Over The Counter Culture

A compilation of pretty good answers to the question when posed on HNews (here):

Many focus on the immediate:

"Wealth is a measure of your ability to do what you would like to do, when you would like to do it – a measure of your breadth of immediately available choice."

You obviously get the standard sepia-tinted stuff:

“Health.”

“Carving pumpkins with my daughter.”

“Wealth is waking up this morning to a beautiful woman bringing me a cup of tea made "just so".”

Some classic related questions:

“How would you differentiate between the terms wealth, freedom, and happiness (or do you consider them interchangeable)?”

The Chief Financial Officer’s answer:

“Wealth = how long you could sustain your current lifestyle (same expenses) if your income stopped, today.”

Oddly, this comes pretty close to Chris Rock’s sketch, where he defines wealth as:

“Wealthy is the point where your grandkids will never need to work a day in their life. Wealthy is getting foundations and libraries named after you. etc…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWERzwbobOk”

There’s the referenced answer:

“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth

Wealth is the abundance of valuable resources or material possessions or the control of such assets.”

But here’s one I found that, for me, nails the wealth taxonomy, albeit offering analysis that then goes down a different line to what I consider to be the crux

“Wealth (what people want) can be divided into two subclasses: transferable (money, property, …) and non-transferable (health, comfort, experiences, memories, fame, power, knowledge, ….) People generally use transferable wealth to gain the non-transferable.

People can be classified based on their patience in turning transferable wealth into non-transferable wealth. Wealth accumulators tend to be more patient in trading on transferable wealth than wealth dissipators who tend to immediately convert wealth into non-transferable form.”

It’s when people start glancing to the future, that I think people are getting warm (relative to my POV):

“The best economic definition of wealth that I have seen is George Gilder’s from his 1980 book, Wealth and Poverty. He contrasted it to resources in general, and to riches, as: Wealth is resources dedicated to future production.

A car used as a status symbol or personal transport is riches, one used in business to generate more income is wealth; similarly with education for enjoyment versus education for future production, and so on.

He also pointed out that since spending on the military and police is not productive, that though necessary to protect wealth, it is not itself wealth and should be used as thriftily as possible.”

Here was my take:

“For me, wealth is potential for future freedom from constraints on life choices. Money is one format, relationships, friendships and favours owed are another; education also counts, as do health, fitness and certain key possessions (but not so many that dealing with them constrains you; thus actually, very few, and mostly of a tool-like nature). Some of these things are not distinct, exclusive goods, but can be shared or copied amongst large groups. Focusing on doing so without being distracted on needlessly stocking (maximising) the un-shareable (distinct) parts of wealth, is a productive way forward for humanity.”

Of course, some people go a little further than I would with this:

“Wealth is the ability of an entity to create change.

Skills you know, your business network, your emotional support network, assets you can exchange.

People with great wealth can affect the world in profoundly positive or negative ways. In other words, wealth is closely tied to the notion of power.

A member of congress who has relatively low net worth could have as much financial influence as Bill Gates. While this power is not as liquid or easy to exchange as cash, it is still exchangeable and a store of value.”

But only one user really nails it:

“Wealth is an abundance of freedoms.”

(Which makes the paradox of choice all the more puzzling)

We’re not rational, we’re lazy: hence economic models, assuming rational decision-making, are often very wrong.

In 2008, economists Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein made waves with a book called Nudge. It advocated the idea that socially beneficial policy could be implemented without forcing anyone to behave a particular way. All you had to do was make the socially optimal option the default; e.g. saving a certain percentage of your monthly wages.

Anybody not happy with that could opt out and do something different. No freedom or choice is taken away from anyone: you’re just nudged in the right direction.

Well, could nudges help something as ‘far out’ as copyright?

Advocates of the copyleft movement think that in this day and age, more of culture should be in the commons: free to be shared, remixed and disseminated. Scarcity business models are completely out of touch with a world where copy, paste, share & remix is such a ubiquitous feature of cultural participation.

So why not nudge creative works into the commons? I’m talking about default public licensing of copyrighted works (not to be confused with – illiberal and paternalistic – compulsory licensing).

The idea is that by default, new published work would be licensed to the public for non-commercial sharing and remixing (those familiar with the Creative Commons will recognise this as a CC Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licence).

The author would still be free to override that with any other licence. Copyright it would still fully apply to works; the rights “castle” is still there from day zero of a work. But by default, a non-commercial share/remix “drawbridge” is let down.

You would still have to go to the artist and negotiate a deal (or at least, ask for permission) if you intended to make money from the work or a from remix of it. And she would always be credited, and so the more you share, the more famous the artist would get.

I am posting this because it surely can’t be a new idea, but my googling hasn’t thrown anything up yet. I have a dozen questions/ideas, and so was hoping you either could refer me to existing discussions, or give me your own thoughts (in the comments below, or contacting me directly).

Mulve: a RIAA lobbyist’s wet dream, and a Spotify killer.

Wonderful.

Was the current piracy regime so badly broken that this needed to happen?

The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), the Gallo report, the UK’s Digital Economy Act, and in particular, the brand Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Bill, will all:

a) seem completely warranted, and yet

b) will make even moderates presently optimistic about Spotify making copyright enforcement hardening unnecessary, despair

c) finally, the awful copyright policy we’ve seen pushed in 2010 (see above) will seem inadequate to all, and even harsher measures will be necessary. “Throw the safe harbour / intermediary immunity out the window, allow wanton monitoring, consider making wilful downloading of infringing content illegal, bring back DRM, etc… Three strikes? Let’s make it two!! Children are in danger in this Somalia of unregulated theft and piracy*.

And if Mulve had never come along? people would just learn how to conduct their business online with greater discretion. Privacy, anonymity, encryption, closed communities, being selective about which computers you let your PC connect to – hardly a bad schooling?

If it ain’t badly broke, don’t fix it. This is a step backwards for all concerned, not least the freetards that will gorge themselves on a service that seems too good to be true. As an acquaintance recently pointed out, if you don’t know who the free lunch is, there’s a good chance you’re it.

*yes, Lord Andrew Lloyd-Webber really is that cock-mouthed. Children in danger – what a hammy line to trot out, and in the House of Lords. I mean really. And a ‘Somalia of unregulated theft’? As opposed to what, a Somalia of regulated theft? A Wales of unregulated theft? What on Earth does that mean??

How tragic that a legislator can admit that “I do not come equipped with the answers; frankly, they are way beyond my world of musical theatre” in Parliament, then gets so widely lauded (for a rhetoric and bad stat-laden tragic, melodramatic pantomime of a speech) as to be able to kick start the horrifying fisting of the Digital Economy Act (by which I mean hijacking a good bill that was about boosting Britain’s digital telecoms infrastructure, and filling it with copyright enforcement measures so draconian they would have derailed the bill completely but for the use of the ‘wash up’ subterfuge).

According to the now-defunct SABIP (Government Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property Policy)*, they can’t find a record of any recourses to Section 296ZE of the UK Copyright, Design and Patent Act 1988. Who cares, right?

Thing is, with all the press and moaning that DRM (Digital Rights Management; a.k.a locks on mp3 files, DVDs, software and so on) has received, it strikes me that not one person has ever used the catchily-named “Remedy where effective technological measures prevent permitted acts”.

There’s a whole host of stuff you’re allowed to do with content under UK copyright law. I tried to find a good list online where someone explains them, but oddly, I couldn’t (I’d love a pointer to one though!). The best I could find was this, on the UK IPO website.

If DRM or any other technology stops you, you can report them to the Secretary of State, who can slap them around as much as he considers necessary in order to give you your rights.

I just thought that this should be more widely known. Feel free to pass this info on if you think so too.

*”The Relationship Between Copyright and Contract Law report, 2010”