SOPA? THANKS, NOPA!

I normally do not side with the internet libertarian types, but this time I did and I sent petitions to my so-called elected "representatives" to oppose SOPA and PIPA.  I did it for two reasons. 

First, the proposed legislation amounts to collective punishment.  Imagine that you are on a flight from, say, Bogota to Miami.  Just before the takeoff, the cops storm the plane, pull out a guy suspected of smuggling cocaine and then announce that the airline who sold the accused smuggler the ticket is banned, and the flight is grounded.  Or that you are comfortably sitting in a movie theater watching the recently released Hollywood kitsch, and the SWAT team storms the theater to get someone smoking a joint and getting a blowjob in the last row, and then announces that the theater is closed for facilitating illegal drug use and prostitution.

I am pretty sure that the Hollywood schmucks would cry bloody murder if this happened to the airline or the movie industry,  yet they propose the same treatment of ISPs that sell services to folks who pirate their crap.   Because this is the type of medicine prescribed by SOPA: go after companies that sell internet access services to guys who may be breaking the law. 

Second, and more importantly, I do not believe in protecting intellectual property rights (IPR).  To be sure, I do believe that creators of intellectual products should be paid for their work, I just do not believe that intellectual property legislation is a good way of doing it.  The usual argument against IPR cites unscrupulous distributers using them steal music from artists.  A modern version of such abuse is the practices of agribusinesses like Monsanto to “patent” seeds.

Cheating of a few entertainers or inconvenience of a few farmers alone, however unfair it may be, is not a sufficient reason for opposing a legislation design to protect a greater good.  Ban on smoking tobacco in the public is certainly unfair to the smokers, but their inconvenience is a fair price to pay for protecting large numbers of non-smokers from harmful effects of the second-hand tobacco smoke.  However, if the legislation serves no clear public benefit, but instead inconveniences the public to protect profits of those in a position to pay for such protection – there is no rational reason for defending such a legislation, at least by the public that is inconvenienced by it.

So the question boils down to what public good is served by the IPR?  My answer is very little, if any.  The typical argument in favor of the IPR is that is somehow enables the creation of art and other intellectual products, by ascertaining that the creators are paid.  That this argument is a bunch of horseshit is evidenced by the fact the IPR is a relatively late Western invention introduced in the 19^th century.  So if good art could not be produced without the IPR, then it follows that Acropolis, Taj Mahal, The Odyssei, the Sistine Chapel, Lady Macbeth, and not to mention great religious art should not exist.  In fact, the opposite seems to be true, the art created without the IPR “protections” seems to have a far more enduring value than most of the crap “protected” by the IPR.

In addition to value judgment about the aesthetic qualities of copyrighted products, there is also a more compelling logical argument against IPR.  Intellectual products are what economists call “public goods,” i.e. goods that are “non-excludable” and “non-rival.”  In plain English, this means that the producers of such goods cannot effectively bar non-payers from enjoying the benefits of such goods, at least without significant infringements on their quality, and that the enjoyment of the benefit of such goods by one person does not infringe on the benefits of another person. 

Of course, non-excludability and non-rivalry of a particular good or service depends on technologies and institutional settings of their production.  For example, a roadway is a public good because anyone can use it and one driver’s using it does not infringe on the ability of other drivers to do so.  However, a public roadway can be transformed into a toll-road, if the effective means of excluding non-payers exist, and if there is political will to do so, i.e. to finance roads by user fees rather than general taxes.  Likewise, if a certain level of congestion is reached, the use of a roadway can become “rival,” which in turn may justify implementing means of limiting access by excluding certain users. 

Intellectual products are natural public goods, because they consist of ideas that every competent human being is capable of understanding and following.  If someone comes up with a new idea of doing things, say, paining his house white to reduce heat absorption, nothing prevents others from following his example.  Nor do other people painting their houses white infringe in any way on the benefit of so doing in reducing heat absorption.  In other words, nobody will be worse off if all people in the community copycat the original idea and paint their houses white, but everyone will be better off.  This is different from a product manufactured for the same purpose (e.g. a cooling fan), which requires cost and effort.  If the members of that community simply took cooling fans made by others without paying for them, the fan users may be better off, but the fan producers will certainly be worse off.

One of the main political implications of the public good theory is that such goods must be paid by taxes.  It is so, because everyone benefits from them, and it is difficult, impractical, or undesirable to restrict this benefit to non-payers.  It follows that the most fair and practical way of paying for such goods is a compulsory fee aka tax paid by every member of the community.  In other words, the most effective and fair way for paying for public goods, from arts to knowledge is taxes.  In short, public goods should be publicly financed.

The fact that they are not reflects a political and, I may add, ideological decision to privatize these public goods, typically to benefit advantageously situated individuals.  The IPR is the main mechanism of this privatization.  They are necessary because public authorities refuse, or are being prevented by special interest groups, to provide adequate public funding for public goods.  Then the public is told that if it wants to receive these goods, it must buy a protection racket in the form of the IPRs.  In short, typical gangster capitalism – first I take away something from you and then I make money by selling it back to you.

Unfortunately, many artists and inventors bought this protection racket as the only possible way of being paid for their efforts.  Obviously, I sympathize with their concerns over their paychecks – I earn mine by producing intellectual products myself – but I do not understand the failure of their social and political imagination.  They do not have to be held hostage to intellectual property rights gangsters, there are alternatives to it.  For example, Europe that has muchhigher level of public spending on culture than the US not only can support more artists but also make art more accessible to wider population. 

C’mon people, do not be duped by corporate propaganda.  People create new things because they have creative instincts and ambitions.  Surely, they need to be paid for their work, but there are better ways of doing this than passing and enforcing byzantine property rights legislation that serves mainly corporate profits.  How about cutting corporate welfare and increasing public funding of public arts and public education and science instead?