[free-sklyarov] Arguments from consumer rights pov

[Christopher R. Maden]

At 02:47 25-07-2001, huaiyu_zhu at yahoo.com wrote:
>Following are some of my thoughts. I hope it can be communicated to
>interested but uninformed people.  Comments and corrections are welcome.
>Use it if you like it.
>
>1. Some considerations on intellectual property
>
>Intellectual property is quite different from physical property.  Physical
>properties have two kinds of values: utilization value and exchange value.
>If you have a chair, and I take it, you can neither use it nor sell it.  So
>you want to keep it to yourself for both reasons.  On the other hand,
>intellectual property has at most the exchange value.  If you have a book
>and I copy it, you can still use the book.  You can still sell the book to
>others.  What you lose is a fraction of potential exchange value, that of
>selling a copy to me.  Furthermore, if I distribute copies to others, that
>may further take away more fractions of your potential sale value.  Of
>course, if I had no intention whatsoever to buy it from you in the first
>place, and I do not intend to distribute it to others, then you lose nothing
>letting me copy it.

This last point isn't *quite* true.  Even if you didn't intend to buy it, 
there are two damages caused by your copying.  One is that the perceived 
value of a scarce resource is lowered; people place a value on having 
something that not everyone else has (such as limited editions) or on being 
able to own things that have a high cost of entry.  If everyone has one (or 
could), that value is diminished.  The second is that, even for 
commodities, if people who aren't willing to pay can get it for free, then 
some people who might have been willing to pay otherwise will decide that 
there's no point.

Of course, this all assumes that we're starting with a world in which IP is 
rigorously protected, which isn't the case, but you might want to 
strengthen your argument there.

(The argument, "I wasn't gonna buy it anyway," is often advanced by warez 
advocates.  In the font world, at least, one can demonstrate a significant 
drop in the perceived value of fonts in the marketplace due to the fact 
that anyone can get just about any font from a friend or the Web.  Most 
users don't even realize that fonts can be bought at all.  As a result, it 
is nearly impossible to make a living designing fonts full-time, which 
means that fewer fonts are created than otherwise might be.)

In general, I'm not sure if I like the book-with-protective-covers 
analogy.  It's a little bit forced for my tastes.  But I can't come up with 
a better one right now... the obvious ones that spring to mind involve 
music or video recording, and protections like this are already in place, 
and everyone just accepts them. )-:

-crism
-- 
"You will find that the State is the kind of organization which, though
it does big things badly, does small things badly too." - J.K. Galbraith
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