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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
Today's economic system, premised on the sale of physical goods, does not fit the information age in which we live. The capitalist order requires the maintenance of an artificial scarcity in goods that have the potential for near infinite and almost free replication. The Sharing of informational goods through distributed global networks - digital libraries, file-Sharing, live-streaming, free software, free-access publishing, the free-Sharing of scientific knowledge, and open-source pharmaceuticals - not only challenges the dominance of a scarcity-based economic system, but also enables a more efficient, innovative, just and free culture. In a series of seven explorations of contemporary Sharing, Matthew David shows that in each case Sharing surpasses markets, private ownership and intellectual property rights in fostering motivation, creativity, innovation, production, distribution and reward. In transforming the idea of an information economy into an information society, Sharing connects struggles against inequality and poverty in developed and developing countries. Challenging taken-for-granted justifications of the status quo, Sharing debunks the 'tragedy of the commons' and makes the case for digital network Sharing as a viable mode of economic counterpower, prefiguring a post-capitalist society.
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Contents
Cover
Title
Copyright
Acknowledgements
1 Introduction
Sharing: Crime Against Capitalism?
Alternative Business Models or Alternatives to Business?
The Economics of Sharing and of Capitalism
The Structure of the Book
What Sharing? And (more to the point) What is Sharing?
2 Libraries and the Digital World
Introduction
Information: Culture or Capital
Literacy, Education and Libraries
Digital Revolutions One and Two
Internet and Access
Digital Commons: The Anarchist in the Library
Orphan Works: The Capitalist in the Archive
Libraries as Records of Ownership and/or the Common Heritage of Humanity
Plagiarism vs. Piracy
From Scarcity to Authority
Conclusions: Free Culture or Fee Culture
3 Peer-to-Peer Music Sharing Online
Introduction
From CDs to Napster: The Rise of Peer-to-Peer
From Napster to Now
The Myth of The Recording Artist (Then and Now)
The ‘Romantic’ Myth of the Recording Artist
Why Sign?
Why Not Sign?
The Rise of Live
Adaptive (iTunes and Spotify) vs. Alternative (Sharingand Selling-Based) Business Models
Conclusions: Reversing the Menu and the Meal
4 Live-streaming and Television Rights Management
Introduction
The First Digital Revolution in Television: Pay-to-View Enclosure
The Second Digital Revolution: Free-Sharing Livestreams
Justin.TV, First Row Sports and Wiziwig: Network Enterprises and their Users
Sky’s the Limit? The Limits of Power and Counterpower
Conclusions: Power and Counterpower in Digital Networks
5 Open-Source Software and Proprietary Software
Introduction
The Spirit of the Information Age: Hackers, Rebel Code and Play Struggle
Digital Rights Management
Peer-to-Peer Software
Non-Profit Organizations in the Information Economy
Computer Games
Platforms, Programmes and the Limits of Property
Conclusions: Sharing, the Gift Economy, Play Struggle and Creativity
6 Publishing: Academic, Journalistic and Trade
Introduction
Academic Publishing
Journalistic Publishing: The Editorial Nexus and Beyond?
Trade Publishing: Capitalist Concentration
The Long Tail and the Real Lives of Authors
Is First Mover Advantage Enough?
Conclusions: Recognition, Valuation and Innovation
7 Genes, Genetically Modified Organisms, Patents and Agribusiness
Introduction
‘The Genetic Commons’: Human and Non-Human Nature
Culture: Heritage and Public Sphere
Discovery and Invention: On Patents and the Public Domain
Science as Method and Colonial Appropriation
‘Reinventing’ ‘Nature’: Undoing the Discovery/Intention Distinction via Genetically Modified Organisms
Patenting Human Gene Lines
Terminator Genes and Food Security
Alternatives and Critiques
The Common Heritage of Humanity: Seeds, Plants and Farmers’ Rights
Traditional Knowledge Banks
Biopiracy against Whom?
The Human Genome Project
Public Knowledge? deCode Genetics, the Public as Private and Vice Versa
The Eureka Myth
Genetics and the Law
Conclusions: Common Heritage and Sharing Knowledge Production
8 Pharmaceutical Patents and Generic Drugs
Introduction
Ebola
AZT: A History of Control
Bold Claims
Who Pays and What Gets Bought?
Patent and Medical Innovation
One Way Street: The Case of Anthrax and National Security
Generic Medicines
Faking Fakes: The Attempt to Present Generics as Counterfeits
HIV in South Africa, Brazil and Elsewhere
Conclusions: Sharing Knowledge and Improving Human Health
9 Conclusions: Sharing – Crime against Capitalism
Introduction
The Efficiency of Sharing
The Efficacy of Sharing: Fostering Quality and Access
The Incentive Structures of Sharing
Sharing’s Challenge to the Tragedy of the Anti-Commons
Sharing and the Triumph of the Commons?
Global Network Capitalism
Power and Counterpower in the Global Network Society
Only a Return – to Advertiser Funding?
The Rise of ‘Live’: Unmediated Mediation
The Criminalization or the Colonization of Free-Sharing?
A Gift Economy?
Sharing: A Crime Against Capitalism
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Contents
Begin Reading
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To Hilda Valerie (Val) David1939–2016
Sharing
Crime against Capitalism
Matthew David
polity
Copyright © Matthew David 2017
The right of Matthew David to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2017 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1326-0
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.politybooks.com
Acknowledgements
Thanks are due to the various coauthors whose thinking on sharing I have shared (Jack Birmingham, Debbie Halbert, Jamie Kirkhope, Andrew Kirton, Peter Millward and Natasha Whiteman); to those authors whose work I coedited (and thereby internalized) for the Sage Handbook of Intellectual Property (all fifty of you); to those who shared their wisdom in editing this and earlier works of mine on post-scarcity sharing (in particular Anna Davies, Bill Dutton, Richard Giulianotti, David Held, Julia Knight, James Milton, Eva-Maria Nag, Raphaël Nowak, Chris Rojek and Andrew Whelan); to the many nameless but invaluable peer reviewers down the years; to Durham University’s Institute of Advanced Study for hosting discussions that facilitated this work; and to those participants in discussions at Cardiff University, CUNY, SUNY, London’s City University and Queen Mary College, Oxford’s Internet Institute and Department of Music, the University of Utrecht’s Workshop on the Sharing Economy, and Durham University’s Café Politique, where the ideas presented in this book were presented and critiqued. Particular thanks to Sarah Dancy, Rachel Moore, Jonathan Skerrett and Amy Williams at Polity Press for getting things into shape. Finally, I would especially like to thank all the students over the years who have taken my various cybercrime and cyberculture modules. They taught me a lot and I hope they learned something from all the free downloaded versions of my work they seemed always able to find.
1Introduction
Sharing: Crime against Capitalism sets out to examine the pros and cons of property, market and sharing-based economies in terms of innovation, production and distribution of informational goods. The book will address this comparison in terms of efficiency, efficacy and incentive. By informational goods is meant books, music, computer software, visual media, journalism, academic journal articles and scientific research (including pharmaceutical research and development). In contrast to the over- and misused notion of ‘the tragedy of the commons’ (Hardin 1968), which outlines how goods held in common can be overexploited and undermaintained in the absence of counterbalancing forces, but which then (erroneously) asserts that the only viable counterbalance is private property rights, my book (in line with the work of Heller 1998 and 2008) illustrates ‘the tragedy of the anti-commons’, wherein private ownership and competition inhibit the maintenance of public goods and reduce overall efficiency, efficacy and incentive. Sharing: Crime against Capitalism also highlights the superiority of a sharing-based economy in maximizing the public good and overall utility.
Free music online reduces opportunity costs (e.g., the inability to purchase one thing – such as a concert ticket – if one has just spent one’s money on something else – such as a recording), increasing spending on live performance; and when freely shared recordings boost live concert ticket sales, and, consequently, ticket prices, musicians get better paid. The Internet and World Wide Web illustrate the primacy of collaborative programming over commercial coding, and open-source networks of hackers have broken all silo-made corporate encryption. Newspapers and broadcasters draw upon freely shared content provided by digital ‘citizen witnesses’, and this has allowed them to cut costs and sack staff. Yet, such organizations are challenged by the Internet when freely shared content surpasses traditional media claims to be the ones who bring the news and, in particular, who are the first to bring it to audiences (uncensored). Academic journals are increasingly owned by commercial publishers, which profit from content produced by public science, science which is made available without charge by researchers but which is then sold back to the research community in terms of rapidly escalating journal prices. Non-commercial funding (whether in the domain of pure science or of applied science such as in pharmaceuticals) underpins the research that creates most of the value in what may later be fenced off through patent.
While only too willing to cut costs to some degree by means of using freely shared content online (or from other non-property/nonmarket-based networks such as academic science), commercial intermediaries are threatened by free distribution of content if it is too effective in reducing cost. Success in reducing cost can also reduce scarcity and, if that cannot be controlled, may then lead to a radical reduction in price (potentially to nothing). This ‘threat’ (or promise – depending upon how you see things) underpins the pressure for legislation to further criminalize sharing. In conditions of global network capitalism, sharing information is a ‘crime against capitalism’. Nonetheless, despite stringent efforts, such legislative strategies have been radically unsuccessful in actually containing the level and significance of sharing.
In this context, where criminalization has largely failed to prevent sharing, alternative business models have emerged. These new business strategies have attempted to ‘compete’ in the spaces created by sharing as an alternative to capitalist business-as-usual. What has emerged, as this book will document, is a form of post-scarcity ‘sharing economy’. This is, at least, at the level of informational goods. In suspending intellectual property rights in practical terms (the law still formally protects IP), and in bypassing the need for markets (free-sharing is not the same as direct reciprocation in the form of exchange by barter), what emerges is something not fully capitalist. However, there still remains the potential for people to get paid and even for some people to make a ‘profit’. Yet, this is in conditions where content is open and accessible to ever greater numbers; and in many cases for nothing.
Sharing: Crime Against Capitalism?
The significance of free-sharing across global digital networks needs to be seen in the light of the emergence of global network capitalism (Castells 1996, 2009). The contradictions within global network capitalism are both the spaces in which free-sharing arose, and those that are intensified by free-sharing. The first contradiction lies in globalization itself. On the one hand, globalization extends market and property relations. Globalization has meant expanding markets by means of a deregulation of trade barriers and the integration of distribution chains within global distribution networks. Globalization has also extended property rights protection beyond national jurisdictions. This is particularly true for IP, where the harmonizing of national laws has been achieved in recent years through a combination of multi- and bilateral treaties (Yu 2015). Globalization also reduces costs through global outsourcing of production to cheaper labour markets (Chon 2015). On the other hand, globalization affords an exponential expansion in pirate, counterfeit and generic ‘outsourcing’ in production and distribution (Rojek 2015).
In similar fashion, digital networks expand markets and reduce costs for copyright holders and counterfeiters alike – this is the second contradiction of global network capitalism. This is true in music, film, publishing, software and computer games, as well as in television (Kirton and David 2013). Digital compression, distribution and processing have afforded the expansion of legal markets and have also allowed widespread bypassing of the legal channels for gaining access, as well as the bypassing of the technical means of preventing access to those who do not pay – i.e., encryption (David and Kirkhope 2004).
Third, the ‘capitalism’ within global network capitalism shows an intensification of the tension between markets and property rights, which is a generic contradiction – but one that global digital networks take to new levels. Intellectual property protection is designed to limit market entry and so to suspend competition. However, pirate capitalists operate illicit markets at the expense of IP-based monopoly profits. In so doing, they reduce prices. Whether ‘capitalism’ is primarily defined by ‘markets’, as Weber (1930) argued, or whether ‘capitalism’ is primarily defined by ‘private property’, as Marx (1995/1867) held, remains disputed. This is not just a dispute between theories. It is a dispute enacted in the conduct of IP defenders, pirates and sharers across global digital networks.
The free circulation of information challenges IP-based business models, because in such models it is information that is the commodity being sold, or at least it makes up the greater part of the value being sold relative to the physical packaging in which the informational content is delivered. This is true in relation to copyrighted software, music, published works and live sports broadcasts, as well as in patent-protected scientific research. If the price being charged is largely determined by the market value of the informational content and not by its packaging, then when that informational content is freely available elsewhere, the price collapses.
Knowledge has always been valuable and, in part at least, defines human social and economic activity in distinction from animal behaviour (Gouldner 1976). What is understood today as intellectual property law emerged alongside capitalism and the industrial revolution (May and Sell 2005). The significance of innovative technologies and novel creative expressions, in giving economic advantage, is not new. Nor is the drive to protect such innovation/novelty as something akin to ‘property’. The emergence of what Castells calls a network society (1996, 2009) does give greater significance (as a cost of production) to information over physical raw materials, physical labour power and/or energy inputs. However, it is an error to simply assume that an ‘information society’ is one where informational content inevitably becomes more valuable than physical objects, effort and energy. Where once information-rich commodities (such as novels, films, musical recordings and so on) required physical carriers to be manufactured and distributed, networked computers allow such content to be circulated without the need for traditional modes of packaging and distribution. In the past, someone seeking to sell books or records would look to protect themselves from commercial rivals by means of copyright. Now it is possible for every networked computer user to copy and share content that would have once required expensive printing or record presses.
Because the challenge to IP control has shifted from commercial to non-commercial copying, it is sharing that has been criminalized all the more forcefully in recent years. The rise of the tape-cassette first saw a shift in attention from commercial piracy to personal infringement (Marshall 2004), but digital network sharing has taken this challenge to far greater levels (David 2010). However, while efforts have been made to prohibit sharing as a threat to network capitalism, there is also evidence of a more fluid relationship between sharing and business, which this book will highlight. Legally speaking, sharing, in the sense of making free copies of IP-protected content without permission, is an ‘alternative to business’. Yet it can also be the basis for ‘alternative business models’. Freely distributed content is being profited from by some, even as freely shared content is undermining profit from the sale of such content by those who retain the traditional IP-protected business model. Sharing (in the sense of lending) an individual’s physical goods and/or giving up their time may lead to an extension of market relations (if that lending is done in the form of paid ‘renting’). However, IP infringement, in the form of free-sharing (making copies) of formally IP-protected content, challenges capitalism as a system of property rights. In this way, free-sharing of digital content challenges us to rethink our theoretical accounts of property, exchange relations, production, distribution and incentive.
Since the end of the Cold War, a ‘global network capitalism’ has been constructed. At the heart of this new ‘regime’ has been the deregulation of labour combined with an intensified regulation of property protection, particularly intellectual property protection. In ‘global network capitalism’, monopoly rights over informational content have been extended in time, space, scope and depth (David and Halbert 2015). This is true at least at the level of formal law, even if enforcement of such a regulative framework has not been fully achieved. The World Trade Organisation (WTO) was created in the years just after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The WTO’s first act was the 1994/95 Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). TRIPS required all signatories to the WTO to pass into domestic legislation the treaty’s harmonization of global IP protection. At that point in time, the perceived threat to intellectual property was still commercial infringement. Only one year later, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) produced a revised Copyright Treaty (1996). This treaty first addressed the perceived global threat of free digital sharing. In 1996, it was the increased availability of cheap CD copiers to the general consumer that was considered the primary emerging challenge (Krueger 2004). Simply having two CD players built into one stereo system, and the fact that one of these had a record function, meant the ‘digital revolution’ that had been such a benefit to the music industry since the advent of the CD in 1982 (Sandall 2007) suddenly started to look like a threat. Yet the ‘threat’ from CD burners was as nothing when compared to what came next: online file-sharing.
Free digital sharing arose in the copyright domain. Its development from music (discussed in Chapter 3) to film and onto live visual content (see Chapter 4) in part followed, but also drove, technical developments. The same is also true of computer software (see Chapter 5). In a further development of technical capacity, the 3D printer revolution (Rifkin 2014) will make IP-rich physical goods available to ‘download’. Where film and television followed music, downloading objects will follow the downloading of purely informational content. However, for the moment, ‘free’ sharing of (patent-protected) information (such as is contained in generic medicines and ‘fake’ designer handbags) does not ‘give’ you the pill or the bag. For this, for now, the end-user still requires what IP holders call ‘pirate capitalist’ intermediaries (Rojek 2015).
While the copyright industries’ war on downloading has commanded the headlines regarding the potential challenge of sharing, significant issues also exist around sharing in the domains of IP covered by patent and trademark. Two-thirds of pharmaceutical science is funded by non-commercial actors (Boldrin and Levine 2008). Scientific innovation is built upon the principle of free-sharing of knowledge (Merton 1972/1942). Sharing-based knowledge production makes large private profits only if pharmaceutical companies can place end-products under patent controls, or if counterfeiters can sell unlicensed copies at inflated prices – something itself only possible because the monopolies they infringe keep prices higher than would be the case if competition were legal. In both cases, shared knowledge production fuels private profits only if its shared origins can be controlled.
On the other hand, trademark holders, when seeking to reduce costs by outsourcing production, also make life easier for counterfeiters. Counterfeiters can use the same cut-price outsourced manufacturers used by lawful rights holders to make identical, but IP-infringing, ‘fakes’ (Chon 2015). However, at the level of selling these pills and bags and so forth, the struggle is between legal and pirate capitalists.
Manufacturing generic drugs in developing countries is another example of the relationship between IP control and infringement. Unlike counterfeit drugs, generic drugs replicate the chemistry of the patented product but not the trademarked packaging of its owner’s brand. Generics undercut patent monopoly prices, just as they also undermine the market for counterfeits. This enables safe and affordable access to medicine in the global South (Darch 2015; Millaleo and Cadenas 2015; Thomas 2015). Again, we see that what was produced in conditions of freely shared knowledge can become private property; and what was private property can be appropriated and sold by others. Medical research produced by publicly funded science may be patented, and this may then be infringed by generic drug-makers. (Of course, such things as medicines and designer goods cannot be simply shared freely at the current time, but free access to the information required to make them does enable radically more affordable generic products.)
This book is for the most part concerned with the free-sharing of informational content. It is not, therefore, primarily concerned with commercial generics, counterfeiting and piracy. The 3D printer revolution is increasing the scope for the free downloading of information-based physical goods. However, at the present time, for all but the simplest of objects (and only for the very small minority of people with access to a 3D printer), information-rich things still require manufacturers and distributors (lawful or otherwise), and these are for the most part commercial – not sharing-based. As such, a large part of this book focuses upon the free-sharing of content protected under copyright. This includes music, visual media, software and publishing, including scientific publishing. However, to the extent that sharing is central to scientific knowledge production, this book does address genetics research and pharmaceuticals.
Alternative Business Models or Alternatives to Business?
The collaborative production and free distribution of code (protocols) enabled the production of the Internet (Abbate 1999), as well as of the World Wide Web (Berners-Lee 2000). Nevertheless, such foundations do not mean that the Internet and the Web cannot be used to make money.
Facebook streams advertising to its users when they freely share their lives on its platform, and this business model is hugely profitable. Similarly, selling eyeballs to advertisers is the basis for Google’s business. This is despite the fact that most of the information being sought via Google’s search engine is not for sale as such (Vaidhyanathan 2012). Services like YouTube (itself owned by Google) also make their money from advertising linked to the freely shared content that users upload, or look for and then look at, via these search services. A range of very lucrative alternative business models work on the basis of linking end-users to freely shared content, but then also linking both to advertising content.
Traditional business models, such as those of record companies, film studios, publishers and broadcasters, have suffered as a result of the rise of free-sharing. Nevertheless, during the first wave of the digital revolution, these businesses benefited greatly from reduced costs and wider distribution networks, fuelling a wave of global cross-media integration. The largest recording, filmmaking, publishing and broadcasting businesses are today owned by global cross-media corporations (Castells 2009). More often than not, one arm of the same corporation will be selling the Internet access that enables the infringement of content produced and/or distributed by other arms of that same corporation (David et al. 2015).
This book documents how sharing-based production and distribution underpin the greater part of informational content in today’s network society. This ranges from science to publishing and the arts. Collaborative production is the wellspring of profit in pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, print and television. It also underpins the wider ‘creative industries’, although this is in large part due to the non- and underpaid nature of much creative work, under conditions of copyright control and royalties rather than real wages and secure employment (O’Brien 2015).
Free-sharing is good for business if content is free to business while remaining scarce to customers. However, this condition cannot be easily maintained in a network society. Free-sharing cannot be kept scarce when it can be freely copied and distributed online. This potential for post-scarcity threatens, or promises (depending on your point of view), to turn a reduced cost of production into a radical driver of price reduction. Such price reduction is potentially to zero if the cost of making each new copy by any given computer user is too small even to be measurable (Rifkin 2014; Mason 2015).
Where marginal cost, the cost of making the next copy, approaches zero, there can no longer be said to be any scarcity in such a good. In these conditions, the need for allocation mechanisms such as markets and property rights is brought into question. In relation to informational goods, that ‘zero marginal cost’ situation has become a reality. Nonetheless, even if the marginal cost of informational goods falls away in a network society, the prior development costs remain. Those who defend IP argue that it is in the need to recover these fixed and upfront costs that a justification for property rights and markets remain.
Markets and property rights may be warranted after all if free-sharing of outcomes does not incentivize individuals and organizations to produce efficient and effective products and distribution mechanisms for them. The three related issues of efficiency, effectiveness and incentive are therefore recurrent ones in this book. At least in relation to informational goods, Sharing: Crime against Capitalism will show that free-sharing outperforms markets and property rights on all three fronts.
The Economics of Sharing and of Capitalism
‘Economics is the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses’ (Robbins 1935: 15). As this quotation suggests, economics primarily concerns itself with producing and distributing rivalrous goods. Rivalrous goods are things where ‘use’ by one person limits or even exhausts use by one or more others (Phythian-Adams 2015). Institutions designed to deal with the rivalrous quality of time and things include property rights (which may or may not be ‘private’ property) and markets. Other institutions include state planning, communal regulation and familial obligation. All such arrangements for dealing with the rivalrous quality of time and things are ‘social institutions’, including markets and property rights. Goods where one user’s use does not limit further use are, in contrast, referred to as non-rivalrous goods (Phythian-Adams 2015: 33). Non-rivalrous goods are, for the most part, non-physical ‘creations’ of human activity, such as technical knowledge and artistic expressions. Depending upon a good’s rivalrous or non-rivalrous quality, ‘sharing’ it relates in different ways to markets and property rights. The ‘sharing’ of rivalrous goods may be enacted through renting, free-lending, disintermediated exchange and/or barter. Nevertheless, referring to such direct and instrumentally calculated exchanges as ‘sharing’ has been brought into question by some writers (Hern 2015). New forms of rental, lending, direct exchange and barter may extend market relations through digital network services. In some such situations, property rights are upheld in the manner of someone offering to rent out a physical object that they own. However, markets may be extended even while undoing property rights. This might occur when the distribution of generic medicines and counterfeit designer goods are extended by means of online marketing. Market expansion at the expense of property rights also occurs in the production and distribution of ‘pirate capitalist’ CDs and DVDs (Rojek 2015).
Moreover, free-sharing, when limited to the private family and friendship sphere, represents no challenge to markets and property rights. In fact, unpaid domestic labour provides an essential foundation to markets and property-based allocation mechanisms (Crompton 1997: 83–98). It is the ‘private’ character of such actions that reproduce the undervaluation of such provision of resources. Digital networks, on the other hand, create scope for high levels of free-sharing within a global ‘public’ domain, a domain in large part created by such sharing. As Habermas argues (1992/1962), free speech was central to the emergence of a public sphere in the long eighteenth century. Today, in similar fashion, it is free-sharing that is pivotal to the creation and defence of a global public sphere. This public domain stands in opposition to ongoing attempts at a proprietary enclosure of all domains of human interaction today (Dutton 2009). Free-sharing of time and things within specified (high-trust) communities can be enabled by digital networks. Where there is no physical limit to multiple and simultaneous use, such as in relation to fully non-rivalrous informational goods, digital networks enable forms and levels of free-sharing that challenge both markets and property rights.
Whether free-sharing of informational content represents an existential threat to market- and property-based arrangements depends rather upon the capacity of sharing, not just to undermine conventional economic arrangements, but to provide alternatives. This question of alternatives can be broken down into three elements: efficiency, efficacy and incentive.
Efficiency concerns the cost of producing a good. Efficiency can itself be divided into five dimensions (Heyne 2008): production and allocation efficiency, informational and transactional efficiency, and ‘Pareto optimization’. Production efficiency, as its name suggests, relates to the cost of making particular goods. Allocational efficiency connects to production efficiency, but is specifically about optimizing investment of resources. Production and allocational efficiency together provide a narrow conception of efficiency within the immediate process of production. Informational efficiency, meanwhile, describes the level of resource expenditure required to make an optimal rational decision about which available option best meets one’s needs. Transactional efficiency relates to the expense involved in actually fulfilling a preference once it has been selected (there may be various expenses involved in actually taking hold of and/or using an item).
Efficacy is closely connected to efficiency. However, efficacy refers to the utility of goods, not the cost of producing them. It is concerned with the ‘quality’ of particular outcomes and the overall quality of all the outcomes achieved (the overall quantity of such quality achieved). In this connection, production and allocational efficiency are linked within a narrow definition of efficiency in terms of costs of production, while informational and transactional efficiency extend the concept of efficiency to the domains of circulation (i.e., distribution). Informational and transaction costs have a significant impact on the efficacy of decisions made, in terms of their quality and access (i.e., their overall utility).
‘Pareto optimization’ is a term used to refer to a condition of overall efficiency where no more utility can be achieved through relocating resources without then creating a more significant loss of utility by making that alteration. In relation to non-rivalrous goods, this zerosum calculation is irrelevant. However, time remains limited even where digital plenitude makes a near infinite amount of informational content available for nothing. Indeed, in such conditions the scarcity of time becomes ever more apparent. This continued scarcity of time in conditions of informational non-scarcity is highly significant in the economics of free-sharing.
Whether in relation to techno-scientific innovation or artistic creativity, incentive, meanwhile, refers to levels of motivation. Free-sharing, or so the argument commonly goes, may diminish incentive/motivation if creators/inventors thereby receive no reward for their efforts. However, free distribution also offers scope for promoting paid performance, peer recognition and the display of abilities that are better rewarded than direct creators and innovators actually receive from copyright and patent. Indeed, Sharing: Crime against Capitalism demonstrates how free-sharing of non-rivalrous informational goods outperforms market- and property-based systems on all counts: efficiency, efficacy and incentive.
The Structure of the Book
This book sets out the case for sharing as an alternative to markets and property-based forms of allocating informational goods across seven domains: libraries, music, visual media, computer software, publishing, genetic science and pharmaceuticals. These seven themes are addressed one by one, in Chapters 2–8.
Chapter 2 addresses libraries and the digital world, the idea of a library as a repository of free (at the point of use) access to information, and its migration from walled spaces to networked infrastructures. Where once the best libraries were free to access only to the most privileged groups in society, today’s digital repository of knowledge extends access to unprecedented numbers, even while digital divides (around access to the Internet and quality of access to/skill in use of the Internet – see David and Millward 2014) continue to limit this availability. Information is either capital or culture, private asset or public good, depending upon its level of accessibility. The struggle between the principles of ‘the bookshop’ and those of ‘the library’ become the defining conflict of the network society. The struggle for literacy, education and for public libraries is a long one. Today’s struggle for a free culture online is only the latest manifestation. Two digital revolutions do in fact coexist, one enabling the technical locking down of access to and distribution of content, the other allowing the breakdown of these barriers. This double digital revolution can be seen in the recent history of libraries, as well as in the wider domain of online information selling and sharing.
Chapter 3 addresses peer-to-peer music-sharing online. The recording industry business model in the second half of the twentieth century became centred on the idea of the ‘recording artist’. The advent of file-sharing has seen this (largely illusory) common sense fall apart. The first digital revolution in music was the CD, creating a commercial profit storm. That the affordances of digital storage, distribution and processing should have so radically turned the recording industry upside down was not predicted by those who laid its foundations. The history of file-sharing has been a legal and technical, cat-and-mouse struggle, not the unfolding of any linear logic of technology. The case of recorded music most clearly illustrates the mythic nature of the claim that rendering information as property (rather than as freely shared culture) benefits creators or that it is the key to stimulating creativity. The copyright-based record contract leaves almost all artists in a condition of debt bondage to their record company in return for recordings that may get them noticed, and hence gain them a live audience whose ticket purchases do offer the artist a better reward for their time. That such an audience can more efficiently and effectively be gained for nothing online, and when free access to material eliminates the opportunity costs between record sales and ticket sales/prices, artists are better off when their music circulates with no price tag attached.
Chapter 4 engages with live-streaming of television content. Where the CD replaced an earlier commodity (the vinyl disc), the first digital revolution in television was the replacement for free-to-access (state- or advertiser-funded) ‘terrestrial’ broadcasting with subscription-based cable and satellite television. The scope to erect technical monopoly controls over access and to increase audience size by global digital distribution technologies allowed the first digital revolution to outbid terrestrial rivals for legal monopoly rights, especially over live sports events. Technical monopoly control was assured early on by the fact that the domestic Internet bandwidth was insufficient to stream live events with any clarity. Rupert Murdoch’s UK Sky and US Fox networks were built up on the basis of this set of monopoly conditions. Only with the development of a faster domestic Internet bandwidth was it possible to bypass such monopoly control. Live-streaming now offers a second digital revolution that is beginning to challenge the first.
Chapter 5 looks at open-source software and proprietary software, and argues that it is wrong to assume that copyright is the best way to incentivize the production of such software. Those producing code in corporate research and development departments have never successfully produced encryption code that open-source-based and free-sharing-based communities of hackers have not been able to break – almost as soon as it has been released. What Himanen calls ‘the hacker ethic’, and what Söderberg calls ‘play struggle’, represent forms of incentive and creative space that allow for far more innovation than takes place in corporate silos. Even within the silos of corporate coding, such as those making commercial computer games, the claim that the prevention of free-sharing by means of copyright is either necessary or significant is questionable. These industries stay alive by bringing out new products rather than protecting old ones with legal monopolies. At the cutting edge of gaming, the scope for free-sharing increases as the scope for proprietary control falls away. The history of the Internet, the World Wide Web, Wikipedia, Facebook, Google, Apple and Microsoft all illustrate the primacy of free-sharing over the capacity to lock down ideas. The creation of non-profit organizations in the digital commons has been essential not just for the creation of the standards and protocols on which the network society operates, but also for maintaining scope for future development, as well as for meaningful and informed choice for end-users.
Chapter 6 unpacks the complex and diverse world of publishing: academic, journalistic and trade. Academic publishing is the most extreme case, with no payment to authors for journal articles, even while commercial purchase of academic journals in recent decades has seen exponential increases in journal prices. Authoring, editing and reviewing are all done for little or no payment as part of a sharing-based academic economy structured around peer recognition. Journalism (print and broadcast), meanwhile, has been radically challenged by digital media networks, although the Internet is only a secondary part of a longer-running digital revolution in print and broadcasting. Digital proliferation of media channels has seen advertising revenues spread thinner, while the rise of citizen journalism online offers cheap copy and yet also a threat to the value of traditional journalistic authority. Horizontal integration in publishing houses and vertical integration of these within larger media companies in general has been combined with an increased outsourcing of the agent function, creating increased pressure to deliver ‘big books’. An ever-shrinking number of big players produce a similarly shrinking pool of such repeaters (‘franchises’), pot-boilers, cookbooks and tie-ins. Free-sharing remains the wellspring for new writers. Beyond the tiny layer of big book celebrity authors, most writers make money from types of activity that free circulation of their work actually encourages.
Chapter 7 offers an account of free-sharing in science, with a particular focus upon contemporary genetics. At one level, genes are fundamentally ‘free’, in the sense of being a common heritage of all humanity, both those of our own bodies and those of the non-human ‘nature’ around us. At another level, genetics (as scientific knowledge of genes) is best furthered through the free-sharing of research, rather than through commercial patenting. Genetic diversity, in non-human nature and within human bodies, pre-existed scientific ‘discovery’, even as traditional knowledge of certain properties and conditions also preceded today’s scientific accounts. Whether by means of patent or by new forms of rights over traditional knowledge, attempts to regulate access to such content, and knowledge of it, have proven highly problematic. The defence of genes as a common or shared heritage of humanity continues not only in relation to human genetics, but also in the defence of farmers over claims made, and practices undertaken, by agribusiness in relation to genetically modified crops. It is argued that not only is free-sharing an ethical imperative; it is also essential in the production of scientific knowledge in the first place. The Human Genome Project and related public and private gene mapping and patenting strategies highlight both the superiority of publicly funded and freely shared scientific research, and the dangers of private patent thickets in closing down knowledge production.
Chapter 8 looks at the case of pharmaceuticals. Medical research requires large scale, upfront investment. Patents are said to incentivize such investment, so free-sharing of pharmaceutical research findings reduces the willingness to invest. As Chapter 8 will show, this argument is doubly misleading. First, the greater part of innovative pharmaceutical research is funded directly, or indirectly (via tax breaks and other mechanisms), by non-commercial sources; meanwhile, the greater part of what commercial actors do spend is done so on ‘down the line’ development (i.e., reverse engineered, ‘me too’, patent-evading emulation), as well as on clinical and post-clinical trials, all of which turn out to be far more expensive when conducted commercially than is the case when they are undertaken by publicly funded agencies. Privately funded research is also far more prone to corruption, price inflation and even medically harmful conflicts of interest. Second, private patents limit research development and collaboration, where the foundation for innovation is shared access to past and cutting-edge findings. Beyond the question of scientific production of new drugs, which is best served by free-sharing of knowledge via public science, generic drugs (drugs made by freely appropriating patented or formerly patented formulas) are actually the best way to maximize distribution, undercut monopoly prices and limit the market for dangerous counterfeit medicines that seek to profit from deceit in relation to existing patent and trademark monopolies. The cases of HIV/AIDS and Ebola illustrate the primacy of publicly funded medicine in both initial drug development and in delivering results to those most in need.
Chapter 9 will draw together the evidence presented in the preceding chapters to answer the question: is sharing a crime against capitalism, or is capitalism capable of absorbing and adapting to the challenge of sharing? This final chapter highlights the failure to contain sharing within the bounds of a property-based profit system. As such, sharing represents an existential challenge to capitalism today, even as the pre-figurative spaces of such a new mode of production have not yet abolished the fetters of the old.
What Sharing? And (more to the point) What is Sharing?
Two questions are important to address at this point. First, why have the seven domains that make up the substantive content of this book (libraries, music, visual media, computer software, publishing, genetic science and pharmaceuticals) been chosen. Second, how does this book seek to apply the category ‘sharing’ when it is a term that means so many different things to different people (and sometimes even to the same people)? The answers to both questions relate to one another. This book focuses upon the sharing of informational goods first of all because these goods are central to today’s informational or network society, and, second, because the non-rivalrous nature of such goods renders them so much easier to share and, in so doing, challenges traditional conceptions of value, scarcity and price. Attention to libraries arises as a pre-digital form of informational sharing that prefigures contemporary struggles, while attention to music, visual media, software and publishing in the digital age addresses the most powerful fault lines in the conflict between free-sharing and a market based on property rights and prices. Discussion of scientific and medical research highlights how this struggle is growing even in those domains where non-rivalrous informational content still requires physical carries and procedures (pills, seeds, etc.), as was once the case – but increasingly is not – in the domains of books, records, films, newspapers and the like. My choice to address genetics and pharmaceuticals, but not designer goods and patented jet engine components, etc., is deliberate. Pills, tests, procedures and seeds still require physical interventions or making, and cannot simply be ‘downloaded’ by the average Internet user. This makes them more similar to designer clothing and engine parts than to the digital download of a film, game or book, etc. However, the science behind genetic and pharmaceutical inventions are predominantly created by scientists working within a culture of shared knowledge production, not the commercial domains that often claim credit for their creations, nor to the commercially driven fields of designer goods and of commercial manufacturing. This is not to say that the study of design, fashion and engineering would not also highlight significant foundations for creativity coming from shared cultures, and to that extent further study of these fields certainly warrants attention.
The second question, of what is being meant here by sharing, has already been answered in part. This book addresses the sharing of non-rivalrous informational goods, and to that extent what is being talked about here is the making of free copies, not the dividing up or lending out of physical objects. The notion of giving and taking that apply to singular objects – such that taking removes the thing from the person giving it – does not apply when making copies of infinitely reproducible code. In place of giving and taking, what exist in relation to informational goods are domains of production and reception, enabled by systems of transmission in between them. Sharing may occur at the level of coproduction, free circulation of copies or in the free reproduction of such copies by end-users. The distinction between sharing as peer coproduction and sharing as free copying is significant, but porous. These dimensions may complement or contradict, diverge or mesh. Some informational content is produced through peer-to-peer coproduction (as in hacker software, Wikipedia, the Web and Internet platforms, scientific research, citizen journalism and fan fiction), and circulated freely beyond its producer community.
