From: Samantha Atkins (samantha@objectent.com)
Date: Thu Mar 13 2003 - 02:16:24 MST
Hal Finney wrote:
> Wei writes:
>
>
>>Speaking of alternative approaches to handling intellectual property,
>>here's a proposal I made on another mailing list:
>>
>>http://www.weidai.com/measuring.txt
>>
>>and some follow up discussion with Robin Hanson:
>>
>>armchair@gmu.edu/msg02481.html">http://www.mail-archive.com/armchair@gmu.edu/msg02481.html
>
>
> I'll quote the first part of the first link above:
>
> : I think we should consider funding information goods (software, movies,
> : music, etc.) through tax revenue rather than copyrights. (Those rights are
> : increasingly difficult to enforce and produce much waste by causing
> : information goods to be priced far above marginal costs.) One way to do it
> : would be to let people spend their own money to produce the information,
> : and then reimburse them based on some function of the expended cost and
> : the social benefit.
Another way to do it is to remove money from the equation
entirely. In a truly abundant economy this is not impossible.
What do you mean by "information" here? There are many types of
information. Should the first person to derive the quadratic
formula receive monies involuntarily coerced from everyone else
(tax dollars) for having done so? Should others be prevented
from deriving the formula themselves or have to check to see if
someone else derived it before using it in their work? No?
Then why should I have to do this for some software algorithm?
> In a way what you are suggesting is that information be treated as a
> public good. Then the question is a special case of the question of
> how to find the right level of funding public goods. However it is a
> particularly difficult case because every piece of information is unique
> and has its own value, to a vastly greater degree than traditional public
> goods like highways or dams.
>
Yes. Information is not a physical thing. The distinction is
all too often lost.
> Nevertheless I wonder if the economics literature on public goods could
> provide some insight and tools that could be applied to this case.
> I have (temporarily) put a copy of what I think is a seminal paper
> on this topic, The Optimal Allocation of Public Goods, by Groves and
> Ledyard, on my web site at http://www.finney.org/~hal/GrovesLedyard.pdf.
> For more information, a site with many good links to papers on public
> goods (towards the bottom of the page) is
> http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/~tedb/econ230b.html.
>
No, not without making the distinction. Go read the works of
Lessing if interest in what the distinctions are and why they
are crucially important.
- samantha
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