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."
I've toyed with the rival question as well, but I think the opportunity cost of current 'remixes' that never come into fruition almost-certainly outweighs any degradation that could arise from concepts being made more available.
To the extent that there's value placed on the authentic/canonical creations, I think it would still be reflected in the market being willing to pay more for works by the original artist than the various remixes. Like, George RR Martin's Winds of Winter would still be considered canon, even if I've spent hours writing my own wattpad romance versions.
Even more saliently, if the HBO adaptation wasn't under copyright, nothing would stop a well-financed person from hiring all the original actors (or deepfaking them) to make an actually good ending to the series. (Or dispense with getting the original actors, and do a brand new reboot, anime adaptation, whatever. Let a million flowers bloom).
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.
I thought about expanding a bit more on latent space and such in the article but ultimately decided that would bloat too much. Certainly this Georgist analysis is highly relevant for the AI art discourse...perhaps I might talk about it further in a future article.
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.
Optimal IP policy is indeed a Pigouvian subsidy that efficiently compensates people for the labor and capital they invest in production. I don't think copyright or patents are the best way to provide that subsidy but forms of them can be defended on those grounds. An earlier version of my article actually made an explicit comparison to Norways Georgist mineral/oil policies that author Lars Doucet has talked about on this Substack.
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.
Georgism is not against the exclusive use of space, certainly, but because you are excluding people from accessing it, you must pay the LVT. That is the whole point- since enclosure is depriving people of their equal right of access to the natural world, you pay them the value of the land being enclosed. But copyright is an artificial monopoly; it is not like land in that only one person can use it. Once an idea is known, everyone can use it simultaneously in a non-rivalrous fashion. Copyright works by the government declaring a purposely-created special monopoly right over that portion of the idea space within the government's jurisdiction, and enforcing noncompetition on everyone else, and then making *them* pay to use it (if you choose to let them do so). It's almost the opposite of Georgist logic of enclosure.
This is not to say I'm necessarily in favor of full abolition of copyright, but I think we need to have a much more careful consideration of the kinds of monopolies we grant and how useful to the public they are. Modern copyright law is immensely bloated, at the least we can trim down terms to 20 or 30 years and/or implement mandatory licensing laws like there are in the music industry.
What would be the equivalent of LVT in possibility-space? LVT corresponds to the unimproved value of land; what is the "unimproved" -- or for that matter, the "improved" -- value of an idea?
This is what I think is most worth trying to work out in the future. Unlike land, ideas are non-rivalrous, so you don't actually need any kind of LVT- the LVT is payment for exclusion, there is no exclusion from possibility space unless the government artificially enforces it, therefore there is no payment to be made. What matters is ensuring that people profit from "improving" ideas- that is, publicizing them and connecting them with other ideas (as an example, the author mentioned "Harry Potter" vs. "Boy Who Lives in a Magical Wizarding School", but Harry Potter is valuable because it is carries so many more connections with other ideas than the generic case). That still might entail something similar to copyright, if we can't think of any better way to do it. But it might not, if we manage to come up with a different way of viewing the issue that generates new solutions.
Just adding on that the *process of exploring* the Library of Babel is very much *not* random. I talk about this in the piece in the section rebutting the argument that there's no real scarcity in the possibility-space. All human culture is built atop itself in process of continual remixing. You can't divorce an artist from their influences. Just as the Norse could only discover Iceland from their prior colonization of the Faroe islands, artists must follow prior trails of ideas to ultimately discover valuable new sections of the possibility-space.
I think talking about "improving" ideas isn't quite the right frame. You don't "build" on the possibility space-I explicitly compared using the mineral analogy bc I thought it fit better in terms of comparisons in production. We want to encourage people to discover and create tangible wealth or services from ideas (books, songs, etc) . This means some form of payment to compensate people for the labor and capital invested in production. How this payment should be structured is an open question-I have my own ideas on the optimal solution. But the ideal should be to have no restrictions on competition that create rent.
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".
I reached the same conclusion reading this essay. An essay or a book is a tangible product, although not a form of capital good as defined by George. As the author, I can decide to make the product available to others without asking anything in return. I might do so by self-publishing the product on a website. I am much less likely to offer the product for free if I must incur the cost of printing and distribution. Certainly, if I enter into a contract with a publishing company, that company will offer the product at some price based on various cost factors. Law that prohibits others from also printing and distributing the product without a contractual agreement meets what I see as a reasonable definition of property theft.
The question is whether such copyright protections should be time limited or extend into the future. What is a reasonable period for such protection? The lifetime of the author? A limited number of printings by the publisher?
As I note in the last paragraph of the piece, I don't go into whether or not copyright should exist and what the best way to encourage creative production is. That's for a later piece. I have my own thoughts on the question but it is distinct from the analysis. There is in fact a way you can argue for copyright based on my piece, through I personally think it's not the best solution.
For now, I'll note that even needing to have the discussion over "reasonable" limits of copyright protection is itself an indication that the discussion is over what the degree of subsidy should be to encourage optimal amount of subjectively desired creative production. Henry George thought copyright should be perpetual precisely because he saw it as no different from any other legitimate property right.
And to Bennie: I don't see what IQ or physical attributes has to do with anything I said and neither did Henry George given that he makes the same argument I do except applied to just patents. No one is harmed by IQ or physical attributes. There is no privilege, exclusion, or private tax in being faster or smarter than someone else.
What I see as a fundamental difference between patent protections and copyrights is that work on a new process, technology or product is almost always occurring simultaneously by many people around the world. A patent rewards the person or persons who get to the finish line first, even if by only a day. Thus, whatever limits are placed on others to bring their process, technology or product to market should recognize this fact. A work of music or literature is of a quite different character. A song I write is my work alone, unless I co-write the song with someone who shares ownership rights with me. The same holds true with a book. Articles I might write for publication in a magazine or journal (paper or digital) are different. I might receive payment or not receive payment. It is highly unlikely that the publishing entity would ever take action to prevent this article from being copied and distributed. The author is even less likely to take such action because the author's hope is for the widest readership possible. As long as I am not seeking to profit by the sale of another's person's article, the "fair use doctrine" seems to me to be the right approach to protecting the interests of the author.
This is not necessarily true, it's entirely possible that someone else may come up with the same melody independently (and remarkable occurrences of this have been known to happen). Of course, the more complicated the product, the less likely this is to happen- possibility space is so large as to be nearly infinite- but the point is that there is nothing special about a sequence of notes or a mathematical equation which gives it some special characteristic of belonging to you simply because you find it. Einstein did not invent E = MC^2, he simply discovered what already existed, and all ideas function the exact same way. They do not belong to any of us, and indeed most of what we take for our own ideas are simply part of the endless hodgepodge of thousands of years of human cultures before ours from which we have drunk.
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."
I've toyed with the rival question as well, but I think the opportunity cost of current 'remixes' that never come into fruition almost-certainly outweighs any degradation that could arise from concepts being made more available.
To the extent that there's value placed on the authentic/canonical creations, I think it would still be reflected in the market being willing to pay more for works by the original artist than the various remixes. Like, George RR Martin's Winds of Winter would still be considered canon, even if I've spent hours writing my own wattpad romance versions.
Even more saliently, if the HBO adaptation wasn't under copyright, nothing would stop a well-financed person from hiring all the original actors (or deepfaking them) to make an actually good ending to the series. (Or dispense with getting the original actors, and do a brand new reboot, anime adaptation, whatever. Let a million flowers bloom).
That'a just a non-compete argument!
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.
I thought about expanding a bit more on latent space and such in the article but ultimately decided that would bloat too much. Certainly this Georgist analysis is highly relevant for the AI art discourse...perhaps I might talk about it further in a future article.
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.
My only guess at the reason for the difference between music and ballet is some path dependency specific to ballet’s relatively limited viewership
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.
Optimal IP policy is indeed a Pigouvian subsidy that efficiently compensates people for the labor and capital they invest in production. I don't think copyright or patents are the best way to provide that subsidy but forms of them can be defended on those grounds. An earlier version of my article actually made an explicit comparison to Norways Georgist mineral/oil policies that author Lars Doucet has talked about on this Substack.
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.
Georgism is not against the exclusive use of space, certainly, but because you are excluding people from accessing it, you must pay the LVT. That is the whole point- since enclosure is depriving people of their equal right of access to the natural world, you pay them the value of the land being enclosed. But copyright is an artificial monopoly; it is not like land in that only one person can use it. Once an idea is known, everyone can use it simultaneously in a non-rivalrous fashion. Copyright works by the government declaring a purposely-created special monopoly right over that portion of the idea space within the government's jurisdiction, and enforcing noncompetition on everyone else, and then making *them* pay to use it (if you choose to let them do so). It's almost the opposite of Georgist logic of enclosure.
This is not to say I'm necessarily in favor of full abolition of copyright, but I think we need to have a much more careful consideration of the kinds of monopolies we grant and how useful to the public they are. Modern copyright law is immensely bloated, at the least we can trim down terms to 20 or 30 years and/or implement mandatory licensing laws like there are in the music industry.
What would be the equivalent of LVT in possibility-space? LVT corresponds to the unimproved value of land; what is the "unimproved" -- or for that matter, the "improved" -- value of an idea?
This is what I think is most worth trying to work out in the future. Unlike land, ideas are non-rivalrous, so you don't actually need any kind of LVT- the LVT is payment for exclusion, there is no exclusion from possibility space unless the government artificially enforces it, therefore there is no payment to be made. What matters is ensuring that people profit from "improving" ideas- that is, publicizing them and connecting them with other ideas (as an example, the author mentioned "Harry Potter" vs. "Boy Who Lives in a Magical Wizarding School", but Harry Potter is valuable because it is carries so many more connections with other ideas than the generic case). That still might entail something similar to copyright, if we can't think of any better way to do it. But it might not, if we manage to come up with a different way of viewing the issue that generates new solutions.
Just adding on that the *process of exploring* the Library of Babel is very much *not* random. I talk about this in the piece in the section rebutting the argument that there's no real scarcity in the possibility-space. All human culture is built atop itself in process of continual remixing. You can't divorce an artist from their influences. Just as the Norse could only discover Iceland from their prior colonization of the Faroe islands, artists must follow prior trails of ideas to ultimately discover valuable new sections of the possibility-space.
I think talking about "improving" ideas isn't quite the right frame. You don't "build" on the possibility space-I explicitly compared using the mineral analogy bc I thought it fit better in terms of comparisons in production. We want to encourage people to discover and create tangible wealth or services from ideas (books, songs, etc) . This means some form of payment to compensate people for the labor and capital invested in production. How this payment should be structured is an open question-I have my own ideas on the optimal solution. But the ideal should be to have no restrictions on competition that create rent.
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".
I reached the same conclusion reading this essay. An essay or a book is a tangible product, although not a form of capital good as defined by George. As the author, I can decide to make the product available to others without asking anything in return. I might do so by self-publishing the product on a website. I am much less likely to offer the product for free if I must incur the cost of printing and distribution. Certainly, if I enter into a contract with a publishing company, that company will offer the product at some price based on various cost factors. Law that prohibits others from also printing and distributing the product without a contractual agreement meets what I see as a reasonable definition of property theft.
The question is whether such copyright protections should be time limited or extend into the future. What is a reasonable period for such protection? The lifetime of the author? A limited number of printings by the publisher?
As I note in the last paragraph of the piece, I don't go into whether or not copyright should exist and what the best way to encourage creative production is. That's for a later piece. I have my own thoughts on the question but it is distinct from the analysis. There is in fact a way you can argue for copyright based on my piece, through I personally think it's not the best solution.
For now, I'll note that even needing to have the discussion over "reasonable" limits of copyright protection is itself an indication that the discussion is over what the degree of subsidy should be to encourage optimal amount of subjectively desired creative production. Henry George thought copyright should be perpetual precisely because he saw it as no different from any other legitimate property right.
And to Bennie: I don't see what IQ or physical attributes has to do with anything I said and neither did Henry George given that he makes the same argument I do except applied to just patents. No one is harmed by IQ or physical attributes. There is no privilege, exclusion, or private tax in being faster or smarter than someone else.
What I see as a fundamental difference between patent protections and copyrights is that work on a new process, technology or product is almost always occurring simultaneously by many people around the world. A patent rewards the person or persons who get to the finish line first, even if by only a day. Thus, whatever limits are placed on others to bring their process, technology or product to market should recognize this fact. A work of music or literature is of a quite different character. A song I write is my work alone, unless I co-write the song with someone who shares ownership rights with me. The same holds true with a book. Articles I might write for publication in a magazine or journal (paper or digital) are different. I might receive payment or not receive payment. It is highly unlikely that the publishing entity would ever take action to prevent this article from being copied and distributed. The author is even less likely to take such action because the author's hope is for the widest readership possible. As long as I am not seeking to profit by the sale of another's person's article, the "fair use doctrine" seems to me to be the right approach to protecting the interests of the author.
>A song I write is my work alone
This is not necessarily true, it's entirely possible that someone else may come up with the same melody independently (and remarkable occurrences of this have been known to happen). Of course, the more complicated the product, the less likely this is to happen- possibility space is so large as to be nearly infinite- but the point is that there is nothing special about a sequence of notes or a mathematical equation which gives it some special characteristic of belonging to you simply because you find it. Einstein did not invent E = MC^2, he simply discovered what already existed, and all ideas function the exact same way. They do not belong to any of us, and indeed most of what we take for our own ideas are simply part of the endless hodgepodge of thousands of years of human cultures before ours from which we have drunk.