Law in the Internet Society

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TomGlaisyerPaper1EbensArgument 22 - 22 Dec 2008 - Main.AndreiVoinigescu
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Introduction

In this paper I examine Eben's argument that anarchism produces inherently superior functional goods when the marginal cost of production of each new unit equals zero. Specifically, I employ the arguments of David Stark and Gina Neff in their article "Permanently Beta" and Eli Noam's arguments in "The Economics of User Generated Content and Peer-to-Peer: The Commons as the Enabler of Commerce," and suggest that there are conditions at the micro level which provide additional insight into the set of conditions under which Eben's argument works band that anarchism might not be the right way to describe the mode of production.
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 A possible negative result of open-source software development: http://www.engadget.com/2008/10/29/motorola-expected-to-cut-more-jobs-as-it-simplifies-around-andro/ -- MarcelEggler - 29 Oct 2008
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While I won't dispute the importance of the GPL in the current free software environment, I would characterize free/open source software licenses as a hack that engineers the existing copyright regime into something more akin to what you would have under anarchistic conditions.

The GPL would not be as necessary without copyright and patent laws. In an environment where legal protection didn't exist in the first place, commercial software developers would've sought to extract value from something other than the code from the very beginning.

Widespread acceptance that software code could be copyrighted or patented didn't happen until the 70s/80s. Prior to that point, software development followed patterns that are quite similar to the development patterns now seen in the FOSS community. And commercial software developers like IBM subsidized their software development costs through other means -- selling the hardware and the support.

The GPL (and its enforcability through the mechanisms of the state) does create different baseline conditions from pure anarchism; it forces parties to distribute source code if they distribute object code. But if copyleft was a necessary feature of an environment under which anarchistic modes of production create better functional goods, then how do you explain the considerable success of BSD-licensed FOSS projects?

-- AndreiVoinigescu - 22 Dec 2008

 
 
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Revision 22r22 - 22 Dec 2008 - 16:24:17 - AndreiVoinigescu
Revision 21r21 - 22 Dec 2008 - 01:35:47 - TomGlaisyer
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