“the madness of crowds and an internet delusion”
over at the new york times, john tierney writes about jaron lanier’s new book you are not a gadget. Amidst the usual, oh no the internet is not what we thought it would be, is this sad quote:
Dr. Liebowitz suggests a more traditional reform for cyberspace: punishing thieves. The big difference between Web piracy and house burglary, he says, is that the penalties for piracy are tiny and rarely enforced. He expects people to keep pilfering (and rationalizing their thefts) as long as the benefits of piracy greatly exceed the costs. (emphasis added)
the last bit is right, but punishment is not the answer. didn’t anyone else’s high school make them read a bit of dostoyevsky? perhaps we should worry about making the benefits greater — case in point, i’m happy to pay for a netflix subscription and get streaming movies, but when you tell me if i want to do it legitimately, i have to wait a month, the benefit of breaking the law (torrenting a movie) becomes much greater. “controlling” a mob is not about punishment, it is about creating incentives to change the mob’s behavior. see techcrunch (mg siegler is just so brilliant, ya know.)
i can only presume lanier has a similarly reasonable strategy — the nyt article reports his love of trendy micropayments, for example — it’s too bad that in the article his argument gets tangled up and intertwined with liebowitz’s libertarian silliness:
After reviewing battles like Dvorak-qwerty and Betamax-VHS, they concluded that consumers had good reasons for preferring qwerty keyboards and VHS tapes, and that sellers of superior technologies generally don’t get locked out. “Although software is often brought up as locking in people,” Dr. Liebowitz told me, “we have made a careful examination of that issue and find that the winning products are almost always the ones thought to be better by reviewers.” When a better new product appears, he said, the challenger can take over the software market relatively quickly by comparison with other industries.
/sigh
