For me, the article really helped clarify the distinction between the inherent value of ideas (which should universally be considered Rent) and the labors of the artist in actively discovering (or creating if you prefer) those ideas.
Our chief goal should be in creating incentive structures that reward those labors in just the right way so-as to encourage just the right amount of them. Granting them 60 years of the Rents seems rather arbitrary when framed that way, and I think we can do better.
And my response to Caplan's critique of LVT (https://www.econlib.org/archives/2012/02/a_search-theore.html) is the same: seems incredibly arbitrary to give landowners untaxed, fee simple ownership of their land purely in the hope that they'll search for better ways to use it. Rather, we should collect the Rent, and then design mechanisms that compensate types of 'search' that are deemed potentially useful.
I think it's a useful starting point; the obvious next step is to directly grapple with the arguments made by copyright maximalists themselves. I believe they would be:
- That the possibility space is infinite (you dealt with it a bit here but it could use a more in-depth treatment)
- That the production of ideas is "creation", not "discovery", actually (I imagine most pro-copyright folks would immediately balk at your framing, so you will need to establish it more firmly, or find a way to continue the argument even if you concede that particular point for the sake of argument)
- The intellectual property "naturally" belongs to the people who "created" them as an axiomatic right in and of itself (I think this is actually the core objection, and I think a historical examination of how humans have treated ideas and where copyright came from and how it evolved is the natural counter)
- That intellectual property IS rival, actually, because in a world without copyright people will "dilute" and "tarnish" my brand by making bad knockoffs & porn and gross out horror movies and whatever, and thus it has to be "protected" and "safeguarded"
- That the current IP regime ensures that ideas are put to their highest and best use. I've seen many people, including some YIMBY's who are naturally sympathetic to Georgism, say things like "It's good that Disney owns Marvel because Marvel movies are really good, and we wouldn't have gotten the highest and best use of these ideas otherwise."
It's interesting to note that the actual model created for Midjourney is often referred to as "latent space". I'm sure there's a pun one could muster about latent space and land somewhere.
Interesting piece! I find the idea of 'exploring' the possibility space presented here really helpful. Exploration (and documenting/communicating the findings!) increases the overall value of our knowledge. This is much like exploring and mapping the physical landscape. Surely the explorer should be compensated for more than the production cost of the map. But on the other hand, discovery can hardly result in legitimate ownership of the discovered possibility space (claiming entire continents). You would want to adequately compensate the explorer for the costs/risks of exploration, plus a profit margin that is high enough to encourage exploration.
This is relatively straightforward when the exploration is publicly funded. For example, it is argued that publicly funded research should be made freely available instead of being owned and commercialised by academic publishers. We also already partially have this in the form of inventions becoming ownership of employers rather than the employees who performed the exploration. In the same vein it could be argued that research-intensive companies should be adequately compensated. But they should not be allowed to make excess profits from their discoveries.
I’ve long observed a behavior in the US ballet industry that bothers me and I’m wondering how it relates to this model you’re proposing for thinking about copyright laws... here goes:
Ballet performances are recorded to enable studying performances by the dancers themselves and others who work at these ballet studios but not made available to general public (even with payment). They don’t even try to capture the kind of viewing angles that would facilitate that!
My guess is that this is because they think as soon as the performance is available in digital format it’ll spread across the internet like wildfire and they’ll not see a dime of the labor they had to put into hours of practice and the actual performance itself. But maybe I’m wrong.
I’m worried if we make it harder for people to get the kinds of return on their labor and time they are afforded under the copyright law today, that we will create more bad incentives for people to make their works available via live performances only.
I don’t think that’s a good behavior to encourage. As it is, ballet performances are mostly enjoyed by the wealthy whereas songs can be streamed rather cheaply by anyone who has a smart phone.
I admit that I don’t actually know why the two industries behave differently but my thought has always been it’s a quirk of the copyright laws or distribution options available.
Intellectual property grants should be understood in light of Pigouvian subsidy. With such royalties (rents) we are recognizing that such reproducible and non-rivalrous resources will be insufficiently produced without some subsidy. Such royalties therefore intend to enhance the public domain of intellectual products which we might fear will be inadequately developed otherwise.
This is clearly the spirit in which such intellectual property powers are conceived in the U.S. Constitution:
“ To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries” (emphasizing the “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts preamble).
Unfortunately, such intellectual property royalties are not utilized in the manner intended by the framers of the Constitution, but instead to maximize the royalty profits and discretionary power of those authors and inventors (instead of aimed at the progress of the public domain). So we end up discussing whether this perverted form of copyright and patent should or should not exist and neglect to discuss whether the Pigouvian form of royalties intended by the constitution.
I'm not persuaded on this analogy. Discovering an idea that no one else has discovered is not like selecting a parcel of land that everyone else is also aware of. The Library of Babel is random, so good ideas aren't adjacent to each other, unlike valuable real estate. It takes real, productive labor to search possibility-space. Moreover, Georgism is not against the exclusive use of a piece of real estate, which in possibility-space would mean the exclusive use of an idea. This isn't necessarily a defense of patents and copyrights; I'm just not convinced that this particular analogy holds water.
How does an author get paid for his work if anyone can make and sell copies of his book?
When I try to promote LVT on various comment boards, one line of push back has been: "Your mind and body were pre-existing in nature, perhaps you should be taxed based on your IQ, physical strength and other attributes". The author of this article seems to buy in to what I'm sure was intended as a facetious comment. Everything is "land".
For me, the article really helped clarify the distinction between the inherent value of ideas (which should universally be considered Rent) and the labors of the artist in actively discovering (or creating if you prefer) those ideas.
Our chief goal should be in creating incentive structures that reward those labors in just the right way so-as to encourage just the right amount of them. Granting them 60 years of the Rents seems rather arbitrary when framed that way, and I think we can do better.
And my response to Caplan's critique of LVT (https://www.econlib.org/archives/2012/02/a_search-theore.html) is the same: seems incredibly arbitrary to give landowners untaxed, fee simple ownership of their land purely in the hope that they'll search for better ways to use it. Rather, we should collect the Rent, and then design mechanisms that compensate types of 'search' that are deemed potentially useful.
A good treatment!
I think it's a useful starting point; the obvious next step is to directly grapple with the arguments made by copyright maximalists themselves. I believe they would be:
- That the possibility space is infinite (you dealt with it a bit here but it could use a more in-depth treatment)
- That the production of ideas is "creation", not "discovery", actually (I imagine most pro-copyright folks would immediately balk at your framing, so you will need to establish it more firmly, or find a way to continue the argument even if you concede that particular point for the sake of argument)
- The intellectual property "naturally" belongs to the people who "created" them as an axiomatic right in and of itself (I think this is actually the core objection, and I think a historical examination of how humans have treated ideas and where copyright came from and how it evolved is the natural counter)
- That intellectual property IS rival, actually, because in a world without copyright people will "dilute" and "tarnish" my brand by making bad knockoffs & porn and gross out horror movies and whatever, and thus it has to be "protected" and "safeguarded"
- That the current IP regime ensures that ideas are put to their highest and best use. I've seen many people, including some YIMBY's who are naturally sympathetic to Georgism, say things like "It's good that Disney owns Marvel because Marvel movies are really good, and we wouldn't have gotten the highest and best use of these ideas otherwise."
It's interesting to note that the actual model created for Midjourney is often referred to as "latent space". I'm sure there's a pun one could muster about latent space and land somewhere.
Interesting piece! I find the idea of 'exploring' the possibility space presented here really helpful. Exploration (and documenting/communicating the findings!) increases the overall value of our knowledge. This is much like exploring and mapping the physical landscape. Surely the explorer should be compensated for more than the production cost of the map. But on the other hand, discovery can hardly result in legitimate ownership of the discovered possibility space (claiming entire continents). You would want to adequately compensate the explorer for the costs/risks of exploration, plus a profit margin that is high enough to encourage exploration.
This is relatively straightforward when the exploration is publicly funded. For example, it is argued that publicly funded research should be made freely available instead of being owned and commercialised by academic publishers. We also already partially have this in the form of inventions becoming ownership of employers rather than the employees who performed the exploration. In the same vein it could be argued that research-intensive companies should be adequately compensated. But they should not be allowed to make excess profits from their discoveries.
I’ve long observed a behavior in the US ballet industry that bothers me and I’m wondering how it relates to this model you’re proposing for thinking about copyright laws... here goes:
Ballet performances are recorded to enable studying performances by the dancers themselves and others who work at these ballet studios but not made available to general public (even with payment). They don’t even try to capture the kind of viewing angles that would facilitate that!
My guess is that this is because they think as soon as the performance is available in digital format it’ll spread across the internet like wildfire and they’ll not see a dime of the labor they had to put into hours of practice and the actual performance itself. But maybe I’m wrong.
I’m worried if we make it harder for people to get the kinds of return on their labor and time they are afforded under the copyright law today, that we will create more bad incentives for people to make their works available via live performances only.
I don’t think that’s a good behavior to encourage. As it is, ballet performances are mostly enjoyed by the wealthy whereas songs can be streamed rather cheaply by anyone who has a smart phone.
I admit that I don’t actually know why the two industries behave differently but my thought has always been it’s a quirk of the copyright laws or distribution options available.
Intellectual property grants should be understood in light of Pigouvian subsidy. With such royalties (rents) we are recognizing that such reproducible and non-rivalrous resources will be insufficiently produced without some subsidy. Such royalties therefore intend to enhance the public domain of intellectual products which we might fear will be inadequately developed otherwise.
This is clearly the spirit in which such intellectual property powers are conceived in the U.S. Constitution:
“ To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries” (emphasizing the “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts preamble).
Unfortunately, such intellectual property royalties are not utilized in the manner intended by the framers of the Constitution, but instead to maximize the royalty profits and discretionary power of those authors and inventors (instead of aimed at the progress of the public domain). So we end up discussing whether this perverted form of copyright and patent should or should not exist and neglect to discuss whether the Pigouvian form of royalties intended by the constitution.
I'm not persuaded on this analogy. Discovering an idea that no one else has discovered is not like selecting a parcel of land that everyone else is also aware of. The Library of Babel is random, so good ideas aren't adjacent to each other, unlike valuable real estate. It takes real, productive labor to search possibility-space. Moreover, Georgism is not against the exclusive use of a piece of real estate, which in possibility-space would mean the exclusive use of an idea. This isn't necessarily a defense of patents and copyrights; I'm just not convinced that this particular analogy holds water.
How does an author get paid for his work if anyone can make and sell copies of his book?
When I try to promote LVT on various comment boards, one line of push back has been: "Your mind and body were pre-existing in nature, perhaps you should be taxed based on your IQ, physical strength and other attributes". The author of this article seems to buy in to what I'm sure was intended as a facetious comment. Everything is "land".