I have a new research paper in collaboration with Bert Wilson titled “Never steal a car: Moral intuitions about intellectual property.”
The title of this post, “Everyone Gets a Copy,” comes from a conversation between subjects in our lab experiment on which this paper is based. This experiment investigated when and how people compete for resources from each other.
As you can see in the screenshot below, each person in the game controls a round avatar in a virtual environment.
In our experiments, “seeds” represent competing resources, meaning they cannot be owned and used by multiple people at the same time. In other words, it works like most physical goods. If the almond-colored player in the photo steals the seed from the blue player, blue will be de-seeded, just like if someone’s car is stolen, they no longer have it.
Therefore, it is no wonder that the players called taking seeds “stealing”, as you can see from the speech bubble in the photo. This result was expected and is consistent with Bert Wilson’s previous work on the origins of physical properties.
Our research question considers whether similar claims would emerge after acquiring a non-competitive product called a “disc.” A non-competitive product is one that can be used by multiple people without causing loss to other users. If a participant exercises the ability to retrieve a disc, the original disc owner still retains the disc and can spend all of its value.
Although human subjects are not forced to interact through chat functions, they often choose to form communities and use language in order to try to capture the available surplus within the environment. The following quote from our paper shows that subjects did not categorize or conceptualize the acquisition of digital goods (discs) as “theft.”
In our paper we write:
Participants frequently discuss disks and reveal how they conceptualize resources. Often they articulate a positive-sum logic of copies with zero marginal cost. Farmer Almond, for example, explicitly refuses to apply the term “stolen” to discs, reasoning that “discs can’t be stolen, so everyone makes copies.”
Participants do not instruct each other to stop ingesting the discs, but they frequently prompt each other to stop ingesting the seeds. The challenge is not about the copying itself, but about competing products. As Farmer Almond explains in noSeedPR2, “Even if you gift a disc, you’re still keeping it,” highlighting that artists can reproduce discs at zero marginal cost.
If you are interested in the details of how to set up your environment and exchange mechanics, I recommend reading the manuscript. We conclude that people do not intuitively consider piracy to be a crime, contrary to the comparison desired by the Motion Picture Association of America’s “Don’t Steal Your Car” advertising campaign in the early 2000s.
Humans can claim that digital piracy is illegal and take steps to prevent it. However, it would be difficult to make individuals who commit piracy feel as guilty as if they believed they were directly harming other human beings.
This has implications for how the modern information economy is structured. Consider the model recently dubbed the “subscription economy.” Consumers are increasingly paying recurring fees for ongoing access to products/services (Netflix, Adobe software, etc.) rather than one-time purchases. Gen Zers are complaining on TikTok about feeling stuck with too many recurring payments and lacking a sense of ownership.
In a recent interview on a talk show called The Stream, I speculated that one of the reasons companies are moving to subscription models is because they don’t trust consumers with “ownership” of digital products. As people share copies of their songs and software whenever they get the chance, creators will no longer be able to monetize their work by selling the full rights to their digital products. “Everyone gets a copy.”
A feature of our experimental design is that when a disc is shared, the attribution of the person who created the disc in the first place is secure, although the creator was rarely directly compensated. Discs created by Blue players are blue, so you can tell who provided them. The reason we chose this design was to allow blue players to easily see their work being circulated.
Recent developments in information technology, namely the development of large-scale language models, mean that many idea creators are no longer credited when users report their original work on the answers they get from tools like ChatGPT. In a recent settlement, Anthropic agreed to pay for some of the training materials used to create Claude. How human creators are rewarded (or not) for providing input to AI models will shape the future landscape of ideas. Understanding how people think about these inputs reveals how we think about the process.
