View Thread > History of Intellectual Property in the U.S. > IP History Survey > Gift Economies

Hesse quotes Martin Luther: "Freely I have received, freely I have
given, and I want nothing in return."  This quote and other mentions
of IP as gift (both from God and to the community) led me to wonder
how we might reconeptualize the exchange of ideas within the framework
of a gift economy.  Following are some half-formed thoughts about IP
within a gift economy.

Our modern capitalist economy is characterized by the separation of
products from the people who produce them.  A consumer generally has
no idea whare the shirt he is buying from the GAP came from, let alone
who produced it.  The shirt is explicitly associated with the GAP
brand rather than the person who made the shirt.

In contrast, gift economies are characterized by a web of social
connections created by the exchange of gifts.  When I give you a gift,
it creates a debt between the producer and the consumer that forms the
basis of a social bond.  As long as the debt exists, there is a
connection between the producer and the consumer of the product.  Gift
exchanges are rarely exactly equal, so participants in a gift economy
are constantly acquiring new relations through gifts but rarely
discharging these connections completely.  Producers support
themselves by relying on this web of social exchange and on the fact
that the society will expel anyone who doesn't participate (someone
who is known not to reciprocate will soon stop receiving gifts!).

Typical anthropological examples of gift economies are small scale.
It's tough to think of how a gift economy that thrives on local
connections between producers and consumers could produce enough
quality clothing for three hundred million Americans.  The existing
mode of modern mass production requires sticking folks on assembly
lines to create mostly identical items.  The Model T made cars
affordable for everyone by turning the production of a car into a
industrial enterprise rather than the craft of a skilled worker.  And
the result was that everyone could afford the Model T.  The modern
economy has orders of magnitude more transactions than typical gift
economies do, making it pretty much impossible for individual
participants to keep track of the resulting web of debts.  We use
money in place of social relations at least partially becuase a
monetary transaction is completely atomic and thus easier to manager
in the macro.

The separation or product from producer is true of the vast majority
of products made in our economy (shirts, meat, cars, even houses), but
not all.  Most notably, it is generally not true of artistic
intellectual property.  Books, music, and movies (among other forms)
are generally strongly associated with the name of a producer or set
of producers.  Authors go on book tours.  Recording companies push
music artists as brands.  Movie producers make their actors and
directors travel the talk show circuit.  All of these actions are
specifically designed to strongly associate products with the people
who produce them (see Julia Roberts' latest movie!  Listen to N'Sync's
new album!), perhaps even to the exclusion of a description of the
product itself. In fact, producers of arts specifically try to portray
the production process as that of a craft (arts & crafts!) rather than
an automated system.  For an artistict product to be labeled the
result of an assembly line is a bad thing.  Thus, critics decry the
assembly line creation of boy bands.

This strong association between an artistic product and its producer
suggests the consideration of a more gift oriented approach to the
management of artistic intellectual property.  Since producers remain
strongly associated to their artistic products for the most part, it
is possible to reward an artistic producer who gifts his product to
the community.  In fact, such an economy already exists in fact if not
in law for recording artists.  It is well documented that the vast
majority of recording artists make nothing from CD sales due to the
structure of the recording industry.  The only profits they make are
from people who have enjoyed their music (either throu gh CDs or
through the radio) coming to their shows.  From the artist's point of
view, the distribution of CDs to the community is a gift, since the
artist gets no concrete compensation.

Public radio and TV are likewise more or less based on a gift model --
the station produces content and in return periodically asks for
donations to continue the work.  This model is essentially just a
modernized version of patronage -- stations that produce good content
are rewarded with stable source of income.  In return, most public
stations are at least relatively publicly minded -- NPR, for instance,
provides free access to its recent archive of shows.
       
Terry Fisher's alternative compensation system is another form of gift
exchange.  In his proposed world, artists would freely give their
products to the community, and in exhcange the community would
allocate to the artist some part of a pool of money depending on the
enjoyment of the gift by the community.  In fact, the meat of his
proposal is the struggle to come up with a way to manage on a large
scale the social web of debts.  An artist can't easily track the tens
of thousands of people who enjoy her work, and a consumer can't easily
track the hundreds or thousands of artists the he enjoys, so Terry
proposes an automated system that will track these relations
systematically.

Perhaps thinking along these lines will produce other proposals for
dealing with IP, especially of the artistic sort, that don't assume a
modern market economy.

Hal opens a new window of opportunity my providing real time examples.It is not the price you pay it is the value you get.
For example, would you think that one system that you may have access to will have all the songs in the database and a consumer may run a search on the database by name/name of song,/artist company/sound similiar ones in several segments etc.;and will be able to play the song they wish. Some similiar systems exist, it would be probably the best gift along together with a database of movies. Should this product be sold on subscirption basis, what would be the best distribution channel?
Please allow  me to ask where I may access Terry's proposal.
Thank you:))

Seems like what you're talking about is a semi-gift economy, where one side of the exchange is identified, while the other side is anonymous.  A writer or singer may be well known, but they cannot know the names of each of their individual fans, or give gifts specificallly to each of them.

Unfortunately this semi-gift concept looks an awful lot like the economist's public good, something which is given to everyone if given to anyone.  And the fundamental result from the study of public goods is that they are under-provided absent government intervention. Intellectual property mechanisms attempt to turn these public goods into private goods so that market forces can apply. It may be that compulsory licensing schemes like Fisher's proposal can accomplish the same thing, but as you say they struggle to provide the same signals which the market imparts automatically.