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Malcolm Gladwell Challenges the Idea of "Free"
An anonymous reader brings us another bump on the bumpy road of Chris Anderson's new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, which we discussed a week ago. Now the Times (UK) is reporting on a dustup between Anderson and Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers. Recently Gladwell reviewed, or rather deconstructed, Anderson's book in the New Yorker. Anderson has responded with a blog post that addresses some, but by no means all, of Gladwell's criticisms, and The Times is inclined to award the match to Gladwell on points. Although their reviewer didn't notice that Gladwell, in setting up the idea of "Free" as a straw man, omitted a critical half of Stewart Brand's seminal quote.
I'm done tinkering with Windows and am ready for something easier that makes more sense.
Linux - Because your time isn't free.
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
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is dying. Fact: And she ran Troubled OS. NOow
Your mother and your sister are the same person? I don't know how that works.
Virginia is for lovers. EVE is for griefers.
Except all of this is bullshit. I will skip for the moment the entire discussion of the fact that no such thing as "Intellectual Property" exists, merely a gaggle of half-assed, perverted "laws" intended to create artificial scarcity of information. I will just focus on your assertion of "costs" of this "IP", pretending for the sake of discussion that it is a logical and coherent concept, which it is not.
You see, the cost of this "IP" is a tiny fraction of all of the manufacturing, distribution and promotion (which constitute the lion share in many cases) of the expenses in real products (i.e. the physical world kind), even for the pharmaceuticals, where the "marketing" costs alone outrank the R&D costs by an order of magnitude.
In case of pure information "products", like music, what is the exact cost to disgorge an over-produced, industrial product called an "album", versus the revenue? A team of perhaps 20 (on the outside, including the band members and sound engineers) working for, say, 6 months, versus 500,000 units (an album going "gold") at $20 retail. And that is only the beginning, as the songs are expected, due to the perversions of the "copyright" assholerism, to be sold for the life time of an author + 70 years or so. The actual expected sales to production costs ratio of the "IP" is clearly expected to approach as close to infinity as possible over its useful lifetime. But that is an extreme case of costs of an industrial "product", meant to baffle brains of masses of witless teenagers by mass promotion endlessly-looped playback on corporate radio networks, which is not the case with over 99% of songs produced, the cost of which is that of a several individuals in a home-computer-centered "studio" producing for distribution over the Internet. The total cost of most of this "IP" is measured in pizzas and beer and the quality, these days, quite comparable to the industrial "product".
But the costs of "IP", being a never ending excuse and rallying cry of all sorts of crooks and thieves, are indeed extravagant in the case of Hollywood-produced kitsch, which is not surprising when a vapid actress can command $45 million dollars for the dubious privilege of her oh-so-precious "intellectual" property of her layers of makeup, tits and ass being filmed for the "adoring audience". But that is only because the appropriate technological revolution is only just starting in this area. Fortunately the every-day-closer notion of 100% computer generated movies, the means to manufacture which will within a decade be withing a grasp of every amateur, will quite surely put an end to that "IP" "industry" too. May it rest in peace.
All of this is happens because you forgot that the technology not only lowered the costs of distribution of information to its natural state of zero (or as near zero as be practically indistinguishable), but it also drastically reduced the cost of producing the "IP". Whereby before you had hundreds of engineers slaving over pen and pencil drawn diagrams duplicated via blue-print machine (in actual blue) you now have CAD/CAM workstations which automate a vast majority of mundane engineering tasks. Whereby before you had to hire a symphonic orchestra, you now can get a home computer to synthesize it digitally. And so on and on and on.
Sure, law has a "key" place in the "markets". I mean what would be the price of weed or crack cocaine if it were not for the "War on Drugs"?! I mean think of all those poor drug cartels and all of their hard earned profits just going "poof" and disappearing. Then there is all of that gigiantic machinery of the ATF, why with billion dollar budgets, its own airline and what not. All those
You do understand that the use of the word "structuralist" makes you sound like a student of the liberal arts, and one far from the modernist/positivist school? I cannot comprehend one who does not feel the need to apologize after using such terms. The concepts introduced are impractical and, one might even say, womanly.