beating a dead horse I'm sitting on the floor, in a mostly empty apartment, but I feel it my civic duty to rebut yet another pro-Hollywood apologetic, this time from TCS in a piece by Econ professor James Miller:

In her article opposing Hollywood hacking, Sonia Arrison suggests that Hollywood need not fight peer-to-peer thievery because, as she correctly notes, "consumers will always be willing to pay market prices to be entertained." A market price is not the fair or reasonable price; rather it's the amount of money consumers must pay to acquire goods. But in a world of easy peer-to-peer piracy, the market price of movies, books and music is zero.

Now, it's true that -- unchecked by copyright laws -- advances in technology will push the market price of "intellectual property" close to zero (but not quite all the way). Miller concludes that we need to allow Hollywood to hack into our computers and keep the price artificially high. However, this is not the only possible conclusion. A lot of economists would argue that if you can't sell something profitably, then you should probably be selling something else. While the competitive price of Pearl Jam "Ten" is pretty close to zero, the competitive price of Pearl Jam's yet unreleased album is not, since the only way you can get it is from Pearl Jam. A different solution, then, which doesn't involve giving Hollywood hacking powers, would be to charge for unreleased "intellectual property." Jason Soon asked me why I keep pushing this untested, pie-in-the-sky system:

You might think you have a better system but similarly other people might think they have a better system for other areas of law but I don't hear them calling for the abolition of those areas of law just yet.

Ten years ago, I wouldn't have cared. But, as Miller points out, technology is pushing the competitive price of IP to zero. And, if you follow the goings-on of Congress, Hollywood is pushing more and more draconian measures to keep IP above the competitive price. If the choice were between the status quo and my newfangled system, then, yeah, I'd just be some crazy guy who thinks "hey, I could do that better." But the choice, as I see it, is between a system close to what I describe, and the police state (Hollywood hacks your computer, general-purpose computers outlawed, etc...) necessary to keep publicly known IP above marginal cost. And I have a strong aversion to police states.