The smell of chicken, the sound of music?

I want to share a parable of sorts that I was told as a child:

Long ago, there was this poor man.  He had a wife and two children.  He worked in a quarry for one piece of silver a day.  This was just enough money to buy a loaf of bread and some milk each day to feed his family.  Each day, he would get up at sunrise, to work at the quarry.  After six hours of work, he would get an hour off for his lunch, then he would work another six hours, before going home.  During his hour of lunch time, we would take his lunch, a small chunk of bread, to the market, and he would sit near the stall of a fried chicken vendor and enjoy the aroma of the chicken, while eating his bread.  One day, the vendor approached the man.  He pointed out that he had seen this man eating his bread near the stall, every day, for a long time.  He asked why the man chose to walk to the market and eat there each day, instead of staying at the quarry (the rock dust on his clothing made the man's occupation obvious).  The quarry worker told the vendor that he enjoyed the smell of the fried chicken while he ate his lunch.  The vendor suddenly got hostile.  He told the quarry worker that he had worked hard to make that chicken.  He demanded that the quarry worker pay him a silver piece for smelling the chicken.  The quarry worker laughed at him.  Several days later, the quarry worker was summoned to court.  The fried chicken vendor was there.  The judge informed him that the chicken vendor had accused him of theft.  When the vendor was allowed to speak, he reasoned that the quarry worker had benefited from his labor by smelling the chicken and thus owed him something of value in return.  He argued that, since the quarry worker had been smelling his fried chicken for many years, it was not unreasonable to charge him one silver piece.  He demanded that the quarry worker pay him something of equal value to the benefits received.  When the vendor was done speaking, the quarry worker was dumbfounded.  Being uneducated, he could not think of any argument against the chicken vendor, even though he was certain the vendor's demands were unfair.  An old wise man who had been observing the proceedings then stood and asked the judge if he could present a fair resolution to the case.  The judge, also unsure of the situation, agreed.  The wise man approached the quarry worker and asked him for a silver piece.  The quarry worker handed him the only silver piece he had, the previous day's pay.  The wise man held it up and asked the chicken vendor if he could see the shadow the coin cast on the floor.  The vendor acknowledged that he could.  The wise man then said, "You may take it and leave."  The judge agreed that this was a fair resolution, the silver piece was returned to the quarry worker, and the vendor left with only the knowledge gained from seeing the shadow of the coin.

This story is interesting, because nearly everyone can see the justice in the outcome.  It is immediately clear that the demands of the vendor are unreasonable.  After all, who can own a smell?  We can see the absurdity of the demand, even though the vendor is clearly correct that the smell was produced as a result of his hard work.  We can also see that the quarry worker did indeed benefit from the smell produced by the work of the chicken vendor.  The argument of the vendor is almost flawless.  Why then do we consider it unfair that he demand compensation for his work?  It is just a smell.  It is not a physical object, and it does not improve the quarry worker in any way.  The only material value that the quarry worker can get out of it is that it might make his bread more palatable.  It is possible that it gives him temporary pleasure, but this is only of value while he is actually smelling the aroma.  Once he goes back to work, the benefits are gone.  The smell of the chicken does not give any lasting benefits.  Similarly, the vendor might enjoy looking at the shadow of the coin, because he obviously likes money.  Seeing the shadow might give him temporary pleasure, just like the smell of the chicken might give the quarry worker temporary pleasure.  Just like the smell though, the vendor cannot take the shadow of the coin with him.

The moral of this story is that immaterial things do not have material value.  Immaterial things only have value as they are being experienced.  They have no value before or after the experience, only during.  Some might argue that pleasurable experiences can increase happiness.  This is true.  I would like to see someone try to put a material value on this.  The first problem with this is that it is completely subjective.  The chicken vendor smells the chicken every day, all day long.  If the pleasure from the smell of the chicken does indeed result in lasting increases in happiness, then the vendor should be the happiest man alive.  As such, it seems to me that it could be argued that the vendor is already getting the full benefits of the smell and thus should not expect compensation from anyone else.  If, however, the vendor is so sick of the smell that it results in decreased happiness, how then can we decide on a fair price?  The guy in the next stall over might also be sick of the smell, or he maybe he likes fried chicken so much that the smell will never get old for him.

What it comes down to is that the smell is just information.  Furthermore, it is information that has no inherent value.  A person who has smelled the chicken cannot use the knowledge of what it smells like to gain any profit.  Since there is no way to predict the affect of the smell on people, we cannot even claim that the smell improves happiness, and even if we could, there is no way we can accurately rate the value of the happiness it might bring.  In the story, the outcome was completely fair, because the vendor was "paid" with equally valueless information: what the shadow of the coin looked like.

Is there a way that we could make the smell more material, so that it could be considered to have material value?  First, to do this we would have to make the smell difficult to obtain.  If we cannot do this, then there is no way to assign a value.  The guy in the stall next to the chicken vendor will never pay for the smell, in any form, because he can get it for free.  In light of modern patent and copyright law, this might seem unfair to the chicken vendor, but it is actually an integral part of a free market system.  It is both unreasonable and unfair to attempt to force people to pay for a resource that is freely available.  It would be like trying to charge people for the air they breathe.  Air is required for our survival, but it cannot be assigned a value, because the supply is saturated.  The vendor would have to stop making chicken in the market, and he would have to prevent anyone else from making chicken there.  Second, he would have to attach the smell to a physical object.  This is necessary because the smell must have some means of  being transported.  Again, no one is going to pay much for it if they cannot use it as they please.  He could enclose his stall, so that no smell escapes, then he could charge a fee for entry (or, an hourly fee for being in the stall).  He would get few or no customers though, because most people are not willing to pay for valueless information, if the information will then be denied because they are no longer willing to pay for it, or can no longer afford it.  The solution to this would be for the chicken vendor to prevent anyone else from producing the fried chicken smell, then make something like scratch and sniff stickers with the smell.  Even this solution has problems though.  It clearly interferes with the freedom of other fried chicken vendors.

Now let's discuss media.  Movie theaters use one of the potential techniques I suggested for the fried chicken vendor.  They enclose their "stall" to prevent the "smell" from escaping.  Movie theaters are not much more than glorified stalls designed to allow paying customers to experience something with some of their senses, while preventing those who have not paid from experiencing that thing.  As I mentioned above though, for this to work, they also have to prevent any other "stalls" from offering the experience for free.  This is done with copyrights, in the case of movies.  Funny that it seems fair to do this for movies, but not for the smell of fried chicken.  Would it be fair to do this for fried chicken if this vendor had invented the product?  Now we have a dilemma.  Fried chicken is trivial, so it seems wrong to allow the government to impose such absurd limitations.  Movies take a lot of work to produce, so it seems more reasonable to impose these restrictions.  In fact, this particular contradiction actually exists in U.S. law.  Even though these are ultimately exactly the same thing, U.S. law forbids copyrighting or patenting of food recipes, but allows copyrighting or patenting of movies, music, writings, and a great number of other things.

Now let's look at this with reference to music piracy.  Why is music piracy so rampant in the world?  I have heard it argued that it is because people do not want to pay for things and will take anything that is available for free if they want it.  I cannot entirely discount this theory.  It is true that some people will steal if there is very low risk of getting caught.  That said, I think that most people have better ethics than that.  Most people can clearly see that shoplifting is wrong and choose not to do it, even though it is very low risk and extremely easy (in fact, most retail stores will not detain or press charges if they do not have continuous observation of a suspected shoplifter, because the person may have put the item down when not observed).  I think that music piracy is so rampant due to a combination of factors.  One factor is the freeness, and another is the convenience (bit torrent is even easier than I-Tunes).  The reason that people do not treat it like shoplifting, though, is that they do not see media piracy as the same thing as stealing.  The above story illustrates why.  Music has no material value.  Listening to a song imbues the listener with the knowledge of what it sounds like, but this knowledge has no functional value.  Music has value as it is being listened to, but not before or after.  As with the smell of the chicken, pleasure obtained during listening to music is completely subjective.  Some people love country music, while some people hate it, and this applies equally to every genre of music.  Some people do not like any music at all.  The only difference between the music and the smell is which sense is used to detect them.

So, here is where the problem lies with music:  The music industry used the scratch and sniff sticker strategy to monetize music.  They used copyright law to prevent other vendors from making the "chicken smell."  They attached the music to physical objects (vinyl records, tapes, CDs).  Then they sold the objects.  Using this strategy allowed them to include the perceived value of the music in the price of the physical object.  The internet made the inherent flaw in this strategy evident.  This strategy is not a free market strategy.  It relies on government intervention to work.  The problem is that the government only has so much resources, and further, it is not the government's responsibility to identify those who violate copyright, only to judge those that are accused.  The internet has allowed a huge number of unregulatable "vendors" to distribute the "smell" at no cost and in an extremely convenient way.  Since the media has been disassociated from the physical object, it is nearly impossible to regulate effectively.  The media is now free (as in freedom) information.  It is not chained to physical objects.  This means that music has become like the smell of the chicken, except that now it has a much more effective mode of transportation.

Let's look at data as a recipe for something (since it is really nothing more).  A computer program is a list of instructions, just like a cooking recipe.  An mp3 file is a more abstract recipe for generating sound.  Note that it is not the sound itself, it is just digital information that can be translated into a list of instructions for generating sound.  Similarly, digital movies are nothing more than a list of instructions for generating sound and video.  The only difference between this and cooking is that cooking requires that physical ingredients be consumed.  (Do not, however, think that this is a justification for treating them differently.  A patent is not much more than a list of instructions for a process, or for building and using a device, and exactly like a recipe, when building a patented object physical ingredients are consumed.  Like recipes to copyright, patents have an exception: mathematical algorithms cannot be patented, even though it could be argued that any process described in a patent can be boiled down to a simple mathematical algorithm.)

Anyhow, what this comes down to is that media piracy is so rampant because most people recognize the hypocrisy in charging for a sound or an image that has no lasting value.  This provides an ethical conflict that allows the desire for free and convenience to have highest priority.


I also want to cover an argument against my assertion that people will not pay for valueless information unless they are free to use it as they please.  First, there are always exceptions.  Not everyone has good judgment (and, our culture encourages poor judgment in this area).  Second, the obvious argument that people pay for video games on a subscription model is not a valid argument to claim that people will pay for valueless information.  Video games have repeatedly been shown to have educational value.  As interactive products, games also tend to continuously provide information (unlike a movie or song, games typically provide much more information, and well made games often provide different information each time they are played).  In fact, the interactive nature of games often creates a feedback loop that improves skills at the same time as encouraging the user to continue playing the game.  This leads to the third part, this does not apply to addictive substances or media.  Plenty of people pay subscription fees for pornography, even though the information has no value (and often has long lasting negative value).  This is because it causes dopamine addiction.  People acting on addictions cannot be considered competent customers.  (In some cases, games can also fall into this category.)

Lord Rybec