That's not my thesis, that's your thesis. I never said anything about disregarding existing rights, I said that goods produced for anarchist distribution, in which no one is excluded from distributing, will attain superior distribution. Already you appear to be debunking or adding nuance to something you made up, which is fine with me, but doesn't contribute to the conversation you are supposedly keen on.

No. The phrase "efficient distribution" means in my argument the most widespread distribution in the shortest time using the least resources. But if the phrase "efficient distribution" is to be redefined, which it certainly can be, it should be redefined in such a way as to have something to do with distribution, which the phrase as used below does not.

Could we have, please, capitalization and grammatical clarity?

This paragraph appears to me to be nonsense. Would you put a sentence in front (usually known as a "topic sentence" conveying succinctly the idea the paragraph is supposed to convey?

No framework has in fact been laid out, or at any rate, none that I could understand. One confusion that is clear through the confusion is between the property rights that restrict distribution and the property rights that restrict modification. As I tried to point out at some length, perhaps inadequately for your purposes, though sometimes contained in the same copyright, they're always analytically distinct.

No one has advocated pirating anybody's music. But it seems obvious, doesn't it, that anyone with any form of player playing any form of medium from vinyl on could have stopped playing any particular Pink Floyd song in the middle? If you are making an argument at all, which I am not sure I can see you doing, what would that have implied about the record distribution system that put the vinyl record someone once stopped playing in the middle into his hands?

Again, the purpose seems to be to turn "efficient" into a word implying qualitative integrity, and we would agree that a distribution system is not efficient unless it preserves the things it distributes. But from here the point seems to be that any distribution system that does not also control the way in which the goods are used at the other end interferes with "artistic integrity." This is also true, of course, of the distribution of physical artifacts considered beautiful by their producer, which may be rendered ugly in her view by subsequent intentional modification. Why this is an inefficiency in the system of distributing the object is neither evident nor discussed.

This argues too much, of course, because the distribution of these masterpieces for playing in suboptimal non-dark anti-communal circumstances is done primarily by the "owners" not the "pirates."

Umm, are you sure you understand the economics of the Indian film industry? Are you worried about piracy, here or flatscreen TVs at home?

This is a poorly-framed and slovenly argument, once the bullshit is removed, that piracy (by which you mean intentional sharing in violation of copyright) is sometimes destructive of artistic integrity. Descriptively this is evident, and requires little argument. Normatively this is also easy to agree with. There are arguments on the other side, having to do with the concept of "artistic integrity" in relation to the concept of "authorship," but you don't make any contact with those arguments, because you assume without further discussion (though accompanied by a great deal of ungrammatical rhetoric without capitalization) the normative primacy of "authorial intent."

Somewhat inappropriately, the argument is presented as though in response to an argument of mine in favor of intentional copyright infringement that I never made. The ideas I have presented are tendentiously mischaracterized, but whether for the purpose of deliberately misunderstanding them, or merely in order to permit an argument about the substantive importance of property rights to the preservation of artistic integrity to be made under the guise of an argument about efficiency of distribution is unclear.

If the latter, why bother? The distortion necessary to turn a simple idea ("Propertization of distribution plays a role in protecting artistic integrity") into this complex farrago is unnecessary. It's also destructive of the very form of dialogue you overtly advocate. Put simply, this is a meaningful objection to ideas critical of copyright. "Because propertization of distribution plays a role in protecting artistic integrity, doesn't integrity protection for creative works suffer from the decline of copyright?" Some might choose to respond, as I've indicated above, by asking whether "integrity protection" is important. More likely, however, the objection will be met by reference to the general jurisprudential principle, often associated with Guido Calabresi, that property rules are structual alternatives to liability rules, and that the role played by property restrictions on distribution (which are actually secondary in this function of protecting artistic integrity to property restrictions on production by modification) can be played instead, in a system without property rights, by specific liability rules.

Two different steps need to be taken here. Substantively, the argument needs to be simplified and the excess machinery done away. From an execution point of view, a return to the ordinary rules of grammar, including efforts at shorter sentences, along with formatting changes designed to make reading easier, including punctuation and capitalization, should be adopted. Nothing useful makes expressivity the enemy of clarity and accessibility.

-- By AnilMotwani - 4 Nov 2011

[rough draft deleted]

It does make sense to consider distributive efficiency in terms of what it means for the authors of creative works. Users are only one piece of the puzzle - and any system should take into account the desires of creative producers. There are certainly musicians who want only the final versions of their song heard, and to be heard in sequence so as to make an impact when the album is released to the world. I disagree with you when you say that "if listeners know they are getting unfinished, often purely experimental cuts, that'd be okay." If distributive efficiency focuses on the artist's goals, then even if an experimental version is released, fans are previewed to what the song might sound like - they are previewed to lyrics, to a message and feel of the work. If the goal of the producer is to make a dramatic impact upon release of his work, then hearing even an experimental version is detrimental to his goal and would thus be distributively inefficient.

I think Kanye West is a good example to illustrate my point (obviously this won't be true for all artists, but certainly for some). When My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy was nearing release, versions of some songs on the album leaked online. Kanye was pissed about it mainly because he wanted to wow the world with his album, at once, in one dramatic release. He didn't want people to hear it fragmented, and he certainly didn't want people listening to the final versions of the song before they were released (for monetary and intellectual/conceptual reasons). After the songs were released online, he went back into the studio and re-recorded the songs that were leaked online, and completely transformed them. He clearly believed distributive efficiency, from his perspective, was about conceptual unity, and his focus was on himself as a creator. He stated "It's a piece of art that just can't be unveiled until it's completed." This demonstrates that had fans received unofficial versions, or even final versions of single songs, that it would have been distributively inefficient (in terms of your definition of efficiency) because it was against the author's will and his goal

(On his next album, Watch the Throne, Kanye and Jay-Z decided to release the album first only through iTunes in an attempt to prevent leaking of the album and individual songs before its release. Their plan was successful - Watch the Throne, one of the most anticipated hip-hop albums of all time, did not leak at all before the release date. This demonstrated that the leaks were coming from someone in the distribution chain of the physical CD manufacturing. Its somewhat ironic that the internet was actually used as a means of preventing a premature leak.)

While authors/creators and their artistic goals/values are certainly a concern, we must also ask what the users want. I wanted to watch Avatar in theaters because I cared about the spectacle of it. I wanted to watch it the way it was intended to be watched. But, not every user cares as much and is willing to pay the massively overinflated price to go to the theater and watch it. So, if you're arguing for a re-examination of the word "efficient" by saying it also means artistic integrity, where does the balancing come in? If someone doesn't really care if they hear 1 leaked kanye song at a time, or see a film on their 11 inch laptop screen instead of in IMAX, then how will the term "efficient distribution" address that fact. It might be inefficient from the author's perspective to have the film leaked, but it might be 100% efficient from the user's perspective. Where does the balance come in?

-- AustinKlar - 19 Oct 2011

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