A Tragedy In 3 Acts: Property Rights, Video Game Consoles, and Our Natural Resources
This blog post was originally going to focus on a diffusion model for people abandoning cities due to the collapse of mass transit (you can read the WIRED article here). However, after the property lecture I was struck by a “cow” of a problem I had read about over the weekend: video game consoles.
The post focuses on this article from ArsTechnica and relies on this article from WIRED magazine.
Copyright Law
This past Saturday, ArsTechnica published a deep-dive into the complicated realm of copyright, repairs, and video game consoles. To break down the piece let’s start with a simple question: what happens when your computer breaks down?
Your first step is usually to get it repaired. Whether you take it to Best Buy or your local technician’s shop, your computer will be running nearly good as new.
You might assume the same situation applies to video game consoles, as they are essentially specialized computers. But because video game consoles are specialized, they are categorized independently from general purpose computers by U.S. copyright law. The company that writes the software for these consoles holds the exclusive right to “unlock” it and repair it, if they have applied what are known as “digital locks”. “Digital locks” are simply software-based mechanisms which are meant to verify who is performing a repair or verify that only original parts can be used with the systems.
As video game consoles have evolved from the Atari to the Xbox to the PlayStation 4 these locks have been gradually and consistently introduced and made more complex. This means that “hackers” who (illegally) repair their consoles by bypassing these “locks” face increasing obstacles and repair companies are unable to do anything because circumventing these “locks” is illegal and they can’t afford to tamper with them and risk their business.
You may own a console and have property rights for the physical box, but U.S. property rights now effectively give private ownership to the original maker over how it can be repaired. This doesn’t have to be the case, as ArsTechnica argues, since every 3 years the Library of Congress is empowered to reevaluate who retains ownership of the “digital locks” and decide whether specialized computers like video game consoles and hospital equipment can be repaired by anyone other than their manufacturer.
For video game consoles, the Library of Congress has yet to make that determination. Thus begins the Tragedy of the Commons.
The Environmental Tragedy of Commons
In the traditional Tragedy of the Commons scenario we have a plot of grazing land, with c capacity and x cows attempting to graze. A farmer, by default, derives c – x revenue per cow and x(c – x) total revenue. Without any property rights, the land is exhausted because farmers only have an incentive to continuously add cows to the land to get more revenue. Eventually, they will exhaust the land and destroy it. In video games the finite resources are less apparent, but they lurk beneath the sleek black plastic of every box: precious metals, batteries, and more.
To produce a specialized computer like a video game console you need to collect a vast array of precious and rare metals from across the globe, and as we produce more and more electronics we will struggle to keep up with the demand. If profit is the only motive companies will eventually exhaust the supply because new consoles and new tech is what makes them the most revenue. These companies make little to no money repairing old ones, and thus only have an incentive to bring out the next generation.
In short, shifting to a new generation of consoles is an environmental nightmare, per WIRED. These consoles’ rare-earth metals, plastics, and batteries are eventually chucked into landfills or poorly recycled after an artificially short lifespan, contributing to continuous environmental disaster and destruction year by year. Our environment and the metal mined for these consoles are vast resources but not infinite and we are poised to find out what happens when we exhaust them. Because video game consoles exist in generations, imagine that when our farmers exhaust an initial pasture they get a new, greener pasture. There is still a finite supply of say, fertile soil, but the green grass keeps coming back generation after generation. This is the scenario we find ourselves in. At the surface, our grass is green but it is leaching nutrients from the soil until one day… there isn’t enough left to grow.
How do we fix this?
An Incentive To Repair
Many stories will immediately point to the right to repair, which generally gives consumers or commercial stores a right to repair consoles and thus extend their immediate life times. The Library of Congress, remember, has the power to enact this change of rights every 3 years. This is a genuine solution to a massive problem, but I’d argue we can’t stop there to truly solve our Tragedy of the Commons. Even if people have the right to repair, companies can easily make their digital locks so complex it is incredibly hard for people to actually execute the repairs. Instead of vesting the stewardship of these consoles and their environmental impact solely in private ownership, we should deploy public ownership – for the “right price”. If we charge a company for every console that is thrown out and charge them even more for every console that is thrown out for being unrepairable we can start to create a business incentive to invest in recycling and repair avenues.
Let’s set up this formula…
Assume c is our total capacity to “have an environment that works” and “the amount of rare-earth metals we have”. Assume xn is the amount of consoles a company intends to sell per generation and that a company wants to sell an equal amount of consoles every generation (i.e. companies want every player to buy the latest and greatest)
Given the transition from the Playstation 4 to the Playstation 5:
(x4 + x5)(c – (x4 + x5)) = 0 or (2x)(c – (2x)) = 0
2xc – 4x ^ 2 = 0
2c – 8x = 0
x = c / 4
We can see that the optimal number of consoles is c/4, but unfortunately as we’ve seen above the optimal solution for society cannot occur without some form of ownership. To represent our novel form of ownership let’s introduce two new terms:
f(1)r and f(2)t
Where r is the number of trashed repairable consoles and t is the number of trashed consoles which are not repairable and f(1) and f(2) are our respective fees. If we apply these pressures to our equation:
c – c / 4 – f(1)r – f(2)t = 0
f(1)r + f(2)t = (3/4)c
Here, the public owner must make the fees for the not-recycled or trashed consoles steep enough that they cost the companies approx. three quarters of our total capacity. The trickiest part of this solution might be that consumers aren’t likely to adopt it unless they have buy-in. So I’d propose paying consumers a portion of these fees when the companies refuse to recycle or allow repairs of their consoles. The bill for paying the consumer is then forwarded on to the company as a fee and suddenly we have a cycle of public ownership that encourages responsible private ownership of both the hardware and software for video game consoles.