A peculiar thing happened a few weeks ago. On March 22nd, thousands of JavaScript developers were faced with broken builds and failed installations due to a missing piece of code, 11 lines in length. Much like the events in the Day the Earth Stood Still, a single superior force brought the much larger but far more primitive press of humanity to a grinding stop. But unlike that iconic movie, the motive in the internet crisis wasn’t moral but rather economic (although there is certainly a moral aspect to this story as well – as there is in all things economic).
The timeline of events is disclosed in detail elsewhere. The key features for the sake of this argument are simply these. There exists a common JavaScript code repository called NPM which dubs itself as the place to “Build amazing things” and describes itself as:
One such developer, by the name of Azer Koçulu, had provided to all of humanity, 250 JavaScript Modules. Of these, the reader must focus on only two of them. The first was named kik, which is also the common short form name of Kik Messenger, a messaging app for smartphones. The second, called left-pad, was the 11-line piece of code that brought much of the internet to its knees and opened lots of new horizons in the ownership of intellectual property.
As might be predicted by the common name, a clash developed between Azer and Kik’s corporate office. The latter requested that Koçulu surrender the name of the module since they legally owned the trademark. When he refused their less than polite request, they went to NPM to force the issue and, when NPM management complied, Koçulu unpublished all his modules. The resulting elimination of “left-pad” broke the systems that depended on it, precipitated NPM’s unprecedented step of restoring “left-pad” (so-called un-unpublising), and launched a controversy that is likely to become a watershed event discussed for decades to come.
Now I’m not going to weigh in on the various legal points that have been raised, such as did Kik have the right to the name, did NPM have the right to give it away or to un-unpublish the “left-pad”, or did Koçulu have the right to unpublish the code in the first place. As interesting as these questions are there is a much more interesting question. Was “left-pad” a public good?
To appreciate this question one must first understand how economists place goods into the four categories of private, club, common-pool resources, and public. Each good is judged in terms of two attributes: excludability and rivalry.
A good is termed excludable if a person or entity possesses legal rights that enable them to prevent others from using it. A good is non-excludable if no one either possess such a right or if the right is effectively non-enforceable. The term open is synonymous with non-excludable in what follows.
A good is rivalrous if the use of the good by one entity precludes its use by all others. A good is non-rivalrous if it can be used by many entities without harm being done to any of them. The term shareable is synonymous with non-rivalrous in what follows. Note that only intangible things likes ideas and concepts can be truly shareable but that in many cases some goods are so much closer to shareable than not that the idealization is useful.
The four possible combinations of excludable/open with rivalrous/shareable give the four categories of goods:
- Private good - excludable and rivalrous
- Club good – excludable and shareable
- Common-pool resource – open and rivalrous
- Public good – open and shareable
These definitions are abstract and difficult to think about so a common tool is to construct a 2x2 table with instances of each type. Common tangible goods can be placed in such a table and on such version is
The next step is to create an analogous table for digital goods and then, using the resulting categorization, conclude in which of these cells the innocuous but vital “left-pad” module should live.
Adapting the 2x2 table to cyberspace is a bit more challenging than tangible goods precisely because of the blurred lines that exist in the digital world between ownership and right-to-use. For example, when one buys a videogame, one is really buying the right-to-use the game on a game console and not the game itself. Unlike Monopoly, where the owner really owns the matter/hardware that goes into the game and can transform it as he sees fit, the owner of Halo really owns the ability to interact with that particular copy of the game he purchased. The situation is further complicated by the fact that there is a fundamental difference between the embodiment of the game (the pit and blanks on the DVD, the DVD itself, the game console, etc.) and the code that makes up the game.
Nonetheless, after some thought, it is possible to come up with good examples in three of the four categories; the common-pool resource being the only one that seems to lack a digital analog. One such instance is
The only step that remains is to determine where in this table “left-pad” finds a home. The natural first reaction is that “left-pad” is a public good; an opinion mostly endorsed by Nadia Eghbal. But this question isn’t really well-defined enough to answer.
Certainly, the code concept itself, taken as an abstract entity, is a public good. Koçulu neither claimed copy-right nor did he regulate (exclude) use. But the embodiment that he maintained on NPM was more like a club good, where for much of its life the club was everyone. Then after the debacle with Kik, Koçulu simply redefined the club to be no one. The delicate point here being between the particular copy or instance of the code and the ownership of the code itself.
As time progresses and society, in general, and economists, in particular, have a chance to analyze the fallout from this event and others like it, I suspect that whole new modes of thought will have to be developed about who owns what in digital realm.