Unintended consequences

THE law of unintended consequences says that almost all human actions will have at least one unintended consequence. This phenomenon, first described by the American sociologist Robert Merton, can be observed in a wide variety of situations in the world of technology.

A simple example of this is how IT departments often tell people to use passwords that aren’t easy to guess. Instead of improving security, however, this approach can actually weaken it as users scribble down their hard-to-remember passwords on scraps of paper that they leave on their desks, or worse, their monitors.

Sometimes, technology can have a profound, unintended effect. The PC revolution in the 1980s for instance, shook up the publishing industry as desktop publishing systems killed hot metal typesetting, a trade that craftsmen trained all their lives to learn.

Now we seem to be on the cusp of yet another unintended consequence that involves copyrights in a digital age.

The explosion of content on the World Wide Web in the 1990s and the growing availability of broadband access suddenly made it possible for people to share all sorts of files on the Internet, including copyrighted software, music, movies and TV shows and books.

The immediate reaction of copyright holders has been to sue. That’s why the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America are suing not only the companies that host file-sharing programs but also people who download music and movies. In a recent case, a Tucson, Arizona man was sued for downloading “Alien Vs. Predator” and “Master & Commander: The Far Side of the World” from the Kazaa file-sharing site and may have to pay up to $300,000 for his night at the movies.

While neither of these industry associations has filed similar suits here, the US software industry has been policing its members’ intellectual property rights in the Philippines for a number of years.

Despite sporadic raids on local companies, however, the Business Software Association estimates that piracy is still high at 71 percent in 2004, costing its member companies such as Microsoft “losses” (more accurately unrealized revenues) of $69 million.

This situation and the widespread availability of pirated movies on DVD have kept the Philippines on the US government’s Special 301 priority watchlist of countries that do not provide adequate protection for intellectual property rights.

A few weeks ago, American trade officials briefed journalists about an “out-of-cycle review” of the country’s status. Reviews are usually done once a year, they said, but the mid-year review would give the Philippines an extra opportunity to get off the list.

Being on the list doesn’t bring any sanctions, they explained, but getting off it is like a seal of good housekeeping that encourages American companies to invest here.

One concrete measure they were looking for was the establishment of a special court to try IPR cases, which have not prospered in the notoriously slow regular courts. In fact, one official said, out of more than 1,400 IPR complaints filed last year, only one prospered, and the sentence was suspended.

Will a stricter enforcement of IPR law reduce piracy and bring higher sales for US software companies? It might. On the other hand, the law of unintended consequences may kick in and trigger a renewed and more widespread interest in free, open source software. I’ve seen this happen on a small scale whenever the BSA launches a new antipiracy campaign. In one company I worked with, it even sparked a wholesale migration to Linux on the desktop.

Each time I look, too, open source software seems to be getting better.

If the shift were to happen on a larger scale, this would clearly qualify as what Merton would call a “perverse effect” for the BSA—where the action taken has a direct, opposite result to the one intended. But given the high cost of software and the hard times, I’m not sure this would necessarily be a bad thing.