JONTILLMAN.COM | part of the problem since 1976

It boggles my mind that there are so many businesses that have yet to comprehend the basic reality of the internet (Movie studios and music labels, I’m looking at you)

These businesses are in the distribution business, which is to say, they are in the scarcity business. For their products, scarcity is directly related to price. The harder it is to get a copy of their product, the more expensive that product is. Conversely, without high scarcity, prices fall. At zero scarcity, prices are also zero. Basic stuff, no.

Well, here’s the bit they don’t seem to get, though I’m sure they DO get it, they are just trying to jam the genie back into the bottle. The internet destroys scarcity. It is the most efficient distribution mechanism yet invented: for many products (theirs included) it is basically zero price for infinite copies. That’s good news for everyone who doesn’t make all their money on distribution, but bad news for everyone that does.

Stop trying to legislate that everyone must continue to use your buggy whips even if they buy an automobile and figure out a new way to make money - one not based on a scarcity that no longer exists.

Attempts to legislate scarcity back into existence, and that is all that modern “intellectual property” laws are, are doomed to fail for one simple reason: everyone already knows that there is no underlying scarcity there. Has anyone really looked at why there is such an explosion of P2P use recently, from a standpoint of people’s personal ethics? My bet is that it is exactly this: an innate understanding of the (lack of) scarcity created by downloading a copy of an album or film.

Sure, there are other arguments against file-sharing, but those businesses making the most noise about it are framing the argument incorrectly. They are concentrating their efforts around the thing that used to make their business viable, physical scarcity, instead of some still relevant aspect of the transaction. Making intellectual property claims by analogy to physical object property is a mistake, and one that, it seems, increasing numbers of people are unwilling to accept.