QUESTIONS:

1.make article summary of the document "Law and Technology Theory: Bringingin Some Economic Analysis" elaborate.

2. How does the author explain the significance or implications of his article? elaborate

3.Feedback/thoughts,A brief overview of the key takeaways & thoughts ? elaborate

Law and Technology Theory: Bringing in Some Economic Analysis Samuel TrosowI Abstract Bulletin of Science,Technology & Society 30(l) 3&32 20|0 SAGE Publications Reprints and permission: http://www. sagepub.ccmljournalsPermissions.nav DOI: |0.| |77I0270467609357453 http://bsrssagepubtom SAGE The author argues economic analysis needs to be explicitly included in an overall theory of law and technology. Differing approaches to the economics of information are considered, and the copyright policy environment of the |9905 is taken as an example of how the lack of substantive economic analysis resulted in poor policy-making. Keywords Economics of information, political economy, copyright, intellectual property, law and technology This essay will argue that a theory of law and technology needs to account for issues pertaining to the economics of information and information technologies, and that it needs to do so in a conscious, purposeful and critical manner. I agree with the notion that we need to work on a general theory of law of technology that views the interrelationships between law, technology, and society as interdependent; avoiding either a technological determinist account or the formalist positivist view of law as an internal system unto itself. But I worry that not enough attention is given to eco- nomic issues, which I believe a crucial component of a ill understanding of the relations between law, technology, and various social phenomena broadly construed. At the outset, I should disclaim any interest in adopting a law and econom ics approach to the problem; it is not my intention to substitute economics for technology as a key determinate. I just want to make sure that choices concerning questions of economic policy, indeed some very basic threshold questions about eco- nomic policy, are not lost under the broader guise of \"law,\" \"technology,\" or \"society.\" Toward this end, two competing theories of economic analysis are identied that are referred to as mainstream posi tive economies and critical political economy. These two ways of thinking about economies contain some inherent ten sions that are oftenplayed out in the information policymaking process that results in intellectual property and related laws. My goal is not necessarily to convince anyone that one of these two disparate world-views is better than the other, or some potential mixture; but rather of the need to take eco- nomic issues into account when thinking about the parameters of a theory of law and technology. Having said that, I should indicate that in my work I rely heavily on an economic approach grounded in radical political economy, (Trosow, 2003b) and I use this to approach inform my critique of expansionist intellectual property policies and other policies that tend to reduce intellectual goods (data, information, knowledge) and intellectual and communication technolo gies to commodities without regard to their public goods qualities. 1 will rst review the contours of these two competing theories and their underlying assumptions as well as the need to explicitly recognize the contention between these schools of thought. Mainstream positive economics starts with the assump- tion that the free market system, as it operates through a price mechanism is the ideal allocation mechanism to govern the production, dissemination and use of intellectual goods and information technologies. It is thought that such goods will be underproduced without a guarantee of sufcient market- based nancial incentives to creators, inventors, owners, and distributors. A related assumption then is that an expansion of property rights are necessary in order to protect these marketbased interests from being underproduced or under mined by acts of appropriation, especially in an era of easy reproduction. In contrast, one might reject this market- based system of allocation in favor of an approach rooted in the tradition of critical political economy. With political economy, which has historically stood at the intersection of politics, social theory, and economics, a society's prevailing reward structure and economic IUniversity ofWestern Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada Corresponding Author: SamuelTrosow, Faculty of Law and Faculty of Information and Media Studies, University ofWestern Ontario,josephine Spencer Niblett Law Building, Suite | IO, | ISI Richmond Street, London, Ontario N6A 3K7, Canada Email: strosow@uwo.ca Trosow 3| institutions and models are not taken as a predetermined given. Rather they are constantly subjected to evaluation and reevaluation especially under conditions of change. Taking a broad historical approach, it becomes evident that societies can, and often do, change their economic institutions and the manner in which they operate in response to new argu- ments. With respect to a theory of law and technology, it is also evident that economic analysis has played an important role in informing copyright, patent, and related policies and these utilitarian theories are often rooted in the search for the optimal tradeoff, or balancing, of the various interests of creators, rights holders, and users. Central to this utility max imizing is the presumed need to provide direct economic incentives to create intellectual goods, be they works of expression or works of invention. One recurring criticism of the efciency-centric, cost benet analysis mode of thinking is that certain gains and losses are not as susceptible to precise quantitative measure- ment as are others. So in the area of intellectual property, it is often argued that losses to the general public interest resulting from overprotection are not as easy to identify and measure as those concrete nancial benets accruing to the rights holders, and that this disparity creates a builtin bias in the policy process in favor of overprotection of intellectual assets. It can also act to marginalize other policy options which are not rooted in proprietary mechanisms. Proponents of an approach rooted in critical political econ- omy (Bettig, I996; Mosco, 1996; Perelman, 2002; Schiller, 2000) would argue that a deeper analysis is needed than what can be provided by models tied to market efciency assumptions. Within the critical perspective, the \"public goods\" quality of information (it tends to be nonrival in con sumption and not inherently subject to an exclusion mechanism) is seen as a good thing that presents society with many potential social benets. But within the logic of the market, the public goods nature of information is view as a market failure \"problem\" that needs to be \"cured\" so that the price mechanism can properly operate. These cures take on various forms designed to induce scarcity, promote rivalry in consumption, or employ new exclusion mechanisms. Getting back to the interdependent relationship between law, technology, and society, I am not sure Where to place the consideration of economic issues. Perhaps it is a subset of the \"society\" prong, or perhaps it is embedded in the \"technol ogy\" or perhaps even with the \"law.\" I am clear though, that economic issues need to be considered somewhere in this mix, and such difcult economic issues need to be considered in an explicit manner. Failing such explicit treatment, the underlying assumptions of one of the models continues to go unchallenged, and its values and suppositions are absorbed into the policy process even if only implicitly. A major weakness in the information/communications/ technology policy process (I will use information policy as a catch-all term that encompasses all of these and which includes substantive areas such as intellectual property, pri vacy, censorship, network policy, etc.) stems from the failure to question many \"taken for granted\" assumptions, particu- larly those about the nature of our economic system. As history shows that economic systems change over time, it is a mistake to assume one particular system as being universal and immutable. Yet much policy making fails to get beyond certain assump- tions about the superiority and inevitability of market exchange and the price system as the only possible allocative mecha- nism. Using an approach rooted in critical political economy helps correct for some serious \"blindspots\" that, at least in the case of intellectual property and other information tech- nology issues, results in the assumption that the public goods nature of information is a \"problem\" that needs to be \"cured. This \"cure\" tends to involve crafting policies that use tech- nological measures to induce scarcity, promote rivalry in consumption, and create new exclusion and control mecha- nisms, all with resulting negative social effects. Under the predominant utilitarian approach much in favor with contem porary policy makers, these social costs are often justified based on the need to foster economic incentives. On the sur- face at least, it would seem that economic analysis plays an important role in the information policy process. But when one cuts below the surface, it appears that the policy process is not quite so driven by any real economic analysis as much as by the power of economic interests. The copyright policy environment in the United States in the mid- to late 1990s provides good examples of how an unswerving faith in market exchanges combined with a \"circlethewagons\" response to the challenges of new tech nologies, resulted in some very skewed policies (Thurow, 1997). Skewed, that is, in the direction of insuring that market mechanisms could operate without the increasing pesky interference being caused by the public goods nature of infor- mation. During that period, there was a convergence of several policy initiatives, which taken together constituted an unparalleled proprietization (or maximalist drift as it was often called) of intellectual goods and services. Several measures were passed into law, such as the strong anti- circumvention and digital rights management rules in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), the Sonny Bono Term Extension Act, the N 0 Electronic Theft Act, the passage of the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act MCITA) in Maryland and Virginia, and the general ratcheting-up (Drahos, 2002) of mandatory levels of intel- lectual property protection through trade agreements. Other measures failed to secure passage, such as a continuous series of sui generis database protection bills and UClTA in all but two states. But throughout this entire process, the policy process was generally devoid of any serious under- standing of the relationship between law, technology, the economy, and society. Little effort was made to try to under stand how the technological advances on the horizon would 32 Bulletin of Science, Technology 84 Society 30( I) interact with the social, cultural, political, and economic practices. What little of what even tried to pass for economic analysis tended to focus on alarmist accounts of the dollar losses to the information and entertainment industries on account of piracy; or dire warnings of the impending demise of the domestic database industry should the problems cre- ated by the Feist case not be \"cured\" with expansive database legislation. In retrospect, we can view the passage of the anticircum vention rules of the DMCA as a highwater mark of a backward-looking maximalist agenda (Samuelson, 1999) or perhaps better stated as the lowiwater mark of progressive and future-oriented information policy making. One only need review the Electronic Frontier Foundation's (2008) \"Unintended Consequences: Ten Years Under the DMCA\" to get a sense of how ill advised this particular legislation truly was. That it was accompanied by other similarly ori- ented measures, and then exported for international adoption through an expanding series of trade agreements (Trosow, 2003a) only exacerbated the problems. It did not take long for even some of the key policy makers to have second thoughts about what they had unleashed in the 1990s as best evidenced by DMCA architect Bruce Lehman's comments at a 2007 conference at McGill University (Geist, 2007). For its part, Canada has done well in avoiding the excesses of the DMCA, but the pressure is still on to adopt similar policies. Substantive economic analysis, based on an under- standing of how people are using new technologies and how the old business models might not be the best way to foster innovation, induce creativity and enable sustainable levels of growth, will help ensure that the Canadian policy process does not fall Victim to the same traps that the US fell into over a decade ago. Perhaps in retrospect it is all too easy to say that the fail ure of the policy process was due to a lack of careful economic analysis or a clear understanding of the nature of the techno logical changes then underway. It might be that the forces pushing for these changes had simply captured the policy process at the time and no amount of economic analysis (critical or otherwise), and no amount of technological insight would have changed anything. Economic times were good, and new information and communications technologies promised an optimistic future of seemingly unlimited growth and plenty. For better or worse, today we are living under very differ ent circumstances. Some of the utopian glitter of the hi ghtech enthusiasts has worn off (well at least some of it), and we are giving some serious thought of possibility of ordering our economic system in different ways, at least insofar as imme- diate government policies are concerned. So all in all, I think now is a particularly good time to be working on the development of a general theory of law and technology (or law, technology, and society) that takes due account of a wide range of cultural, social, political, and economic factors. If the forces of technology can be used to expand access to intellectual goods rather than to devise ever more insidious exclusion, metering, and surveillance systems, it will take some conscious effort and some afrma tive information policies. Declaration of Conicting Interests The author declared no conicts of interest with respect to the authorship and/or publication of this article. Funding This project was supported by funding from the University of Western Ontario Faculty of Law. References Bettig, R. V. (1996). Copyrighting culture: The political economy of intellectual property. Boulder, CO: Westvicw Press. Drahos, P. (2002). Information feudalism: Who owns the knowledge economy? London: Earthscan. Electronic Frontier Foundation. (2008). Unintended consequences: Ten years under the DMCA. Retrieved December 1, 2009, from http://www.eff.org/wp/unintended-eonsequenees-ten-years underdrnca Geist, M. (2007). DMCA architect acknowledges need for a new approach. Retrieved December 1, 2009, from http://www .rnichaelgeist. ca/content/View/ 1 826/ Mosco, V. (1996). The political economy of communication: Rethinking and renewal. London: Sage. Perelman, M. (2002). Steal this idea: Intellectual property rights and the corporate conscation of creativity. New York: Palgrave. Samuelson, P. (1999). Intellectual property and the digital economy: Why the anti-circumvention regulations need to be revised. Berkeley Technology Law Journal, 14, 519. Schiller, D. (2000). Digital capital: Networking the global market system. Cambridge: MIT Press. Thurow, L. C, (1997), Needed: A new system of intellectual property rights. Harvard Business Review, 75(5), 95 103. Trosow, S. (2003a). Fast-track trade authority and the free trade agreements: Implications for copyright law. Canadian Journal ofLaw & Technology. 2, 135-149. Trosow, S. (2003b). The illusive search for justicatory theories: Copyright, eommodication and capital. Canadian Journal of Law & Jurisprudence, I 6, 217-241. Bio Samuel Trosow is an Associate Professor at the University of Western Ontario jointly appointed to the Faculty of Law and the Faculty of Information & Media Studies. Before coming to Western in 2001 he was a law librarian at the Boalt Hall Law Library at the University of California at Berkeley and was previously in private law practice in California. His doctoral work in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA focused on information policy issues. He maintains a website at http://samtrosow.ca where he equently comments on copyright and other information policy topics