Since people like to take shopping carts, the local supermarket used to have barriers to keep you from wheeling them beyond a small territory outside the store's door. To get your groceries, you drove around to a usually-congested loading zone.

The barrier is now gone and shopping carts can be wheeled out to the trunk of your car in the parking lot. Much more convenient. The cart bears a notice: "Take this beyond the parking lot and the wheels will lock."

Clearly, this is some kind of wireless ditigal technology -- DRM, in fact.

So I began thinking. Don't shopping carts want to be free? Shouldn't it be fair use to wheel the cart to my home? After all, there are lots of them, so I would not really be depriving another shopper of the use of a cart.

Perhaps a court should determine on a case-by case-basis whether the social utility of allowing free removal is greater than the social utility of controlling shopping carts? Or perhaps we need a law saying you can take the cart as long as you intend to return it, and the store should protect its carts only by suing those shoppers who don't follow through.

And, surely, shopping carts are manufactured in the tens of thousands, so the marginal cost of each one must be close to zero. So if we think price should equal marginal cost (a justification used for illicit P2P distribution of music), the supermarket is offending static economic efficiency by its miserly attitude. It needs a new business model that takes account of people's right to take carts.

One could go on -- where is a copyleft academician just when you need one? Luckily, none wandered by, so I had to content myself with enjoying another instance in which more is more -- more protection of the store's property rights results in more consumer convenience, and lower prices.

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posted by James DeLong @ 10:26 AM | DRM & Watermarks, etc.

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