Should we all just throw up our hands, say infringement online can never be tamed, and find some way to compensate creators even if that means forfeiture of their rights over distribution and reproduction? Some say yes. I continue to maintain that consumer-friendly legal models (sometimes enabled by rights management) and education can make the digital space a better world for both creators and their rights.

A sign of the uphill battle facing creators, however, has been laid out by behavioral economist Dan Ariely in a must-watch video before a TED conference. (Thanks to Dean Kay for passing on the reference from Ed Pettersen.) It suggests we may need a consumer honor code when it comes to creative works.

We are all predictably irrational, Ariely tells us, citing several studies he has done on cheating. Bottom line, a lot of people cheat a little bit. His lessons tell us a lot about file-sharing and how people rationalize that behavior (the very term, using the word “sharing,” is to me part of the rationalization).

It turns out that if we can still look at ourselves in the mirror and feel good about ourselves, we’re willing to bend the rules a bit and rationalize our behavior based on a number of factors.

The normal economic incentives aren’t at play here, Ariely found. We hear a lot about game theory and the Prisoner’s Dilemma in explaining why people infringe — mainly, if everyone else is doing it, I’d be a fool not to — and that certainly is a factor. But Ariely discovered people don’t tend to lay this out logically, weighing the probability of getting caught, what they stand to gain, and how much punishment they’d face. Whether the risk is high or nonexistent, the gain is low or high, and even when there is no punishment, most people cheat, but only a bit.

“We can cheat a little bit and still feel good about ourselves,” Ariely said. That may be a separate calculation — how much harm am I doing? — which comes not from economic rationality but from moral guidelines. In fact, Ariely found that when people were given the opportunity to cheat in naming all of the Ten Commandments — a task no one could do, by the way — even athiests wouldn’t cheat.

So we find that we feel being a little naughty is okay. So we feel we can download a few songs, or a few dozen, but not a ton. Sometimes people defend infringement by saying hey don’t download without authorization hundreds of songs or movies, and they even pay for music or movies sometimes. The rationalization is at work.

But why not shoplift just a few CDs or DVDs? That’s not much different, right?

Ariely’s work suggests consumers perceive a difference. People were more inclined to cheat when they earned tokens — that had real economic value — than when the cheating led directly to money. Stealing a pencil from work, he said, is easier to rationalize than stealing a dime from the petty cash drawer, even though the value is the same.

I can see that with creative works. A physical work — a CD, a DVD, a videogame cartridge — appears to a consumer to have value beyond the work. It doesn’t, really; it’s just a plastic conveyance. But it has a price tag on it, and it takes up real estate in a store. An unauthorized creative work online takes up no physical space and has no price tag on it. The same amount of creativity and sweat equity went into the work, whether in physical or online form, but it would seem we process them differently. Or I should say, those who don’t have experience with the creation of a copyrighted work of economic value see a difference. A published songwriter or novelist will correctly see no difference, but most of us aren’t published songwriters or novelists.

So where does an honor code fit in? It turns out peer pressure plays a part in our behavior. On the negative side, if someone in our circle cheats, and we know it, we give ourselves a license to cheat as well. Interestingly enough, we are far less likely to do so if the cheat is not in our circle; there, it appears we don’t wish to lump ourselves with that person. Ariely discovered this by conducting an experiment with an actor blatantly cheating and identifying himself either with or not with a group of subjects.

Conversely, when we have a sense that our peers are playing by the rules we are loathe to break them. Here he had people behaving within the norms stipulated to subjects regarding an MIT honor code. Most interesting about that experiment? MIT has no honor code. Just believing there might be one and that others were following it made the subjects behave.

I find myself in discussions with infringers quite frequently. The only consistent deterrent I’ve ever seen to infringement online is the fear of spam, viruses and trojans. That’s a negative, and not one produced by creators. But perhaps we could help people who are playing by the rules to encourage others in their circles to do the same, and even commit to an honor code, formal or informal. Peer pressure is helping to spread infringement, but it can also help reduce it.

Share this:

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 2nd, 2009 at 12:20 pm by Patrick Ross and is filed under creators, drm, internet, p2p, piracy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.