FnH's Blog - 2008/5/13 - imaginary_property 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scroll no-repeat bottom right}.node>.body>h1{font-size:larger;font-weight:normal;margin:20px 10px 10px 10px}.node>.body>div{margin:10px;}.node>.body img{padding:4px;margin:4px;border:1px solid #000} Imaginary property Posted by FnH on 2008/5/13 0:28 Last Saturday someone posted a thought-provoking video on slashdot. While the video itself annoyed me - mostly because the audience seemed to be high on something and laughed way too hard - the ideas put forward by the speaker were interesting. Basically, he argued that the result of labor isn't something you own. He argues that this is already the case for the standard, menial type of work where labor simply transforms resources and doesn't imply extra owner rights. If I hire someone to create a nice deck from a pile of wood in my garden, then he doesn't have the slightest property claim on my newly constructed deck. Why should it be different for intellectual work like inventing something or composing a song? Economics never really was a favorite subject of mine. Even though the field ends on -nomics, I barely consider it a science. Not being able to tell whether patents foster or harm innovation after a few hundred years doesn't really help your credibility as a science either. This was a refreshing exercise though. It takes something everybody takes more or less for granted "If you create something, it's yours" and throws it out the window, not unlike what Non-Euclidean geometry does with the parallel postulate. Just as with Non-Euclidean geometry it is interesting to explore where this new set of axioms leads us. Would there still be pop stars? Would new drugs still be developed? Somehow I think there would be and they would. The way they get paid would obviously be very different though. The video suggests people might simply give what they consider is fair, and even though there are examples of this today (userfriendly, Radiohead), I don't believe this would be a stable model. What I can see happening is pop stars keeping a new album hostage until a predefined amount of money is transferred to their account, after which they release it. Another interesting realization is that there are lots of people (like me) who don't really own the result of their intellectual labor anyway because they sign the copyright over to their employer. Similarly, pharmaceutical agencies might be contracted by the United Nations or smaller groups like Aids organizations to research and develop new drugs. The upshot of all this being that, once created, the album or drugs would be manufactured and distributed near cost prices. Interestingly, copying music from your favorite p2p network would no longer be stealing, and this might make some sort of sense. After all, stealing usually implies depriving someone of a resource, and copying a song or other information doesn't really take something away from the person you're copying from. Finally, it is interesting to wonder whether this is just a fun Gedankenexperiment, or whether this might someday be reality. While the enormity of the change argues against this ever happening, you could also argue that it already happened, and that the music industry is the first business facing the immense consequences. Time will tell.