What Makes Something "Better Than Free"?

Stanislav_J writes "In a very thought-provoking essay entitled 'Better Than Free' Kevin Kelly, Senior Maverick at Wired, probes the question of how thoughts, ideas and words that are so constantly, easily, and casually copied can still have economic value. 'If reproductions of our best efforts are free,' he asks, 'how can we keep going? To put it simply, how does one make money selling free copies?' He enumerates and explains eight qualities that can, indeed, make something financially viable — 'better than free.' A very timely article in light of the constant discussion of RIAA/piracy/copyright issues."

Comments

chocolate

[Timesprout]

nuff said

Re:chocolate

[iamthetru7h]

if it don't come with either beer or bacon and is 'free' it's just not 'merican'

Re:chocolate

[mrxak]

Better than free is getting paid to do or get something you want.

was actually performed by ... ?

[opencity]

Do people actually make imitation Grateful Dead live tapes? Some bar band (or Phish?!?) and claim it's the Dead? The mind boggles.

All of the points make sense but he doesn't address that, while he is describing value, it many cases it is valued much less measured in dollars (OK, Euros) than previous, say 20th century, media value. Sure you'll pay for the immediate delivery, I do with iTunes, but I almost never buy the whole album/disk/collection. Personalization is fine in the future but where is the great employment engine in the here and now? While media is worth a lot less money, real estate, food and energy will only continue to rise. Can 21st century media provide anywhere near the level of employment that 20 century media did? That sure is a lot of adsense.

Re:was actually performed by ... ?

[CRCulver]

Do people actually make imitation Grateful Dead live tapes? Some bar band (or Phish?!?) and claim it's the Dead?

A lot of files on P2P networks are mislabeled. You'll see a file going around titled "Cocteau Twins - The Thinner the Air (Massive Attack remix)" which Massive Attack didn't actually have anything to do with (probably just some teenager adding beats onto the song with his home computer).

In the print publishing world, however, deceptive labeling is common. Think about the $2 "Webster's Dictionaries" you can get at a supermarket. They are paperbacks often printed on newsprint and haven't been updated in decades. Not an appealing product, but the presence of the freely usable term "Webster's" gives them a shine of reputability. However, the real standard American English abridged dictionary is something like Meriam-Webster's Collegiate and people might want to spend a little more if they know they are getting the right thing.

Re:was actually performed by ... ?

[NewAndFresh]

Do people actually make imitation Grateful Dead live tapes? Some bar band (or Phish?!?) and claim it's the Dead? The mind boggles.

You have a point about the article, but I think you're harping on a tiny detail. (Although I have downloaded plenty of mislabeled music -which is probably the point he was trying to make)

All of the points make sense but he doesn't address that, while he is describing value, it many cases it is valued much less measured in dollars (OK, Euros) than previous, say 20th century, media value.

Yeah, but you can't go back in time.

Sure you'll pay for the immediate delivery, I do with iTunes, but I almost never buy the whole album/disk/collection

You paid something. (which I think is the point)

Personalization is fine in the future but where is the great employment engine in the here and now? While media is worth a lot less money, real estate, food and energy will only continue to rise. Can 21st century media provide anywhere near the level of employment that 20 century media did? That sure is a lot of adsense.

It turns out that most artists actually profit from piracy. http://torrentfreak.com/why-most-artists-profit-from-piracy/
And if you mean the industry, well think of how the icemen felt when the refrigerator was invented?

Re:was actually performed by ... ?

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to spend $1000+ per year on CDs and DVDs, until I discovered The Pirate Bay. Now I pay nothing. I can easily afford to pay the money, but I choose not to, because why should I pay for something that other people (who don't work as hard as I do) can get for free?

I don't begrudge paying the artists, but I DO begrudge being the only sucker who does.

I am the future, and I'll keep on doing it until it becomes too difficult or risky to bother.

Re:was actually performed by ... ?

[Anonymous Coward]

and claim it's the Dead?

It's not Dead until Netcraft confirms it.

Re:was actually performed by ... ?

[Foobar of Borg]

And if you mean the industry, well think of how the icemen felt when the refrigerator was invented?

Now, if they only had a large representative organization (say, the Ice Kooler Executives of America), then they could sue all the "ice pirates" for making ice so easily available to everyone and demand compensation and punitive damages to make sure they never do that again.

Re:was actually performed by ... ?

[dmitri3]

The fact that you're doing what the crowd is doing doesn't mean you're any better, just worse. Oh, so you're afraid to be a sucker? To be left out of the cool community? Well, you're doing it wrong! The point of downloading music, is that if you like it afterwards, you will go to the group's concert or donate directly to the artist, so as to avoid 80%-90% of revenue going to some major label. Don't tell that all people who download are leechers.

Re:was actually performed by ... ?

[opencity]

> And if you mean the industry, well think of how the icemen felt when the refrigerator was invented?

Sure or the hat makers when people stopped wearing hats. There is actually more money around for, especially, the low end artists in music at least, but the industry as a whole, I mean media not just music, is losing value (if you measure that in cash) and less value = less jobs.

Re:was actually performed by ... ?

[opencity]

> A lot of files on P2P networks are mislabeled.

A friend predicted, was not advocating, that poisoning would be the labels great defense back in the 90s.

While I read the article quick and late he was specifically mentioning Grateful Dead live tapes. Perhaps it's too obscure but counterfeiting a Dead live tape is a strange concept to me.

Re:was actually performed by ... ?

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to spend $1000+ per year on CDs and DVDs, until I discovered The Pirate Bay

Doesn't it feel good?
Screw them industry lamers. Up Pirate Bay!

Re:was actually performed by ... ?

[NewAndFresh]

Sure or the hat makers when people stopped wearing hats.

I do miss hats.

Re:was actually performed by ... ?

[opencity]

Support your local hat maker. Oh, wait ...
Support Chinese hat makers, or rather Chinese industrial hat factories.
Hey, maybe that is local. Ni Hao!

Re:was actually performed by ... ?

[flyneye]

This has been going on for years.
The earliest example I can recall is buying a generic looking "bargain" 8-track tape of a Led Zep album and instantly upon listening to it in my '73 Plymouth Duster,knowing it was not Zep I was hearing but some copy band that was way too clean with nearly no soul at all.Fortunately I was able to trade it for admission to a "Kegger" that eve.
The Television abounded with ads for Vinyl Albums with 40 greatest hits on one platter turning out to be underpriced garbage with no album art,bad sound,skips,scratches and a funny smell.Many times these weren't by the original artist.I won't mention any guilty party names but their initials were K-Tel.

Re:was actually performed by ... ?

[opencity]

yeah but the Dead ... live? On a p2p? Too weird.

Makes me want to fire up the protools and hack out a 'recently discovered' Mountain Jam with Duane dueling with, let's say, Stevie Wonder.

OK, I'm off topic now. I'll stop.

I know!

[Frogbert]

Something that is not only free but comes with a complementary reach-around.

Simple

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

A price. That cannot be avoided (ie piracy kills the value of objects and ideas).

Wait you probably think I'm joking, but I'm not. How do people think about value ? Well simple, they think in terms of opportunity costs. All other value estimates are derivatives of this basic principle. That it generates jealousy for example, is a good thing. In 1905 a car that went 40 km/h was an object that had no equal in value. In 2005 a car that goes 120 is worth basically nothing (what ... a 10-year old one that does this goes for ... $500 ?)

Re:Simple

[vertinox]

A price. That cannot be avoided (ie piracy kills the value of objects and ideas).

Artists have been making work for centuries without often being compensated for their work and many eventually dying in abject poverty only to be recognized for their talents years after their deaths.

One could argue that if one could not make money off of art then only those really interested creating art "for the sake of art" would be doing so. If copyrights went away tomorrow, there would still be musicians playing on the street corner, photographers taking pictures, painters making paintings, and writers writer stories. Now granted there will be a lot less of them, but people still desire to create work for the reward in itself rather than a monetary return. That may be a good thing or bad things depending on how you view it but I think aesthetics will enjoy the fact corporations are no longer actively creating art and the average joe will probaly not like it because no one is making art he likes anymore.

Personally, I think the ideal solution was how things were back in the middle ages. If you wanted art, you commissioned someone to do it. If no one is willing to commission it then either you give away your works for free or don't make them. The key problem with the current system is that it derives art for profit which is sometimes shallow at best due to the fact its creating something to be consumed rather than observed as art. (Damn I sound like a turtle neck art snob with a glass of wine complaining about the sad state of affairs at the New York Art gallery, but I hope you get my point)

Re:Simple

[megaditto]

Artists have been making work for centuries without often being compensated for their work and many eventually dying in abject poverty

Well, the same could be said of scientists (plus add "burned at the stake" and "tortured by the Inquisition" to the starving/dying part). Remember that less pay means much less future talent drawn to the area, and much less new work created.

if one could not make money off of art then only those really interested creating art "for the sake of art" would be doing so.

And how many would that be? How many doctors would we have if they had to starve/die to be practice medicine? How many teachers and researchers would we have in our society if they could not make a living? Why should artists be any different?
  Art is harder to judge, but compare the scientific progress during 1800-2000 (when the scientists got paid) to the scientific progress during 0-1800 (when they worked for comission or starved).

Re:Simple

[shmlco]

"Now granted there will be a lot less of them..."

Bingo. Further, the current systems funds a large number of people who work "on spec" in the hope that they'll make enough money to eat. Or pay the rent. Or send their kids to college. Which in turn gives me a larger selection of products to buy. Then if and when I decide something has value to me, I pay for it.

Besides, there's a huge difference between "art" and "entertainment". Some people may value "art", but most people pay simply to be entertained.

"Personally, I think the ideal solution was how things were back in the middle ages."

Yeah, like I want my favorite artists and writers and musicians and directors spending all of their time running around looking for commissions and patrons. Sorry, but I prefer it when they're working on new music and books and movies.

A COPY of an original article.

[Anonymous Coward]

This super-distribution system has become the foundation of our economy and wealth. The instant reduplication of data, ideas, and media underpins all the major economic sectors in our economy, particularly those involved with exports -- that is, those industries where the US has a competitive advantage. Our wealth sits upon a very large device that copies promiscuously and constantly.

BETTER THAN FREE [2.5.08]
By Kevin Kelly

Introduction

"I am still writing my next book which is about what technology wants," writes Kevin Kelly. "I'm posting my thoughts in-progress on The Technium, a semi-blog." Kelly is one of the three sages that I consult with regularly editorial matters pertaining to Edge. The other two members of the hitherto ultra-secretive "Council of Elders" are Stewart Brand and George Dyson. Here, he invites the Edge community to look over his shoulder and provide feedback on his latest thoughts.

--JB

KEVIN KELLY is Senior Maverick at Wired magazine. He helped launch Wired in 1993, and served as its Executive Editor until January 1999. He is currently editor and publisher of the popular Technium, Cool Tools, True Film, and Street Use websites. He is the author fo Out of Control.

Kevin Kelly''s Edge Bio Page

Better Than Free

The internet is a copy machine. At its most foundational level, it copies every action, every character, every thought we make while we ride upon it. In order to send a message from one corner of the internet to another, the protocols of communication demand that the whole message be copied along the way several times. IT companies make a lot of money selling equipment that facilitates this ceaseless copying. Every bit of data ever produced on any computer is copied somewhere. The digital economy is thus run on a river of copies. Unlike the mass-produced reproductions of the machine age, these copies are not just cheap, they are free.

Our digital communication network has been engineered so that copies flow with as little friction as possible. Indeed, copies flow so freely we could think of the internet as a super-distribution system, where once a copy is introduced it will continue to flow through the network forever, much like electricity in a superconductive wire. We see evidence of this in real life. Once anything that can be copied is brought into contact with internet, it will be copied, and those copies never leave. Even a dog knows you can't erase something once its flowed on the internet.

This super-distribution system has become the foundation of our economy and wealth. The instant reduplication of data, ideas, and media underpins all the major economic sectors in our economy, particularly those involved with exports -- that is, those industries where the US has a competitive advantage. Our wealth sits upon a very large device that copies promiscuously and constantly.

Yet the previous round of wealth in this economy was built on selling precious copies, so the free flow of free copies tends to undermine the established order. If reproductions of our best efforts are free, how can we keep going? To put it simply, how does one make money selling free copies?

I have an answer. The simplest way I can put it is thus:

When copies are super abundant, they become worthless.
When copies are super abundant, stuff which can't be copied becomes scarce and valuable.

When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied.

Well, what can't be copied?

There are a number of qualities that can't be copied. Consider "trust." Trust cannot be copied. You can't purchase it. Trust must be earned, over time. It cannot be downloaded. Or faked. Or counterfeited (at least for long). If everything else is equal, you'll always prefer to deal with someone you can trust. So trust is an intangible that has increasing value in a copy saturated world.

There are a number of other qualities similar to trust that are difficult to copy, and thus become valuable i

Re:A COPY of an original article.

[illectro]

Immediacy: The problem is that many pirate downloads are available prior to the official release. Of course it's clear that early access to material is currently being used as a stick to pull people to media websites - I know my favourite site imeem.com has promoted the showing of at least one movie releases prior to the theatrical premier and plenty of 'exclusive' music from big name artists. The article does seem to be a little behind the times in terms of music accessibility "We'll pay Acme Digital Warehouse to serve us any musical tune in the world, when and where we want it" - right now you can get practically any piece of music for free via ad supported sites like imeem.com, deezer and last.fm. There's still room for paid services though, there are holes in these collections either content-wise or geographicly - imeem has the biggest catalog, but most of it is only in north america, last.fm and deezer have half the number of tracks, but are available in more countries, spiralfrog has the smallest catalog, but it's the only one to offer downloads.

Re:A COPY of an original article.

[shmlco]

"... right now you can get practically any piece of music for free via ad supported sites..."

I love it. Go back and look at nearly any Slashdot article regarding advertising and ad blockers or Tivo and all of the people who post that it's their "right" to block or skip ads. Some people don't want to pay ANYTHING for the content they enjoy. Not money. Not attention. Nothing.

What's Better Than Getting Paid?

[NetSettler]

The article makes some quite useful observations in terms of categorizing present trends and is a worthwhile read for that purpose, I think.

But I'm uncomfortable with its "conclusions", if it can even be said to have any. (It seems to indulge a sense throughout of "this is ok, things are good, we just need to embrace them".) From the article:

In short, the money in this networked economy does not follow the path of the copies. Rather it follows the path of attention, and attention has its own circuits.

If I reworded this as:

In short, the money in a networked economy does not go to the people doing the work. Rather it follows the path of who controls the view, and that path has its own circuits.

it would sound a lot less benign.

He makes some casual references to the need for trust and the willingness of people buying to give money to creators. But he overlooks the fact that it's in the best (financial) interest of the people who are the conduit to do as much as possible to obstruct the ability to do this.

The industry thrives (for now) on talk of riches that can be achieved in this new world order if people just contribute freely and hope the money comes somehow, but the obvious truth is that that works better for the people who get the money than for the people who don't, and when you're touting that there's no correlation between where the money goes and where the credit is due, that's not sounding too good to me.

Just look at how long it took the TV writers to get what was obviously due them, and they were very organized. Now imagine how much difficulty a group of uncoordinated netizens is going to have getting the same, since when any number of them boycott their "jobs" putting out free content, there are gonig to be any number of others rushing in to fill the gap for free, causing the content deliverers to say "gee, why should we pay them at all?"

Re:What's Better Than Getting Paid?

[mspohr]

But I'm uncomfortable with its "conclusions", if it can even be said to have any. (It seems to indulge a sense throughout of "this is ok, things are good, we just need to embrace them".) From the article: In short, the money in this networked economy does not follow the path of the copies. Rather it follows the path of attention, and attention has its own circuits. If I reworded this as: In short, the money in a networked economy does not go to the people doing the work. Rather it follows the path of who controls the view, and that path has its own circuits. it would sound a lot less benign.

I think you have missed his point here. The money DOES go to the people doing the work. Except the 'work' is the not necessarily the people who made the original work but the people who are adding value through immediacy, personalization, interpretation, authenticity, accessibility, embodiment, patronage, and findability.

I believe that his real point is that it is no longer sufficient to 'create' something and then retire on royalties but you must go out and continually provide value for that creation in the ways he lists. This is the great shock to traditional businesses publishing books, music, software, etc. Their business model has been formed on the scarcity of copies and they have failed to adapt to the reality that copies are no longer scarce.

Actually, I kind of like the concept that you have to work for a living by continually providing value rather than create a monopoly on some idea or expression of an idea and coast on monopoly rents.

Re:What's Better Than Getting Paid?

[kevinbr]

"......in a networked economy does not go to the people doing the work....."

In, for example, todays music industry, the money does not go to the people doing the work. There are rare exception like Madonna and U2, but the money goes to the distributer.

"...Just look at how long it took the TV writers to get what was obviously due them......"

Um, no. They still do not get what is due to them. I believe for example their download fee kicks in after something like 30 days ( where most of the money is made in the first 30 days ).

No one is due anything. We all have to work and in the US today millions of workers are told to adjust or starve. Writers and musicians are no different. The fact is that the cost of a digital copy is zero.

The other reality is that the existing distribution is trying to use the law to prop up a defunct model.

Take the movie distribution. I live in France but speak English. I see a movie available today in the US, but I am supposed to wait for 6 months to get it legally, when I can get it now on Piratebay? It of course never occurs to them I might pay today, if they would only make it available. They do demand creation but fuck up the fulfillment.

Or take a concert. I recently paid 120 Euros for several nights at the Nice Jazz festival. I want to buy MY concerts that I attended but of course where are they available? Bootlegs on Youtube. Demand creation yet no fulfillment.

etc etc.

With digital copying, they might want to create demand yet throttle this demand in stupid ways ( I do not want DVD's I want 700 MB downloads for my hotel at night on a laptop but no this is not a commercial choice, they fail again to to fulfillment).

So this article makes perfect sense to me. I work with IT contractors who make lots of money. They ALL download films because that is the easiest way to them, not because they are free.

Re:What's Better Than Getting Paid?

[PietjeJantje]

Actually, I kind of like the concept that you have to work for a living by continually providing value rather than create a monopoly on some idea or expression of an idea and coast on monopoly rents. Let's put it this way, let's not take the RIAA as an example because that has been muddling the discussion into a mono copyright bashing affair.

If an author, say Douglas Adams (rip), spends a couple of years on a book, your equation does not work. That is because it is based on an investment of time, and you need a return for that. Creating value after that, for instance based on your popularity, is nice, but not economically related to the investment needed for the addition of value to the initial product. Also his audience, and book readers in general, might be less inclined to purchase services after the free copy.

Do we want a culture based on the commercial return on t-shirts and such? Would Adams have written the books? I for one prefer having given him some monetary units for his product, than obtain it for free, then see if I like him and toss him some coins like he's some kind of beggar.

I believe copyright and old-fashioned publishing are outdated mechanisms in digital times. I also believe that over time many money grabbing industries got a firm, unhealthy grip on the writers, artists, etc. But I also believe the single-minded mono-culture of simply proclaiming everything related to copyright as evil, and magic solutions like making everything free and then it will all be solved, is just silly and a cover-up for the fact that people like to take things for free while not having the worry about the morality of it. This makes one equal to the RIAA. Full of greed and hypocrisy.

Re:What's Better Than Getting Paid?

[hupskadee]

A recent example of this is artists moving from traditional record labels to organisations which core business is to organise performances. Everything else, including the records, is merchandise. I believe Madonna recently made this switch.

Re:What's Better Than Getting Paid?

[IamTheRealMike]

I believe that his real point is that it is no longer sufficient to 'create' something and then retire on royalties but you must go out and continually provide value for that creation in the ways he lists. This is the great shock to traditional businesses publishing books, music, software, etc.

You're exaggerating. The number of people working on music, books and software who can actually retire on the basis of one hit are vanishingly small. The vast majority need to be continually creating new things if they are to have a living wage. Look at 99% of the programmers in the video game industry for instance.

Actually, I kind of like the concept that you have to work for a living by continually providing value rather than create a monopoly on some idea or expression of an idea and coast on monopoly rents.

You're also using language manipulatively :-( Especially on slashdot, most peoples connotation of "monopoly" is "sole provider of something I need". Saying copyright holders are a monopoly is like saying that Nike have a monopoly on producing Nike trainers. It doesn't say anything useful. Nobody needs Nike trainers specifically, just like nobody needs Britney Spears' music specifically (regardless of what the little sisters of the world may think). What you say might apply in very, very special circumstances, like with Windows but certainly doesn't apply to most copyrighted works.

Re:What's Better Than Getting Paid?

[wall0159]

Then why can't I just make a site that mirrors Joe Bloggs' personalised aggregator and slap advertising on it? Oh sorry - it's ok for him to use other peoples' work, but not ok for me to use his? (I realise that was not your implication, but my question is really "where does it end"?)

Re:What's Better Than Getting Paid?

[clarkkent09]

Actually, I kind of like the concept that you have to work for a living by continually providing value rather than create a monopoly on some idea or expression of an idea and coast on monopoly rents.

The question is whether fewer people will come up with new works if their value is so drastically reduced and whether society will lose out overall. Take books for example. Where is the incentive for an author to write a new book if it can be immediately copied for free by anybody. Did it ever occur that by removing copyright protection we are going back to the time where authors could not make a living by their works and therefore the marketplace of ideas is limited to idle wealthy and those willing to make the sacrifice of living in poverty.

Re:What's Better Than Getting Paid?

[cshotton]

There is an alternative to getting paid for "free" content. It's a simple mind-shift that has to happen and it gets us away from the centuries old idea of an economy based on sale of tangible goods. Put concisely, you should get paid for the ability to create value in the future, not the items you create. Musicians could receive what amounts to "futures contracts", fans paying for (or rewarding) musicians for creating of future works. The works are given away for free. The people with the talent and skill to produce them are paid to create. No pay, no new music. Sucky music, no pay for future albums. It's fairly balanced out but it requires a one-time leap of faith on the consumer's part that by paying in advance for someone to create something of value, the value will be freely given. Fans (customers, etc.) are essentially paying in advance for the creator to make something of value that they will then get to freely enjoy. It is essentially an institutionalized form of patronage. It would work with any kind of product for which multiple free copies can be made (i.e. data) but would work best if there was some sort of controlled reputation system in place to actually measure the relative value of someone's creations.

Re:What's Better Than Getting Paid?

[oojimaflib]

If an author, say Douglas Adams (rip), spends a couple of years on a book, your equation does not work. That is because it is based on an investment of time, and you need a return for that. Creating value after that, for instance based on your popularity, is nice, but not economically related to the investment needed for the addition of value to the initial product. Also his audience, and book readers in general, might be less inclined to purchase services after the free copy.

Do we want a culture based on the commercial return on t-shirts and such? Would Adams have written the books? I for one prefer having given him some monetary units for his product, than obtain it for free, then see if I like him and toss him some coins like he's some kind of beggar.
While I'm aware that your argument may well hold for some people, Douglas Adams is a _really_ bad example in this case. Indeed, he's a fine example of the counterargument:

Douglas Adams (DA) is paid by the BBC to write a radio series. This is given away, for free, by the BBC, over the airwaves (I don't think that there was a radio license by the time Hitch-hiker's was broadcast). DA chose then to add value to the original product (the radio series) by: writing sequels, adapting it as a book, adapting it as a TV show etc., cashing in on its (and his) popularity.
Now clearly, in this proposed new world of content distribution, different ways of cashing in would have to be chosen, but the principle still holds. DA would have written the work regardless, as it was initially paid for by a corporation that wanted the content. How he then chose to cash in on his success was then simply a product of the time.

This is not to say that this will hold for every author--public service broadcasters can't be expected to employ every content creator--but DA is a fine example of exactly how you can make money by giving stuff away for free.

Re:What's Better Than Getting Paid?

[autophile]

From the article:

In short, the money in this networked economy does not follow the path of the copies. Rather it follows the path of attention, and attention has its own circuits.

If I reworded this as:

In short, the money in a networked economy does not go to the people doing the work. Rather it follows the path of who controls the view, and that path has its own circuits.

it would sound a lot less benign.

Granted. However I think the point of the article was that the content creator is also the one that controls the view. For example, Radiohead created the content and controlled the view by setting up the site where you could download the song.

He posits eight areas where value can be added. I think some are more futuristic than others, which makes sense because we are in a transition period. Let's try an example. Suppose I want to write a book. Assume the text is free, because it gets on, say, IRC.

Immediacy: Well, you can't get every book immediately on IRC. So fans would be willing to pay to get early copies, maybe even drafts, of your novel.

Personalization: This is one of the futuristic scenarios. In essence, you wouldn't be writing a book, but an algorithm with data that generates a book given various inputs -- and you're the one controlling the input data. So I might want a book that emphasizes character, while someone else might want a book that emphasizes woowoo physics. Yes, it's very futuristic.

Interpretation: I'm not even sure how to apply this to a novel. Suggestions?

Authenticity: There's nothing stopping you from selling copies of your work -- guaranteed, as-the-author-intended -- copies.

Accessibility: I don't think the content creator makes money off of this. I see this more as some piece of software which holds your data for you.

Embodiment: Leather-bound edition. Perhaps even personalized. Sell mugs and T-shirts with the book's designs, concepts, whatever on it.

Patronage: Two types, a-posteriori and a-priori. A-posteriori patronage is simply paying for a copy, like with Radiohead. You pay because it makes you feel good to reward the creator. A-priori patronage could be commissioned short stories set in the same universe, or maybe an escrow fund to guarantee a sequel.

Findability: Again, not the creator's job, but the creator must ensure the work is findable.

So I think there's something to be said about the eight points. Again, perhaps they are not all applicable today, or not applicable to a particular concept, but they are apropos.

--Rob

Re:What's Better Than Getting Paid?

[NewAndFresh]

nobody needs Britney Spears' music specifically (regardless of what the little sisters of the world may think)

You made my day. (still laughing)

Re:What's Better Than Getting Paid?

[sayfawa]

If things go the way I expect/hope then, in your analogy, Douglas Adams would have been paid to write the book in the first place, instead of writing the book and then selling copies in order to receive payment. By the time he is done with the original work of art, he has been paid enough to make all the time and effort worth it. The valueless copies are freely distributable.

Imagine your favourite author stating that they are not going to start writing another book until they get x dollars to do it, but once they are done, the book is available for all in electronic form. Sure, there will be lots of freeloaders, but as long as the artist gets what they want, who cares?

Re:What's Better Than Getting Paid?

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

The money DOES go to the people doing the work. Except the 'work' is the not necessarily the people who made the original work but the people who are adding value through immediacy, personalization, interpretation, authenticity, accessibility, embodiment, patronage, and findability.

The majority of the work done (hopefully) will be in the creation of the work, yet it's not the creation of the work that's being even indirectly rewarded here. It's all the other services that adorn the work that you are paying for, and the market value will reflect that. We're essentially asking the artist to create the work for free, and if he wants money, well, he'll have to work for it another way (i.e. by providing those services).

In addition, because there'd be no restriction on who can provide those services, the artist would be forced to compete with absolutely no advantages against other people providing the same service with his creation. The only difference between them is that the creator was burdened with cost of production.

Basically, we might as well tell artists to find a real job while in between their art creation.

Re:What's Better Than Getting Paid?

[coolGuyZak]

Interpretation: I'm not even sure how to apply this to a novel. Suggestions?

Imagine a book so information dense that even E. Tufte couldn't read it without getting a nosebleed. A group of readers wishing to understand such an accumulation of language could hire a team of analysts to analyze and explain it. (Or, alternatively, the author could travel the country teaching the principles of the book at lectures or conferences).

It may not work perfectly for novels, but I'd imagine something similar could be established for compelling settings--think Star Trek conventions.

Re:What's Better Than Getting Paid?

[wvmarle]

Imagine your favourite author stating that they are not going to start writing another book until they get x dollars to do it, but once they are done, the book is available for all in electronic form. Sure, there will be lots of freeloaders, but as long as the artist gets what they want, who cares? This will likely never work. This is like people have to actually invest something in this author, and hoping they get results. But what if the work that comes out is not of your liking? Even a favourite author is not guaranteed to write a work you like so much you really want it. Investment is supposed to give results, it has risks, and the higher the risk the higher the potential reward should be. This book writing case I'd say is a very high risk investment, with a relatively low return, unless you are really totally heads over heels in love with that author.
Copyright I think is a good thing, in principle. Not the way it is implemented now, but that's another discussion. The author should have a right to sell his copies, and get money for every copy sold. That is how a business works: the entrepeneur (the author) invests money/time/whatever in their business (writing a book, this takes time and costs money: the author has to live during the writing, and living costs money), hoping in the long term to make more money out of this. In case of an author, by selling copies of his work.
Now it is up to the author to limit the number of copies, or not. To give it away freely, or not. For an author of a book, they may post some chapters on the Internet for free, and sell the rest in a hardcopy. Fifteen years or so ago I also bought a hard copy of THHGTTG, after reading fragments of it for free, downloaded from a BBS system. Whether those copies are legal or not, I don't know. But now I'm the happy owner of the book.
Software is a bit different, there is a clear service to be sold related to the software use. Software-as-a-service we call it already. Books, music, paintings, they do not fall under this category (well music maybe). So while for some forms of intellectual property TFA has quite a good point, I don't believe it will work for all kinds of IP. Not all IP is the same.
Wouter.

Re:What's Better Than Getting Paid?

[Macthorpe]

Except that surely makes it close to impossible for a new author to get into the business.

Publishers rarely offer advances to unknown authors, and considering the investment of time required, these people rely on being paid after the book is bought. Once you take that away by distributing for free, suddenly you have budding authors who want to be published but won't be paid before or after the fact.

Giving away for free could work for established authors (that's another debate) but is close to useless for anyone trying to enter the business.

Re:What's Better Than Getting Paid?

[Anonymous Coward]

Did it ever occur that by removing copyright protection we are going back to the time where authors could not make a living by their works and therefore the marketplace of ideas is limited to idle wealthy and those willing to make the sacrifice of living in poverty.

Yes. If only there were some counter-example. Just one thing where allowing people to freely use one's work was wildly successful, and would have failed otherwise. Anybody?

Re:What's Better Than Getting Paid?

[hey!]

If I reworded this as:

        In short, the money in a networked economy does not go to the people doing the work. Rather it follows the path of who controls the view, and that path has its own circuits.

it would sound a lot less benign.

Let me play devil's advocate here for a moment.

Money isn't a reward for work. That's the hard lesson of business. The economic system does not care about your personal travails. It is concerned with scarcity. Money is a reward for reducing scarcity.

Over the years I have turned my hand to a number of crafts from calligraphy to woodworking. I am fascinated by the process of craft. So when I walk into a store and see a basket that was woven by some third world basket weaver selling for less than five bucks, I automatically consider how long it would take me to make that same basket if I were doing it day in and day out. In some cases I believe I could make a many as four or five if I worked extremely hard. I doubt, however, that after shipping and stocking and whatnot the basket weaver received more than a few nickels per basket.

I have also seen domestic made, artisanal baskets that sell for two or three hundred dollars, that probably weren't much more work than baskets that sell for a few dollars. While on the surface this would indicate that a superior, more deserving artisan got more money, I don't think it's as simple as that. Who's to say the third world artisan doesn't have the ability to make equally unique and interesting designs? The problem is that he or she has no way to market them; there is no money for that artisan in anything but baskets meeting the specification of the exporter. I could probably (with practice) make a Nantucket Lightship basket that could sell for $700 to $1000. Given my marketing costs, I might clear three or four hundred for a week's work. That's not enough to support the lavish (by world standards) lifestyle I lead. There are third world artisans making a few dollars a day who could do the work; if they cleared even fifty dollars a week it would be huge.

The first world artisan is rewarded in part for is artistry, but mainly because he addresses a scarcity. There aren't many people willing to work for five hundred dollars a week where he lives, and people willing to work for less than that don't have access.

Creative activities, such as writing and performing, are a hobby for the vast number of people who do them, including those who get paid from time to time. A small fraction of people make their living from them, and a vanishing small number of people make a comfortable living from them. A world of "free" copying is a disaster for those who make a frugal living from their art; it puts them back in the hobbyist category. It also dashes the hopes of those in the hobbyist category of quitting their day job. But the idea of restricting copies is not an economic one; it's a value judgment. It's the idea that people should be able to make a living producing something even if it means keeping others out of the market who would produce for sub-living-wage economic rewards.

Re:What's Better Than Getting Paid?

[totally bogus dude]

but my question is really "where does it end"?

Well I would say, not there. If we assume there's no copyrights, then there's no reason you can't mirror Joe's personalised aggregator and slap advertising on it. The question then becomes, is it viable for you to do so? Will it make you enough money to justify the effort to set this up and make sure it keeps working?

For you to get enough traffic, people have to a) find your mirror of it and b) not find the original (assuming the original somehow is more valuable -- which might merely require it be identifiable as being the original, or maybe it has less ads) as well as c) find the content worthwhile. If this is the case then you are actually providing a valuable service: that of discovery. Maybe you're marketing your mirror better than Joe is marketing his aggregator.

Now, sooner or later Joe will discover you're mirroring his content, and will probably block you. So you'll have to keep an eye on it and find ways to hide your scraper's identity. This will probably be more costly for you because you're having to react to his changes, and if your mirror is unreliable then people will be less likely to use it.

At the end of the day, Joe might find it's too much work to block you from mirroring his stuff, and that it's not making enough money to be worthwhile to him, and he'll stop producing it. This is analogous to the vast majority of bands who don't make enough money to make a career out of their music (let alone retire on it) and stop producing it, or the vast majority of authors who don't "make it", or bloggers who fail to monetize their work.

I think the whole "nobody will produce anything if there's no easy way to make it financially viable" thing is a little bit overdone. Pick your favourite "easy money" industry and realise that the vast majority of people who try to make it in that industry fail at it. It's pretty difficult to become self-employed, let alone a wealthy self-employed person, and that's why most of us work a safe stable job for someone who's willing to take that risk. If there's a desire for content then there'll be a way to get paid for producing it. 90% of us won't ever try because it's too scary and uncertain; 80% of those who do try will fail to make a living out of it; and 1% of those who succeed will become fabulously wealthy and make the rest of us jealous. Just like now. Without copyright the way to get paid for producing the content will almost certainly change substantially, but there'll be a way and people will find it.

Re:What's Better Than Getting Paid?

[mspohr]

Regarding my use of the term 'monopoly rent', I was using this in the classical economic sense of the use of a legal or regulatory mechanism to extract payment instead of producing wealth through trade or productivity and not in the vernacular of 'sole provider'. See Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking for a further discussion.

Re:What's Better Than Getting Paid?

[runningduck]

In a very real way this explains a lot about what is going on in society today. Fundamentally we no longer value thinkers and creators. Instead we value packagers and preachers.

Re:What's Better Than Getting Paid?

[NetSettler]

Money isn't a reward for work. ... Money is a reward for reducing scarcity. ... Creative activities, such as writing and performing, are a hobby for the vast number of people who do them, including those who get paid from time to time. A small fraction of people make their living from them, and a vanishing small number of people make a comfortable living from them.

I get in this argument a lot with people, and it always ends up going down the same rathole, with people thinking I'm saying that I am entitled to money for work. That isn't how I get to where I do in my sadness about the present situation.

Like you (I suspect), I begin from the point of view of the consumer. Let's take a different example. I like certain books, and not very many of them get written by decent authors. So there are a few I wish would spend 100% of their time writing books. But they can't. Because the world does not reward the writing of books. It rewards the writing coupled with the marketing. So the books that come out are the books that are the result of the authors I care about spending their time doing an activity I wish they did not have to do--marketing their books--and then writing in the rest of their free time. In the end, they make many fewer books.

Web publishing lets a lot more people publish. So you could say they don't have to spend time marketing. But they can't then turn to writing, even then. Because now they don't have a source of income.

Speaking for myself, I'm not a rich person. So I can't just be a patron. What I want is to pay a fair amount and to get good quality. I have no desire for free books or free software. I'd rather pay money for decent stuff and be paid for writing decent stuff (whether books or software). It does me no good to swap my free writing for someone else's because my grocer and auto dealer and so on won't take those in trade. So I'm left assuming the middle man will take my contribution and funnel it to the right place. And I don't aspire to be a middle man--that's a different occupation and is not my special skill.

But the middle man isn't going to optimize my personal favorite choice. He's better off making a quick buck on 3 authors willing to work for free than pay money to one author who might write better but will charge money. So his economy of scale is working against the good writers and to the prolific mediocre.

You'd think it was a business opportunity for someone, but I keep looking for forums that offer published writings with authors getting a substantial (not just token) share of the profits, but so far I don't see them. Starting such an endeavor is complicated and more work than I am up to myself, but I still think it would suit the world a lot better than what we're seeing. I don't know what to make of the fact that it doesn't happen, but the fact that it's scarce does not seem to be causing it to come into existence.

I think the world would work best if people could be used in the ways they are skilled, and could get paid for it. And I'd prefer that worked by capitalistic means than communistic means. But unfettered capitalism seems objectively to be leading to money accumulating centrally and on track to be very feudalistic, which is even worse than communism. The problem with this model of just doing what the world needs in the moment is that all the planning the world wants you to do can be tossed aside in a moment. A job can require you to have all sorts of training, then toss you out and say "never mind", and all your training is for nothing. The questions, I emphasize, are not just "what about me", but "what do I advise someone who is planning a career?" Telling them "society doesn't care about you, you must be a jack of all trades, don't rely on anything, it's all going to change anyway, there's nothing you can count on" is not very satisfying. Neither is it satisfying to tell a c

Re:What's Better Than Getting Paid?

[ahfoo]

If you think authors have it bad giving stuff away free, you can't imagine what it's like trying to sell it. What I mean is the print publishing industry is totally corrupt as it stands. The best thing in the world that could happen to authors would be for the consumers to stop supporting the utterly corrupt publishing cartels. This is especially true inthe case of textbook publishers. You're not supporting Joe Schmoe the budding author when you buy a book in a bookstore. Distributors are the only conduit into the bookstores, even the university bookstores, and the distributors only work with major publishers. As an unknown author, when you approach a large publisher they'll tell you to first get the book printed at your own cost before submitting it. Well you can't get away with a run of less than five hundred copies so you not only have to write a book that you believe in, you've got to pay to get it printed. Once you've done that, the next step is where the publishers realize you're serious and you've already committed cash so you're a sucker waiting to be had. At that point is when they invite you into the office and sit down face-to-face and actually start asking you for direct kick backs on the deal. Now of course they want 35% of the cover price and the bookstore needs fifty percent and you have to sign a contract guaranteeing that you will buy back unsold copies at the end of the year at the cover price. But the kick backs are on top of that. As an independent author, after you've paid for your own printing, you're looking at fifteen percent of the cover price and this is where your kick-back to the publisher is supposed to come from.

          That's a real story from someone who has published many limited-run textbooks with a small publisher and once attempted to cut a deal with a major publisher only to by shocked by the audacity of those sleazy bastards. It was like welcome to the jungle sucker. They want you to basically pay them for the honor of writing textbooks. Screw that business.

          And for the record, my small publisher went out of business about 2002 because it was obvious the market was basically dried up. My publisher and I agree that it really is for the best. The arguments that buying crap from these hustlers is somehow about patronage is totally naive.

          Oh, and this article is absurd. None of his points make any sense. Authenticity? People will pay for authenticity on the Internet? What kind of moron would write such a thing. As has been pointed out earlier, the immediacy of media is already here, same for accessibility. Interpretation with Red Hat as an example? Huh, as a Debian user I find that Google answers just about any question I can come up with already. Findability? What?

            Patronage is the only thing I see in that list that is "better than free" and as I've tried to point out, people's concepts of patronage as being the equivalence of buying the physical media is totally misguided because the very cartels that control the physical media are the greatest impediment to even beginning something that works like patronage. Moreover, it totally sidesteps the very complex social issues that lie at the heart of the concept of patronage.

          The best thing is to simply get over it. The old economy of scarcity is dead. Let us get on with reassessing our economic and legal policies to adjust for this change rather than waging yet another war against the average joe. What's to win by fighting a trend that only benefits an increasingly concentrated group of elites against which the majority are framed as being in the wrong?

Re:What's Better Than Getting Paid?

[sgtrock]

In addition to the points raised by others, may I point you to the Baen Publishing Company's Free Library? The front page includes an insightful essay with hard data as to why authors especially should be looking for ways to spread the word about their works.

Re:What's Better Than Getting Paid?

[shmlco]

As has been pointed out many times, this provides a high barrier to entry for new authors, musicians, directors, etc.. Further, I suspect that the "contract" system would fall down in many cases for movies, which have prohibitive price tags.

How may people are going to risk giving a "contract" to someone for $100 million dollars? How much information would you require before doing so? Enough to spoil the surprise? (Sixth Sense, Matrix).

Finally, I have enough things to do without continually looking for new works to commission.

I know, let me delegate that job to someone else. And hey, maybe he'll believe in a new writer or director enough do the whole thing on spec. And then, maybe, after hearing my friends talk about it then I'll agree that it sounds like it's worth it to me, and I'll buy a copy or pay for a ticket.

We already have an amazing system of "micro-payments", where you and I spend a tiny fraction of the amount of money it took to create a given work. Why screw it up?

Re:What's Better Than Getting Paid?

[cshotton]

We already have an amazing system of "micro-payments", where you and I spend a tiny fraction of the amount of money it took to create a given work. Why screw it up?

Well, it's pretty much broken when it comes to paying for items with zero manufacturing costs. If I can get something for free, there is no real economic benefit to me to pay for it. The value is in the act of creation, not the result of it. My point is that for that category of value creation, a reputation based economy is more fair than not. Lowering the barrier to entry for new participants is the long-standing job of marketing organizations, venture investors, and other entities whose market existence is based on enhancing value, lowering risk, and commoditizing novelty.

Those organizations don't go away. But what alternative do you have for monetizing "free" other than to place value on creation? That is the only unique thing in an otherwise endless sea of copies.

Re:What's Better Than Getting Paid?

[Oligonicella]

"Douglas Adams (DA) is paid by the BBC to write ... DA is a fine example of exactly how you can make money by giving stuff away for free."

You don't see the conflict in your argument?

Let me fill it in. He didn't give it away from free, the BBC paid him. Neither did the BBC give it away free, as it is "paid" by the British government. Neither did the British gov give it away free, as it is "paid" by British citizens.

Re:What's Better Than Getting Paid?

[spectecjr]

Douglas Adams (DA) is paid by the BBC to write a radio series. This is given away, for free, by the BBC, over the airwaves (I don't think that there was a radio license by the time Hitch-hiker's was broadcast).

Don't "think" - research. There was a radio license as early as 1904; it was rolled into the TV license in 1971.

Re:What's Better Than Getting Paid?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have all ways looked at it this way:

a*x + b*y + c*z + d*w + e*u = total revenue + cost of processing

x = ideas person
y = builder people
z = distribution people
w = advertisement people (free is a form of advertisement)
u = business people that keep the process running smoothly

The question is what/how do you assign % value to these different people, the constants or functional variables (a,b,c,d,e), when the method has changed for doing some of the aspects for these functions. Note: that these changes allow people with bad morals to get ways with a lot because most people have not thought through the impact of the change in process or processes. I have all ways thought that writer and music people should get paid more because they fulfill both the ideas role and the builder rule. However, some singer dont write there own songs so they should get paid less then the ones that do.

But the current status quo is that the business people get to decided how to split it up and with that setup, as most people will, they will try to value themselves over others; unless people bane together and demand change (minim wage, paid vacation, health care, extra as seen though out history). These changes can occur with in the business area, like the writers did. However, other times the changes need to be done at a national level like health care and minim wage. At the national level, these changes can take on a nasty role as in a revolution instead of compromising; its all ways the people in power (business people, politicians, some judges, extra) that get to high or abusive to the people under then, and at some point those people band together to make change.

Any ways, its a rather long explanation to say I dont trust what this guy is saying. But its my two cents and I thought the WHY was important enough to state.

Re:What's Better Than Getting Paid?

[Paul Fernhout]

"If an author, say Douglas Adams (rip), spends a couple of years on a book, your equation does not work. That is because it is based on an investment of time, and you need a return for that."

If everything else is free (or incredibly cheap), why does an author need a return on their time (most of the time)?
See: http:///www.reprap.org (GPL'd 3D fabricator) "Money is a sign of poverty." - Iain M. Banks, 1987.

Do parents need a return for the time they spend with their children? Or, in this case their "mind children"?

In 1997, my wife and I gave away a garden simulator under the GPL (more than six person-years of work)
    http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/
and got the whole free internet in return (including Slashdot). Seems like a good deal to me. :-)

The problem for Douglas Adams was that, as Ian Banks' quote might suggest, he was was *poor* (or felt he was poor, or felt at risk of being poor in the future), where poor essentially means you can't expect reasonable needs to be met without major effort. So Douglas Adams must have felt (perhaps quite correctly) that he needed the ration units to survive (or thrive) in a system oriented around rationing. When scarcity (for most things) comes to an end worldwide, as is happening, then there is not much need for rationing and ration units for most of the basics (energy, food, water, shelter, computing, health care, transportation, etc.) See also, from 1964(!):
    http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
"The fundamental problem posed by the cybernation revolution in the U.S. is that it invalidates the general mechanism so far employed to undergird people's rights as consumers. Up to this time economic resources have been distributed on the basis of contributions to production, with machines and men competing for employment on somewhat equal terms. In the developing cybernated system, potentially unlimited output can be achieved by systems of machines which will require little cooperation from human beings. As machines take over production from men, they absorb an increasing proportion of resources while the men who are displaced become dependent on minimal and unrelated government measures--unemployment insurance, social security, welfare payments. These measures are less and less able to disguise a historic paradox: That a substantial proportion of the population is subsisting on minimal incomes, often below the poverty line, at a time when sufficient productive potential is available to supply the needs of everyone in the U.S."

To see what such a world might look like in fiction (contrasted to our the recent ways), read James P. Hogan's novel, _Voyage from Yesteryear_.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_from_Yesteryear
Of course, as in James P. Hogan's novel, getting there (post-scarcity ideology dominant) from here (scarcity ideology dominant) is going to be "interesting times". For a more dystopian take on this (if the wealth from cybernation is not shared roughly evenly), see:
    "Manna"
      http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

Re:What's Better Than Getting Paid?

[ilikeyouanyways]

Also his audience, and book readers in general, might be less inclined to purchase services after the free copy.

Actually this turns out not to be a problem. We now have publishers who are finding that you can give an electronic version of a book away and that sales of the paper copy are not only not diminished, but enhanced. An example that just happened yesterday is the availability of the new Suze Orman book that was given away on the Oprah website. The book is also ranked #7 on Amazon after the giveaway.

From the article:

"I can tell you that with respect to the '9-11 Report,' the free download did not seem to hurt sales at all," Norton publisher Drake McFeely told The Associated Press on Saturday. "There were people who wanted it quickly, in a less convenient form, and that was clearly a different market from the people who wanted the traditional book."

Part of why I pay for a book is to get pages printed and delivered. Part of why I pay for a movie ticket is to have a giant screen and a comfy seat. Part of why I pay for a sculpture is to admire the physical shape of it. Copies of art that lose these qualities/benefits are less valuable to me. Even if I get an electronic version of a book, for example, I'll still pay for a physical copy. Or more precisely, I'll pay for a different set of benefits. Getting one doesn't prevent me from being interested in the other.

Article about Suze Orman's book giveaway: http://apnews.myway.com//article/20080216/D8URJ49G0.html

Semi-related rant: Sometimes people forget that there are a lot of players involved in producing any piece of art.

For Suze's book for example, there were editors, printers, software makers, truck drivers, buyers, cashiers, etc. Before you start with the "without the artist, there is nothing!" argument, let me head you off. Without someone to layout the text there is nothing. Without someone to print the book there is nothing. Without someone to drive the printed book to the store where you can get it there is nothing. Etc. etc. Not only are many people/organizations/systems involved in making art, those people are involved in the actual content of the art as well. The choices made by the illustrator of a book, the editor of a movie, the producer of a tv show, etc., actually shape the meaning, and thus, value of the art as well. Can we start getting away from this cult of the "artist" or "author"? Art is a team sport.

One thing to remember is that on one level art is _always_ the result of patronage. Let's say an author, such as Douglas Adams, spends 3 years writing a book. Well somehow he had a place to sleep and food to eat and clothes to wear before the book was done and could be sold. Maybe his parent's were his "patron". If he wasn't writing the book because he had a contract with someone to publish and sell it, then he was taking a risk that no one would want to read his book. No one may be interested in buying it. And if it sucked, society as a whole is under no obligation to cover the costs of those three years or give him anything for his effort. If he had a contract with someone, like a publisher, then it's the publisher's problem if the book sucks. The publisher who contracts with an artist is taking a chance as well. They are investing in the artist, in paper, in ink, in shipping, etc. with the hopes that they can put all those things together in a package that they can sell people for money. Again, if society doesn't value that particular combination of content/ink/paper/etc, we are under no obligation to buy it.

Now think of the people and systems for music distribution. ITunes and Pirate Bay are two different packagers and distributors of music that's offered to people. Neither directly pay artists to make music. In fact, the record labels rarely pay artists to make music. First the artis

Re:What's Better Than Getting Paid?

[shmlco]

"... zero manufacturing costs..."

Which, in all such arguments, ignores the very real costs in terms of time, people, and capital it took to create that value. And which still need to be amortized among those that would consume it. Not to mention the fact that the creative types it takes to create that value are in very short supply, a "finite resource" of their own.

"Lowering the barrier to entry for new participants is the long-standing job of marketing organizations, venture investors, and other entities..."

Who still have to get paid. In more than "reputation". Otherwise they're not going to do it either.

Re:What's Better Than Getting Paid?

[Anonymous Coward]

This will likely never work. This is like people have to actually invest something in this author, and hoping they get results. But what if the work that comes out is not of your liking? Even a favourite author is not guaranteed to write a work you like so much you really want it. Investment is supposed to give results, it has risks, and the higher the risk the higher the potential reward should be. This book writing case I'd say is a very high risk investment, with a relatively low return, unless you are really totally heads over heels in love with that author. Really? I would not be willing to invest a few bucks in an author just because the work might suck? It seems to me that I already pay money to purchase books that might suck. I hope they don't, but by the time I know for sure, I have already paid. What is the difference? One might say that in the current situation, the critics could already know if the book is good, and I could buy or not based on that. But in reality I avoid the critics. They have extermely different views than I do on what is good. So under the current model I'm paying for a book based mostly on the title, the blub from the back, and ideally past experence with this author. It seems to me that under this new model all those things could still be there before the book is more than a mere idea. So my risk/reward payoff system is exactly the same. On the other hand though, this system would have a downside. Getting the result is not immediate. That is worth something. Of course, there are other ways to "monetize" that attribute, involing pre-exisitng works of no real value.

Re:What's Better Than Getting Paid?

[cshotton]

Huh? You are missing my point. I am only talking about the economy around digital goods that can be infinitely reproduced. The existing "old economy" infrastructure is intact and irrelevant. This whole thread is about how to monetize "free" items. My point is that you pay for the act of creation, not the item. I have no idea what you are talking about.

Re:What's Better Than Getting Paid?

[davidannis]

In short, the money in a networked economy does not go to the people doing the work. Rather it follows the path of who controls the view, and that path has its own circuits.

This is so true. Let me try to give a better example than Douglas Adams and hitchhikers. I have just put up a website, with a few more to follow. The first is a business valuation calculator http://freevaluationsonline.com/. I'd like to believe that I can make money on this, through donations, advertising, offering consulting services, keeping it up to date, or something other than charging for content.

But, to get traffic I need to go through Google Adwords - cost me about a buck to get someone to do a valuation - a steep price to get back for free. The site provides immediacy, personalization, interpretation, authenticity, and accessibility already. I'm going to enhance the site, to provide more of the above, but I think that those who control the pipes (Google, Yahoo, et al) will make 100 times what I do.

Re:What's Better Than Getting Paid?

[Eivind Eklund]

You're also using language manipulatively :-( Especially on slashdot, most peoples connotation of "monopoly" is "sole provider of something I need". Saying copyright holders are a monopoly is like saying that Nike have a monopoly on producing Nike trainers. It doesn't say anything useful. Nobody needs Nike trainers specifically, just like nobody needs Britney Spears' music specifically (regardless of what the little sisters of the world may think).

There's a thing that I feel make a difference here: Culture and sociability. Music, movies etc are social investments. Boycotting has a cost way beyond just not having that kind of entertainment for a period, a continual cost in the interaction with others.

I know, because I am living with such a boycott - I have boycotted TV and radio for about a decade now. I boycott because it cost me time I feel I can spend better elsewhere - but doing this boycott, I also find what cost it has, and I believe this cost is *way* higher for a teenager than it is for me. Effectively, this may turn commercial (marketed) music into something that is quite irreplaceable for social reasons. A manufactured need, yet still a true need (relatedness need, one of the core constructs in psychology.)

Eivind.

Better than Free?

[martin-boundary]

How about... advice by a real lawyer?

A Step in the Right Direction

[orionop]

In a free-market world with supply and demand determining costs, it makes sense that digital information that is in infinite supply will cost nothing. The things that are listed in TFA are things that can not be distributed infinitely and thus help guide artists and software providers toward adding valuable content that customers will pay for. Maybe sometime soon we will see less lawsuits and more content.

Re:A Step in the Right Direction

[IamTheRealMike]

You're assuming a market system is a given, seeing that without copyright easily duplicated things have no value, and concluding therefore that they have no value. That's pretty ridiculous. More likely, the base assumption is wrong - if we can't enforce copyright, then we need some alternative to markets for encouraging the creation of copyable things. Nobody knows what though, which isn't surprising, our economic thinking is clouded by capitalist religion. We have yet to reach the Enlightenment period of economics.

Re:A Step in the Right Direction

[clarkkent09]

The things that are listed in the article are nowhere near enough to compensate an author for the time it takes to write a book. Hence, less people would write books. You don't see that as dangerous direction to go?

Re:A Step in the Right Direction

[ThosLives]

...then we need some alternative to markets for encouraging the creation of copyable things. Nobody knows what though...

We already have this. It's called people finding something they like to do for which other people are willing to trade goods and services which the former people want and/or need. If people enjoy making copyable things, and other people want those copyable things, then the balance works.

There is no rational argument for a system which enforces people trading for something I want to produce if that thing I want to produce is not desired. There is also no rational argument for forcing people to create something they don't want to create if there are people that desire it (but don't want to provide it themselves). To use two examples common in these conversations: If I create a song, there is no obligation for people to pay for it. If I only hold concerts and people want recordings, I am under no obligation to provide those recordings. (Note that I'm just talking about obligation, not about if it's a good idea or not.)

The bit where technology is helping is where it helps match up the desires of the creators with the desires of the traders.

That's it, and anything else is just what I would like to call "economic friction."

Re:A Step in the Right Direction

[Microlith]

There is no rational argument for a system which enforces people trading for something I want to produce if that thing I want to produce is not desired.

This system does not exist. If you make something no one wants, no one will pay for it. But conversley, even if no one wants it -now-, who's to say they won't want it after it's made ("hey have you heard about X?!") There's no rational argument for denying a system that allows that to happen. Going out on a limb is not unheard of, but it's much easier when you can convince some deep pockets to take a gamble, which sometimes pays off.

There is also no rational argument for forcing people to create something they don't want to create if there are people that desire it (but don't want to provide it themselves).

Not a single person is forced to create something they don't want to. If they don't want a job writing show Y or song Z they don't have to. There is no force going on. This point is baseless.

Re:A Step in the Right Direction

[Slippy.]

Hence, less people would write books. You don't see that as dangerous direction to go?

And then writing books becomes a valuable skill, and worth more money. It's not one or the other.

If low distribution costs cause a loss of value, when the chaff is weeded out by the crappy renumeration, the value of the decent work rises again.

Very, very few writers get rich now. If someone is writing to get rich, it is a mistake. But if you have decent writing skill, people will value that *skill*, which can't be easily replaced. Same as with any other job. Computer geeks fear automation, engineers fear automation, union car industry workers fear automation. Everyone is working in a world where tools are improving.

I don't feel worse for the artists than I do for everyone else affected by better tools.

And I'm extremely interested to see what happens here over the next decade.

Re:yes its possible

[martin-boundary]

yes its possible (Score:-1)

Looks like someone just gave you an ANTI-score :)

WOW, Immediacy!

[Anonymous Coward]

Immediacy -- Sooner or later you can find a free copy of whatever you want, but getting a copy delivered to your inbox the moment it is released -- or even better, produced -- by its creators is a generative asset.

Yes, yes, this is exactly what I wanted, the whole article immediately available here, instead of having to click on the link!

How much do I owe you? Where do I pay?

Better than free?

[kitsunewarlock]

How about...getting paid? Power of attorney? A complementary winning lotto ticket? I can go on all night and I'll be here all week, folks.

I would like to add "Connectability"

[Sique]

Information increases its value if it is connected to other information. Many inventions happen when separate, wellknown concepts were put together for the first time. No, I am not talking about "business method performed on the Internet", because this connection is very simple. Putting two things together of which one is all the rage is easy.

But in a cloud of possible dots finding the right ones and connect them actually creates value, and if the number of possible dots increases, the value of the single dot may be negligible, but the combination of the right ones gets more and more value. The process thus is twofold: Make every dot as connectible as possible, and find a way to spot valuable connections. Construction kits for children like LEGO show how you do it for the single dot. Every piece of LEGO can connect to every other piece (ok, sometimes with the help of a third piece, but the overall structure itself remains the same).

I hear often complain that open source software is "not innovative", and then it points out that it wasn't able to invent a single new type of building block for software. That complaint got it all wrong. LEGO also didn't invent a single new connector since the introduction of LEGO Tecnic. And when was the last time a new type of brick was invented? Often the invention of a new type of dot means that you can't connect it to anything. So the invention itself is completely worthless until you invent a way to actually connect it to something.

Many a commercial software has its value because of its combination of wellknown "dots". Photoshop is the standard because it combines Hundreds of wellknown algorithms in a unique way. SAP R/3 even is completely "open source" in a way meaning that everyone with developer rights on a SAP R/3 system can look into the complete source code of every subroutine and function block, and change it at will. But SAP R/3 draws its value from the fact that it implements so many different business concepts and business logics. Every single of it is well known, but only with a system like R/3 you get them bundled together.

And even Microsoft seldom was innovative, but it was always a good integrator. Microsoft software is not valuable because it implements things not found somewhere else. Microsoft's business was to present enough connected dots, so everyone could find something to use.

Nonsense

[clarkkent09]

Ok, to summarize for those too lazy to read the whole article: his point is that since its getting so easy to copy things (digital and in some cases physical), the actual products will become super abundant and therefore worthless (free). Instead of paying for the products, people will pay for other things.

Immediacy - You pay to get it right away, becomes free later. Nonsense. A free copy can be made available as soon as a non-free copy, even sooner - see movies "released" on bit torrent before they show up in theaters.

Personalization - You pay to get it specially personalized the way you want it. Doesn't apply to a vast majority of products. His examples: book ending tailored to your preferences, aspirin tailored to your DNA are both ridiculous.

Interpretation - You pay for help with using the product. Again, applies to only a small minority of the products. Support for complex software is one, but how many other examples can you think of?

Authenticity -- You pay to ensure that the album is really performed by the band (his example). I don't even know what he means by that. Is there a big problem with people downloading a song by, say, Metallica, only to realize that it was actually performed by some other band? I don't think so.

Accessibility -- You pay somebody else to store your digital possessions and serve them to you on demand? Again, there may be a small value in that for certain things (backups etc) but I prefer to keep my music/movie/book etc collections on my own keychain, thank you very much.

Embodiment -- I guess what he means by this is that you may want to pay to have a fancy copy in some cases. For example, the book is free but you pay for a pretty old-fashioned hardcover binding or whatever.

Patronage -- You pay out of goodness of your heart because you want the musician/artist/author to make some money. Yeah right.

Findability -- You pay for a service that helps you find stuff that you want. Those are free now, but in the future they will become for pay, according to him.

I'm sorry, but if thats the best people can come up with as the "new" economy, we are screwed.

Re:Nonsense

[MulluskO]

Maybe you misinterpreted accessibility? It's much faster for me to listen to a song on Rhapsody than it would be for me to do so with bit torrent / usenet / IRC.
I like the Steam service for that reason as well. I can lose CD keys and media. Steam is very convenient in that respect. Gametap's pretty good too, but the way it locks you out of the games' install directories is inconvenient.

As previously seen on BoingBoing

[brit74]

His article was posted two weeks ago on boingboing and discussed quite a bit. I have to admit to being one of the detractors of his idea (which I think reduces artists and creators to beggars trying to eek out a living). I also think he talks too much in generalities, and that makes his ideas seem more persuasive. The minute you think about specific things (how does his ideas apply to X), his ideas often don't apply at all, or reduces the income from digital creations to pennies on the dollar.
http://www.boingboing.net/2008/02/02/kevin-kelly-better-t.html

Re:As previously seen on BoingBoing

[CRCulver]

Copyright is a very recent notion. For most of the history of the human race artists, dramatists, and poets were not paid for each copy made from their work. Nonetheless, the art world flourished, and no one seemed to regret the lack of copyright. For example, when the Roman poet Martial heard that someone was transcribing his poetry recitals and having the poetry copied by a team of slaves and sold, he was angry only that this enterprising fellow was putting his own name on the poetry instead of crediting Martial. I think history shows us that artists can do just fine without copyright.

In the United States, there is a still a strong tradition of private patronage--that's how many contemporary composers make their living there--and in the European Union state arts ministries are generous with subsidies, so much of the infrastructure that supports the arts would survive if copyright were to disappear.

Re:As previously seen on BoingBoing

[Timesprout]

So if i should feel a need to take some GPL code and badge it as my own then OSS will carry on just fine (apart from the whinging about stealing obviously).

Re:As previously seen on BoingBoing

[clarkkent09]

For most of the history copyright wasn't an issue since easy copying and wide distribution were not possible (or practical). Musicians, made a living either by performing their own work or by being supported by wealthy patrons. Painters/sculptors made and sold unique products that were not easily copied. Writers, well they kind of struggled. None of them made a good living out of their art, and for that reason it was mostly members of the privileged classes who engaged in it.

It is interesting that in preference to the, admittedly flawed, copyright system we have today your would like to see artists placed at the mercy of wealthy patrons or even worse, supported by taxpayers money.

Re:As previously seen on BoingBoing

[CRCulver]

For most of the history copyright wasn't an issue since easy copying and wide distribution were not possible (or practical).

With regards to literature, this is something of a myth. The presence of thousands of literate slaves in Rome allowed the mass-copying and sale of literary productions.

Re:As previously seen on BoingBoing

[IamTheRealMike]

Well, not really. Unless you consider "most" of the history of the human race to have taken place in the last three hundred years (a New Chronologist perhaps?) for most of human history there were practically no creative works, and what few did exist were usually religious in nature - paid for either by a totalitarian religious authority, or by believers own devotion.

Art, literature etc all started appearing during the renaissance, (or during the pre-dark age antiquity, depending which timeline you subscribe to) and were inaccessible to the vast majority of the population. Your Roman poet is a good example - he didn't care that somebody was copying his poetry because he wasn't relying on his poetry for his income. The size of the population who had disposable income to spend on poetry just was too small for it to be an issue. Anyway, a combination of illiteracy and expense of duplication meant that only the ultra-wealthy families like the Medici could indulge in owning books and paintings. The problem of copyright infringement didn't exist, because the scale was too small. As you note, fraud was the issue of the day.

The invention of copyright was triggered by "piracy" of books, effectively, and it happened only about four centuries ago. Even then, it would be a long time until the number of people making a living off of producing creative works was >1% of the population.

So what history shows us is not that artists can do fine without copyright. It's that it's possible to have the arts, as long as you have amazingly rich patrons willing to fund it, in which case not only would most of the creativity be oriented towards a 50 year old+ bankers tastes (forget Half Life!), but there'd be much less of it. We'd have an abundance of copies but a shortage of new, interesting things. Doesn't sound like a good deal to me.

Re:As previously seen on BoingBoing

[CRCulver]

We'd have an abundance of copies but a shortage of new, interesting things.

No, we'd probably have more new, interesting things. The free market has reduced the entertainment scene to rehashes of the same simple-minded films and music (even most bands at the fringe outside of major-label control aren't really doing anything new). The avant-garde of cinema and music has always operated through the support of wealthy individuals or ministries.

Re:As previously seen on BoingBoing

[SlashJoel]

I think the point of this article is to posit that copyright *can* coexist with the digital copying/piracy that is so prevalent today. However, the business model needs to change. For instance, with music right now you can purchase DRM-laden songs for $1 each. Alternatively, you can find music on the P2P networks that is DRM-free and costs you nothing. How is a model like iTunes sustainable if the music is available for free elsewhere? Kelly's point is that people are willing to pay for things above and beyond the music itself. For instance, people trust that if you download something from iTunes, it will be virus- and spyware-free. This can be less than certain when dealing with torrents and such. Trust is therefore something that is "better than free" in the sense that people will choose to pay for something they could get for free if they trust the source.

The key is obviously taking advantage of the types of qualities Kelly is talking about. Make buying media more attractive than pirating it. Don't tell me I can only play the music I buy in one type of mp3 player because then you're making pirating more attractive. The big companies just need to wake up and get in the game. Stop fighting digital media and start embracing it. How long were TV shows available on bittorrent before SOME networks finally allowed SOME shows to be streamed online in full after they aired? Years! If I want to buy a digital copy of a movie, odds are I won't be able to find it and if I do it may very well be a slower download or of lesser quality than a pirated copy. I firmly believe that the majority of people who download digital media illegally do it because to pay for the alternative is unattractive not because of the price, but because of the bit-rate, slow speeds, DRM lockdown, or because it doesn't exist at all.

Re:As previously seen on BoingBoing

[Oligonicella]

You neglect a few details. In the times of patronage, very few of the commoners got to experience the arts except at the rich peoples will. Me? I'll pay the artist and allow him to exploit the masses for a few cents each instead of relying on Gates, Kennedy, et.al. to "bestow" the privilege of seeing the arts on me.

Re:As previously seen on BoingBoing

[Oligonicella]

Uh, no. The entertainment industry has done nothing new. Go to an art gallery and look at the paintings. Portraits and religious pictures. Shitloads of them. Why? Exactly the reason he stated. At least the current regurgitata is oriented to the common man, not the church or uber-wealthy.

Avant-garde cinema? And you complain about the rehashing of current entertainment? How many grim short flicks about a young woman's angst do you want?

Re:As previously seen on BoingBoing

[spectecjr]

With regards to literature, this is something of a myth. The presence of thousands of literate slaves in Rome allowed the mass-copying and sale of literary productions

In that case, let's change that statement:
For most of the history copyright wasn't an issue since easy copying and wide distribution were not possible (or practical) without resorting to slavery.

Wired

[DrSkwid]

Did I fall into a wormhole on my way to work, this subject is *old*

Results 1 - 10 of about 12,800 for "competing with free".

This is old stuff...

[mangu]

I believe that his real point is that it is no longer sufficient to 'create' something and then retire on royalties but you must go out and continually provide value for that creation in the ways he lists.

Like the recording industry has been doing for the artists for a hundred years or so?

Music has always been free, in the sense that you can sing any song you remember. What the recording industry has been doing is to bring to the people better executions of those songs to people who enjoy music but do not have the necessary talent to bring that music to life. There *is* real value in that, because otherwise people would have never paid for it.

However, where the whole music industry went wrong was in not realizing their method for bringing music for the people had become obsolete. They insist on selling high-priced horse-drawn carriages in an era of cheap automobiles.

the art world flourished....

[Joce640k]

Paintings are hard to copy, and many were commissioned. Very few artists got rich.

There were no stereo systems, music had to be played live. Musicians could eek out a meager living but very few composers got rich (many could gain food/lodging with wealthy patrons but not much actual cash).

"history shows us that artists can do just fine without copyright."

I'm not sure that many artists have done well historically. The question is whether or not copyright makes much difference.

I say it does - but mostly in the sense that it means that the CDs in the shops are official CDs and the films you see in the cinema are provided by the official distributer. Without copyright you can bet they'd all be cheap duplicates of the original CD/film and nobody involved in producing the original work would make any money.

Re:the art world flourished....

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Without copyright you can bet they'd all be cheap duplicates of the original CD/film and nobody involved in producing the original work would make any money. I really don't see how one necessarily follows from the other.
You presume that the creators would expect to be paid for the distribution of copies and that 'bootleggers' would take any profit out of that.
So, the solution isn't to become a pauper. Its to figure out how to make money despite the bootleggers. For example, pre-sales - if enough fans pay for enough advance copies to make the production worthwhile, then the creators still make money, the fans still get new productions from creators they like and the bootleggers can still sell knock off copies to every one else. Take it a step further and the creators can sell subscriptions - as long as enough subscription moneys come in, they keep releasing the next in line - be it tv episodes, songs for the next 'album' or even movies (like sequels, or just new works from known quantities).

Re:the art world flourished....

[Microlith]

For example, pre-sales - if enough fans pay for enough advance copies to make the production worthwhile, then the creators still make money, the fans still get new productions from creators they like and the bootleggers can still sell knock off copies to every one else.

But pre-pay is kind of a hard thing for a new artist to use successfully. A major band like Radiohead -might- be able to get away with it. For artists who you are confident of in their ability to produce good works will get plenty of business but what about new artists? It's a huge barrier if they must either somehow drum up the funds to produce an album ahead of time (sight unseen, something which many slashdotters are apparently averse to) or eat the costs and hope a few people are kind enough to throw a pittance their way.

Never mind the fact that this model probably can't support ventures and works with higher fixed costs. While technology is great for reducing costs, they can only come down so much before you start hitting practical barriers.

Bootleggers are probably the worst outcome of all cases, since they crank out mass quantities of duplicates with none of the initial investment. For essentially no work they'll make more off the back of a given work than the creator did, and that's a real good disincentive to bother.

Re:the art world flourished....

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

But pre-pay is kind of a hard thing for a new artist to use successfully. Name one model that is easy for a new artist to use successfully. 99.99% give it away to get started anyway, the only difference is that under the current system they give it away to the record labels, or movie studios or print publishers. No point in giving it away to a select few when you might as well give it away to the general public.

Bootleggers are probably the worst outcome of all cases, since they crank out mass quantities of duplicates with none of the initial investment. For essentially no work they'll make more off the back of a given work than the creator did, and that's a real good disincentive to bother. They only reason bootleggers make big money is because of copyright laws. Without copyright to artificially prop up the price of copies, the price would fall to nearly zero since the internet makes distribution nearly free. The only bootleggers left would be selling their service as distributors, just like any other distributor.

Re:the art world flourished....

[Microlith]

They only reason bootleggers make big money is because of copyright laws.

No, the reason they -don't- is because of copyright laws. Otherwise you'd see them in mass numbers on every street corner. Right now (in the US) they're hard to find outside of major cities, or online. And even then, those caught selling or distributing bootlegs are extremely liable and regularly get busted.

Without copyright to artificially prop up the price of copies, the price would fall to nearly zero since the internet makes distribution nearly free.

The price of REPRODUCTION would fall. The cost of production would remain unchanged, which is 90% of the price on those discs.

The only bootleggers left would be selling their service as distributors, just like any other distributor.

No, they'd be in business for themselves, churning out as many copies of a DVD as they could before all the others did and there was a glut of the disc on the market. The producers (writers, artists, other workers) of a given work wouldn't see a cent and would be stuck holding the bill.

Re:the art world flourished....

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Whatever dude. You seem to have failed econ 101.

Re:the art world flourished....

[spectecjr]

Whatever dude. You seem to have failed econ 101.

No, you're applying it poorly.

For supply and demand to work, the suppliers (the creators) still need to be compensated. Otherwise you're talking slavery/mooching/indentured servitude. If there were an infinite number of creators, you may have a point. There aren't.

Re:the art world flourished....

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

For supply and demand to work, the suppliers (the creators) still need to be compensated. Otherwise you're talking slavery/mooching/indentured servitude. If there were an infinite number of creators, you may have a point. There aren't. Didja miss my first post in this thread?
You know, the one where I addressed how to do that without copyright?

Re:the art world flourished....

[spectecjr]

Prepay only works if you can guarantee that the work will be completed, and also it puts a huge barrier to entry to anyone but the already established superstars.

Subscriptions don't work in general - it's the same problem. Most people prefer completed works so they don't have to wait for the next installment - and there's no guarantee that the next installment will ever be created. Unless you enjoy buying your novel by the chapter, and are willing to wait several months for each one to come out. You also lose the benefits of rewrites that way; you're just injecting scarcity over again. For the completed work to be of any merit, it'll probably need rewrites, which means planning it out, and pretty much writing the whole damn thing before selling the first subscription.

Subscriptions are also still subject to the "famous people sell the most" problem.

You're just pushing the issue of scarcity around. It's still the same system - except instead of selling finished works, you're front loading it, or doing it in pieces. Why not just enforce copyright, and then you get all the same benefits, but it actually works out to be better for the consumer - you know what you're buying, when you're buying it. The whole term of the deal is a known quantity and you're getting exactly what you pay for.

Of course, this doesn't solve the problem of anarchists and malcontents deciding that they deserve to get for free the benefit of others' hard work.

You know, tribes would actually ostracize or kill people who did that in the past.

Re:the art world flourished....

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Prepay only works if you can guarantee that the work will be completed Its called escrow.

also it puts a huge barrier to entry to anyone but the already established superstars. Jesus, is there a fucking echo in here? Didja read my second post in this thread where I addressed exactly that point?

Subscriptions don't work in general - it's the same problem. Most people prefer completed works so they don't have to wait for the next installment Have you heard of this thing called cabletv? You pay a subscription and you get your entertainment in weekly installments.

Subscriptions are also still subject to the "famous people sell the most" problem. Echo, echo, echo...

You're just pushing the issue of scarcity around. It's still the same system No, its not the same system, not by a long shot. The whole problem is that copyright is unenforceable because distribution is now practically free. But you can't distribute what hasn't been published, so that's the point where scarcity continues to exist and thus the point where creators can still enforce a contract.

Why not just enforce copyright, and then you get all the same benefits, but it actually works out to be better for the consumer - you know what you're buying, when you're buying it. The whole term of the deal is a known quantity and you're getting exactly what you pay for. People like to say such things without really thinking about them. Most people go to the movies with little knowledge of what they are in for beyond the reputations of the actors and director and tons and tons of advertising. Similarly with music where they tend to hear one song on the radio a million times (more tons and tons of advertising) and then buy the entire album. Similarly with books where they buy on the reputation of the author and tons and tons of advertising. Sure, you can go and point out that some people pay attention to reviews, but many reviews are just shills and the number of people who are devoted followers of reviews pretty small compared to those who are swayed by advertising. When comes down to brass tacks, very few people actually buy their entertainment as "known quantities."

Re:the art world flourished....

[spectecjr]

Have you heard of this thing called cabletv? You pay a subscription and you get your entertainment in weekly installments

That's how it's distributed. Believe it or not, cabletv subscriptions don't pay for shows to be produced except in the case of the premium channels like Showtime, HBO. That's why they have advertising. It still requires movie & tv companies to stump up the money to create the content first. They get their money back through the advertising revenue; the cable company actually charges channels to be distributed.

As for your "known quantities" comments... no, they're basing it on the reputation of the producers. Your system will make it nearly impossible for an unknown to break in. You can't rely on your reputation when you don't have one yet.

Re:the art world flourished....

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

That's how it's distributed. Believe it or not, cabletv subscriptions don't pay for shows to be produced except in the case of the premium channels like Showtime, HBO. Duh, that's what I am talking about. Very popular those channels are.

As for your "known quantities" comments... no, they're basing it on the reputation of the producers. What part of "with little knowledge of what they are in for beyond the reputations of the actors and director and tons and tons of advertising." did you not read when I wrote it?

Your system will make it nearly impossible for an unknown to break in. You can't rely on your reputation when you don't have one yet. Echo, echo, echo...

The current system is just as hard for an unknown to break in, in fact I think it is worse because the distribution channels are controlled by a cartel that only exists because of copyright law. Without a cartel on distribution, anyone can distribute their work and make a name for themselves.

Now I am waiting for you to echo again.

Of course...

[VON-MAN]

If you were able to satisfy that same need with, say Microsoft Windows Vista, then yes.

Aaahh... Nonsense...

[denzacar]

Parent post is full of it.

Re:Aaahh... Nonsense...

[clarkkent09]

For example?

Actually, now that I think about it, the article and those such as yourself who agree with it are not just silly as I originally thought, but actually dangerous.

Re:Aaahh... Nonsense...

[denzacar]

Immediacy - According to you all theaters in the world were closed in 1995, then burned to the ground.

Personalization - Using your limited imagination as a starting point for judgment of someone else's ideas is well... silly. :P
Oh... and books with multiple endings exist for years.
Author having a say... poll for the readers to decide which ending to choose... or which one to write first? Hm? Something ridiculous about that?
And did you ever hear of pre-screenings of the movies where they ask the audience what they do and what they don't like about the movie and then change it?

Interpretation - Again... your lack of imagination. Can't help you there. Did you ever take a payed course in say... MS Office? Thousands if not millions do.

Authenticity - Is there a big problem with people downloading a song by, say, Metallica, only to realize that it was actually performed by some other band? I don't think so.
Not only do you lack imagination, but also any logic or comprehension of the world we live in? Wow!
Sooo... fans are idiots for liking a particular BAND who created the song instead of realizing that its just a song and it does not matter if it is played by Metallica or "Your Local Trio of Drunks" using their armpits as only instruments?

Accessibility - You pay somebody else to store your digital possessions and serve them to you on demand? Again, there may be a small value in that for certain things (backups etc) but I prefer to keep my music/movie/book etc collections on my own keychain, thank you very much.
And say someone comes along, hits you on the head with a large rubber dildo and steals your keychain. My... it sure would be handy if all that hard to collect information was easily accessible.
And oh... How do you check your e-mail in the middle of the ocean? Or in the middle of Sahara? Or on the bottom of the coal mine? Hmmm... what was that word again?

Embodiment - I guess what he means by this is that you may want to pay to have a fancy copy in some cases. For example, the book is free but you pay for a pretty old-fashioned hardcover binding or whatever.
Wow... you almost have a clue this time. Seeing how you describe it I can only guess that you are either 11 years old or that your lack of said imagination is a big bad mind block again.

Patronage - You pay out of goodness of your heart because you want the musician/artist/author to make some money. Yeah right.
You are really a fuckin idiot, are you? Yes. People like to pay for things. Some like to do it because they think or are taught that it is right to do. Others because they feel that their copy is worth more that way. Some because it gives them that feeling of superiority over the author - "It is I, mighty reader that pays your bills!".
Ever heard a street performer singing a tune you like and dropped him a buck or two? That basic form of patronage has been working for millennia now...

Findability - Those are free now, but in the future they will become for pay, according to him.
Soo... amazon and eBay are making $0.00 according to you? He mentions those, you disregard them.
Now, imagine not knowing what you want, but knowing what you like - and a service providing more of what you want based on that?
Oh... sorry... I forget... you are imagination and logic impaired.

Might try honing that nonsense trait you have. World needs clueless people too. See... you made me elaborate on each topic.
Can't say you are completely useless to the world.

Re:Aaahh... Nonsense...

[Seiruu]

Immediacy - According to you all theaters in the world were closed in 1995, then burned to the ground. Theaters aren't popular because they have things fast IMO, they are mostly popular because of the whole atmosphere/big screen surrounding them. That's why peeps can and will still go to theaters after DVD's are out (and why theaters are still hosting those movies).

Personalization - Using your limited imagination as a starting point for judgment of someone else's ideas is well... silly. :P
Oh... and books with multiple endings exist for years. Just because something has existed for years, doesn't mean it's financially profitable. Especially not when their standard cousins (normal books) are still around and making money. Your examples are part of a significantly small minority. OS has existed for years, most projects aren't making money at all, they are in fact being funded by their commercial jobs.

Interpretation - Again... your lack of imagination. Can't help you there. Did you ever take a payed course in say... MS Office? Thousands if not millions do. Thousands and millions, indeed. But it's still just one product, one example. SAP is also one good example. But how many examples can you think of, compared to the billions of products out there that don't need people to train you to use the products?

Authenticity - Is there a big problem with people downloading a song by, say, Metallica, only to realize that it was actually performed by some other band? I don't think so.
Not only do you lack imagination, but also any logic or comprehension of the world we live in? Wow!
Sooo... fans are idiots for liking a particular BAND who created the song instead of realizing that its just a song and it does not matter if it is played by Metallica or "Your Local Trio of Drunks" using their armpits as only instruments? No, that's not what he's trying to say. He's saying that this has never been an issue, how many mass complaints have you observed going "I downloaded the wrong song waaaaah"? Again, it's just a small portion of peeps, and they will find the right ones sooner or later. And who cares who plays it? If they like it it's good.

And say someone comes along, hits you on the head with a large rubber dildo and steals your keychain. My... it sure would be handy if all that hard to collect information was easily accessible. Then he'd still have the collection on his computer? And what if the server breaks down and they lose everything? Or they get hacked? They mess up their back ups?

And oh... How do you check your e-mail in the middle of the ocean? Or in the middle of Sahara? Or on the bottom of the coal mine? Hmmm... what was that word again? How is this different when the stuff is hosted online? You can access one location online but not another? Never heard of ftp servers/VPN?

Wow... you almost have a clue this time. Seeing how you describe it I can only guess that you are either 11 years old or that your lack of said imagination is a big bad mind block again. You're rather mature yourself.

Patronage makes sense, but there's nothing new/thought provoking about that. And let's face it, there aren't that many people earning their bread with developing OS compared to their commercial cousins. Most of them are being funded out of their own wallets, from their commercial jobs.

Findability - Those are free now, but in the future they will become for pay, according to him.
Soo... amazon and eBay are making $0.00 according to you? He mentions those, you disregard them. Amazon and eBay are actually bad examples IMO, because the products they can "find" aren't free at all. You are paying for the product + their fees. If the products were free you'd simply google them and download them, just like what most are doing with free software etc. now. If google or wiki start charging for their search results THEN you'd have a case. And how much room for google like search engines do you think the market has anyway?

So I gotta say, that guy makes more sense than you and the guy who wrote this essay.

Re:Aaahh... Nonsense...

[dreadclown]

"Your Local Trio of Drunks" using their armpits as only instruments

Well, that sounds like the thing that should not be...

Re:Aaahh... Nonsense...

[clarkkent09]

Ok, you are a pea-brained smelly ape. I guess that takes care of the insults.

You miss the point completely. I am too lazy to go through all the points again, but let me try to summarize it in a simple way so that perhaps you can understand: I never said that those eight things don't exist, just that they don't provide anywhere near enough value, that people would be to pay for, to replace the current system.

sorry for nitpicking

[mapkinase]

In "Immediacy" part he was giving example how "immediacy" is a value for consumer of entertainment and that is why entertainment industry is selling immediacy. Example he gives for software is quite different. Software industry needs us to have access to earlier versions so we could help the industry to fix the bugs. Seems quite opposite things to me. Early software indeed goes for free or lesser value, and early entertainment goes for higher value (even earlier free screenings for narrow groups of critics and target audience excluded).

Here's my thinking...

[Viceroy Potatohead]

I've been thinking about this sort of thing recently, and here are a few of my ideas (wrt music).

What the music industry should have done is this:

Create a decent online store and classify the music as either popular (the Brtineys, Metallicas etc), historical (the Creams, Johnny Cashes etc), or up-and-coming (the Modest Mouses, Jason Webleys etc) where they DON'T sell the biggest hits, they give them away, when you purchase a different track from the same artist, as well as a track from any band classified 'up-and=coming'. Personally, I think $1 a track is quite a bit too much, but whatever, they'd have to discover the actual price point. Regardless, basically three tunes for the price of two.

If even a small percentage of those who buy then go and buy further tracks from the u&c bands, it would be promoting new and less homogenized music, as well as making the smaller bands more profitable for the labels.

For big acts (U2, the Stones, that sort of thing), I'd also offer some meatspace uber-boxset, with absolutely EVERYTHING they've done. These half-asses boxsets that are actually offered nowadays don't appeal to me at all. DVDs of all their studio work, a few DVDs of all known live recordings, a DVD of demos, DVDs of all known video, a book about the band, a book of all known tour and show posters, etc... Basically, I mean EVERYTHING. Number the boxsets and sell the first ten for a ridiculous price (maybe a couple thousand), and the next hundred for maybe twice the general price. Anybody else can get it for $200 or whatever... I know there are several bands that I would have happily payed that amount, and judging by the twenty to thirty million people who entered the lottery to see Zeppelin for $300 (IIRC), there are bound to be plenty of others like me.

Then, instead of the current rush ticket buying system for concerts we have now, I'd open the sales to those who bought the boxset first, followed by those who have bought tracks from the online store, followed by the general public. As well, bases on the areas the boxsets have sold well in, I'd do another concert, for $500 per couple, limited to 300 or 400 people. Personally, I wouldn't have paid $100 to see Zeppelin with 20,000 other people, but I would have paid quite a bit more than $500 to see them with only 400 people. Let everyone at the show meet the band. Considering what deranged, out-of-touch twats so many of these celebrities have become, it would be doing them a favour.

Anyhow, that's my 2c. An industry which is providing something people want has clearly fscked up when they have become as hated as the IRS.

easy one

[McGiraf]

'If reproductions of our best efforts are free,' he asks, 'how can we keep going?

Easy: Abolish money.

Duh!

Re:easy one

[ChrisMaple]

Money is an accounting system for what things are worth. It facilitates fair and efficient trade. Consider the alternatives.

Barter. A pure barter system is inefficient, because trades are only made when the parties involved exchange things of equal value. To allow trades of things of non-equal value, at least one party must have a supply of things of small agreed-upon value to make up the difference. Over time, these variety of small things will reduce, as a community settles upon one standard of small things that everyone accepts. Guess what? They've just invented money, and it's no longer a pure barter system.

Charity. Won't work. Some people are unwilling to do work of any sort; many others soon see that there is no good reason to produce when all they want to do is consume. If existence is possible at all under a pure charity system, it won't get much beyond a subsistence level.

Involuntary transfer of goods. An effective way to make life "brutish, short, and nasty". The biggest bully gets almost everything; people who would normally produce have no incentive to do so.

Re:easy one

[McGiraf]

No these are not alternatives, like you say these do not work. Abolishing money is better.

"Money is an accounting system for what things are worth. It facilitates fair and efficient trade"

That's just not true. Money is just a mean of control.

(The first post was tongue in cheek, i did not expect a rational answer.) :)

most free things have a real $$$$ cost

[petes_PoV]

Whether it's free software or a free sample or a "take it, it's free" giveaway of unsold items after a yard sale. Once you have something you start to make an investment in it. On the case of the free sample, the promoter hopes you'll like it and buy more. For free software you spend time installing it and trying it out. If you don't like it you spend more time removing it. With the unsold items, you spend real-estate in your home to house it (probably the reason it was up for sale to start with) and time to clean it when you do housekeeping.

So "free" doesn't really exist at all

To be better than free, an item has to pay you back for it's upkeep, care / feeding / maintenance and the time you spend using it, exploring it's potential and possibly the disposal costs if or when you toss it out.

In short to be better than free, it must make you a profit.

I've recently spend several days exploring a "free" CMS package for building websites. So far my time-cost has been well over $1000. In my view this package is certainly not free and may even be more costly than one I purchased for $500, but got my website built and operational in a day.

Free as in no-cost is a myth. In my mind "free" simply means disposable, with very few regrets.

Remember kids

[NewAndFresh]

Home Taping is Killing Music
(or to quote the Dead Kennedys on In God We Trust)
"Home taping is killing big business profits. We left this side blank so you can help."

it just has to not suck

[192939495969798999]

The Eagles had a 700,000-album debut week selling only at wal-mart. AC/DC's "Back in Black" recently hit 22 million copies sold over its lifetime. Piracy exists but it has not stopped good music from selling, it just stopped the labels' cash cow of generating money from crap releases by slapping some cute kid's picture on the front of the disc.

Start of making it "as good as free"

[Chris_Jefferson]

One thing which irritates me about official channels of getting things is that it is often much more trouble than getting a bittorrent. There are things I would pay for, because I want more to be made, but it's too much hassle. The obvious examples of this is DRM and "Use need the CD/DVD in the drive" for games, but it effects other levels too.

A recent extreme case of this is the BBC's new iPlayer. This is free (and I'm in the UK, so it works), and I use windows so it works fine, yet I'm STILL using a standard bittorrent site to get programs, because the interface is so goddamn slow and awful.

Let me sign up once, then make it easy for me to search for, and download what I want with the minimal of fuss.

In fact

[NewAndFresh]

You are a threat to national security. Without a carrot on a stick, people around the world are simply going to "keep it to themselves" to the point of self-imploding. WE NEED TO SHUT DOWN THE INTERNET NOW!!

I am frequently surprised...

[ChainedFei]

... That so many people equate successful ideas with monetary value. How is religion successful? Were there people going around asking individuals to buy into the Renaissance? We, as a society, focus altogether too much on how to make a quick buck off of something that we ignore the fact that some ideas are just damn good. A good idea sells itself. Bad ideas have to be marketed to the idiots. And we should be asking, is money the point or are we making it INTO the point?

Re:I am frequently surprised...

[ChrisMaple]

Human time and effort is (like all things) a limited quantity. If a person is to make good decisions about how to live his life, he must be able to rank the possibilities open to him. He then chooses the things that most advance his life. Monetary value is an easily understandable standard that can be used for the ranking. Sure, there are things that fall into the category of "That's worth more (to me) than any amount of money", but that does not break the ranking system.

Re:I am frequently surprised...

[Anonymous Coward]

I understand your sentiment, and agree that there are more important things than money, however I have to say that the material components of all the things you mentioned were bought and paid for many times over. The Renaissance as an intellectual movement was free, but the art, architecture, science and writing of Renaissance masters were generally commissioned or supported by commissions for other works. And of course religion is free, but it did not get so successful by word of mouth alone. Most major religions have some sort of tithing ethic or requirement. Christianity would never have spread across the globe if there wasn't money to fund the missionaries, build the churches, print the bibles, translate the bibles, etc... The Vatican/Catholic Church is a multibillion dollar organization. Money is not the POINT, but it is an integral part of everything in modern society - and before money it was just measured differently, sacks of grain for example.

Re:I am frequently surprised...

[Anonymous Coward]

Speaking as a professional illustrator (yes, I paint), it's not just about profits. It's also about sustainability.

Cue standard reference to 'starving artists'.

Yes, the work we create is self-fulfilling. Yes, it's also personally fulfilling to satisfy client needs. All of the emotional circumstances have sentimental value, certainly.

But if I can't eat, then for God's sake, I certainly can't continue to paint.

Meet the "new" economy, same as the old economy

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

The economics haven't changed here, it's just that we're allowing the commercial value of the artwork itself drop to practically zero instead of propping it up with some scarcity. The artwork is distributable for free, and any company may publish it, tailor it, provide help for it. There's plenty of room for competition, so inflated prices (for example, to cover for and incentivise production costs) would not be tolerated. It's the same economics, it's just now that everything between the covers of your book is now commercial dirt. Suddenly artists/publishers are now no longer in the business of selling art to the public, but in making flashy versions of existing artworks (since that's where the money comes from), and artist question the necessity of actually bringing their own works to the table.

Freebies

[Cytlid]

The next time someone whines "How can we make money if we give away XYZ for free?" ask them how we can give away recipes for free without starving.

Good article, btw, but I think here in the /. forum, it's more preaching to the choir.

Re:Freebies

[spectecjr]

The next time someone whines "How can we make money if we give away XYZ for free?" ask them how we can give away recipes for free without starving.

Pity that analogy doesn't work for - say - novelists. Or movie makers.

Take it further. How can you give away recipes for free without starving? Simple:

The recipe creator has another job.
They're not relying on the recipe for income.
Recipes are algorithms for the creation of food from ingredients. There is value in using them again and again. Fiction, for example, loses its value over time - you remember it.

So, what you're saying is - without the pap analogy:

Writers, filmmakers, musicians should all have a different source of income than selling their creations.

Which is another way of saying "I don't want to pay for it. It should be free for me to consume".

Sorry, but society doesn't work like that - and none has. If you want something to do something for you, you pay for it. You're advocating a return to slavery, or a rule-of-muscle society. But hey, good luck. I'm sure you won't mind when someone comes to you and demands that you give them the chair you made, or the poem you wrote at gunpoint. Because heck, taking that won't make you starve will it? You can always make another chair.

One more way.

[PopeRatzo]

vertinox, of course I agree with your assessment.

I have been using for a year now a "commission" model to make a living off of my music. Besides the more "traditional" methods of earning money as a musician and composer, I create one-of-a-kind works on commission. After an interview and rather extensive set of conversations, I create from 20-50 minutes of music and then give the work completely to the patron, no rights reserved. They could copy it and sell it if they want, but I never will. They could even put their own name on it if they want, but I warn them it will probably decrease its value (unless their name is Bono). So far, nobody has taken that route, though.

Oh, I also charge for this work on a sliding scale, based upon income and political orientation (I require proof of income, too). The prices have ranged from the cost of an evening out for two at the movies to 5 figures. It's sort of like the way the fine artists have always worked, and when I figure in my time and expenses, my price-per-hour is about the same as a low to mid-level painter or sculptor (but I'm just getting started).

As you say, if copyright went away tomorrow, there would still me music, books, even movies. Also, there will still be artists making a living at it, and in new and interesting ways. Creative people are supposed to be innovators, so why shouldn't that extend to the ways they monetize their efforts?

Ultimately, the price is less important than the value, to me. As long as I can continue to do what I love, what I have to do, I'm happy.

Re:One more way.

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

Let's get one thing straight ... you're a marketeer, not an artist. And as you say, you don't put your works in the public domain, in fact you don't even exercize the basic rights that copyright guarantees an author (such as authorship for example, or demonstration).

The post was obviously about working to create ... for free. Nothing, nada, zilch.

And your pricing practices range somewhere between "discriminatory" and outright "racist". I bet you were one of those guys screaming bloody murder when amazon did the same (pricing based on ideology). But obviously doing it yourself is ... just normal.

Re:One more way.

[PopeRatzo]

And your pricing practices range somewhere between "discriminatory" and outright "racist". I bet you were one of those guys screaming bloody murder when amazon did the same (pricing based on ideology).

No, I liked it when Amazon charged based upon ideology.

Actually, I do put my work in the public domain. About a third of it is public domain, another third is creative commons "non-C" and the last third I sell as sliding-scale commission work.

I forgot to mention that the sliding scale is also based upon how big an asshole the patron is. In other words, you couldn't afford me.

Re:One more way.

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

I forgot to mention that the sliding scale is also based upon how big an asshole the patron is. In other words, you couldn't afford me.

Don't worry. I have, several years ago already, promised myself I'd kill myself before I hire a marketeer. Unlike you, I have a speciality companies can't do without.

Autorun sucks!

[jackjeff]

People not disabling the auto-run deserve to be hacked.
People enabling the auto-run by default on their OS deserve to be jailed.

Re:Autorun sucks!

[Jerry Beasters]

mod troll

Product vs. Service

[david_thornley]

One thing that struck me about the list of eight things is that very, very few people are going to get rich off them, while they will allow a very large number of people to make a good living.

The way to get rich is to sell a product, a single thing that you make (or at least design) once, and sell in very large quantities. If you do it right, you can take a certain amount of work you do, and use it to get money out of a whole lot of people. This is what the RIAA and MPAA are trying to do with songs and movies: sell the exact same thing millions of times.

The other way to make money is to provide a service. I make my living writing software for a company. They get my services, I get a continuing income that, while it pays for a nice lifestyle, isn't going to make me rich. (My current company does much the same thing: instead of selling the software, it supports the company in supplying a service very efficiently.) I do something specifically for the company, and they pay me.

The eight listed qualities of "better than free" are mostly services. They provide something personalized, or services that can't be sold indefinitely, or things that are of limited if positive value. That's extremely threatening to institutions like Microsoft or Disney, that have made oodles of money out of artificial scarcity.

It may well be that it will be much easier to make a good living in twenty or thirty years, but much harder to become rich. That doesn't sound bad to me, but there's going to be a whole lot of resistance by people with lots of money between now and then.

Re:Product vs. Service

[Microlith]

The other way to make money is to provide a service. I make my living writing software for a company. They get my services, I get a continuing income that, while it pays for a nice lifestyle, isn't going to make me rich. (My current company does much the same thing: instead of selling the software, it supports the company in supplying a service very efficiently.) I do something specifically for the company, and they pay me.

But your company would not pay you if they did not foresee a return on their investment in you. That there is a return now is why so much is invested into various forms of entertainment. Make that return impossible (make the product free) and you will drive off investors.

Eventually you will drive off enough that you will have to make something on pocket change, for better or worse, and you might (just might) recoup enough to make your money back.

Re:Product vs. Service

[Shados]

The main issue with services I've always found, is that then people don't have a reason to make something that doesn't require services...

Hypothetical, geek-wise example: I make a free RDBMS to compete with Postgres, MySQL, etc. Now, I make money out of services (well, not unlike how the people behind MySQL do). Now, I need to choose which features to add (as a priority, of course all are good)... I could make the RDBMS run faster, have more programmatic features, blah blah, or I could have a good ecosystem of management tools, auto-tuning services, etc.

Well, of course, if I make money out of services, unless it would be a showstopper for adoption, I'd be RETARDED to do the later: it will cut in my cash flow, and thats all it will do (since all my extra "customers" will be jumping on the wagon because they -don't- need me).

Actually, that is fairly commonly seen in the world of software, and other products, that live mostly off of services. The thing works well, ONCE its all properly configured, setup, tuned....but good luck doing that yourself (Oracle, I'm looking at you).

Then you have things that simply don't require any support or services, and are mighty boring to make. That accounts for, like, 99% of the lacks in open source softwares: for example, most UI things. If its well done, it doesn't need to be supported (much), in general (most) people hate doing UI, its long and tedious. So the better UIs out there are made from projects that are directly or indirectly linked to commercial projects (KDE...).

In the world of music for example, you have a bit less of a problem: the better musicians, singers, etc out there, do it because its fun first, for the money later (thus why there's so much great indy music). In videogames though? Ouch. You'll virtually never get the 100+ people team to work for years on a PS3 game (especially since aside he occasional collector edition, you can't sell much lateral products). It is a pain, documentation is scarce, you have a 5 years artificial deadline to get anything done (the lifespan of the console). Well, unless everyone starts making MMORPGs (ugh....)

So by going fully services and related products, one side of things will continue to purr along just fine...the other side will probably suffer in product diversity a lot. Not everything can be supported. And there aren't enough people who do it "for fun" to completly fill the remaining gap.

Re:Product vs. Service

[ChrisMaple]

There's always going to be a "time value of money". Rich people will always be able to increase their riches by loaning out their money.

People making a good living who are not rich, can become rich by forgoing immediate gratification, and saving and loaning out the surplus.

Sure, some rich people are going to resist changes. There are always going to be people who don't want to exert new effort, and from among those the rich have the wherewithal to impede progress.

centralization is an anomaly

[Joseph_Daniel_Zukige]

and the interesting thing is that the author seems to be aware of that fact. (But maybe not of how it impacts his current thesis.)

Anyway, yeah, 20th century media provided an awful lot of nominal employment, but the jury is still out on how much value they provided. Kind of like Microsoft provided an awful lot of software, but the jury is now reporting on how much real work that software actually did/does. You can sell snake oil for a while, but eventually you find that you have polluted your own market.

But the thing is, when you can get a copy of any manufactured good you want dirt cheap, what good is money? Money is our proxy for value. If nothing has value, how can any proxy function? So, people who believe that value is generated by rarity will look for things that are rare, and this guy found several things that are rare even when everything tangible is copiable.

He kind of alludes to the fact that these eight things have been the actual source of value all along. But he seems to ignore that they all point back the way we have come -- back away from WalMart, back away from centralization. And when you step back away from centralization, you realize, we don't need need any big provider of employment.

All we needed was communication, and the people we were entrusting our communication (not the telephone company, although they did sometimes try) have, for the most part, held our communication for ransom.

We don't need big farming, either. (Nothing sucks the nutrition out of a crop faster than mass producing it.) We can actually produce sufficient food if we produce it locally, in most places. If we can keep unrestrained communication networks, we can produce our own food in the morning, be doctors, scientists, artisans, technicians, teachers, etc., in the afternoon, and philosophers in the evenings. Kind of like what Marx said, but not with the revolutions he assumed were necessary. (Not sure which way is bloodier, but that's a rant for another day.)

And we no longer need the proxy. If my neighbor gets sick, I and some other neighbors go answer his need without insurance money, just because we know that, when he's well, he will be making desks and cabinets and such in his afternoons. If I need a certain kind of desk, I go visit that neighbor (after he's well) and we draw out some plans, and he helps me work out the parts I don't know how to do.

When we can communicate about real value (because no one is holding things for ransom anymore), we no longer need the proxy. And we know longer need others to employee us or be employed by us.

Re:centralization is an anomaly

[ChrisMaple]

For just one thing out of many possibilities, money is a safeguard against waste. Many people are already slobs, as a walk down many busy roads will demonstrate. With a requirement that things be paid for, people are less likely to discard things for trivial reasons. (My car ran out of gas. I'll get a new one.) Some people enjoy destroying things. If they have to pay for the things they destroy, they are less likely to destroy things.

Not all things are manufactured. People pay money for live performances.

On a more fundamental basis, you have attempted to destroy the word "value". Value has 2 generally accepted meanings.

• A desire. If I want something, I value it.
• A useful thing. Hammers are of value for driving nails into wood.

Neither of these aspects will go away as long as people live and act. Money, as a fungible and divisible system for quantifying and trading value, will not disappear.

Big projects are facilitated with money. Try building a vacation cruise ship with voluntary labor, donated materials, and no accounting system. It isn't going to happen.

Even your example of a sick neighbor falls apart quickly. Highly skilled brain surgeons are rare. If your sick neighbor needs one, and it's 300 miles to the nearest one of a good enough skill level, the surgeon is unlikely to perform his valued function for free. Occasionally maybe, but always? Why should he bother?

Re:centralization is an anomaly

[shmlco]

Ah, the quintessential communal system. Of course, one only has to go back to the sixties to see how many of those utopian societies survived.

And if barter systems worked so well, we wouldn't have evolved money way back in the day. Communication doesn't help, as small villages already had excellent word-of-mouth communication systems.

Everyone knows that Jim is a parasite who doesn't want to do any work. Now what? Let him starve? Jane does "favors" for the men. Is that work? Is that enough work? What if you don't need or want her favors and she needs one of your cabinets? And as mentioned above, some skill sets are more valuable. Many people can make cabinets, but the only brain surgeon around is Mike, who spent years learning to do what he does. And because of that Mike already has all of the cabinets he needs. Now what do you do? Run around trying to arrange a trade with someone else? Could be hard to do when you need surgery.

"But the thing is, when you can get a copy of any manufactured good you want dirt cheap, what good is money?"

IF you can get a copy of ANY manufactured good you want dirt cheap, then your argument may some hold water. But even "dirt cheap" isn't free.

Re:centralization is an anomaly

[multisync]

Jane does "favors" for the men ... What if you don't need or want her favors and she needs one of your cabinets?
 
... the only brain surgeon around is Mike ... Mike already has all of the cabinets he needs ...

Now what do you do?

I know what I'd be doing if I was Mike 8^D

Re:centralization is an anomaly

[opencity]

> We don't need big farming, either. (Nothing sucks the nutrition out of a crop faster than mass producing it.) We can actually produce sufficient food if we produce it locally, in most places. If we can keep unrestrained communication networks, we can produce our own food in the morning, be doctors, scientists, artisans, technicians, teachers, etc., in the afternoon, and philosophers in the evenings.

Sure I agree but I'm curious how you think that applies in the short, say Ah, the quintessential communal system. Of course, one only has to go back to the sixties to see how many of those utopian societies survived.

Wrote the man on a networked computer. What exactly does BSD stand for? Just asking.

If you degrade the concept of barter by making absolute or by assuming it means Bolshevik of course it doesn't work. If you decide free market means society has no control over the flow of wealth then your bridges don't get fixed and your air is filthy. I advocate an Evolution, as Revolution tends toward a full circle and a clique ends up on top.

Re:centralization is an anomaly

[shmlco]

"I advocate an Evolution..."

Sounds to me like you were advocating that we scrap the current system and do away with money altogether. Hardly seems "evolutionary".

Either way, anyone can advocate anything, regardless of whether or not it's practical or workable or scalable. As has been said, the devil is in the details, and I simply pointed how such utopian schemes, created by people with the best of intentions, have failed in the past.

BTW, if you're interesting in societies based on alternative value systems, and where everything is "free", then you should read James P. Hogan's Voyage from Yesteryear.

Re:centralization is an anomaly

[opencity]

> Sounds to me like you were advocating that we scrap the current system and do away with money altogether.

You're getting your posters mixed up - I was responding to utopian local farming post and while I agree with that direction I wonder how to add value short term, say 25 years. Big Quick Solutions usually turn out bad - though I'd argue for FDR and any further commentary on my part is usually sectarian flamebait. Incremental change in, hopefully, the right direction gives much better odds (IMHO)

For the record I doubt cash is going anywhere for a long time. Well, The Euro and RMB at least. But that's not to say the despecialization in the workforce, long overdue, won't change moneys relation (hey, it's value) to overall standard of living.

Re:centralization is an anomaly

[krazytekn0]

If my neighbor gets sick, I and some other neighbors go answer his need without insurance money, just because we know that, when he's well, he will be making desks and cabinets and such in his afternoons. If I need a certain kind of desk, I go visit that neighbor (after he's well) and we draw out some plans, and he helps me work out the parts I don't know how to do.

That sounds great, except for the fact that people are involved. The only way for this to work is if every person continued contributing to the whole as they have been, once the concept of money is gone. The problem with this is that many people only provide the services that they provide because of two reasons, a. They know how/are able to do it, b. It pays better than the other things they are able to do. So what happens when all the septic tank pumpers realize that it would be more pleasant to just build desks and they could still derive the same benefits from the rest of society that they would otherwise.

People do distasteful jobs because there is added value (more money), once the value is gone from that there will be no reason to do it anymore. Then other people who need the distasteful services done will need a way to add extra value to those services in order to get them done which will most likely lead to the reinstitution of a standard of trading / money.

As a musician, my work is free

[smilinggoat]

I'm a musician, and I've come to terms with the fact that from now on, music is free. I support other musicians by purchasing LPs and CDs and the occasional MP3 of other artists I like, but for the majority of our audience (the public), our music is free.

How do we, as musicians, make money on our works? By doing the same thing that any underground band has known for a long long time: merch. The money is in the t-shirt, the lighter, the sticker, the wallet, etc. People want that.

That, and vinyl will never die. It is definitely a niche. But for one of my bands, we sell a 7" EP and you get a free MP3 download version of it as well. For one price you get the high quality, inconvenient vinyl and the low quality, convenient MP3. Not a bad model, IMO...

I've bought a few MP3 albums off Bleep before they were available in a physical format, but damn it, I wish for my $10 for the MP3 album, I'd get a $10 coupon to buy the LP or CD...

But why allow bootleggers?

[Joce640k]

"...the bootleggers can still sell knock off copies to every one else"

Why let them?

Record stores and cinemas are the one place where copyright law makes sense and is enforceable.

Re:But why allow bootleggers?

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Record stores and cinemas are the one place where copyright law makes sense and is enforceable. Because copyright laws have a cost to society. Selective enforcement won't make record stores and cinemas very happy, there will be a constant push to re-expand copyright to improve their business.

What makes something "Better than free"?

[jeremy128]

A beowulf cluster of free things (or should I say, Imagine a beowulf cluster of free things).

Getting paid for ever?

[serviscope_minor]

A comment on some opinions above, first:

I did an engineering degree at one of the top schools and I got a high mark, a first as it happens. I had to work very hard for 4 years to get that, and I had to pay to do it as well.

You know what sucks? People don't keep paying me since I'm a great engineer. I have to actually work to get people to keep paying me. How is this different from being an artist? I had to work very hard for years, and PAY, just to get to the position where I'm recognised. Now I can do things that the majority of other people can not. Maybe you don't think I'm creative enough and only really creativeness should be rewarded in this way. If this is the case, look around at some of the modern engineering wonders of the world. They're as much art as science (and fine examples of both). But people don't keep paying the engineers for the use of those works.

Now substitute any other high-end training/degree/education for the engineering degree I claimed above. Art is great, just like engineering. But it's not special.

Finally, I have nothing against people being stupidly successful and making vast amounts of money. What I mind is people whinging and trying to change laws so that they can make more money at my expense.

Work for a living, damn it.

And that's kind of what the article says: you will have to accept that copies are simply not scarse. No amount of wishful thinking will change that. You will now (as always) have to make money by providing things which are scarse. Like service, customization, support, trustworthiness, and so on.

Re:Getting paid for ever?

[spectecjr]

You know what sucks? People don't keep paying me since I'm a great engineer. I have to actually work to get people to keep paying me. How is this different from being an artist?

People are willing to pay you a living wage to be an engineer. People won't pay more than about $20 for entertainment, which is what they get from an artist. If an author sells one book every 4 years for 4x your yearly salary, it all evens out.

Entertainment is the economy of wide distribution. It means that 1,000,000 people buying something for a very small price can afford to have something that otherwise, one person would have to spend $10,000,000 to do. And that normally doesn't happen.

Or you could actually, you know, man up and use your engineering skills in an artistic fashion.

Wait a second...

[raftpeople]

...when they have become as hated as the IRS.

I think you're being a little hard on the IRS.

Re:Nonsense: NONSENSE

[serviscope_minor]

Ok, to summarize for those too lazy to read the whole article: his point is that since its getting so easy to copy things (digital and in some cases physical), the actual products will become super abundant and therefore worthless (free). Instead of paying for the products, people will pay for other things.

Yes it is easy to copy things. Money is made from scarcity. It's the scarse things people will pay for, in general.

Immediacy - You pay to get it right away, becomes free later. Nonsense. A free copy can be made available as soon as a non-free copy, even sooner - see movies "released" on bit torrent before they show up in theaters.

Bull. It's a bloody pain in the neck downloading stuff. You have to find it, it takes a while and you might get a crappy encoding and have to start over. It's much less effort for me to simply pick up a dvd in the local supermarket when I buy dinner. No waiting, guaranteed quality (except for Sony's copy protection) and I get it NOW, as in wihin 0.5 hours I'll be watching it with dinner. I have the ready money to pay for the convinience, so I do. Even when I'm in no hurry, it's a mixture of `patronage' and `immediacy' which causes me to buy stuff rather than download it.

I'm not `holier than thou' either, but I value my own time. When factors aggreagte differently, I'll download stuff (well stream it from youtube--see findability).

Personalization - You pay to get it specially personalized the way you want it. Doesn't apply to a vast majority of products. His examples: book ending tailored to your preferences, aspirin tailored to your DNA are both ridiculous.

On quite a few OSS projects, you can pay the developers for features. I have paid.

In other aspects it does work. Furniture is mass produced so cheaply than an individual can not compete with the likes of IKEA, for instance. Skilled woodworkers can make money by customization. IKEA won't make you high-quality fitted bookshelves for instance. And this service includes charging for some free stuff. For instance the skilled woodworker will also know where to go to find those high quality woods which match your taste. You could do that searching `for free', but most people don't since it's easier to pay.

Interpretation - You pay for help with using the product. Again, applies to only a small minority of the products. Support for complex software is one, but how many other examples can you think of?

I use RHEL at work, not Whitebox. I'm guessing that isn't free. RedHat are still in business, so my experience is not unique.

Authenticity -- You pay to ensure that the album is really performed by the band (his example). I don't even know what he means by that. Is there a big problem with people downloading a song by, say, Metallica, only to realize that it was actually performed by some other band? I don't think so.

Art auctions would seem to contradict you point. People are willing to pay (IMO) far too much for authenticity.

Accessibility -- You pay somebody else to store your digital possessions and serve them to you on demand? Again, there may be a small value in that for certain things (backups etc) but I prefer to keep my music/movie/book etc collections on my own keychain, thank you very much.

I don't pay for that. However, many people seem to pay over the odds to get email on a cell phone, so the idea is not far-fetched.

Embodiment -- I guess what he means by this is that you may want to pay to have a fancy copy in some cases. For example, the book is free but you pay for a pretty old-fashioned hardcover binding or whatever.

I own a number of classic books, available free since copyright long since expired. Yet I have paper copies of them. In the case of my really favourite books, I have hardcover copies. Maybe I

Free as in beer isn't best

[SL Baur]

Free as in beer isn't always worth it. Think, white elephant.

Two examples from own life: I "won" a "free" grandfather clock by participating in some intrusive survey and buying discount coupons which I never used. Since I was in college and living on campus the grandfather clock had negative value and I never bothered to collect it.

The second was the time I was bored enough to drive out into the desert and listen to one of those shared time share thingies. That night they were selling shares of timeshares in San Luis Obispo (my home town) and my "free" gift for attending was a couple nights stay in a hotel in downtown San Francisco (where my brother lived at the time).

"Free" stuff often isn't worth it.

(And the obligatory, yes, I was young and very stupid).

Stop and think

[dosboot]

Consider for a moment digital books, movies and games. The only value of such things is the copy. If you can't charge for a copy then very few people will create these things as an individual. These leaves just two options: 1) people can create digital works as a service to a media company or 2) people can create digital works as a hobby and give them away freely. There is no 3) where people create digital works and sell them themselves. And in case 1) the company won't be selling us the digital work as a product, they either charge us for a password or they won't be selling it digitally at all.

Re:Stop and think

[serviscope_minor]

Before telling me to stop and think, perhaps you should read the fine article. Yeah, I must be new here or something.

Even so trying to reason why something is a bad idea isn't going to change the facts of the real world.

Re:Stop and think

[dosboot]

Well, I did read the article.

>>Even so trying to reason why something is a bad idea isn't going to change the facts of the real world.

But presumably we care about the real world. There are some things to which you can't assign 'generative value', and yet people did work hard dammit to create and sell them to you. What I was saying is that there is problem in the real world, and you should think about it. Saying that "the real world is the real world" is avoiding them problems we face.

The very essence of the Free Rider problem.

[shmlco]

The very essence of the Free Rider problem.

It's also why donation systems, support your favorite artist drives, and other such alternative "models" don't scale. There are too many parasites, or too many people who simply assume that someone else is picking up the slack. And people also become annoyed when they're perceptually being nagged to "give". Or, as you say, they no longer want to be the "sucker".

But don't worry, because of people like you there's an entire army of people out there dedicated to making things as difficult and risky as you can possible imagine.

Enjoy the ride.

most non-free things have a real $$$$ cost

[Anonymous Coward]

For free software you spend time installing it and trying it out. If you don't like it you spend more time removing it.

As opposed to buying non-free software, spending time installing it and trying it out, and if you don't like it, spend more time removing it?

I've recently spend several days exploring a "free" CMS package for building websites. So far my time-cost has been well over $1000.

I've spend several years exploring a non-free operating system. So far my time-cost has been well over $100,000 in dealing with viruses and trojans and random reboots. In my view this operating system is certainly more costly than one I downloaded for free, but got my computer system operational in an hour (with no further issues with viruses).

There's an investment in time regardless of whether something is free or non-free. Just because you pay for something doesn't necessarily mean it will be anymore useful or better than the free item.

Re:Nonsense: NONSENSE

[clarkkent09]

Like the author of the article, and some other people in this thread, you miss the point. I agree that all of those things exist and they do add some value, but, in my opinion, nowhere near enough to replace paying for the actual products. Take a combined annual revenue of music, movie, software and publishing industries. Many, many billions of dollars, right. Now imagine all those products are available for free and simple download. You are saying that more than a tiny fraction of that revenue (and those jobs) can be replaced by these added services? Most of these services exist now and they don't make that much money by comparison to product sales.

Re:Nonsense: NONSENSE

[serviscope_minor]

you do know that the VAST majority of software is custom work, right?

The future varies depending on who-where one is

[gobbo]

I never downloaded music until I realized I had been paying a levy for CDR's for years, totaling hundreds of dollars paid--for backing up data and recording original tracks. I felt like a chump.

Now I download anything I want that's on a major label and available, since I'm paying for it anyway. I always buy CD's direct from the artist if I can, in solidarity. Support the artists, and screw greedy middlemen with their faulty business model. The levy distribution system is as broken as a typical recording contract.

Disclaimer: I'm in Canada. Many canadians, being poisoned by USian media, are confused about this, and don't know about Section 8 of the Copyright Act.

Re:The future varies depending on who-where one is

[khellendros1984]

How odd....I've known that Canadians pay a media tax on their CD-R's, and I'm a United Statesian. Funny what you hear when you pay attention (and what you miss when you don't!)

Re:The future varies depending on who-where one is

[gr8scot]

I never downloaded music until I realized I had been paying a levy for CDR's for years, totaling hundreds of dollars paid--for backing up data and recording original tracks. I felt like a chump. How much do you get taxed for petrol? What do you steal from Exxon? See, you're not acting on principle, you're just making excuses to be a leech, which is just another type of sucker.

Re:The future varies depending on who-where one is

[gobbo]

How much do you get taxed for petrol? What do you steal from Exxon? See, you're not acting on principle, you're just making excuses to be a leech, which is just another type of sucker.

OK, I take exception to that, because I strive to pay independent artists directly. I'm actually trying to get value for monies paid ($0.23/cd, thousands of cd's purchased over the years), and have to cast about to find mainstream/big company music I want to fulfill my levy with. Otherwise, I am the one being stolen from. Perhaps you don't understand how a levy works.

Not only that, but your exxon example is disingenuous and misdirected, by confusing copyright infringement with commodity theft, and taxes with levies. My 'petrol taxes' are misapplied by the government for general revenue, when they should go directly into subsidizing the transportation systems, but that is a local political issue as it's entirely government run, not a redistribution to the industry that assumes I'm a gas thief. So, you're either an unclear thinker subject to various logical fallacies and rudeness, or an industry shill.

Re:The future varies depending on who-where one is

[gobbo]

right.. so when did you hear about it? I found out about 5 years ago... about the same time I got a /. account.

Re:The future varies depending on who-where one is

[gr8scot]

OK, I take exception to that, because I strive to pay independent artists directly. OK, I criticized you first, so I'll admit, that part is a principled choice. I meant only to be critical of your thieving, but your point is valid. I should have phrased that more narrowly.

Not only that, but your exxon example is disingenuous and misdirected, by confusing copyright infringement with commodity theft, and taxes with levies. Not if tax on the physical commodity, blank CD, is your justification.

My 'petrol taxes' are misapplied by the government for general revenue, when they should go directly into subsidizing the transportation systems, but that is a local political issue as it's entirely government run, not a redistribution to the industry that assumes I'm a gas thief. I think the rationales for both those types of taxes, and many others, boil down to Imaginary Guilt: whatever convinces enough law-abiding citizens to pretend to believe we owe more to 'the system' than we really do. I also think the entertainment industry is one of the easiest to boycott, and the tax on CD-R's is not enough to change dissuade me from that opinion, so I really don't grok what all the fuss is about. I do enjoy the meticulous, cogent arguments that I frequently read against Imaginary Property, though. Please keep up the good work.

Re:The future varies depending on who-where one is

[gobbo]

I meant only to be critical of your thieving, ...

This is a sticking point. It isn't thieving for two reasons: it is a levy to compensate artists directly (in theory) for section 8 of the copyright act, so it is services received for monies paid (I'm confused about your morals here); and, if it were copyright infringement, which it ain't, read the act I linked to above, it wouldn't be theft, as they are categorically different. Cue arguments about digital vs. physical, etc.--particularly relevant to gas vs. music. Is playing music at a party theft as well? In canadian law, and according to most of the industry, it's the same as personal copying.

Not if tax on the physical commodity, blank CD, is your justification.... I think the rationales for both those types of taxes, and many others, boil down to Imaginary Guilt: whatever convinces enough law-abiding citizens to pretend to believe we owe more to 'the system' than we really do. I also think the entertainment industry is one of the easiest to boycott, and the tax on CD-R's is not enough to change dissuade me from that opinion, so I really don't grok what all the fuss is about.

Alright, so you don't understand what a levy is. It is a blanket fee collected against the purchase of each good or service, in this case CD-R, to compensate for a proposed service rendered. In this case, personal performances of recorded music. It is NOT a tax; the money is received by an industry organisation called SOCAN (Society of Composers, Authors, and Musicians) who are mandated to charge the levy for various circumstances like public parties and copying rights, and redistribute the money directly to artists. It's an indirect method, but a transaction nonetheless, not a tax. If one pays the levy but does not copy any music, one is paying for a legal service not received. One ALSO pays taxes on blank CD-R's in Canada, to the tune of about 13% in most places. It is less than the levy, which makes up about 50% of the price of the CDR, and in fact the levy is also taxed, as a service (significantly, no-one is up in arms about "taxing a tax" with respect to the levy).

I do enjoy the meticulous, cogent arguments that I frequently read against Imaginary Property, though. Please keep up the good work.

These arguments are enshrined in Canadian Law and embraced by the industry association. Copies of music aren't theft, they are personal performances. Steal a CD from a record store, you aren't stealing the music, you're stealing the package and avoiding the performance fees. It's obvious you aren't canadian, and can't wrap your head around the concepts involved. Let's just say that your template of reality in this case is misaligned.

how was it 'for free'?

[mgkimsal2]

This is not to say that this will hold for every author--public service broadcasters can't be expected to employ every content creator--but DA is a fine example of exactly how you can make money by giving stuff away for free.

Where exactly was the 'free' in this? The BBC is gov't run, funded by taxes. Maybe not a direct radio license in this case, but it collects money from people, hired a guy to write something, then gave the original people something back in return: the work it commissioned and paid for with the money it collected from the original population. I'm not sure I see anything 'free' here.

Re:Nonsense: NONSENSE

[spectecjr]

Yet it's funny how the software that everyone wants to pirate is not this custom work. Must be a reason for that...

Market value and Real value

[Wildclaw]

Lately IP proponents have been focusing heavily on the economic side of the issue. More accuratly they are trying to confuse two distinct terms. Market value and Real value.

Market value is what an item sells for on the market. It is heavily affected by supply & demand and is always lower than the real value. Real value is the usefulness an item has to a specific person. Note, that while the real value remains constant as supply increases, the Sum(Real Value) for all items on the market doesn't increase linearly simply because not all people value the item the same, and those that value it most will get hold of it first.

It is very difficult if not impossible to calculate the real value for most items, and for most economic systems this is a big problem when you want to measure the prosperity of the population.

So why are IP proponents so intent on confusing the different between market value and real value. It is simple. The monopoly on copyright does a single thing. It increases the scarcity of the copyrighted item, making the market value higher, which allows the holder of the copyright to earn more money. In contrast, with no copyright, scarcity is removed and when there is no scarcity on an item, the market value will approach zero. Just look at air. It has quite a high real value. Without it you would die. It is however next to impossible to find anyone willing to pay for common air.

There are of course other ways to increase market value even without a copyright which is often mentioned by those who are against copyright. That however in my opinion is secondary to the real issue of market value vs real value. Copyright may increase the total number of works produced, but it has a hefty price as it also simultaneously decreases the total number of copies of those works that gets produced. It may have been acceptable a couple of hundred years ago, when there weren't so many works of art produced, but today the price of that exchange is simply not worth it.

Musical works are copyrighted too

[tepples]

Music has always been free, in the sense that you can sing any song you remember. People can't sing songs written by people who were alive on or after January 1, 1938, "at any place where a substantial number of persons outside of a normal circle of a family and its social acquaintances is gathered" (17 USC 101). Granted, that has near 0 to do with the record industry, except to the extent that a lot of record labels own music publishers (e.g. Warner Bros. Records and Warner/Chappell Music). Even if you write your own songs, you can get sued and lose if your song happens to be similar to something that was on the radio a decade ago that you had forgotten about.

Free as in YOU

[bitspotter]

SomeONE who is free is better than something that is free.

This has long been my difficulty with the name "free software": the subject of the license tends to be software. But the point is the freedom, not of the software, but of the user.

Not free as in beer, but free as in YOU.

Is that supposed

[vespacide2]

to be an analogy for music?
cause, man, does it not work.
Our music is manufactured in Chinese industrial factories? Huh?
What are you clamoring about?

Re:Nonsense: NONSENSE

[serviscope_minor]

Yet it's funny how the software that everyone wants to pirate is not this custom work. Must be a reason for that...

I don't get your point. Custom software is all but useless to anyone except the customer. That's why there is and there will continue to be a very large amount of money spent on it. I wonder why thieves never steasl fitted bookshelves. Must be a reason for that...

Re:Nonsense: NONSENSE

[spectecjr]

I don't get your point. Custom software is all but useless to anyone except the customer. That's why there is and there will continue to be a very large amount of money spent on it. I wonder why thieves never steasl fitted bookshelves. Must be a reason for that...

My point is this: pointing at custom works and saying "hey, look, the industry will be fine - most of this stuff is custom! It's only the stuff that isn't custom which will suffer" is a pretty lousy idea. Most people rely more on the non-custom stuff.

Have you ever considered the possibility that mass-market sales is a good thing? It allows someone like me, or you, to get out of the rat-race and start producing stuff that we want to, instead of working on billing software for a business.

the "treat the symptom" industry flourished....

[Anonymous Coward]

"So, the solution isn't to become a pauper. Its to figure out how to make money despite the bootleggers."

Comparable to how people have to "figure out" how to run a web site in the face of pshing. Seems it would be better for a society as a whole to reduce those forces that lead to the creation of people who engage in pshing. But apparently that sounds too much like solving the problem rather than treating the symptoms in an never ending cycle.

Re:the "treat the symptom" industry flourished....

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Seems it would be better for a society as a whole to reduce those forces that lead to the creation of people who engage in pshing. But apparently that sounds too much like solving the problem You presume that it is more cost effective to fix the "root" problem. It isn't. Especially with copyright where the "root" problem is simply an artificial construct created in the last few centuries.

You can take this to heart - the cost to society of effective copyright enforcement dwarfs the value received to society as a whole.

Furthermore, switching to a new business model isn't "treating the symptom" its entirely possible that copyright-based business models are holding us back. Its obvious they make it real easy for cartels to form and those are never good for the market.

how was it 'for free'?-illusions.

[Anonymous Coward]

The illusion of free is always free. Now the consequences however...

Slash-Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

"One could argue that if one could not make money off of art then only those really interested creating art "for the sake of art" would be doing so. If copyrights went away tomorrow, there would still be musicians playing on the street corner, photographers taking pictures, painters making paintings, and writers writer stories. Now granted there will be a lot less of them, but people still desire to create work for the reward in itself rather than a monetary return. That may be a good thing or bad things depending on how you view it but I think aesthetics will enjoy the fact corporations are no longer actively creating art and the average joe will probaly not like it because no one is making art he likes anymore."

There's a flaw in the above because it's based upon an unsaid assumption. The one who creates will automatically share. Artists remember create foremost for themselves as audiance. If they share it's because they want to. Not because society has any expectation* that they will share.

*And expectation is all it can ever be.

"Personally, I think the ideal solution was how things were back in the middle ages."

He who the gods damn, they first reward. Careful pining for what you don't understand.

As previously seen on Psychology 101.

[Anonymous Coward]

The interesting thing I note every time the "back in the day" argument comes up is the quiet desperation behind it. The plea that the status quo doesn't end. What other time in history has their been such an abundance of both "art" and "entertainment"? And a lot of it free for the picking. And it could all come to an end if those who create decide to not create what we desire. And why would they do that? Simple really. Despite all the technology we develop and will develop, the people of "back in the day" are little different than the people of "this day" or "the coming day". Abusing those who create regardless of what form or degree it takes will garner a reaction now, little different than "then", or "soon to be". Keep that in mind next time you lust for a past were people supposedly enjoyed the kind of circumstances you would gift them with, but the present will not allow.

haha

[Anonymous Coward]

your weak argument turned into name-calling! HA!

What is wrong with that?

[jotaeleemeese]

If that is the system that benefits society as whole (Mozart vs Arctic Monkeys? Give me Mozart any day).

Some artists may struggle, society as a whole would win with the dissemination of arts and knowledge.

What would stop people joining in cooperatives?

[jotaeleemeese]

10000 people , 10 bucks each, that is 100000 bucks. That would pay a damn good writer or composer a very good salary for a year.

This idiocy that nowadays only rich people could afford art is complete nonsense.

Better than Free

[manwithmanyquestions]

I think there is something to the author's opinion about people being willing to pay for non-traditional qualities online - for instance, immediacy in delivery seemed like a good example. But in most media markets, distribution windows are closing anyway - there is an inundation of information so its all about the initial release - after opening weekend, BO for a movie falls 50 percent, same with DVD sales and music - album sales taper off quickly too. I dont think its just about there being digital copies for free online. Its also about there being a lot of competition for increasingly limited attention spans. And there IS a problem when Michael Moore's "Sicko" is available online two weeks before it hits the theaters. But the film still did well. My point is, if you want to incentivize there being a higher-quality market and products, there needs to be SOME before-the-fact guarantee for people - whether they be investors or artists - to sink time and energy into aggregating the skill and talent needed - whether its software or a movie. So the answer isnt just getting people to donate a la radiohead - there needs to be some fundamental restructuring - whether its profit-sharing between ISPs or software distrib platforms and content providers, for instance, on an "all you can" eat subscription model or advertising or some combination of models, to avoid detrimental reliance and loss of creative incentive. I think the reality is that even though a lot of great work product comes from the edges, and the peer production is rife with possibility, on whole, there will be a demand for higher quality content and products and services. and i think people wil be willing to pay for it, if its priced in a way that makes sense - also i do agree personalizetion and interactivity are important and commodifiable features for the future, though i haven't seen them monetized in a really compelling way yet