Trond, I very much agree with you about the consequences of the growing importance of the "knowledge-content" of the products of modern technology. The very same intuitions you had aroused my interest in the questions of intellectual property rights. I didn't react when you posted your ideas about all this in PKT because I really don't have much more than "intuitions". I would put my intuition that way: The growing importance of knowledge and information creates *objective* conditions which are favorable to more socialized forms of ownership of means of production (manely: knowledge). Private ownership of knowledge/information ostensibly becomes a fetter to the technological and economic progress: - The monopolies which are granted by intellectual property rights create artificially high development costs for new technologies based on protected technologies. In many cases only very few big enterprises can afford these (artificially high!) costs. In a society where technological information would be for free (or at least cheaper) development costs would be much lower - spurring technological progress. (That's clearly one of the "mysteries" behind the success-story of Japan and the NICs.) - Given new information-technologies - which lead to practically neglectable costs of copying and transmission of information - *exclusion* from information (the precondition of effective intellectual property rights) becomes more and more difficult, leading to ever increasing dead weight (social) losses in form of costs for the enforcement of property rights, new encryption technologies and so on. I don't believe in historic determinism. So these objective conditions won't translate automaticly into a drive towards social ownership of at least knowledge based means of production. Capitalists aren't interested in technological and economic progress per se, but in their private profits. The successful presure which especially the US exerts on developing nations, the inclusion of TRIPs in the new GATT treaty, clearly show that capitalists know what's going on and that they have enough power to protect their threatened interests. So I'm perhaps less optimistic about all this than you. I rather see intellectual property rights as a new battle field with growing importance. But a battle field where "socialists" have a great advantage. Even by very mainstream standards private ownership is not efficient. As far as information is concerned capitalism clearly isn't any longer a "progressive" force. And linking all this to environmental concerns it's quite easy (that's my experience) to convince people that free information, free knowledge would mean a major step forward: There's a force of production and of economic progress which in a very real sense doesn't cost anything in terms of destruction of our environment or in terms of the consumption of resources. Andreas Goesele PS 1.) I wrote a paper on "Intellectual Property in the Context of the North South Conflict" which I'm planing to put into the "incoming" directory of the pkt/pen-l archives. There are three caveats: It's in German. It's in WordPerfect 5.1. It's written for a not-so-progressive journal, so it's much more cautious than what I wrote here. Any comments are welcome. PS 2.) I would like to second Peter Dorman's contribution: Of course we of the left don't have all the answers. As far as the dissemination of knowledge is concerned clearly private ownership is inefficient. As far as the creation of knowledge is concerned clearly private ownership leads to artificial costs. But there's still much to think about the efficient organization of the creation of knowledge/information if we take (as we should) the question of incentives seriously. Bill's non-monetary incentives provide *part* of the answer, as I see it.
