The Candle Makers are back

M. Bastiat and the Candle Makers are back in the news:

From lawsuits to IT hacks, the creative industries are deploying a range of tactics to protect their jobs and original work from automation

There are calls for changes to copyright in order to protect those jobs and incomes. Which is, from the societal point of view, entirely the wrong answer. For it is to fail to understand why we have copyright in the first place.

Innovation (which is covered by both patents and copyright) is difficult and therefore expensive to do. Once done it’s easy to copy. Therefore artistic works are, in an economic sense, public goods. The ease of copying means that they are non-rivalrous and non-excludable. We can all have a print of a Vetriani, a copy of Pratchett and hum along to a popular beat combo once that difficult work of creation has been done.

The public goods argument is that given this then less effort than we would like will be put into the original creation. Given how difficult it is to profit from having created less creation will happen. So, we deliberately construct these copyrights in order to make such things excludable and so enable artists to generate an income from the artifical scarcity.

There is no natural right here, this is a purely invented and for good enough reason attempt to solve the public goods problem.

Now we’ve the AIs able to copy out unlimited amounts of tosh. We have solved our supply problem. We do not need to protect the supplies of tosh in order for there to be supplies of it. We have solved the public goods problem not by placing restrictions upon supply but by entirely abolishing said restrictions upon supply.

Super. The public goods nature of the creation of what is a useful description of vast amounts of modern art, literature and so on - that tosh - is now solved. We can relax copyright therefore. Indeed, should. Restrictions which are past their sensibility date should be relaxed. Artists can go back to starving in their garrets and the rest of us have an unlimited amount of creativity to enjoy.

Protecting the jobs of artists was never and is not the point at all. Protecting the incentive to produce what we wish to consume was. Now that AI - as we’re being told is true by the very complaint we’re getting from the candle makers - automates and therefore makes free the creation of what we wish to consume then the correct response is to abolish copyright.

Fun how a proper appreciation of basic economics illuminate matters, no? Draws back the curtains on the correct policy response?

For the avoidance of doubt, this writer makes a living scribbling about financial markets. Exactly the area where such ‘bots and AIs have been making in roads - reporting company results and so on - this past decade. Yes, this is a welcome to my world argument.