Excludability

In economics, a good or service is said to be excludable when it is possible to prevent people who have not paid for it from having access to it, and non-excludable when it is not possible to do so.

Examples

An architecturally pleasing building, such as Tower Bridge, creates an aesthetic non-excludable good, which can be enjoyed by anyone who happens to look at it. It is difficult to prevent people from gaining this benefit (although people have tried, by forbidding amateurs from taking photographs of certain sites ^[1]).

A lighthouse acts as a navigation aid to ships at sea in a manner that is non-excludable.

The ease and availability of file sharing technology has made many forms of information, especially music, movies, e-books, and computer software non-excludable. If the content producers want to make their works excludable, they have sometimes resorted to either "Copy protection" schemes, or lobbying for the kinds of laws they prefer, in order to prevent one owner of a copy, from being able (or, from being allowed) to share with others. On the other hand, some content producers—(the authors and editors of Wikipedia, for example)—welcome (and even hope for) widespread sharing. The Free Software Foundation and others have noted that "Copy protection" schemes can often create inconvenience for authorized users, while failing to prevent "unauthorized" sharing by others. Those who want to share copy protected information or files, sometimes use technological methods to bypass the copy protection, and/or ignore certain laws.

An excludable good could be a magazine; people who do not pay for the subscription are mostly excluded from obtaining a copy directly from the publisher. Another case in point is a pay television subscription.

References

1. ^ "Millennium Park Photography: The Official Scoop". http://chicagoist.com/2005/02/17/millennium_park_photography_the_official_scoop.php. Retrieved 2010-05-05. 

See also

	Excludable	Non-excludable
Rivalrous	Private goods food, clothing, cars, personal electronics	Common goods (Common-pool resources) fish stocks, timber, coal
Non-rivalrous	Club goods cinemas, private parks, satellite television	Public goods free-to-air television, air, national defense

• Rivalry (economics)
• Free rider problem
• Panoramafreiheit

Further reading

• Excludability, in: Joseph E. Stiglitz: Knowledge as a Global Public Good, World Bank. Last accessed 29 May 2007. Copy at the Internet Archive