Answering criticism of this article by Paul Davis

from Linux Audio mailing list discussions

Having read my article, Paul Davis, lead developer of Ardour, has put forward a good argument.

Paul Davis writes:

ideas are not covered by copyright. expressions of ideas are.

the error that i see in your webpage on authorship is that you seem to think that property is automatically about scarcity. its not about scarcity, its about control. now, with resources that actually are scarce, the control offered by property has a number of different implications to the control over, say, a musical composition. there's a second angle on this too. you claim that for creative works, the ability to copy removes scarcity. but this is a semantic confusion: what is scarce are the ideas, not the copies. beethoven, like lou reed and fela kuti, can only write so many pieces. any given work that they create might (now) be very easily copied, so certainly copies of the work are not scarce in the sense that wood or gold or clean water might be. but the actual idea in the work is scarce, and the way we tackle the scarcity is to try to make it worthwhile for the person with the ability to create such things to keep trying to do it. how we identify those people has varied enormously, of course, from court patronage to market forces. one could make an argument that there is no scarcity of, say, musical ideas as a general category, and that therefore there is no reason to put any value on the ideas of any particular person. i think that anyone with a genuine love of music will see the fallacy in this way of thinking.

i would even go so far as to say that the very earliest human ideas about "property" precede any notion of scarcity and in fact focus entirely on the sort of thing touched by authorship. when an early human managed to make a superior tool for hunting, or digging holes, or cutting leather, who had control over that tool? societies that created an orderly (if unfair) regime to take charge of that sort of question likely did better than those that simply allowed the most physically powerful to take control over creations like that.

now, an early human tool isn't a pathway to a potential way to make a living via economic exchange until you get to a much more organized sort of society. but in such a society, there will be people who try to make a living by selling their tools rather than by actually using them. you could make an argument that this is undesirable, but it is one potential outcome for human social organization. their ability to make a living doing this is undermined if someone else can simply copy their designs. so, many societies came up with various kinds of agreements and rules about how such copying could occur, based on the premise that someone *ought* to be able to make a living from selling those tools, presumably because of a belief that it made the overall society better in various ways.

as i see it, the same argument applies to artists and other people who spend time creating expressions of ideas. the big question is whether or not society agrees that it is desirable for such work to be able to be the basis of a way of making living. if a musician/composer is going to make a living from their work, its important for them to retain control over people's ability to copy what they create. if we want a society in which people can do this sort of thing for a living, giving them this control (on reasonable terms) is very important. we can choose otherwise, and certainly for large amounts of human history, we haven't valued this idea very much. but for the last 50-100 years, its been an idea that has grown in popularity. its time may be over, but if its not over, then copyright plays a critical role in making it possible for it to continue.

The main point made by Paul is this: certainly copies of a work are not scarce in a sense that wood or gold or clean water might be. But the actual idea in the work is scarce, and the way we tackle that scarcity is to try to make it worthwhile for a person with the ability to create such things to keep trying to do it.

To start off, I am not at all convinced that there is any foundation for scarcity outlined in such a manner in the world of ideas at all. A physical object can be scarce, like a chair, and then copies of that object, similar objects and their availability, define scarcity. In case of ideas there is really no such thing. The idea can be unique, but I don't see how can we say that unique things are scarce. Scarcity can only be applied to similar objects, not to unique ones.
Of course, one can view, say, music as a collection of melodies, each of which is regarded as a unit rather than a unique idea. But can we view all good melodies as scarce property and base our thinking on the fact that we need more and more good melodies? Certainly, old melodies do not wear out in a same sense that chairs do, (you can get bored with a melody, but it is easy to see it is a different kind of "wearing out"), so with time the amount of good melodies will grow and grow. Provided technology is available to store all those good ideas and make them available, with time the amount of these ideas will be so large, that it would be strange to speak of scarcity.
Of course, what often matters to us are fresh ideas which reflect life today. With "intellectial property" being an artificial device, I am not at all convinced that such device is required to make contemporary authors reflect life around them and that without "intellectial property" our contemporaries would not write literature, music and shoot film. Those, holding to this belief, obviously have a very limited and distorted understanding of how artists work and what matters to them. As they say, a real writer writes because it is his need, not to mention that reflecting life that you are a part of is in nature of man. We do not need to force it.

We also have to note yet another difference between the world of physical objects and ideas, which once more shows scarcity to be a meaningless concept when it comes to ideas. As I state in the article, an idea is infinitely available to anyone any amount of times, so very often we do not need many ideas. One good idea can satisfy us at a given time. To solve a problem we need just one working solution. Having more and more separate original solutions is a questionable goal, what we really need is a solution that works well and once we have it, we basically do not need more. To give an example, we cannot say that there is scarcity of solutions to a geometrical problem. We may state a lack of a more efficient solution, but not scarcity. So ideas can either be or not be. Once an idea exists, the concept of scarcity is not applicable to it.

Another thing Paul said is: "the error that i see in your webpage on authorship is that you seem to think that property is automatically about scarcity. its not about scarcity, its about control."
I cannot agree with that directly. Property is obviously about a special level of control, however the concept of having special level of control over something would be impossible without this something being scarce in the first place. I still maintain that scarcity as natural property of any physical object is the root of the idea of property and that the need to control comes from that.