Stanford Center for Internet and Society

Vivek Haldar, Semantic Remote Attestation, Ph.D. thesis, UC Irvine, 2006.

After a lobbyist-induced hiatus, it is interesting to note the various Internet gaming bills recently re-introduced in Congress, which aim to end Internet gaming by redefining what it means to gamble and/or attacking the financial elements necessary to place and collect upon a bet on-line.

The fascinating wrinkle to watch as this battle ensues is the involvement of countries like Antigua. As Reuters reports, Antigua is challenging the United States, in world bodies like the World Trade Organization, over the US' willingness to regulate and criminalize activity that is lawfully conducted, at least in some measure, outside of the United States. In the case of Antigua, this means their various Internet gaming websites, which are based in Antigua but accept bets generated from the United States.

The baseline argument for intellectual property is generally agreed to be the remedy of the public goods problem. Because ideas cost more to create than to copy, unregulated markets are thought to be incapable of sufficiently rewarding innovation. Intellectual property chooses property rights to subsidize this market failure, but there is no intrinsic reason it must choose this regime (leaving aside the moral rights issue). We could somehow subsidize these activities in different ways, but we choose property because it is thought to be the best means of achieving the given end.

While arguments supporting fair use are often confusing and, at times, contradictory, its basic structure is (or ought to be) the same: it’s a subsidy for good that the market would otherwise not sufficiently provide. Because intellectual property chooses a property regime (which has many pragmatic advantages), it creates a new market failure. This failure emerges in two respects: first, the property regime makes it practical impossible to acquire permission/licensing in certain situations, and second, it disables many forms of creation we otherwise desire. The first problem is contingent and the second is not. That is, changes in technology often mitigate the permission/licensing problem (though not completely), but no change in context will change a property owners desire to permit critique and parody.

Florian Schreiner, Michael Pramateftakis, Oliver Welter, The Role of TC in DRM Within the OpenTC Project, Indicare Monitor 2(12), February 2006.