[ EEPI-Discuss ] Re: Prof Lessig is consistent in his mistake.

[Dan Krimm <djkrimbo@earthlink.net>]

>Date: Mon, 23 May 2005 15:53:25 +0100
>From: David Tomlinson <d.tomlinson@tiscali.co.uk>
>Subject: [ EEPI-Discuss ]  Prof Lessig is consistent in his mistake.
>To: eepi-discuss@eepi.org
>
>
>Professor Lessig, is consistently making a mistake, in beliving the
>solution is always the middle ground.
>
>Rather than support Exclusive Rights, he assumes that the compromises
>made for physical property, should be applied to intellectual property.
>
>Moderation in all things is not a bad strategy, but it can often fail,
>if the pendulum has already swung to one extreme you end up with a
>moderate strategy, at the three quarter point rather than the middle.
>Another occasion when it fails to work, is when the model is wrong.

...

>Exclusive rights, make any marginal gain from marketing justified, and
>reduce distribution as the intention is to maximalise profit form every
>transaction. The result is the public good is minimalised, and the
>private profit maximalised.
>
>When you have the wrong model, only the radical change to a more
>appropriate model will do, moderation is not the solution.


The problem with your reasoning here is that no one model is appropriate
and desirable.  If you take away the (*limited*) property rights granted
under the authority of the Constitution (in the US), you necessarily end up
with no market for IP.

While it is true that these rights have been abused, it is not in society's
interest to obliterate those rights.  In practice, a world without such
rights would be systematically imperfect.  In the case of copyright and
culture, we'd be even more in the clutches of tangential values such as
celebrity than we are now, if that's even imaginable.  I think it would be
a travesty.

There is no "right model" -- we need a hybrid solution.  Purism for its own
sake is a mistake.

For example, the US political system was designed originally in terms of
checks and balances, understanding that allowing only one lens of power to
dominate would be detrimental to some group or other.  In fact, the efforts
of our current administration to undermine those checks and balances is one
of the scariest things to occur in my lifetime.

Having a system of checks and balances is inherently unstable, thus you
can't set it up and let it go on its own power -- one must participate
actively in order to sustain balance.

The content/culture economy is similar, in that no one extreme model of
organization will work well for everyone, and the hybrid model will
necessarily entail constant contention of forces.  The point is to enable
those who are currently disenfranchised to form a collective voice in order
to gain voice into the market dynamics.

Hm, that sounds exactly like the "free market"...

Dan

PS -- Having grown up in the 60s, and being disappointed by the failure of
"radical" reform (I am still a hopeless progressive, though a moderate in
attitude and approach), I have to admit I have a nascent distrust of
radicalism in principle.  It tends to be too simplistically ideological and
politically unrealistic to have any significant chance of actually yielding
positive results.  Democracy is not supposed to be about tyranny of the
majority, it is supposed to be about satisfying the interests of the
greatest number of people possible simultaneously.  Pure ideology is the
danger, from my point of view, not compromises.

It's true that there can be bad compromises instead of good ones, but that
just means we have to be sensitive not to allow the bad compromises to get
through and persist in finding the good compromises.  To paint all
compromises as bad is simplistic and short-sighted IMHO.  Sometimes the
best solutions are those that combine the best elements of the purist ideas
while ameliorating the worst elements of those purist ideas -- that is, the
best solutions sometimes are those that could not have been imagined by
either side alone, but only in collaboration.

Dogmatic ideology scares me.  That is what is threatening the roots of the
US today.
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