More on parasite technologies, following Adam, Jim, and Ray.

Solveig Singleton: I think one can make the observation that technologies are free-riding on other producers without any implication about banning (or any other remedies) at all—especially since everything does this to some extent.

In the overwhelming majority of cases, this is just a business problem, something to be addressed by how you structure and restructure and restructure and evolve how one sells and what one sells.

In a very few cases, one will see free-riding that is problematic in a way that is very hard or impossible to address as a business problem. Not, perhaps, a market failure, because I don't really believe in those, but in the case of copyright, a government failure, because traditional enforcement mechanisms simply will not do. Again, these cases won’t be easy to identify. One doesn’t want to go to tech bans as a solution. But I don’t see why we need to assume that absolutely and in all cases, there must be no changes to the ground rules to address very difficult situations.

My own take on Grokster, just for example: Is it Schumpeterian, like the carriage being supplanted by the automobile? If so, when is the “automobile” going to turn up? It isn’t Grokster or any other pure transport mechanism—Grokster doesn’t produce content. So I think that in that space we were veering closer to Hobbes’ war of all against all than to Schumpeter:

To this war of every man against every man [it is] consequent also to the same condition that there be no propriety, no dominion, no ‘mine’ and ‘thine’ distinct, but only that to be every man’s that he can get, and for so long as he can keep it...

Except of course because we are dealing here with advanced civilization, and not a "state of nature" but cyberspace, the consequences are hopefully not so bad as this:

In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently no culture of the earth, no navigation nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea, no commodious building, no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force, no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and, which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

So we are somewhere in between Hobbes and Schumpeter.