Prokofy:
"When people imagine that virtuality should mean that everything should be free, it's because they think of land and objects not as the emulation or simulation of those things in real life; they think of them as mere software, bits of code, pixels."
No. The reason that they understand that virtuality ultimately means that everything is free is that they understand the economics of scarcity. Unlike a chair in real life, a chair in virtual worlds costs nothing to reproduce, because the only resource that it uses is the time of its builder in its original creation. Once created, the
marginal cost is zero, and the
total cost remains the same.
This means that for any object in a virtual world, the cost of that object will trend towards zero UNLESS there are market-skewing factors built in to the world - for example, digital rights management of the kind in Second Life. DRM is an attempt to create artificial scarcity - and in fact, that's exactly why it exists in Second Life. It's exactly the same tactic as government-imposed production quotas in the real world - an attempt to create artificial scarcity in order to protect specific kinds of business. In this sense, because it sets the "physical laws" of the world, Linden Lab is the state. It may be a low-intervention, freedom-loving kind of state: but a state it is, in all but name.
In the case of Second Life, these "specific kinds of business" which are protected are content creators. Whether you agree with the existence of DRM in Second Life or not, you have to recognise that this is why it exists.
"Whatever the technical accuracy of their comments, they utterly obliterate the social and human side of that emulation equation, that relates to *and values* these things in terms of labour and cash in ways that make a world. Those who refuse to recognize this valuation are inherently world-destroyers"
First of all, this isn't an issue of technology, but one of economics - very simple market forces. Far from being "world destroyers", those who believe that digital copies will ultimately be zero-cost or close to it are world observers: they observe the realities of an all-digital world. By adding DRM into the system, Linden Lab is ultimately creating a specific kind of world: not "Your world, your imagination", but "Your world, your imagination, your right to make a buck off it".
The problem, of course, is that as the record companies are coming to recognise, DRM doesn't work. It doesn't prevent piracy. And in the long run, companies which include DRM systems face two choices: an ever-escalating and unwinnable arms race of measure and counter measure; or simply abandoning DRM.
"Somebody who makes a house or a hovercraft spends time and money -- why can't they charge? Why can't they *make a living*?"
Of course, they can charge - and those who appreciate what they've done, which will probably be the majority of people, will pay. And of course, I have no objection to anyone making a living. But what Prokofy is asking for isn't the ability to make a living: it's state-supported livings, jobs which are gauranteed not by the economy, but by laws of the state. Ironically, what she wants is another variant of "code as law" - the thing which she claims to oppose. All that anyone can charge, at the end of the day, is a fair market price: and without scarcity, fair market prices quickly plummet to zero. Despite Prokofy's claim that open source = Leninism, what she wants amounts to state control of pricing.
Recent Comments