This is the beginning of a long blog post where I’ll attempt to lay out from start to finish the fundamental underlying problem behind intellectual property and copyright in the digital realm, and then present some of my own personal solutions. Nothing here will be particularly new, most of these arguments get rehashed in one place or another, but the idea here will be to provide all the necessary pre-requisite knowledge required to understand the arguments.

We’ll start with the economic models involved, the technical aspects of modern media, the problem with intellectual property, and finish with ideas on how to move forward. If you truly believe you have a firm grasp of any of these (You paid attention in intro to econ and\or you’re someone who has a moderate understanding of computer software) feel free to skip the definitions.

Economics

There are several economic models that you’ll need to know the basics of in order to know why intellectual property exists in the first place.

Patronage

This is the oldest relevant model for incentivizing art, whether it was music, paintings, drawings, or sculptures, was patronage. Patronage, essentially, is an entity such as a church or a royal lord coming along and telling an artist, “I like what you do. I’d like more of it, in order to show off my relative power and worth compared to other [entities]. If you come make me [art], I’ll give you a place to live and work, food, and protection.” For the large majority of human history, this was the model. The power and wealth was concentrated into a very small competing percentage of the population, who leveraged art against each other.

Supply and Demand

Good ole’ Capitalism, the cornerstone of modern western economic development for the last two hundred years. Capitalism is widely hailed by those with no real background in economics as the best economic model ever to have been created. This simple idea is that there is an equilibrium between the amount of a product available to sell at a given price, and how much people want the product at a given price. Given rational decision making between buyers and sellers, an unregulated market will naturally tend towards this price, given no other external factors. Those qualifiers are important, and will be revisited later.

Advertising

This could technically be a subset of supply and demand, as that is what is going on. However, in terms of the outward facing model, it’s very different. Advertising is a modern day patronage system. A company will place an ad before a song or an ad inside a show, promoting a product. The artist is the seller here. They’re selling the viewers they bring in with their art to the company placing the ads, the customer. The “user” experiencing the art is actually the product being sold, and the art merely a tool to herd the product. (In the most strict sense, I’m sure many artists would argue their art isn’t created for that purpose, and I’m in no place to argue with them.)

Post-Scarcity

This is an idea promoted most heavily by the show Star Trek, but shows up in a fair number of futuristic stories, and is a very relevant theoretical model. A post-scarcity economic model is one where there is an infinite supply of a given product. On the show Star Trek they have machines called replicators, which given a specifications file can near instantaneously create anything from a cup of Earl Grey tea or black coffee to a weapon to a trombone. Because of this infinite supply, there is zero economic incentive to ever trade for these goods, the characters simply make what they need. The infinite supply curve reduces all prices to zero.

Now that we have the economic basics, we’ll also need some technical background.

Digital Information

Do you know how your computer works, at the lowest level? Ask that question to most people, and they’ll probably say something along the lines of “zeros and ones, right?” And on the whole, they wouldn’t be too far off.

You can take it on faith from me, or head over to Wikipedia and read about it, but all information can be stored as a series of 0s and 1s. Computers hold all information as a series of high-voltage transistors (1s) and low-voltage transistors (0s).

Anything you ever see on your computer is stored on your computer. I bet not all of you knew that. Every Youtube video you watch, every webpage you visit (including this one), and every song you listen to on Pandora. All of it is at some point or another stored in the RAM of your computer. Now, this might seem confusing, because you can’t just right click and save a Youtube video the same way you can save a file. Access to a lot of web based information has been hidden away by the lines of code in between you and the data in your RAM, but it’s still there.

Note: Functionally there is a difference between having something in RAM and being able to save it for permanent storage on your hard drive, but that’s more technicality than is needed to understand the original premise.

The Internet

So, we have all this information on our computer. We want to get it to another computer. How would we send information before computers? Well, you could go back to the days of telegraph, but let’s go further back into the physical world.

To send information, you would have to be able to translate it onto paper somehow. That’s trivial for something like a story, it’s already in word form, just write it down. It’s also not too bad for a song, as most music back then could have a score and lyrics written in some form or another. But what about something like a chair? You can send schematics, but you can’t send the actual wood. You can give a design, but then it would have to be recreated on the other end.

That isn’t really mailing a chair, its mailing instructions on how to recreate a chair. This is for our purposes analogous to sending a file over the internet. In actuality it’s much more complicated, but oh well.

When you send information from your computer to another computer across the internet, a copy is created. The original on your computer doesn’t need to be deleted, and there is a copy of what you sent on the other side wherever you sent it.

Part two explaining why all of this is relevant should be up in the next few days.