Professor Moglen said:

No one proposes forcing you to share anything you have created, whether valuable or mere rubbish. I have said, and will show the basis for concluding, two other things: (1) Under twenty-first century conditions, sharing cannot be prohibited with any degree of effectiveness; and (2) for digital goods with zero marginal cost, sharing either makes inherently superior goods, or results in inherently superior distribution, depending on the nature of the goods themselves, and thus over time shared goods produced or distributed anarchistically, without ownership, tend to outcompete and replace proprietary goods produced by capitalism. So the argument you are proposing to refute here on grounds of your superior prudence is irrelevant, and the congratulations you are awarding yourself for being smarter than I am are slightly premature.

My thoughts:

1. No one is forcing you to share...

- Does my sharing of my knowledge depend on the willingness of others to share their knowledge? If so, in an environment where no one is sharing, say in the production of new drugs or vaccines (assuming no sharing is done during the research process, but sharing is done during the patent application process), will I share (during the research process) in order to induce others to sharing? If so, will I share only in bits and pieces, and then stop sharing when others do not share? But if I behave this way, I am not truly after the solution to the problem I am researching. I suppose I would be interested in sharing only when I can no longer solve the problem on my own and am at the point when the collaboration of others is needed. If so, it does not do me any good to share just bits and pieces, because doing so will not help me find a solution to the problem I am researching. Plus, I don't really need to induce others to sharing their information. I want them to help me with my own problem! Why should I care if they don't share their stuff? I'm not concerned with their knowledge. In sharing my information therefore, I am motivated by purely selfish motives (I want someone to help me solve the problem I am researching) rather than altruistic reasons (since sharing a history of failed research results will be of limited use).

• That's why the legal arrangements for commons are important. If you did the reading I answered your questions in it. If you have remaining questions, the thing to do would be to sharpen your understanding from the reading, and then show exactly where you need more information or more thorough spelling out of the argument. Trying to invent your way to an understanding based on a comment I made in the wiki is a much less efficient procedure than doing the reading, where I have tried to address this question---as it affects software---completely.

• So far as pharmaceuticals are concerned, including but not limited to vaccines, the political economy of production is very complicated, and you don't understand it because you have been so thoroughly and relentlessly lied to about it that you don't know what you don't know and what you do think you know isn't knowledge. It is therefore the last, rather than the first problem to work through, which is why I didn't start with it. If you begin by trying to analyze an example which contains more complexity than the ones I have given, and which is about different areas of law interacting with different political economy, you will fail to understand that example, and you won't understand anything else. So try, just once, to do the work I actually assigned you on the basis that I might actually understand the subject and how to teach it better than you do, and you'll find yourself making more intellectual progress more quickly.

- when Professor Moglen says that "Under twenty-first century conditions, sharing cannot be prohibited with any degree of effectiveness," does he limit this to mean that the "physical" act of sharing cannot be prohibited effectively? Because if I am a junior chemist working in a drug company Fyser, I can be contractually bound not to share any information that I gain in my research. I can be dismissed from work if I violate this, and I can be slapped with a suit. I will have that dismissal on my record permanently and whenever I apply for work, I will always be asked, "Why'd you leave Fyser?" and I'd say "Um, I was let go, for sharing information." So while the sharing of information/results/data cannot be prohibited with any degree of effectiveness, isn't it that the consequences of doing so can effectively prohibit someone from sharing this information?

• I meant what I said, not what you think I might have been wrong if I said.

2. For digital goods with zero marginal cost, sharing either makes inherently superior goods...

- just to clarify, can we consider the formula of a drug of a vaccine a "digital good with zero marginal cost" (since it can be shared over Google docs for example). I thought that the course is "Law in the Information Society" but I think that doesn't exclude non-software goods which can still be digitized (since I think we can treat the course as "how should the laws of society change, given that we now live in an information society; that the world as we knew it has ended?")

• Stop worrying about pharma. Worry about the cases I gave you enough information to understand: software and---when people have actually applied themselves to learning about software---music. Then we can talk about video, and after video we can talk about pharma.

3. ...tend to outcompete and replace proprietary goods produced by capitalism.

- but currently, in producing drugs, we still need to rely on capitalism (say, Fyser company) to provide funds to test the drugs? How does Professor Moglen see this changing? I am not aware of the costs involved in producing software, but my thinking is that it costs more to create a new drug than a new software? And will drugs created under theory of anarchic production (no one owns the means of production) be allowed in the market, where liability cannot be pinned down on one single responsible person (e.g. Fyser)? Or will anarchic production lead to each and every person involved in the production process to be liable, where a cause of action for liability arises? If so, will fear of being held responsible for liability deter persons working in the drug industry from adopting the theory of anarchic production?

• So these are questions that illustrate the greater political economy complexity of pharma. Indeed you don't know, because everything you think you do know is wrong. But it would be simpler to ask a teacher how to learn this complex material than trying to prove that the teacher doesn't understand the basics, and then make up the subject for yourself, which is an absurd procedure you and others should stop trying to perform.

-- AllanOng - 04 Oct 2009

Thanks for your thoughts, Allan.

re: "Does my sharing of my knowledge depend on the willingness of others to share their knowledge?", I think the answer to this is mostly "it depends." Some people might share only if they will receive something in return; others, however, will be glad to be the "first sharer." So in short, sharing will happen even though some prefer not to share, or so the theory goes. The real answer to your question is an empirical one: do we have any evidence people will share? I think we do. Whatever the motivations are, it does seem to be in the nature of people to create and share their creations. It seems that is your observation as well, but perhaps I misread your commentary.

As for the second portion of 1., I agree with your general observation that even if you cannot stop the occurrence of X completely you might still be able to affect the frequency of X's occurrence. It's a separate question of whether you should affect X's frequency, and that question should take into account how effective your anti-X method is and also consider the method's societal/monetary/etc. costs. I believe in the coming weeks we'll read more about the argument that you cannot stop sharing, and also that we will address further the costs of the current anti-sharing model. I wouldn't worry about the argument's outcome just yet since we haven't finished reading/considering all of the argument's foundations.

• I meant, that under 21st century conditions you cannot affect either the occurrence or frequency of sharing anything that large numbers of people have and want to share. No one has shown why that proposition is wrong. Indeed, the facts are in and that proposition is demonstrably correct.

As for item 3, it reminds me of the question of fixed costs. I also share an interest in the question of fixed costs.

• That would actually be the non-question of fixed costs.

-- BrianS - 05 Oct 2009

Hey Brian,

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on my ideas. I just found out that the TWiki is pretty nifty, because the conversation continues after class. The bad thing about it is, it's possible to be so engrossed on the LITIS TWiki all the time (unlike Securities class where there is no TWiki, haha).

-- AllanOng - 06 Oct 2009