I hope the following is a reasonably good summary of the intellectual property dilemma and what forseeable courses of action there are. I wrote it a few months ago and decided to post it after talking to some people about the recent JSTOR case.

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Today, vast numbers of people obtain music, movies, software, and other forms of copyrighted content in ways that don’t result in any income for the content creator, namely through online piracy or bootleg physical copies. We can expect that such piracy will continue to become more common as it becomes easier and more accepted. This trend poses a serious threat to society’s cultural health. If almost everyone pirates, eventually the price will become so high that the people who do pay will stop. If no one pays, then there is no incentive to create. It’s true that creativity is often its own reward, but certainly a large portion of the current output of content wouldn’t exist if not for the profit motive, things like major motion pictures.

For a useful discussion of this issue, it is necessary to realize that the term “intellectual property” is a misnomer. For the vast majority of human history, people would have laughed at you if you shared an idea, story, or song and then asserted the right to control its future dissemination and use. It was understood that if you wanted to keep something for yourself, you should keep it to yourself. Property is the possession of scarce physical objects that can only be obtained by stealing them from their owner. It doesn’t make sense to apply the property metaphor to digital content, which can be copied infinitely without the original owner becoming any poorer. For more about why intellectual property is bad terminology designed to confuse you, see this essay by Richard Stallman, one of the founders of the free software movement.

Intellectual property rights are thus not natural rights, but rights granted by the state in order to incentivize creativity and innovation. If people can have a temporary monopoly on an idea, so the theory goes, then they will be more likely to create things that benefit everyone, but would otherwise not be worth creating because of the risk of someone else copying their idea or creation and taking away potential profit. There is actually no empirical evidence that state protection of intellectual property rights has historically or presently resulted in a higher level of creativity and innovation than what would have existed in their absence, and some reason to suspect that the opposite is in fact true.

With the invention of the printing press, and then the phonograph, and then motion picture film, people were able to make money from content, but what they were really doing was charging for the physical medium. With this state of affairs, intellectual property worked okay for a long time, until new facts got in the way. The advent of the Internet, which makes the cost of reproducing content almost zero, upended that business model, and the content industries are still struggling to adjust. The Internet also reduces the barrier to entry for content creators and makes it easier for creators and consumers to find each other, both of which obsolete the traditional industries whose value propositions mainly consist of (a) helping finance new works, because they are expensive and time-consuming (economically risky) to create and (b) helping expose those works to a large market.

There are several possible solutions:

• Institute pervasive Internet monitoring and punishment for pirates.  This won’t do, because police states are bad, and it’s also politically unlikely and technically infeasible due to widespread strong encryption.
• The status quo.  It actually seems to work alright.  A lot of people will pay, a lot of people will pirate, live experiences like concerts and movie theaters will continue to offer added value, and the RIAA and MPAA will continue to attempt to implement the business model of suing torrenters and offering modest settlements as an alternative.
• The content industries could adjust prices to reflect the market.  Most people would like to support their favorite artists if they could afford it.  Setting prices high enough to turn a profit but low enough to make piracy unattractive could actually increase sales. former record label executive suggested that £1 albums would be optimal.
• The government (or some corporation) could set up a distribution channel for all content.  Let everyone download as much content as they want.  Artists are paid based on the popularity of their work.  This could be funded by any of several taxation schemes based on whether cultural products should be available free to all or paid for in proportion to their use.

In a previous post, I argued for the irrationality of voting. I have since discussed this issue with a number of people and brought up analogous collective action problems where individual action is irrational, like carbon emissions reduction, and contrasted them with problems where individual action is a moral imperative, like meat-eating.

Is it wrong not to vote?

• The cost of voting is non-zero. Say it takes thirty minutes of your day to go and vote. You could instead spend that time making money in order to donate to charities that save lives, or simply doing something pleasurable with your time.
• The chance that your vote will be the deciding vote is infinitesimal. (In the case of U.S. presidential elections, this is compounded by the electoral college because it must be both that your state has the deciding electoral votes and your vote is the deciding vote in your state.) If the margin was more than one vote, you could have stayed home and nothing would be different.
• The difference in outcome between your preferred candidate and the alternatives is not at all a life-and-death matter. If you vote in your economic interest, the personal economic cost to you of an unpreferred outcome is probably at most only a few thousand dollars in extra taxes. Even if you are a compassionate person who votes based on social issues without regard for your economic interests, it’s not as if the worse candidate is going to kill a bunch of people (well, maybe they will, but it’s hard to predict, and this possibility also only occurs when the electorate is very large, and thus the chance of your vote being the deciding vote correspondingly more infinitesimal). The difference in outcome, to your life, or the life of anyone you care about, is very much finite (except in exceptional cases, like when only one candidate supports the legality of a life-saving treatment that you need).

It is plain to see that voting is usually irrational. In only the rarest intersections of small voter pools and high stakes outcomes is it rational, and most of the elections that people vote in today are not such cases. You could even make a case that voting is wrong, because you could use the time you spend voting to make money to donate to charities that save lives, but this is not a case I want to argue, because the demandingness objection to such attempts to take utilitarianism to its logical conclusions is something that is central to most people’s belief systems because it makes it possible to accept the cognitive dissonance of living in comfort without donating all of your excess wealth to humanitarian organizations when hundreds of millions of people are starving. So, I don’t want to talk about that; all I wish to establish is that not voting is not wrong.

Is it wrong not to reduce your personal carbon footprint?

I believe that global warming is one of the two most important challenges that humanity will ever face. The failure of humanity to act in the past two decades as it has become increasingly certain that we are creating a hellish future for ourselves is emblematic of everything that is wrong with humanity, and it is an existential imperative that we as a species figure out how to stop emitting greenhouse gases.

And yet, I can’t rationally justify personally limiting my carbon footprint. I do it anyway by not eating meat and not driving a car, somewhat incidentally but also because of self-image and conscience. But I couldn’t say to a person who lives a lifestyle of carbon excess that what they are doing is wrong.

• If I gave up carbon-expensive luxuries, my life would be less comfortable. Large warm houses, private cars, plentiful meat and electric appliances are all nice things that people won’t usually willingly give up.
• If I reduced my carbon footprint, it would have barely any effect on the future suffering of anyone. I comprise perhaps one billionth of the current anthropogenic carbon emissions. If I personally prevent a few more tons of greenhouse gases from entering the atmosphere, what does it really accomplish? It means that the temperature will end up, say, .0000001 degrees lower than it would have been. Any affect that this will have on anyone is so small that it doesn’t even outweigh the decrease to my comfort.

Is it wrong to eat meat?

Just to contrast the collective action problems of voting and global warming with a problem where individual action is a moral imperative, consider vegetarianism. I am a vegetarian myself, not because of some idea of animal rights or human virtue, but because it follows from a simple utilitarian argument.

• The production of any meat that I am likely to have access to involves a life of endless suffering for the animal. If you don’t believe this, just read or watch any of the media that has come out on the subject of factory farms since Peter Singer published Animal Liberation in 1975.
• Needless animal suffering is bad. No one has seriously claimed since the 1600s that animals aren’t sentient beings with rich inner lives, the ability to feel pain and pleasure, happiness and fear. There is a gradient of sentience, and I won’t take issue if you argue that a fish is equivalent to a rock as far as ethics is concerned, but for a cow, I certainly will.
• The pleasure I derive from the taste of meat is less than the suffering involved in its production. (That doesn’t even consider the fact that it’s a pretty crummy ethical philosophy to consider the interchangeability of your happiness and another’s suffering on anything approaching a 1-to-1 ratio.)
• Economic reality is such that, by my not buying meat, a substantially corresponding reduction in the production of meat will occur. This is not at all an obvious, and I am not an economist, but I believe it is true. If a million or a thousand people dropping out of the meat market would affect production, then it can be shown by induction that one person doing so must also affect it, otherwise there would be no way for a million people to do so. The precise amount of suffering that I prevent may depend on the elasticity of meat and how consistently I abstain, but I am confident that it is roughly equal to the suffering of one factory farm animal’s life.

I’m not sure how relevant the vegetarian argument is to the point I’m about to make, but it’s useful to see that not all problems are collective action problems.

What is to be done?

People have a stunning inability to think rationally about these questions. People have told me that the above arguments justifying non-voting and personal inaction with regard to global warming scare them, because they seem excessively individualistic. In fact, I am considering the problem from the most collectivist perspective imaginable, the future of humanity itself, and it is the people who refuse to see that acts like voting are fundamentally unable to solve our problems who scare me.

The instinct to irrationally cooperate is the product of millions of years of evolution that rewarded groups whose members cooperated, but also tolerated a certain number of free-riders. People cooperate selectively, but competition is the dominant driver of human advancement. We now face existential risks that require complete cooperation across the entire human species to avoid. Collective action problems have been solved before by totalitarian goverments, but totalitarianism is bad and tends not to last. Humanity must figure out how to get everyone to cooperate without being forced to, how to replace competition with cooperation as the dominant mode of human affairs.

I used global warming as an example, but this is a more general problem that humanity must solve. If we instituted a global carbon tax, it would solve one manifestation of the problem, but not the problem itself. For instance, we would still be killing each other in unnecessary wars that benefit political and religious leaders and the owners of the military-industrial complex at the expense of everyone else. The rich would still be exploiting the poor while every poor person dreams of becoming rich.

How many people collectively have decision-making power over a large enough portion of the global economy (say 30%) that they could force the entire global economy to stop emitting greenhouse gases? I’d guess it’s a relatively small number, maybe 10,000. Global warming could be solved if these people got together in a room and agreed to a binding contract, or to tell political leaders to institute regulations. But until then, these people have a strong incentive to agitate for global warming inaction, and will only act once they see that the consequences will be full-blown within their and their children’s lifetimes, and even then, since any individual only controls a fraction of a percent of the global economy, they will be acting out of conscience, not self-interest. By then, it will be far too late.

We must develop a mechanism to make cooperation among the entire human species rational.

Edit: Some interesting discussion arose on Facebook, including Peter Singer weighing in via email.