Chimps and Copyrights
People don't always act rationally. If social ties are stronger, they may not ask for exact returns on their investments. If they see someone being treated unfairly, they may act — even though they're not themselves part of the unfair transaction.
There's a movement out there — soon someday to be a standard college department — to refute the assumptions of homo economicus. There are people doing studies of chimpanzees dutifully returning tokens in exchange for grapes (or not). There are people doing studies of the effects of emotion on human learning and memory. There are people wondering what effect such empirical studies may have (or should have) on law and corporate behavior.
I had a fine time this past week listening to the chimp and brain studies in particular. (We law professors have terrible graphics.) This gets interesting when intangible “property” is being examined. Do humans have an instinct to uphold property, but perhaps not to uphold intellectual property in the form of bits? Does this suggest that efforts to perfectly enforce tech mandates that hobble machines may be not only unconstitutional (because they give no opportunity for fair use) but also inhuman?
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