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Cory Doctorow: "Intellectual Property" is a silly concept -- You can't "own" information.
Cory Doctorow, esteemed editor of BoingBoing, has made the case again that "intellectual property" is a wrong-minded idea -- You can't "own" knowledge, ideas or data:
"Intellectual property" is a silly euphemism
I've been making essentially this same argument since the early 1990s. The current system of copyright law is untenable, because it is based on the idea of "scarcity," just as traditional property law is. But when you can instantly make a perfect copy of something, without diminishing the original, then the idea of "property" just falls apart. There's no scarcity at all. This is why the music, movie and publishing industries have been scrambling to cope with an old business model that was built on scarcity, distribution and access control. But the rug has been pulled out from under this model by the Internet and computers. The law has just not yet caught up, and in the meantime, we get stupid videos that compare downloading movies to "stealing," and a lot of screaming about "pirates" and "theft."
Believe it or not, it wasn't just the Internet that started me thinking down this path: It was Star Trek: The Next Generation. Specifically, replicator technology. If you can make a perfect copy of an object, down to the molecule, what happens to the value of the original? The value given by scarcity is gone. Let's imagine that I make a perfect, down-to-the-molecule copy of the Mona Lisa, so that even an expert couldn't tell them apart. Have I diminished the value of the original? Isn't it the actual creative work that da Vinci put into it what makes it valuable, not the physical matter of the painting itself?
Mark my words, someday, when we invent perfect replicator technology, human beings are going to have this same argument over property rights.
"Intellectual property" is a silly euphemism
I've been making essentially this same argument since the early 1990s. The current system of copyright law is untenable, because it is based on the idea of "scarcity," just as traditional property law is. But when you can instantly make a perfect copy of something, without diminishing the original, then the idea of "property" just falls apart. There's no scarcity at all. This is why the music, movie and publishing industries have been scrambling to cope with an old business model that was built on scarcity, distribution and access control. But the rug has been pulled out from under this model by the Internet and computers. The law has just not yet caught up, and in the meantime, we get stupid videos that compare downloading movies to "stealing," and a lot of screaming about "pirates" and "theft."
Believe it or not, it wasn't just the Internet that started me thinking down this path: It was Star Trek: The Next Generation. Specifically, replicator technology. If you can make a perfect copy of an object, down to the molecule, what happens to the value of the original? The value given by scarcity is gone. Let's imagine that I make a perfect, down-to-the-molecule copy of the Mona Lisa, so that even an expert couldn't tell them apart. Have I diminished the value of the original? Isn't it the actual creative work that da Vinci put into it what makes it valuable, not the physical matter of the painting itself?
Mark my words, someday, when we invent perfect replicator technology, human beings are going to have this same argument over property rights.
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