[A2k] FT article by James Boyle:closed mind about open world

[Michelle Childs]

<snip>
Studying intellectual property and the internet has convinced me that we
have another cognitive bias. Call it the openness aversion. We are likely
to undervalue the importance, viability and productive power of open
systems, open networks and non-proprietary production.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/64167124-263d-11db-afa1-0000779e2340.html
 closed mind about an open world
By James Boyle

Published: August 7 2006 20:24 | Last updated: August 7 2006 20:24

Over the past 15 years, a group of scholars has finally persuaded
economists to believe something non-economists find obvious: =93behavioural
economics=94 shows that people do not act as economic theory predicts.

However, this is not a vindication of folk wisdom over the pointy-heads.
The deviations from =93rational behaviour=94 were not the wonderful cornuco=
pia
of humanist motivations you might imagine. There were patterns. We were
risk-averse when it came to losses =96 likely to overestimate chances of
loss and underestimate chances of gain, for example. We rely on heuristics
to frame problems but cling to them even when they are contradicted by the
facts. Some of these patterns are endearing; the supposedly =93irrational=
=94
concerns for equality that persist in all but Republicans and the
economically trained, for example. But most were simply the mapping of
cognitive bias. We can take advantage of those biases, as those who sell
us expensive and irrational warranties on consumer goods do. Or we can
correct for them, like a pilot who is trained to rely on his instruments
rather than his faulty perceptions when flying in heavy cloud.

Studying intellectual property and the internet has convinced me that we
have another cognitive bias. Call it the openness aversion. We are likely
to undervalue the importance, viability and productive power of open
systems, open networks and non-proprietary production. Test yourself on
the following questions. In each case, it is 1991 and I have removed from
you all knowledge of the past 15 years.

You have to design a global computer network. One group of scientists
describes a system that is fundamentally open =96 open protocols and system=
s
so anyone could connect to it and offer information or products to the
world. Another group =96 scholars, businessmen, bureaucrats =96 points out =
the
problems. Anyone could connect to it. They could do anything. There would
be porn, piracy, viruses and spam. Terrorists could put up videos
glorifying themselves. Your activist neighbour could compete with The New
York Times in documenting the Iraq war. Better to have a well-managed
system, in which official approval is required to put up a site; where
only a few actions are permitted; where most of us are merely recipients
of information; where spam, viruses, piracy (and innovation and anonymous
speech) are impossible. Which would you have picked?

Imagine a form of software that anyone could copy and change, created
under a licence that required subsequent programmers to offer their
software under the same terms. Imagine legions of programmers worldwide
contributing their creations back into a =93commons=94. Is this
anarchic-sounding method of production economically viable? Could it
successfully compete with the hierarchically organised companies producing
proprietary, closed code, controlled by both law and technology?

Set yourself the task of producing the greatest reference work the world
has ever seen. It must cover everything from the best Thai food in Raleigh
to the annual rice production of Thailand, the best places to see blue
whales to the history of the Blue Dog Coalition. Would you create a
massive organisation of paid experts with layers of editors producing
tomes that are controlled by copyright and trademark? Or would you wait
for hobbyists, scientists and volunteer encyclopedists to produce, and
search engines to organise, a cornucopia of information? I know which way
I would have bet in 1991. But I also know that the last time I consulted
an encyclopedia was in 1998.

It is not that openness is always right. Rather, it is that we need a
balance between open and closed, owned and free, and we are systematically
likely to get the balance wrong. Partly this is because we still do not
understand the kind of property that exists on networks. Most of our
experience is with tangible property; fields that can be overgrazed if
outsiders cannot be excluded. For that kind of property, control makes
more sense. We still do not intuitively grasp the kind of property that
cannot be exhausted by overuse (think of a piece of software) and that can
become more valuable to us the more it is used by others (think of a
communications standard). There the threats are different, but so are the
opportunities for productive sharing. Our intuitions, policies and
business models misidentify both. Like astronauts brought up in gravity,
our reflexes are poorly suited for free fall.

The questions I asked are related to the world wide web =96 which celebrate=
d
its 15th birthday last year. Would we create it today? In 1991, you would
have scoffed at the web, at open-source software and at getting your
information from Google. Control and ownership seem intuitively the right
way to go. How do you feel about today=92s debates? Should we preserve =93n=
et
neutrality=94 and openness or give network owners greater control? Should w=
e
create new rights for broadcasters and database owners? The next project
of the behavioural economists should be to study our cognitive frameworks
about property, control and networks. Like the pilot in the cloud looking
at his instruments, we might learn that we are upside down.

The writer is professor of law at Duke Law School, a co-founder of the
Center for the Study of the Public Domain and a board member of Creative
Commons

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006



--
Michelle Childs -Head of European Affairs
Consumer Project on Technology in London
24, Highbury Crescent, London, N5 1RX,UK.
Tel:+44(0)207 226 6663 ex 252.
Mob:+44(0)790 386 4642. Fax: +44(0)207 354 0607
http://www.cptech.org

Consumer Project on Technology in Washington, DC
1621 Connecticut Ave, NW, Washington, DC 20009 USA .Tel.:
+1.202.332.2670,Fax: +1.202.332.2673

Consumer Project on Technology in Geneva
1 Route des  Morillons, CP 2100, 1211 Geneva 2, Switzerland
Tel: +41 22 791 6727