(In the interests of balance: Everyman learns respect for copyright)
Everyman: Nice set of
stickers you have there.
Copyright Radical:
Glad you like them. Down with the Copyright Fascists!
E: Excuse me?
RadiC: Just
practising. Day of Action tomorrow.
E: About copyright?
RadiC: Knowledge
is a common resource. Defend the public domain. Preserve the commons. Freedom is sharing. Copyright enslaves us.
E: Seemed like a voluntary
exchange when I paid for my books.
RadiC: Information wants to be free. Copyright bars the way.
E: Information isn’t
free. Movies don’t get made for nothing.
RadiC: Free as in
speech, not free as in beer.
E: Doesn’t change anything. Who will make movies if anyone can copy the
product?
RadiC: Paintings
came before copyright.
E: When mass copying
was impossible.
RadiC: So when
copying was expensive, the investment to do it had to be protected. Now it costs nothing, copying has to be
stopped?
E: Aren’t you
ignoring public goods?
RadiC: On the contrary. Knowledge is a public good.
E: That sounds bad.
RadiC: How so?
E: This economics textbook
says that consumption of a public good is non-rivalrous and non-excludable. So an unlimited number of people can take a free
ride on the author’s creative investment.
That leads to underproduction of creative works.
RadiC: You can prove
anything with economics.
E: The book says
that copyright addresses the free rider problem by introducing excludability. It
creates the possibility of a functioning market.
RadiC: So we end
up with big business controlling knowledge.
E: Not a dynamic marketplace
of ideas?
RadiC: Don’t be
ridiculous.
E: Isn’t the
alternative worse?
RadiC: Knowledge
as the commons. Sounds fine to me.
E: If public goods
are underproduced, next thing you have the State stepping in to correct market
failure.
RadiC: Collective democratic
action.
E: A State-sponsored
representative elite controlling the creative commons in the interest of the voter
coalitions whose interests it serves. What’s
free - as in speech - about that?
RadiC: You’d
rather have unaccountable monopoly US corporations?
E: What the State
controls the State rations, including knowledge. Especially knowledge.
RadiC: This is about
copyright, not the State controlling speech.
E: Shouldn’t we just
try to have the right amount of copyright? Not too little, not too much.
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