mandarine

A useful digression

I have recently heard of a psychology experiment about altruistic behaviour in chimpanzees. Every chimp could pull one of two ropes. If they chose the left one, they got a banana. If they chose the right one, they got a banana too, but another chimpanzee got one as well.
The experiment shows that even after a number of trials to understand the rules of the game, they still went randomly for the left or right rope: as long as they got their banana, they did not give a damn about what happened to the others.

I gather that if the same experiment was conducted with humans (maybe with money instead of bananas), and as long as the volunteers were told that there were no hidden consequences whatsoever (i.e. the ones receiving the ‘gift’ would not know who it came from; there would be no shortage of money on the long run, etc.), they would massively go for the altruistic choice. I made a mental note that maybe altruism was a specific human behaviour, and that mankind had become mankind thanks to this hardwired selflessness that compensates for all the other selfish traits we inherited from primates.

I wish another experiment had been done with humans, in which every volunteer was asked to work for a certain reward and then have the choice of having one unit of reward for himself alone or one unit for himself and another one for some unknown other participant. To make things worse, said participant could be described as having been idle while the work was being done. This experiment would show how much our work ethics has made us worse than primates, because I am convinced a majority of people in that experiment would make the selfish choice — for no rational reason.

Now onto intellectual property

Intellectual production, software, music, ideas, stories, inventions, all these are self-replicating bananas: why would one pull the ‘I want it for myself’ rope when one gets just as many bananas by pulling the ‘One for everyone’ rope. I have already said in a previous article that piracy and theft are different things altogether, and now I claim that sharing intellectual goods is completely different from sharing material items:

• intellectual goods can be shared ad infinitum without the original owner missing any of his intellectual wealth
• once an intellectual good is shared, there is no taking it back
• the law of supply and demand cannot apply
• therefore, relying on the commercial model to fund intellectual production and reward creators is grossly inadequate

Intellectual property is therefore a very strange concept: as if one could own something that can be duplicated infinitely. I understand property for some object I have produced. I barely understand property over land (the land was there before I was born, even before mankind existed: how can I own it). I do not understand how we can make a rational case for intellectual property.

I think that concepts of intellectual property such as copyright and patents are not only inappropriate (i.e. they are based on principles derived from our old conception of material property), but they are inefficient and detrimental to improvement, even detrimental to the wealth of the creator/author. As mentioned above, there is no law of supply and demand that can fix a price; or said differently, whatever the price you put on some intellectual good, it is always infinitely higher than what it should be, based on supply (inifinite) vs. demand (finite) ratios. Therefore, intellectual creation that does not come for free is inherently restricted in its distribution, hampered in its diffusion.

If we consider that the potential value (not price) of a given idea, song, work of art, book, is the cumulated value that it represents to all who can have access to it (e.g. the cumulated pleasure felt or enlightenment experienced by the readers of a novel), then putting a price on it means intrinsically stifling its actual value to a fraction of its potential value.

Now, imagine the role of the author/creator/inventor in this game: he can keep a jealous watch on his creation and choke its diffusion, and hence its value; or he can let it roam free, to reach its full potential value, then cross-fertilize other intellectual production (because that’s what ideas do when they are free), so that the idea triggers an avalanche of new ideas. The total value of this avalanche is such that the creator could thrive on a tiny margin of the wealth resulting from the free idea avalanche, when in the old model he would have vegetated on the totality of the imprisoned intellectual property.

Just wonder how musicians lived before copyright was invented: concerts, classes, patronage.
Just wonder how developers of open-source software can make a living: fame, consulting, donations.

The importance of intellectual creation

You may think that intellectual production is a trifle when compared to all the material stuff we need to live: food, housing, clothing, etc. are not self-replicating items. Seemingly, changing the rules of intellectual property would hardly change anything to our economy and our lives.

But just ask yourself to what we owe the improvements of our life standards over what they were centuries or millennia ago: for all the admiration I have for the towers of Notre-Dame, it is not the accumulated material stuff that makes a difference. It is only the intellectual production, the immense intellectual legacy of past generations. What has brought us where we are now is just knowledge, ideas, inventions, science, concepts, literature. Things that can (ought to) be shared, accumulated, cross-fertilized, borrowed, improved, etc. for free.

I claim that our economy and our world is on the threshold of breaking free from intellectual property and reach new heights by ways we would never have suspected in our petty old concepts for material ownership (patents, DRMs, copyright, etc.).

Epilogue

I am preparing to go on a rhetorical crusade against intellectual property. I am sawing off the branch I am sitting on, because one of my (serious) job attributes is to come up with ideas and file patents. As you can imagine, the reflections I will be disclosing are mine alone and reflect in no way the official positions of my employer, which is sad but predictable.

Tentative titles in this series of articles:

• social cost of patents
• the plough parable
• debloating the inventor/author
• the future of libraries
• if no more patents, what else, then?
• the return of the idle gentleman inventor/writer

Stay tuned.

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