Defective by Democracy

I don't know much about intellectual property, so I don't have much of an opinion on the big debates on copyright/copyleft, digital rights management, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or whatever. My worry is that, whatever the merits, the outcome will be determined by idiots. I have similar feelings about most issues, actually, but I get particularly upset when I see empty rhetoric being thrown around and repeated by sanctimonious self-styled rebels fighting against what they see as corrupt, oppressive interests that are holding back the Truth.

It generally bothers me when people feel strongly about an issue but can't be bothered to understand it. Of course, I don't know what's really going on with these people, but their use of the vapid slogan "Defective by Design" doesn't bode well. Let's quickly deal with their point and then consider how political decisions get made.

The notion of defective by design, I take it, is that sellers of certain products have purposefully reduced the functionality of those products. This is part of DRM (digital rights management). It involves expending extra effort to make a product that is harder to copy. A hypothetical example would be a CD that can't be burned onto a hard drive.

The problem is that such "defects" often serve the greater good of society. You can buy fuel made from ethanol, but they mix in some nasty stuff so that you don't drink it. That's a defect, in a sense. The producers are going out of their way to modify a product so that it can't be used in a particular way. Ultimately, it's probably a good thing that desperate addicts can't get drunk/high off lighter fluid (or whatever the stuff is used for). Professor Picker points to the example of governors on car engines that prevent them from going above the speed limit. It's a "defect" that in most cases is good for society. My understanding is that some guns are manufactured to be semi-automatic simply by adding components that prevent them from being fully automatic. Once again, the modifications render these guns "defective," but you are unlikely to hear copyleft demagogues arguing that they aren't good for society.

Professor Picker explains why DRM might also be good for society. I'll leave the details to him, merely noting that of course creative workers are free to allow everyone to copy their works (they can simply not exercise their intellectual property rights). The question is what to do when authors and musicians want to be able to distribute their work in a particular way but can't without DRM (and, perhaps, legal protections).

Serious arguments can be made against DRM, the DMCA, and copyright in general. In fact, I'm not entirely persuaded by Picker's substantive arguments. What's important is that the debate can happen on an intellectual level, but that nevertheless we get crap like "defective by design." The question is which form of persuasion actually ends up making more difference in a democracy. I suspect that simplistic arguments and emotional manipulation win out in the end. This is not to put social science on a pedestal (more in a later post). Academics can get things badly wrong. In academia, though, at least there's a semblance of a truth-seeking process. Better ideas on average, over time, gain consensus. In the Fox News, "defective by design" world of truthiness, the only thing that counts is the quality of your propaganda.