Online video

I wanted to talk a little about the online video our guest speakers talked about. I was really amazed at the quality of videos it's possible to put online at this point. The availability of easy-to-use video editing software is clearly an important innovation, but one of the things that has really made online video possible is the incredible growth of broadband internet access. This goes back to the articles we read about the spread of different technologies in third-world countries. As technology improves and spreads, the role that technology plays in democratic processes will grow. However, the digital divide between those that have broadband and those that don't will grow as well. As political managers, we should be careful that we don't become so enamored of shiny new technologies that we depend on features that are inaccessible to most of our voters.

Social pressure to follow the law

One interesting aspect of the Lessig/IP law issue is one studied extensively by sociologists and legal scholars: what forms of influence lead people to follow laws? Fear of punishment is one, of course, but many laws (like traffic speed limits) can be difficult to enforce without a prohibitively large law enforcement presence.

IP laws are of this type. The prospect of actually catching even a significant proportion of law breakers is miniscule. Sure, you can punish a few people severely (12-year-olds sued for tens of millions of dollars), but people may be willing to take the chance that they won't be in the .0001% of law breakers punished. This makes laws like speed limits and copyrights hard to enforce.

One non-law enforcement way to get people to follow a law is through social pressures to follow laws because, well, they're the law. Sociologists have seen this most clearly with seat belt laws. People feel a duty to wear their seatbelt because it's illegal not to. Sure, there are still people who don't buckle up, but seat belt laws have done far more to increase belt usage than public safety ad campaigns about how seat belts will save your life.

For this reason, the RIAA and MPAA to publicize the illegality of piracy may be one of the most effective ways to get people to stop piracy. Most people don't really like breaking the law, and will go through a legal route if they can. Emphasizing the illegality of the process may further deter people from downloading music illegally. An understanding of the most effective ways to get people to follow the law is critical to reducing piracy of intellectual property.

IP law saves lives (sometimes)

As discussed in the previous post, the original goal of IP law was to encourage innovation and creativity for the good of society. When we think about IP these days, we mostly think of copyrights for artistic creations: movies, music, books, etc. However, some of the greatest benefits of intellectual property laws comes in the realm of scientific and technological innovations. The incentive provided by the possibility of profiting from tremendous advances in engineering, medicine and information technology has produced some of the greatest achievements of our modern society. One of these achievements is modern pharmaceuticals to help treat and even cure terrible diseases.

However, we must remember the original goal of IP laws: the benefit of society. Patents for new medicines encourage companies to invest in finding new drugs to treat diseases. But when those treatments are so valuable that the market price for them makes them unattainable for most people who need the drugs, are society's interests really served by maintaining an absolutist stance on the inviolability of intellectual property? How are society's interests served by the deaths of 17 million Africans, when we have the AIDS drugs to treat them? Are our current laws really fulfilling the goals of IP law, or just filling the pockets of big corporations?

The purpose of IP law

I've always found Lessig's explanation of the history of intellectual property law to be quite persuasive: that copyrights were not invented to ensure that artists make as much money as they can off of their creations, but rather to provide enough of an incentive to create new ideas that the creative process does indeed continue. Fundamentally, copyrights are not for the benefit of the artist (or distributor, or whatever); rather, they are for the benefit of society. Providing limited ownership to creative products provides that incentive; however, copyright law shouldn't be extended past the point at which it increases the creative output of society.

(This is certainly very different than our typical capitalist approach to property rights, but I think Lessig is right that this was the original rational for IP law in the western legal tradition.)