Motivation

Jonathan,

My head is swimming with all the interesting information in your paper. I certainly came away with a stronger understanding of deliberation. However, I was wondering about the strength of some of your claims. You treat preferences as endogenous to politics – shaped by both the act of deliberation and deliberative procedures. But keep going back in time, and you will never reach some “neutral” starting point or a baseline, as you say. Why shouldn’t the same effect hold true for all political decision making, not just those that are the products of deliberation? If all decision making has the same problem, then deliberation may be no less legitimate than other forms of decision making. In fact, there may be many reasons to believe that it is more legitimate – for example, if it allows for the opportunity for manipulations and distortions to be revealed, which may lead them to lose some of their force. From the perspective of the law then, what is the reason to stop treating deliberation as legitimate in some way?

Steve,

Interesting paper. The first couple parts of the paper some strong conceptual points. I had a couple questions about the interventions that you suggest. First, I was wondering how a default rule of compulsory licensing with a fee would send a message of connectedness. Wouldn’t the introduction of money into the relationship and more importantly the coercive aspect of the relationship destroy the sense of connectedness? My second question is about the proposal to move the public domains into smaller communities. If the public domain is open to all, how can it be moved to a smaller scale without excluding people – which would seem counter to the ethos?

David,

I found the central normative claim of your paper quite provocative. You take a central point in this course – that fewer external sanctions can produce more cooperation under the right circumstances – and spin it on its head. Your paper claims instead that greater external sanctions – criminal instead of civil – should produce more cooperation. A couple questions. How do we know that criminal sanctions would not chill innovation? Moreover, why are you sure that companies would not file complaints of willful infringement with the Department of Justice at the same rate they allege it in complaints? They can get the government to pick up the cost of doing the investigating and prosecuting, and all they have to do is file a complaint. It seems like a great way to pass more of the cost onto the state and not the private parties.

Mbabazi,

Really interesting psychological and ideological insights into graffiti artists. I was wondering how approved and commissioned murals fit into the picture. At Trader Joe’s on Memorial Ave there is a big mural of Cambridge and Cambridge residents. It is clearly meant to portray the store as part of that community. Other times I have seen graffiti that was not approved or commissioned but that looked attractive enough that community members viewed it approvingly. Now that graffiti art has been around for several decades, how have these expressions of approval from outside the graffiti subcultures affected the motivations of graffiti artists?