One of my themes is that we’re in a generational political crisis. And old political thesis is dying, and a new one — which I call the Open Source Thesis — is waiting to be born.
The new Thesis is based on the needs of business. In America, business has long dominated politics. Business dominated the Lincoln Coalition, business dominated the Republican Progressive era which followed it. Business got behind FDR, and business brought us Nixonism.
Through all of the last century, the business of business has been aglomeration. That is, bigger is better, and biggest is best. The concentration of all power in the hands of a relatively small number of enterprises was always seen to be in the best interests of those industries, and the country. Consolidation meant mass production for mass consumption. It meant efficiency.
It is this assumption that the Open Source Thesis challenges most directly. The need for scale, and for limiting competition to a well-heeled few, does not exist in the Internet era. Companies can grow, or decline, on their own account. They actually benefit from looser, less-corporate oriented regimes in patent and copyright. This is what encourages the creation of more intellectual goods — call it coopitition.
This plain fact explains why the Intellectual Property industries have chosen to wed themselves to the Nixon-Reagan-Bush Thesis in its time of excess. Its narrow majorities let them press for more protection, even while the interests of business as a whole cry out for reform.
A few recent TechDirt pieces illustrate this trend very well:
Clothes designers are seeking to copyright their designs in order to eliminate competition. This would slow down competition, and innovation, leading to fewer choices for clothes buyers. Designers would not only be able to protect against knock-offs, but anything which looked similar to their products. (Imagine a monopoly on boxer briefs.) The market result of this would be obvious. Not just higher prices, but lazier competitors, all ready to be gobbled-up by those closer to the source of supply.- Movie companies are repeating their mistakes in music. Once again, thanks to DRM, which maintains strict control of content by studios, we’re seeing a host of doomed start-ups. This will continue until someone offering a looser DRM scoops up the whole market, which is the real significance of Apple’s recent announcements. (It’s not about movies on your iPod.) The message of the market, again, will be monopoly, this time for Apple, in the distribution of digital video.
More competition is always better. More goods are always better. More opportunities for more players is always better. This is the message that open source business is giving.
This is the message the present leadership in the proprietary industries is ignoring. So they look to Washington for protection. Which grants it, because it needs these people in order to have a chance to stay in power.
But when they go down, all go down. By becoming partisan, the copyright industries have guaranteed reform in future Congresses. Which is a good thing. And it is through this process of generational reform that America constantly renews itself, and American business renews itself.
