Well I’ll take the first plunge.
First, many thanks to Terry and the folks at the Berkman Center for organizing and inviting us all to the ACS workshop. I very much enjoyed both the stimulating intellectual exchange and meeting the other participants. Many thanks to John and Terry for making our continuing exploration possible.
Here is what I took away from the workshop on the issue of gaming:
- Any ACS system must assume widespread incentives to game the system. We cannot rely on social norms against gaming. The one exception might be with respect to mainstream organizations, like the Harvard Alumni Assn, that would not want to be seen to deliberately siphon off income from creators and copyright industries.
- Gaming cannot be eliminated, but there are ways to minimize its impact. In addition to social norms of mainstream organizations, these include legal sanctions against out and out fraud and, in essence, limiting each consumer to one vote. The latter could be accomplished by including a blind signature on each device that meters consumer use, which would limit the number of hours or uses that are metered. (Although Ed Felten and Eugene Volokh seemed to disagree, I also continue to think that random sampling, whereby any given user would have a small chance of actually being counted, would in fact dissuade many gamers, even if, statistically, the large payback from actually being sampled would make it rational to game.)
- Current systems for approximating consumer valuation for creative works, like ASCAP sampling and Nielsen ratings, are highly imprecise.
- Especially as compared to our current highly imprecise sampling regime, it would not be insurmountably difficult to limit the impact of gaming sufficiently to provide a reasonable and workable approximation of consumer valuations for the purpose of distributing levy proceeds.
Comments?
Neil Netanel
Arnold, White & Durkee Centennial Professor of Law
University of Texas School of Law
Visiting Professor, UCLA School of Law (2003-04)