That's Going to Leave a Mark

Perhaps irritated by being likened to Idi Amin and described as a "'little professor in glasses' leading 'a bunch of wacked-out muppets'," Larry Lessig lowers the boom on Mark Helprin's new book "Digital Barbarism."

It's hard to imagine a more comprehensive demolition - it's sort of like a more polite, yet still almost as humourous, version of one of Matt Taibbi's famed essays mocking Tom Friedman.

Speaking of Monopoly....

If I ever had the motivation to write a 100,000 word post about why intellectual monopoly (intellectual property, to some) does more harm than good, and should be scaled back dramatically, if not eliminated outright, it would look a lot like this, a book by Michele Boldrin and David Levine called 'Against Intellectual Monopoly'.

The short version is that patents and copyright cause more harm by hurting consumers via the restriction of the sharing of knowledge and contents that they create benefits by encouraging people to create more new copyrightable or patentable ideas/content, and that there are better ways to encourage innovation than granting perpetual (or near perpetual) monopolies to creators of such things.

Via Ezra Klein.

Copyright Lockdown

Over at No More Shall I Roam, Jonathan has posted the follow-up to his excellent post on the new copyright legislation which may be coming in Canada and why it's a bad idea.

Like Jonathan, I have a link on the right side of the page, which provides contact info for your MP, in case you feel like reminding them that they were elected to represent your interests and not the Disney Corporation's.

A Few Good Posts

Just a quick note to mention a few worthwhile posts I've seen in the past few days:

Jonathan, over at No More Shall I Roam, has a great post on Copyright.

Timmy over at Voice in the Wilderness has an on the money take on Bush's comments on Missile Defence when he visited Canada a little while back.

Andrew over at Bound By Gravity recounts his experience at the Conservative party regional policy conference the other day.

Shouldn't We All be Paid for Our Work?

OK, enough about the Blog, back to Politics.

If Paul Krugman is the American columnist you should read if you only read one, then Maclean's columnist Paul Wells (and his Inkless Wells blog) is probably the Canadian equivalent. But is that going to stop me from nitpicking at a throwaway comment he made in a recent column? Of course not, if anything, the best need to be held to a higher standard.

The recent column in question included the following line,

I have enough musician friends that I'd really rather see musicians get paid for their work.

First off, there's a word for what happens when people set policy according to who their friends are, and I believe it is 'cronyism'. But I'm guessing that Wells' didn't really mean it the way it came out, so we'll give him the benefit of the doubt.

More interesting, and the reason I made this post, is the 'Musicians should get paid for their work' argument, which I've heard a number of times. The problem, to me, is that the word 'Work' has two (relevant) meanings.

From my girlfriend's concise (yet massive) Oxford dictionary:

1. activity involving mental or physical effort done in order to achieve a result.
2. such activity as a means of earning income

So taken on definition 2, the statement is basically that musicians should earn an income from the activity they take as a means of earning income, the logical fallacy of 'begging the question'.¹

Even if the people who say this have definition 1 in mind, their argument derives force from the fact that the reader has definition 2 in their mind. After all, shouldn't we all be paid for our work?

Given that the question we are trying to answer is, should musicians be paid for the music they create?, it would seem to be more (at least equally) intellectually honest to say that you think musicians should be paid for their hobby, but it doesn't have quite the same ring to it, does it.

¹ Via the Nizkor Project,

Begging the Question is a fallacy in which the premises include the claim that the conclusion is true or (directly or indirectly) assume that the conclusion is true. This sort of "reasoning" typically has the following form.

1. Premises in which the truth of the conclusion is claimed or the truth of the conclusion is assumed (either directly or indirectly).
2. Claim C (the conclusion) is true.

In this case, the Premise is that what musicians are doing is work (in the sense of work being something you do and get paid for) and the conclusion which follows is that they should be paid for their work which they are doing to get paid for.

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Irony: The Blogger spellchecker suggests Nigger as an alternative to Nizkor.
Go Figure: The Blogger spell-check dictionary recognizes Nigger but not Blog???

STV in BC, levy on MP3

Daniel Girard has an informative, albeit oddly timed article on B.C.'s electoral reform situation. This is the kind of concise, informative, matter-of-fact information piece a long-winded, opinionated person like me could never pull off. The one thing he doesn't do (and realistically couldn't in the space of a column), is provide much information on how the electoral systems in question (the proposed [and far superior] Single Transferrrable Vote and the existing [outdated and undemocratic] First-Past-the-Post ) actually work.

For that, I recommend this , a flash animation put together by South Austalia's State Electoral Office, that explains it all and is entertaining enough in its own right to watch even if you're not trying to learn about electoral systems. Well, it's pretty cute at any rate.

One thing to note is that what the Aussie's refer to as Proportional Representation in the animation, we call Single Transferrable Vote, and what they call 'Exclusion (Bottom's Up)' is often referred to as Instant Runoff voting here.

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In other news, the Federal Appeal Court overturned the levy which was being charged on mp3 players (from what I understand it varied from $2 - $25 depending on the storage capacity of the device). The decision was based on a technicality so the levy could be restored if lawmakers get around to making the necessary changes to the law.

I really only brought this up so I could point out this great line,

London Drug's Mr. Powell said the fee is inappropriate for digital music players because they have uses beyond just music. For example, some new iPod models can also store photographs. "So why, when you put your family memories on an iPod device, should you be sending money to Céline Dion?"

Why indeed.

The Parable of the (Digital) Loaves

Over at his ‘jealousy-inducing-because-it-looks-nicer-than-mine’ blog, “On the Fence”, Kelly Nestruck has a post up on the ‘stale’ topic of music downloading. Seeing it inspired me to write my own take on the intellectual property issue and I figured if it is indeed a stale topic, then bread should make a good metaphor:

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Once upon a time in the peaceful, harmonious country of Ipland, Mr. A was walking down the street with a loaf of bread in his hand. But before he could even take a single bite, Mr. C snuck up behind him, grabbed the loaf and ran off down the street.

Such a thing had never been seen before in Ipland, so once Mr. A got over his shock, he went to the police. The efficient police of Ipland soon found Mr. C and he was brought before the chief judge in the land, Queen B, who handed down her ruling on whether this new activity should be allowed or not:

“I have been charged to look after the welfare of the people of this land,” pronounced Queen B, “and I see no net benefit to them in allowing one person to take something from another. What is gained by one is lost by another, and who will make or buy bread if it can just be taken from them. If we are forced to divert our energies to protecting our possessions instead of enjoying them than we will all be poorer. Henceforth we will call this activity ‘theft’ and it will not be permitted in Ipland.”

Mr. C recognized the wisdom of Queen B’s ruling, but he was not easily dissuaded from getting Mr. A’s bread and he soon came up with a new plan. The next time Mr. A walked down the street, Mr. C approached him, from the front this time.
“Please sir,” he said to Mr. A, “may I just borrow your loaf for a moment?”
Mr. A was suspicious, but he knew that stealing had been outlawed so he warily handed over the loaf. Mr. C took the loaf in his left hand, waved his right hand and said the magic word, “Kazaam!” There was a soft clicking sound and then, there in his right hand, was another loaf of bread, exactly like the one Mr. A had been carrying in every detail! Mr. C smiled, handed the original loaf back to Mr. A and continued walking down the street with his new loaf.
He couldn’t put his finger on it, but Mr. A felt that there must be something wrong with what Mr. C had done, so he once more called in the police and once more Queen B delivered a verdict:

“So you had a loaf of bread before you met up with Mr. C?” she asked Mr. A, “and then you still had the same loaf of bread after you met up with Mr. C? It seems like you were not harmed at all. And this new magic Mr. C has developed means that even if we only have one loaf of bread in our land, we will be able to feed the whole country. We will call this great blessing copying and it shall be permitted everywhere in the land.”

Now most men would have been satisfied with this, but Mr. C was a restless fellow and it wasn’t long before he came up with yet another plan. This new plan was so bold that he was called upon to propose it to the Queen at the general assembly where all the people from the land would come together.
“Listen,” he said to Queen B and the assembled people. “Thanks to my new copying procedure, we all have as much bread as we want, but is it not true that our bread is a little tougher, a little less flavourful than it could be? I have developed a new bread, one that tastes much better than the old bread.”

There was a great rush of murmuring and whispering from the crowd. “Well then”, said the Queen, “what is the problem? Present us with this new bread and we shall make copies for everyone and we will all be better off.”

“But what about me”, replied Mr. C, “if everyone just makes copies of my new bread, how I will be compensated for all my hard work in developing it? Why should I even bother giving it to you and not just keep it for myself?”

“Shame!” cried Mr. A from near the back of the assembled crowd, “nobody forced you to develop this new bread, why should we have to pay you just to make copies of it – it’s not like we’re harming you or taking anything away from you by just making copies.

“Fine,” replied Mr. C, “I’ll just go then and leave you to your stale, dry bread.”

“Wait”, said the Queen, “truly you have presented me with your most difficult case yet, Mr. C. On the one hand, my people’s interest is to have the best bread available at the cheapest price. On the other hand, if there isn’t an incentive for people to develop new bread, we’ll always be stuck with the old stuff. Therefore, I propose that....

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OK, what should the Queen propose?

a) The fame and glory of having his bread eaten by all should be enough for Mr. C. His new bread can be copied freely throughout the land, and if he chooses not to offer it, then we will live with our old bread.

b) For the next 5 years, anyone wishing to make a copy of Mr. C’s bread will have to send him a donation of 1 penny. After this time, he should have received adequate compensation for his bread and it can then be freely copied.

c) Nobody can make a copy of Mr. C’s bread unless they pay him whatever he asks for it. This rule will apply forever, with the right to charge for Mr. C’s bread passed down to his children and to their children and so on.

d) Something else? (Opinions welcome)

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So what’s my point? Mainly that, when people (industry lobby groups primarily) try to convince you that downloading is piracy or that copying is theft, they are, quite simply, wrong. Furthermore, they are deliberately confusing different terms and ideas in an attempt to manipulate you into feeling guilty about something you have no reason to feel guilty about.

Theft is one thing, copying is another. The key distinction is that theft involves taking things while you make copies. The true justification for intellectual property rules is solely as an incentive for the development of new ideas/products and intellectual property rights should only be extended as far as is necessary to provide a genuine incentive – not further.