simplest significant difference to see between physical and intellectual property is that intellectual property is a difficult concept to define. Copyrights, patents, and trademarks are all very different beasts, but they all fall under the general umbrella of “intellectual property”. Furthermore, all intellectual pursuits have some commonality—where do you draw the line for infringement? Are only exact duplicates considered infringement? What about borrowing the ideas but creating new material, like fan fiction? What about simply being inspired by a work you read or heard? What about sampling of music? Translations? Format shifting? Each of these have had a different status under copyright law over the years.

Physical property is much easier to define because it can only be in one place at one time, and possessed only by a single person. If you take my watch or my wallet, I do not have them any more and have more obviously been wronged. With land and real estate, you can “infringe” or trespass without actually taking the property from me, but again it’s easy to define. There’s a distinct, visible, definable property line that, when you cross without permission, you are deemed to have trespassed and violated my property rights. No such distinct, obvious line is available for copyrights, patents, or trademarks.

Another difference is the possibility of what I call “infringement at a distance”. To violate physical property rights, you (or some physical agent of yours) always has to be physically located next to that physical property, whether you’re stealing my jewelry or trespassing on my land. With intellectual property, it’s possible to infringe distantly, privately, using only one’s own materials. For example, if I attend a poetry reading, later on that night, in the privacy of my own home, using my own pen, ink, and paper, I can transcribe the poem from memory, make dozens of copies, and give them to my friends, even from hundreds or thousands of miles away. The original author of the poem may have no way of knowing that I’ve even copied his poem without authorization.^[1]

The practical result of infringement at a distance is that enforcement is much more costly and invasive. Perfect enforcement of copyright, I believe, would require nothing less than a police state. From a utilitarian standpoint, this means that the benefit to society of intellectual property must be significantly higher than the benefit to society of physical property in order for it to command the same respect and legal status.

More on this subject next week …

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1. See, for example, Mozart’s similar feat with Allegri’s Miserere.

There’s a demotivational poster called, “Potential”, that pictures a basket of fries and the words, “Not everyone gets to be an astronaut when they grow up.”

Sometimes the world seems so hopeless. Sometimes I feel like everyone around is me is so determinist, so anti-tabula rasa. “Some people are just destined to fail,” they say. It’s in their genes, or they came from the wrong family, or from the wrong neighborhood. Maybe they were born in the wrong country, or at the wrong time, or in the wrong race. Perhaps it was the way they were raised, or their teachers in school, or their peers during their formative years.

But whatever it is, some people will just fail—and telling those people that they can succeed is just cruel. Telling them they can be an Olympic medalist when they’re destined for McDonald’s is simply setting them up for disappointment. As a fellow blogger writes:

Have you ever failed at anything despite your best efforts? … there are tasks in this world that you will never be able to perform. Despite the mantra of parents and teachers that “you can do anything if you just stick with it and don’t give up”, not everybody gets to be an astronaut.

Is it so ridiculous on the face of it to truly believe that a person can do anything if they are determined enough? I’m normally one very grounded in reality—am I really so delusional to believe such a statement?

Some people try and try their entire lives just to go to college, and never make it. Gabriela Ocampo didn’t even graduate high school. She took algebra seven times, and failed the class all seven times. Did she just not try hard enough? Was she not determined enough? If I met her and said to her, “You can do anything you put your mind to,” would she break down and weep?

Bryan Caplan writes about an experiment where teaching students that intelligence is malleable improved their performance, whereas teaching students that intelligence is fixed resulted in lower grades and lower achievement test scores. He responds,

Thus, I suspect that students with who believe in malleable intelligence are more likely to go to graduate school despite low test scores. They’ll probably get better grades because of their belief. But better is often not good enough. Belief in malleable intelligence is no free lunch—it could easily lead students to waste years of their lives trying and failing.

Don’t like that example? Here’s another: Know any struggling actors? How many of them should just give up?

An MSNBC article joins the bandwagon:

One of her recommendations is for parents and educators to ditch the self-esteem movement and aphorisms such as “you can be anything you want to be” or “you have to love yourself first,” which she says have become ubiquitous in child-rearing and have contributed to today’s onslaught of unreal, narcissistic kids. Her study asserts that narcissists are more likely to have short-lived romantic relationships, lack emotional warmth and be dishonest, overcontrolling and violent. Moreover, a narcissistic child is more likely to become an angry failure of an adult, says Twenge. When you’re raised to think you’re great at everything, it can be a devastating blow when success turns elusive.

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I don’t know what the answer is. I don’t know if I’m just lucky, and that an unlucky version of me would be an angry failure of an adult, because of the noble-sounding aphorisms I was raised with.

But I can’t help but believe that you make your own luck in life, you make your own successes, and that people can change to become something much more than they were born to be. (I think that’s why the movie Gattaca brings tears to my eyes every time.) I know people have vastly changed my life, sometimes just from a simple sentence they probably didn’t even give a second thought to. If those noble-sounding aphorisms can have that same effect on somebody else’s life then, as far as I’m concerned, they’re worth keeping.

Do humans have free will? It’s a timeless debate, but let’s start by defining it (something often missing from such discussions). If a human does not have free will then, if the human were placed in the exact same physical circumstance, they will always make the same choice, every single time. They are not free to make a different choice given the same phsyical environment.

At first blush, this seems all too simple. Of course we can make different choices—I might be in the same physical environment, but I might have learned something from last time and have a memory of the previous thing that took place, which would result in me making a totally different choice.

Aha! say the determinists—but your memories are completely and totally physical in nature too. They consist only of what’s stored in the physical properties of your brain. (That’s why, they point out, physical brain damage can cause humans to lose certain memories, or even the ability to remember new things at all.) So to do the test properly, you’d have to have a human with exactly the same memories and exactly the same physical brain-state as well as the exact same external physical environment. Would this human make the same decision every time in such a circumstance?

The determinists say inquivocally yes. There’s no evidence that the choices we make are derived from anything but the physical makeup of our brain. If there were something else making these decisions, it should be measurable or detectable in some way.

I maintain that the answer to the question is fundamentally unknowable. Even if the question is in principle answerable, the problem is that we only have at hand the body of all knowledge knowable to humans. But how do we as humans amass knowledge? All epistemological paradigms include some way of deciding which hypotheses to accept as theory or fact, and which hypotheses to abandon. In other words, the very act of amassing knowledge depends fundamentally on the idea that we can choose which hypotheses to accept and which to reject. If determinism is true, then we cannot choose which hypotheses to accept and which to reject—the ideas we hold as true are deterministically chosen based on our physical environment.

The idea the “correlation does not imply causation” is common and prevalent. (And, among the populace in general, probably ought to be more prevalent.) But I wish to split hairs, as I often do.

Correlation in some instances does not imply causation. However, correlation that persists in the face of all our efforts to part the two is, in fact, synonymous with what we call “causation”. Hume prefered to call causation “constant conjuction” for this very reason. That is, when we see that one event always “causes” another, what we are really seeing is that one event has always been “constantly conjoined” to the other.¹