My previous post on DVD jukeboxes has prompted an interesting discussion among our commenters. There seems to be a lively difference of opinion about how useful a DVD jukebox would be, what it would look like, and who would use it. Personally, I had envisioned a high-end video device that DVD collectors would buy to help them organize their libraries. But some commenters pointed out something I hadn’t thought of: a DVD jukebox—either a set-top device or a portable one—would be a godsend to parents with small children. Children not only like to watch the same video repeatedly, but they’re also far more likely to damage a DVD. Having a sealed, rugged hard drive on which to store a few dozen of junior’s favorite movies seems like it would be extremely convenient.

Of course, I don’t really know. Maybe parents already have devices that fill this need. Maybe the devices would be too expensive or too fragile. But that’s why we have markets: so people can try things to see what works.

It’s worth remembering that new technologies almost always wind up having a “killer app” that their creators didn’t expect. The creators of the Internet didn’t have email in mind, but it was the dominant Internet application by the mid-70s. Visicalc, the first spreadsheet, wasn’t on Steve Wozniak’s radar when he built the Apple II. And Apple didn’t invent podcasting, although they were smart enough to jump on the bandwagon relatively quickly once other people did.

None of these applications could have been developed if the technologies on which they relied hadn’t already been created. But if you’d tried to explain what the Internet, the microcomputer, or the MP3 player was good for before you could create the first one, you wouldn’t have been able to make a very convincing argument. I think the same is true of the kind of products we’d see if DVD ripping were legal. I’m pretty confident that we’d have some useful new technologies, but I can’t say exactly what they’d be.

This is one of the reasons I think DMCA supporters are wrong to point to the DMCA’s triennial review process as mitigating the DMCA’s negative effect on technological progress. The triennial process requires entrepreneurs to explain in advance how a given act of circumvention will benefit society. If we’d held the inventors of the Internet, the personal computer, or the MP3 player to that standard, we might not have any of those technologies.

My post about Wikipedia and public goods prompted an interesting response from Judd Antin at Berkeley’s School of Information. He makes a number of sharp points, but let me focus on this response to the idea that free-riders don’t hurt Wikipedia:

This completely depends on what your goal is. On the one hand, sure, once you reach critical mass, the marginal cost of providing the good is zero (or near-zero), so who cares how many free-riders there are. On the other hand, there are lots of benefits to adding to the group of contributors. Wikipedia isn’t perfect – not even close. It’s wrong on a lot of topics. It’s poorly written in many places. It’s skewed heavily towards CS and popular culture, and away from things like history and literature. There’s a lot to be gained for Wikipedia by converting free-riders to contributors. And let’s not foget about the many, many systems that never get to critical mass.

Notice the background assumption in this passage that the numbers of free-riders and contributors are inversely correlated. That is, it assumes that each free-rider is in some sense detracting from the overall effort by failing to contribute. And it suggests that a better-designed institution might be able to convert more of those free-riders into contributors and thereby increase the total value of the public good that’s being provided.

The problem with this, I think, is that it gets the sign of the correlation between free-riders and contributors backwards. That is, on the Internet, the potential audience is so enormous that the most effective way to get more contributors is to increase the total number of users. For Wikipedia, there isn’t so much a “free-riding problem” as there is a “free-riding opportunity”: the more free-riders there are, the easier it will be to recruit new contributors down the road.

Antin also seems to be under the impression that I’m suggesting that we need to “rethink 100 years of theory” about public goods, which is certainly not the case. Standard arguments about public good problems work perfectly well for in cases like national defense and clean air, and I’m certainly not suggesting that we need to re-think those cases. My claim is simply that the standard model (and especially the focus on free riding) just isn’t a helpful way to think about online content creation, a public goods problem with dramatically different characteristics from clean air or national defense.

The Ashley Todd incident has given us a nice illustration of the points I made on Friday about “free-riding” and Wikipedia. As Clay Shirky notes, there’s a quasi-ideological divide within Wikipedia between “deletionists” who want to tightly control the types of topics that are covered on Wikipedia and “inclusionists” who favor a more liberal policy. On Friday, the Wikipedia page on Ashley Todd became the latest front in the battle between them. You can see the argument play out here. For the record, both Shirky and I came down on the inclusionists’ side. The outcome of the debate was that the article was renamed from “Ashley Todd” to “Ashley Todd mugging hoax,” an outcome I was reasonably happy with.

Notice how the Wikipedia process reverses the normal editorial process. If Brittanica were considering an article on Ashley Todd, some Brittanica editor would first perform a cost-benefit analysis to decide whether the article would be interesting enough to readers to justify the the cost of creating the article. If she thought it was, then she would commission someone to write it, and pay the writer for his work. Once the article was written, she would almost always include the article in the encyclopedia, because she had paid good money for it.

In contrast, the Wikipedia process is that some people go ahead and create an article and then there is frequently an argument about whether the article should be kept. The cost of creating the article is so trivial, relative to Wikipedia’s ample resources of human time and attention, that it’s not even mentioned in the debate over whether to keep the article.

To get a sense for the magnitude of this, consider that in less than 24 hours, dozens of Wikipedians generated a combined total of about 5000 words of arguments for and against deleting an article that is itself only about 319 words. The effort people (including me) spent arguing about whether to have the article dwarfed the effort required to create the article in the first place.

Not only does Wikipedia have no difficulties overcoming a “free rider” problem, but the site actually has so many contributors that it can afford to squander vast amounts of human time and attention debating whether to toss out work that has already been done but may not meet the community’s standards.

This week, one of my favorite podcasts, EconTalk, features one of my favorite Internet visionaries, Clay Shirky. I interviewed Shirky when his book came out back in April. The host, Russ Roberts, covered some of the same ground, but also explored some different topics, so it was an enjoyable listen.

I was struck by something Prof. Roberts said about 50 minutes into the podcast:

One of the things that fascinates me about [Wikipedia] is that I think if you’d asked an economist in 1950, 1960, 1970, 1980, 1990, even 2000: “could Wikipedia work,” most of them would say no. They’d say “well it can’t work, you see, because you get so little glory from this. There’s no profit. Everyone’s gonna free ride. They’d love to read Wikipedia if it existed, but no one’s going to create it because there’s a free-riding problem.” And those folks were wrong. They misunderstood the pure pleasure that overcomes some of that free-rider problem.

He’s right, but I would make a stronger point: the very notion of a “free-rider problem” is nonsensical when we’re talking about a project like Wikipedia. When Roberts says that Wikipedia solves “some of” the free-rider problem, he seems to be conceding that there’s some kind of “free rider problem” that needs to be overcome. I think even that is conceding too much. In fact, talking about “free riding” as a problem the Wikipedia community needs to solve doesn’t make any sense. The overwhelming majority of Wikipedia users “free ride,” and far from being a drag on Wikipedia’s growth, this large audience acts as a powerful motivator for continued contribution to the site. People like to contribute to an encyclopedia with a large readership; indeed, the enormous number of “free-riders”—a.k.a. users—is one of the most appealing things about being a Wikipedia editor.

This is more than a semantic point. Unfortunately, the “free riding” frame is one of the most common ways people discuss the economics of online content creation, and I think it has been an obstacle to clear thinking.

The idea of “free riding” is based on a couple of key 20th-century assumptions that just don’t apply to the online world. The first assumption is that the production of content is a net cost that must either be borne by the producer or compensated by consumers. This is obviously true for some categories of content—no one has yet figured out how to peer-produce Hollywood-quality motion pictures, for example—but it’s far from universal. Moreover, the real world abounds in counterexamples. No one loses sleep over the fact that people “free ride” off of watching company softball games, community orchestras, or amateur poetry readings. To the contrary, it’s understood that the vast majority of musicians, poets, and athletes find these activities intrinsically enjoyable, and they’re grateful to have an audience “free ride” off of their effort.

The same principle applies to Wikipedia. Participating in Wikipedia is a net positive experience for both readers and editors. We don’t need to “solve” the free rider problem because there are more than enough people out there for whom the act of contributing is its own reward.

The second problem with the “free riding” frame is that it fails to appreciate that the sheer scale of the Internet changes the nature of collective action problems. With a traditional meatspace institution like a church, business or intramural sports league, it’s essential that most participants “give back” in order for the collective effort to succeed. The concept of “free riding” emphasizes the fact that traditional offline institutions expect and require reciprocation from the majority of their members for their continued existence. A church in which only, say, one percent of members contributed financially wouldn’t last long. Neither would an airline in which only one percent of the customers paid for their tickets.

On Wikipedia—and a lot of other online content-creation efforts—the ratio of contributors to users just doesn’t matter. Because the marginal cost of copying and distributing content is very close to zero, institutions can get along just fine with arbitrarily high “free riding” rates. All that matters is whether the absolute number of contributors is adequate. And because some fraction of new users will always become contributors, an influx of additional “free riders” is almost always a good thing.

Talking about peer production as solving a “free-rider problem,” then, gets things completely backwards. The biggest danger collaborative online projects face is not “free riding” but obscurity. A tiny free software project in which every user contributes code is in a much worse position than a massively popular software project like Firefox in which 99.9 percent of users “free ride.” Obviously, every project would like to have more of its users become contributors. But the far more important objective for an online collaborative effort to is grow the total size of the user community. New “free riders” are better than nothing.

I think this misplaced focus on free-riding relates to the Robert Laughlin talk I discussed on Wednesday. I suspect that one of the reasons Laughlin is dismissive of business models that involved giving away software is because he’s used to traditional business models in which the marginal customer always imposes non-trivial costs. Companies that sell products made out of atoms would obviously go bankrupt if they tried to give away an unlimited number of their products. ” We’ve never before had goods that could be replicated infinitely and distributed at close to zero cost, and so it’s not surprising that our intuitions and our economic models have trouble dealing with them. But they’re not going away, so we’re going to have to adjust our models accordingly. Dispensing with the concept of “free riding” is a good place to start.

In closing, let me recommend Mark Lemley’s excellent paper on the economics of free riding as it applies to patent and copyright debates. He argues persuasively that eliminating “free riding” is not only undesirable, but that it’s ultimately not even a coherent objective.