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Is the Creative Class Engine Sputtering?

Posted by samzenpus on from the I-wish-a-buck-was-still-silver dept.

Geoffrey.landis writes "The 'creative class' was supposed to be the new engine of the United States economy, but according to Scott Timberg, writing in Salon, that engine is sputtering. While a very few technologists have become very wealthy, for most creative workers, the rise of amateurs and enthusiasts means that few are actually making a living. The new economy is good for the elite who own the servers, but, for most, 'the dream of a laptop-powered "knowledge class" is dead,' he says."

2 of 520 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Mod parent up! by Anthony+Mouse · · Score: 3, Informative

    What's not scarce are the implementations once designed. The real problem is that we don't have any way of rewarding ideas without these easily copyable implementations. Nobody so far has come up with a workable solution to this problem. Well, none more workable than copyright.

    Sure we do: No software patents + 14 year copyright.

  2. Re:Mod parent up! by tlhIngan · · Score: 3, Informative

    I highly recommend thus book. The problem stems from the definition of property. It's main characteristic is that it is scarce. Real goods are property. Ideas are not. The problem with patents and copyrights are they are trying to make a non scarce good artificially scarce.

    Actually, copyright and patents, when given properly are for scarce things. Ideas are a dime a dozen. However, taking that idea and fleshing out a whole work (book/song/movie/wthatever) takes time and energy. Copyright seeks to protect that investment in order to improve society.

    Patents are similar - there are tons of ideas out there. However, turning an idea into a practical machine isn't as easy, so patents seek to protect implementations of ideas.

    The problem is that copyright keeps getting extended and penalties made harsher which basically destroy the original goal - to protect the real work of taking some idea and turning it into something.

    Ditto patents, but mostly because software is quite an intangible that the "old laws" really cannot cope with . After all, IP laws date back many centuries, and back then, there was really nothing equivalent to software - it's something that takes an idea and is written that causes machinery to work in specific ways. Before that, a machine was a well-isolated system that had inputs, did something with it, and produced an output to accomplish some task in a specific fashion. But software can accomplish the same task in many ways, as long as it obeys the system limitations as the physical system it's in.

    Then there's software that doesn't interact with any physical machine other than the computer it's running on. Or maybe not even that. And that's a problem.