Law in the Internet Society

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TomGlaisyerPaper1EbensArgument 23 - 23 Dec 2008 - Main.TomGlaisyer
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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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 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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Andrei, Thanks for your comment. I would agree that the GPL is a hack on the prevailing use of copyright law. I will suggest though that without it coders could attempt to extract property rents via the coding equivalent of creating a trade secret by refusing to distribute source code. Hence my argument that the GPL (and its place within a stable legal system) is critical. Regarding your point on BSD I would rather argue its relative lack of success in comparison to the GPL as demonstrating the value of the GPL rather anything else. I wouldn't go as far as to say there wouldn't be production without the GPL just that pure anarchism would not have produced quite as much code.

-- TomGlaisyer - 23 Dec 2008

 
 
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Revision 23r23 - 23 Dec 2008 - 15:51:51 - TomGlaisyer
Revision 22r22 - 22 Dec 2008 - 16:24:17 - AndreiVoinigescu
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