Re: [LAU] ASCAP Assails Free-Culture, Digital-Rights Groups

On Wed, Jun 30, 2010 at 9:37 AM, Louigi Verona <louigi.verona(a)gmail.com> wrote: ideas are not covered by copyright. expressions of ideas are. the error that i see in your webpage on authorship is that you seem to think that property is automatically about scarcity. its not about scarcity, its about control. now, with resources that actually are scarce, the control offered by property has a number of different implications to the control over, say, a musical composition. there's a second angle on this too. you claim that for creative works, the ability to copy removes scarcity. but this is a semantic confusion: what is scarce are the ideas, not the copies. beethoven, like lou reed and fela kuti, can only write so many pieces. any given work that they create might (now) be very easily copied, so certainly copies of the work are not scarce in the sense that wood or gold or clean water might be. but the actual idea in the work is scarce, and the way we tackle the scarcity is to try to make it worthwhile for the person with the ability to create such things to keep trying to do it. how we identify those people has varied enormously, of course, from court patronage to market forces. one could make an argument that there is no scarcity of, say, musical ideas as a general category, and that therefore there is no reason to put any value on the ideas of any particular person. i think that anyone with a genuine love of music will see the fallacy in this way of thinking. i would even go so far as to say that the very earliest human ideas about "property" precede any notion of scarcity and in fact focus entirely on the sort of thing touched by authorship. when an early human managed to make a superior tool for hunting, or digging holes, or cutting leather, who had control over that tool? societies that created an orderly (if unfair) regime to take charge of that sort of question likely did better than those that simply allowed the most physically powerful to take control over creations like that. now, an early human tool isn't a pathway to a potential way to make a living via economic exchange until you get to a much more organized sort of society. but in such a society, there will be people who try to make a living by selling their tools rather than by actually using them. you could make an argument that this is undesirable, but it is one potential outcome for human social organization. their ability to make a living doing this is undermined if someone else can simply copy their designs. so, many societies came up with various kinds of agreements and rules about how such copying could occur, based on the premise that someone *ought* to be able to make a living from selling those tools, presumably because of a belief that it made the overall society better in various ways. as i see it, the same argument applies to artists and other people who spend time creating expressions of ideas. the big question is whether or not society agrees that it is desirable for such work to be able to be the basis of a way of making living. if a musician/composer is going to make a living from their work, its important for them to retain control over people's ability to copy what they create. if we want a society in which people can do this sort of thing for a living, giving them this control (on reasonable terms) is very important. we can choose otherwise, and certainly for large amounts of human history, we haven't valued this idea very much. but for the last 50-100 years, its been an idea that has grown in popularity. its time may be over, but if its not over, then copyright plays a critical role in making it possible for it to continue. --p