GOV2.0: Napsterize Education

In my last article, we began a discussion of GOV2.0. Over the next couple weeks, I’ll sketch some sexy details. Commenters, keep tossing out your ideas.

Tea Partiers! Here’s how to save every state budget. Let’s hoist our pirate flag high.

In New York City a movie ticket costs $15 – about $7.50 a hour. Three months later it is out on DVD, and you can own it for $15. Twenty eight days later, you can put it, along with thousands of other movies, in your Netflix queue for $9 a month. Eighteen months later, it plays on HBO, along with a great show about having multiple wives, for $10 a month.

Or, if you prefer, you can download a watchable copy of the movie the day it comes out for free… because a lone pirate secreted a HDcam into a theater and jacked into the hearing impaired outlet in his seat.

The movie cost $150MILLION to make. The hooligan did it for free.

And oh, by the way, if your kid is still buying music, you might sit her down for a talk about the virtues of sharing.

For the rabid capitalist, it is crucial to recognize that property rights emerge from the scarcity of the atomic. There is value in creative ownership, but let’s be rational… if we could copy land, food, and oil, the concept of “ownership” would be radically different; there would be riots in the streets if limits on these staples were artificially enforced.

Meanwhile, Wikipedia has this entry called “Public Ivy,” showing plenty of state funded gold plated colleges to plunder.

Some more napkin math: the average tuition per student at an out-of-state Public University is $18,548. Assuming 15 hours of classes for 32 weeks (two semesters) – a single hour (one lecture) runs about $38; that’s 5X what an hour of a $150Million Hollywood blockbuster costs you.

You know where this is going, right? Why in the bejesus are we not paying kids to record their professors’ lectures and put them online so we can steal them for our own use?

Why haven’t all these lectures been legally placed in the public domain, so that Internet companies can build businesses persuading kids to skip school, save money, and graduate online?

Without getting too deep into webco start up jargon, I think everyone groks the basics of evergreen content. In this context, we’re talking about video files that do not decrease in value as they grow older (like movies).

Example: Lecture #11 of Professor Warstler’s ECON204: “Public Goods” is the same every damn semester. And yet, twice a year, 100 new students are packed into a room to listen to him say the same damn thing for $3800.00 per hour. It rarely changes, but next year, kids will pay even more to hear him say it again. Even crazier, there’s another professor 250 miles away teaching the same class.

In web economics, this situation is GOLD. Because unlike a Hollywood blockbuster or “Chocolate Rain” that gets all its action right after its launch, a single recording of Warstler’s ECON204 lecture can be improved endlessly and watched by millions of people over the next twenty years.

If you have any nagging doubts, think of the glorious new private sector businesses that can be built around this public domain content!

Imagine online colleges where you only pay a couple of bucks when you have a question or need to have a test graded. Imagine college that comes free when you buy a new $500.00 55″ LCD TV at Wal-Mart. Imagine being able to test similar lectures from hundreds of professors to see which one is best at conveying information to visual learners, kids from the ghetto, or you when you are sixty. Imagine needing only a fifth/tenth/twentieth of the college professors to teach three times as many students.

The truly talented faculty who survive will be high paid rock-stars with staffs. Like Paul Krugman without a beard or inflation fetish.

Sure, if your kid needs to have the good old college experience and put himself (and you) $150K+ in debt, then by all means you can send the lad off to the glories of keggers and Marxist re-education.

But if he’s an over-achiever, he can start taking college courses about whatever interests him when he’s in ninth grade, or working as a convenience store clerk at night, or sitting in jail, or if he just doesn’t understand the shitty professor you are PAYING for him to sit in class with right now.

Why, in a copyable economy like public education, doesn’t every child deserve the lessons of the world’s premiere teacher in every subject?

This information wants to be free. And the best way to make that happen is to make it legal to copy and profit from the improvement of it. Moreover, it is a public good. Our tax dollars pay for it. It is ours. We want it hocked for pennies on every street corner. There is no better example of Schumpeter’s Creative Destruction.

National and state Republicans, get cracking. Promise to make in-class recordings in every public university legal and distributable under a Creative Commons license that allows commercial application.

In ten years time, every state budget will be in balance. The very best video lectures will improve daily, educate millions online, and thousands of liberal academics will have to go get real jobs.

I kid you not.

A small change to your state’s rules about recording in the classroom, can save your family thousands in taxes and hundreds of thousands in tuition.

Demand it.