Every now and then, I find an article or book that does a good job of communicating the growth message. Here’s an article at Techdirt on the subject of digital rights management—with some good background on the economics of abundance, and the author’s view as to why DRM is getting it all wrong.
...and here’s a good quote the author borrowed from Paul Romer, which I’m borrowing in turn:
Every generation has perceived the limits to growth that finite resources and undesirable side effects would pose if no new recipes or ideas were discovered. And every generation has underestimated the potential for finding new recipes and ideas. We consistently fail to grasp how many ideas remain to be discovered. The difficulty is the same one we have with compounding. Possibilities do not add up. They multiply.
If only more people would pick up on that theme, and keep in mind that the Stone Age didn't end because we ran out of stones.
It's more than just DRM, the whole concept of "intellectual property" is anti-growth. To quote Hayek on the topic on this inefficient kind of government imposed "scarcity":
"""
Just to illustrate how great out ignorance of the optimum forms of delimitation of various rights remains - despite our confidence in the indispensability of the general institution of several property - a few remarks about one particuilar form of property may be made. [...]
The difference between these and other kinds of property rights is this: while ownership of material goods guides the user of scarce means to their most important uses, in the case of immaterial goods such as literary productions and technological inventions the ability to produce them is also limited, yet once they have come into existence, they can be indefinitely multiplied and can be made scarce only by law in order to create an inducement to produce such ideas. Yet it is not obvious that such forced scarcity is the most effective way to stimulate the human creative process. I doubt whether there exists a single great work of literature which we would not possess had the author been unable to obtain an exclusive copyright for it; it seems to me that the case for copyright must rest almost entirely on the circumstance that such exceedingly useful works as encyclopaedias, dictionaries, textbooks and other works of reference could not be produced if, once they existed, they could freely be reproduced.
Similarly, recurrent re-examinations of the problem have not demonstrated that the obtainability of patents of invention actually enhances the flow of new technical knowledge rather than leading to wasteful concentration of research on problems whose solution in the near future can be foreseen and where, in consequence of the law, anyone who hits upon a solution a moment before the next gains the right to its exclusive use for a prolonged period.
"""
The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism, 1988 (p. 35) Friedrich von Hayek
And more recently, german online music store musicload managed by Deustsche Telekom has revealed that 75% of user support request came from problems with DRM:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070318-75-percent-customer-problems-caused-by-drm.html
Incredible?
Posted by: Laurent GUERBY | 21 March 2007 at 16:22