Internet Publishing and beyond: The Economics of Digital Information and Intellectual Property

Citation

Warner, J. (2002), "Internet Publishing and beyond: The Economics of Digital Information and Intellectual Property", Journal of Documentation, Vol. 58 No. 4, pp. 482-483. https://doi.org/10.1108/jd.2002.58.4.482.1

This collection consists of papers presented at a conference organised by the Harvard Information Infrastructure Project and held in early 1997. Papers read adequately in their written form and references indicate some updating, with most references to pre‐1997 publications but with some extending until 2000. A series of topics is covered, for instance, intellectual property, focussing on copyright not patent, models for journal sales, versioning of information goods, bundling and unbundling of information products, and the effects of not asserting protection or property rights in software. Papers are informed by economic theories and methods. Some topics are quite technically treated and would not necessarily be fully intelligible to readers without an understanding of economics or other appropriate interpretive skills. Guidance is offered for best commercial strategies for producers and sellers of information goods and these correspond to empirically observable practices.

An opening paper discusses the special characteristics of information as contrasted with other goods (J. Bradford DeLong and A. Michael Froomkin, “Speculative microeconomics for tomorrow’s economy”, pp. 6‐44). Information goods are not necessarily excludable, understood as the ability easily to exclude others from using or enjoying commodities without payment. With the ease of copying digital products, sellers cannot force consumers to become buyers and a gift‐exchange rather than purchase‐and‐sale relation may arise (pp. 10‐13). Nor are they necessarily rivals, “a structure of costs in which two cannot partake as cheaply as one, in which producing enough for two million people to use will cost at least twice as many of society’s resources as producing enough for one million people to use” (p. 9), as, again, the costs of reproduction are minimal (pp. 13‐15). Excludability and rivalry are regarded as conditions for the working of the invisible hand of the market, whereby individual interest is reconciled with public good. Markets for information goods without these characteristics may, then, not function fully in the public good.

Subsequent papers do not fully develop these themes and cover issues of economics or commerce within an Internet environment rather than an economic understanding of the Internet. One paper (Yannis Bakos and Brynjolfsson, “Aggregation and disaggregation of information goods: implications for bundling, site licensing, and micropayment systems”, pp. 114‐37) suggests more continuity with the invisible hand, and its classic contradiction or antithesis, than the opening paper indicates: the regions for which bundling and unbundling of information goods are profitable are not the same as those which are socially efficient (pp. 135‐6). Here, then, is a reproduction of the conflict between the interests of individual agents within a system and the overall good of that system. At the same time, papers offer both data and developing themes from which an economic understanding of the Internet could be constructed. For instance, the very low reproduction and distribution costs of information goods are noted and contrasted with the high costs of their first production (pp. 1, 190). The role of human labour in the first creation of information goods (implicitly acknowledged in the labour or sweat of the brow theory of copyright) and in their subsequent replication could be explored. A fundamental dialectic between the costs of direct human labour and the diminishing costs of that labour embodied in information technologies could then be detected. Yet this would form a separate, although still desirable, project.

In conclusion, the value of the collection lies in the guidance it supplies for Internet economics and commerce. Its value could be sustained and enhanced by incorporation into a continuing and fuller dialogue.