Welcome to the New Age...Same As The Old Age

Wall Street has won. This is the age of greed and selfishness. As proof I offer you Lawrence Lessig's comments at a recent conference in South Africa on Copyrights.

I said that while I had no problem at all with people paying to listen to music, or novels, we had to be extremely sensitive to the way price might block the spread of knowledge. And that for academic and scientific work, the best model for producing and spreading knowledge might not be one that meters each use. Professors should be paid. But let that be their compensation, and let the knowledge they produce spread widely.

Yet there was a general view at the conference that this was wrong. That we hurt developing nations, for example, if we give them knowledge for free. They should have to pay for the truths we create. It weakens them, the argument went, if they can just take what we have discovered. Better to encourage their industry of science than to destroy it by simply spreading the truths that science here has created.

The rational of the majority at this conference baffles me. They have no problem passing out cell phones to African nations so foreign companies can profit but see no need for them to understand the technology they leaped-frogged over. It really pisses me off, but read some more of Lessig...

 

This is really an astonishing argument, as it is as clearly wrong from the perspective of economics as an argument could be. Assuming the discoverer is compensated for the discovery, there is no reason to block the spread of knowledge just for the purpose of inducing industry in a developing nation.

If you doubt that, then what do you think about this idea: Let's burn all science in the public domain. If developing nations are worse off getting our science for free, then we must be worse off getting the science of our forefathers for free. If the "subsidy" to developing nations hurts their economy, then so too should it hurt ours. So why don't we see a big push by economists generally to ban the public domain, or tax it, so that the burdens of its free resources aren't felt generally. 

 

We know why.

Wall Street wouldn't go for it.