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MP3.com articles: How Free is Free Music?
Richard Hestilow writes " MP3.com has a couple of recent articles on IP and its affect on music. The first article, The Future Of Music , relates mp3s to free software and describes the threat IP presents to music. In response, MP3.com posted another article, How Free is Free Music? , which states that from now on each download page will have an appropriate copyright notice appended. "
I renember about 7 months ago when I pointed out to one of the misc.music newsgroups that copyrights were fake, and that things had to change. People went psycho and even suggested that I justified murder by the same logic that I justified ignoring copyright laws.
Well the more things happen in this busisness, the more it seems I was right.
many programmers are familiar with music. i like many others have study quite abit of music. also you prolly mean that instead of cs majors learning more about music they should take a course in _your_ musical preferances so they will always pick the preview sections you like, right? not everybody likes the same things and they never will so get over it. as far as real audio goes, yeah it sucks but it is small and easy for modem users to hear a bit of the music and if you don't like the 10MB limit then why dont you find the unlimited disk space to offer up larger files.
Digitization of "tangible things" drives the cost of duplication and distribution down to almost nothing. Demanding payment for duplication and distribution doesn't make economic sense because someone else can always undercut the price. The act of digitization inherently makes the 'digital object' free (as an example try to _force_ someone to pay for an mp3 file, he'd laugh at you and download it somewhere else for a lower price/free)
Digitization is probably the greatest means of distributing IP/services so that everyone can benefit. I mean 'benefit' in terms of consuming the "digital item" without destroying it.
Here is the paradox: If you want to make a buck, don't digitize a phyical object. But, if you dont digitize, someone else will digitize and undercut you or even worse give it away for free just to destroy your value chain (drive you out of business by making your customers NOT pay YOU for your physical object).
So how do people make money from digitization?
1)Well by destroying the value chains of those companies that refuse to digitize (you make their customers buy from you at a cheaper price). Simple examples would be: amazon.com, mp3.com, e-toys.com.
2) Content. If the digital content is appealing then money can be made by bringing the content to market and selling it and making the quick buck before someone else can digitize and undercut you. The more imagination and creativity you have then the higher the probability you can make money by bringing a new 'digital object' into existence and make the quick buck by selling at the _lowest_ price and hoping for the biggest volume of downloads. Those with no imagination or creativity will always be distributing for 'free' since they can never charge more than the original creators.
As long as the costs of 'imagination' and 'creativity' used to create digital items are lower than the costs for selling digital items and being undercut by competitors...money can be made. But then money isnt always the driving force behind imagination or creativity so someone will always create, for example music.
I disagree, we should ignore (and defy) it. the GNU was necissary because of the problems caused by copyrights to begin with. true information freedom and int-"property" are unreconcilable over the long term. The GNU hasn't solved the problem, just eased the pressure. Haven't you noticed, copyright laws are getting tougher and nastier than ever before at the same time when they're becomming less usefull and pratical than ever before. Sooner or later someone's gonna stomp, and someone's gonna get squished.
Digitization of "tangible things" drives the cost of duplication and distribution down to almost nothing. Demanding payment for duplication and distribution doesn't make economic sense because someone else can always undercut the price. The act of digitization inherently makes the 'digital object' free (as an example try to _force_ someone to pay for an mp3 file, he'd laugh at you and download it somewhere else for a lower price/free)
Digitization is probably the greatest means of distributing IP/services so that everyone can benefit. I mean 'benefit' in terms of consuming the "digital item" without destroying it.
Here is the paradox: If you want to make a buck, don't digitize a phyical object. But, if you dont digitize, someone else will digitize and undercut you or even worse give it away for free just to destroy your value chain (drive you out of business by making your customers NOT pay YOU for your physical object).
So how do people make money from digitization?
1)Well by destroying the value chains of those companies that refuse to digitize (you make their customers buy from you at a cheaper price). Simple examples would be: amazon.com, mp3.com, e-toys.com.
2) Content. If the digital content is appealing then money can be made by bringing the content to market and selling it and making the quick buck before someone else can digitize and undercut you. The more imagination and creativity you have then the higher the probability you can make money by bringing a new 'digital object' into existence and make the quick buck by selling at the _lowest_ price and hoping for the biggest volume of downloads. Those with no imagination or creativity will always be distributing for 'free' since they can never charge more than the original creators.
As long as the costs of 'imagination' and 'creativity' used to create digital items are lower than the costs for selling digital items and being undercut by competitors...money can be made. But then money isnt always the driving force behind imagination or creativity so someone will always create, for example music.
If we didn't have copyrights anyone who wanted to could just copy slashdot and move it to another site and steal their content then we wouldn't have slashdot anymore and what good would that do us?
Amaron
>If music becomes free, all you will have left >are hobbyist artists, not artists who do this >for a living.
Artists define the music, music does not define the artist. If hobby artists are all that is left, I do not think the quality of music would suffer greatly. After all, almost all professional artists were once hobby artists that got picked up by a distribution company.
Being a professional artist (musical or other) does not make such a person create 'better' than a hobbyist. The idea that 'free' music by hobbyists would cause a lack of music (good or bad) is at most a stretch of the imagination. Would elvis presley have lost his ability to sing if he didnt get paid? would the beatles have lost their ability to change the US music landscape if they didnt get paid? It was their _exposure_ to the masses that caused them to be noticed, not the fact they were professional.
Distribution via digitization is all that a hobby artists (and of course talent) needs to be accepted. Free music can never cause a lack of music, as long as people want thier creations noticed by the masses.
Release recordings for free? Don't those idiots know how expensive it is to buy recording time in a studio? Its an incredible overgeneralization that most musicians don't make most of their moeny from music, and thus releasing their music for free is good. There is a whole population of people that don't like live concerts because of the crowd, noise, cigarette smoke, etc. There goes that source of income.
As for people being able to change the music, that's just insulting to the artist. The original music sounds how he or she intended it to sound. If this idea proliforates we get more cack like Marylin Manson's remake of that eurythmics song, or that other crappy band's remake of Ah Ha's 'Take on me'. And then of course you get 10,000 DIFFERENT crapy changes to the same song floating aorund the internet, made by every talentless fool that thinks they know music better than the original artist.
When a good guitar can cost upwards of 1000 dollars, good drums 800 for the snare alone, pianos 5000 dollars, not to mention food, travel, lodging, and living in general, giving away your work is about the least helpful way to make a living as a musician.
I'd like to see any of you people advocating this course of action to go to work tomorrow and offer to take a 100% pay cut and work for free. It ain't gonna happen. It's one thing to give away a hobby, it's another thing to give away your means of living.
It sad that many times people miss the point and think we are paying for the CD and not the music. The media is not the point! If you are a musician, you and your family can't be fed with just good reputation. (The same goes with programmers, reporters, graphics artists, cinematographers, etc...)
And how long have you been making a living at giving software away?
You are flat out wrong. "free" music does work
the same way as "free" software. Your argument
that playing two pieces of music together is
not "new music" is wrong. I guess you never
heard of "sampling". The rap artist "puff daddy"
has "sampled" just about every song that is
played on the radio. While I do not like his
music I do think that he should be able to
use tunes from songs in the past if he wants to.
This is exactly the same thing that people talk
about when the issue of "software patents" comes
up.
Yes, Yes, your horror stories all sound nice
but the reality is that most bands do not make
much money because they lack exposure. It does
not really matter how much it costs to record
music if people do not get to hear it. Lets
say you spend the money to get a song recorded
and mastered and you press 1000 Cds. Now how
will you sell them. At a concert? Who is going
to come to your concert when they do not
know if they will like your music. Will you try
to make a deal with local record stores? If your
CD costs the same as a "popular" CD then why
would someone who has never heard you before
buy your CD? The songs might suck and a customer
can not return music CDs at most stores so the
buyer would be out the price of the CD. The issue
here is the "channel" where people go to hear and
buy music. The internet is the ideal "channel" as
people can listen to and buy music that they like.
It is no longer a question of "will music make it
bug online?", it is just a matter of when.
>Free music means that people cannot spend their
;)
>entire time making music. They need to make
>money somehow. If an artist has to spend less
>time making music, I think this obviously
>implies that there will be LESS music.
Basically you are saying that the total amount of music is created by professional and by hobbyists AND if there are no professional artists there would be a net decrease in the total amount of music created because there wouldnt be as much people creating music.
The question would be: Is this decrese, of the total amount of music created, a bad thing for humanity.
If the supply of _new_ hobbyists replaces the former-professionals then the net amount of musicians would be regained and actually increase over time. Therefore free music would be a short term detriment for humanity (assuming quantity is the only metric) in that an initial short-term lessening of total music-makers would occur.
If on the otherhand _new_ hobbyists do not replace the total amount of former-professionals (that have moved on to other things)then I can see a detriment to humanity.
Obviously, new hobbyist music-makers (for whom money is not a driving factor) will sooner or later replace the former-professionals and perhaps even add more to the total of music-makers. After all, hobbyist music-makers are born every day
First of all, watch your language.
Second, I did not argue that putting two pieces
of music together is not a new piece. But is the
result better than the two original pieces.
Is there a measure of better in this case.
No, there is none.
For software there is, that's the difference.
Read -> Think -> Post, not vice versa.
Releasing music for no payment is not mandatory. If an artist can _afford_ to give their music away for no-payment it benefits everyone.
Modification or additions to original music is done because it's possible to be done. As for which is 'better' the new version or the original, that is totally subjective.
As for why people give their music away for no payment? Perhaps they seek something other than money as payment, like exposure to the masses or just for bragging rights.
Anyone that can _afford_ to give their music away, for no-payment, should do so. But of course I wouldn't want to force them to give the music away, if they want to sell it instead.
"If we didn't have copyrights anyone who wanted to could just copy slashdot..."
..."
/.ed, we can go to the mirror until the dust settle. Perhaps the 'mirror' would like to do something different than the real Slashdot and a new news site was born. Some of us would prefer the new site and some would prefer the old one. Of course, I don't know if it is good.
I agree with this part.
"... and move it to another site and steal their content..."
It is not stealing. The real slashdot still has the content.
"... then we wouldn't have slashdot anymore
We would still have slashdot. The action of copying and moving to another site doesn't affect the real Slashdot. Perhaps we would have two 'Slashdot', the real and up-to-date one and the 'mirror' which is always left behind unless the copier is diligent enough to copy the site everyday.
"... and what good would that do us?"
This is my guess. When the real Slashdot is
That aside, I have a question. Is the domain name a property since you cannot make a copy of a domain and thus you could 'steal' or 'ask with force for' a domain name?
Credibility is not included.
Well, when musicians start giving out MP3s that have a 30-second Microsoft ad between the chorus and the second verse, we'll know who to blame.
My band used to have some of our mp3's hosted on mp3.com. This lasted for about 6 months until they sent all of the hosted musicians notices that if we wanted to continue to have our music hosted we would have to forfit any rights to the music. Basically selling your music for a few lousy megabytes. What a crappy deal. Imagine if one of us became famouse with a real record deal: we would still be bound to mp3.com. They lost alot of their "clients" this way. (sorry about spelling)
-Brian D.
Posted by gruv:
.99 cents a track thing so far, but how are bands going to pay the engineers and the producers who charge an arm and a leg for a quality recording, certanly not .99cents a song.
this isn't. There is the real world, and then there is the highly financial backing of fake-plastic marketing hype. I've seen some incredible talent in the shittiest places like run down hole-in-the-wall bars. And I've seen it on the charrts here and there. The thing about record labels. Marketing. Plain and simple.
Yea, bands make tons of money touring if they have a solid fan base. I've seen alot of really cool bands make it w/o huge advertising from labels. But the definition of "making it" is different for every band. I've seen alot of bands who had alot of money backing them fail miserably.
As a musician and engineer, I've seen the dark side of the music biz far to much. The tech biz is no different either. Free is my favorite four letter word, but not when it comes to paying the bills. I think royalties is my favorite word actually, and there is none with "free" music.
I like the
It's all a big mess, and cleaning it up is something that confuses everyone. I certanly don't have all the awnsers, I just require my paycheck, that's why I don't do alot of engineering much anymore.
Posted by Funkcongress:
I'm getting REALLY tired with all this MP3 talk.
As far as i'm concerned, the radio does the same
thing. What is to prevent me from tapeing a song from a radio station. If I really like a song I heard on the radio, I might buy the whole CD. I think MP3's do the same thing. Record companies and Artists should be happy. They get another media to sell their music.
Imagine for instance, that we allow free redistribution of the music, and that very little of it is actually sold.
Imagine, for instance, that the artists make their money from tangible goods that come as a result of their popularity.. Selling concert tickets, T Shirts, Merchandising their craft.
May I have a minute or two of your time? I'm sorry if I've come a little too late to this party.
Your solutions point to impossible examples; sure, the Stones and the Floyd can make tons of money this way, even while their recordings are yawn-inducing loss-leaders designed to promote the latest World Tour, but this has nothing to do with music, and everything to do with showbiz. Popular music has more to do with showbiz than it does with music; it's a distinction that goes largely unnoticed. Thanks to the suits who work at the large corporations affiliated with the dreaded RIAA (and the suits who work in showbiz management), Mick'n'Keef, and whomever's-left-in-Pink-Floyd-these-days have been able to establish brand names that are as powerful as brand names such as Microsoft and Oracle. This has little or nothing to do with music; we're talking about brand names and product. There are only subtle differences between Mariah Carey, Marilyn Manson, and whatever little-known band or DJ is appearing at your favorite local venue - but perhaps this flame-inducing statement probably belongs elsewhere.
Yeah, maybe it's OK for some just-started band to try to make their money off of ancillary merchandise - they've probably come up with a logo and an "angle" before they've even come up with a full set-list. And they've chosen a genre of music that is highly marketable, thanks (again) to the dreaded RIAA, the dreadful agent-weasels, and their henchmen in the radio industry (which, again, has little to do with music, even though their programming is rife with it). But what of those people who make "real" music - i.e., non-pop music. Do Ellery Eskelin (who?) or Fred van Hove (who?) now have to sell t-shirts and assorted tchotchkes? I've seen people wearing Coltrane or Beethoven t-shirts, but I don't think the licensing monies are doled out to them posthumously. As a kid, I remember reading an article about the (then pre-academe) composer/saxophonist Anthony Braxton (who?) in which it was mentioned that he was having trouble coming up with the money to pay his phone bill; Braxton at that point had already gained a worldwide reputation, with gigs and recordings in North America, Europe, and Japan. Gee, maybe if he'd come up with a "Braxton World Tour '73" logo and sold World Tour t-shirts at the concert halls, that phone bill wouldn't have been a problem! These individuals I've mentioned (and perhaps thousands of others) don't have any misconceptions about music being a "hobby" - they've spent a hell of a lot more time studying, formulating, practicing, rehearsing, and flat-out working than many of you will ever do in your chosen fields.
I'm getting a little tired of these "Let Them Eat Cake" arguments (i.e. "free your music, and the money will follow"). I respect and understand the arguments and rationales for Free Software, but it doesn't necessarily scale to all fields of endeavor. Is the sheet music equivalent to the source code, or is the recording equivalent to the source code? That simple question should tell you that there isn't a one-to-one correspondence. In the art world, a JPEG can't compare to the "hard copy" of an actual painting or sculpture - so there's no problem with having that JPEG freely distributable on the Web; there will, if the work in question is good, be someone out there who will want to purchase that actual painting or sculpture. With music - or, more specifically, a recorded work of music - the MP2/MP3/MPEG-4 digitized version can be "CD quality" if the bitrate is high enough and the source material is recorded and encoded well. That means there's less of an incentive to buy the "hard copy" version.
Those of you who write code for a living, how would you like it if your compensation came this way: you get paid a few cents each time someone runs your code, no matter how large or small that code was. If that doesn't bring in enough cash to buy all those nice toys, well... there's plenty of McJobs out there; maybe you're "just not working hard enough". Maybe you can supplement your income by selling screensavers and mouse pads with the wonderful logo you've designed for your shared library? Can we please put an end to these ivory-tower solutions for "helping" musicians in the digital age? I'll have a hell of a lot more respect for Ram Samudrala's Free Music Philosophy once he's spent a few years making a living solely through music-making.
Fin du rant. Thanks for stopping by.
--
--
=8^
mp3.com has actually tightened up their restrictions on what you put on there site. Instead of making your own preview recordings, a staff member formally trained in computer science determines what portion of the song is interesting, determines the proper audio balance, and makes a realaudio preview of your music. The preview is of the most boring part of your song, encoded in the worst audio engineering humanly possible.
Then of course, the restriction to 10MB per song is a CS major's dream come true because it cuts the download time for listeners, but how much classical music is deliberately written to accomodate file sizes?
The idea of freely hosting music is a great idea, but unless CS degree programs start requiring music training, the implementation isn't going to be musician friendly.
You are being critical of an artist because of the medium? Are you a fruitcake? Would it be better if the music was on a LP? The artist is offering you something: his performance captured using some form of technology.
You can either buy it or spend your money elsewhere.
I love the post and agree with it. I especially love the sentence that I quoted in the subject.
I think the free everything frenzy is based on people without the means to get anything any other way.
I think the second someone discovers they can make some money off some program they wrote or a song they penned or even a story they were about to post they lose their evangelism. They have a stake in things.
What these people are doing is analogous to the free software movement, but real (literate) musicians have been doing this for years (any jazz players with "real books" out there?), since printed music is FAR easaier to distribute than digital recordings, which are huge in comparison.
support gun control: take guns from cops
This isn't true because very few musicians make money from recordings anyway. Most musicians make money teaching in college and/or gigging. Mostly only rock stars make money selling records, and I say it's about time we trimmed some of that crap anyway. What we might see is an end to POP music, no music. There were musicians everywhere BEFORE we could record music and they will be there after recordings have become WORTHLESS too.
support gun control: take guns from cops
The way I see it, free music can become very similar to free software.
Imagine for instance, that we allow free redistribution of the music, and that very little of it is actually sold.
Imagine, for instance, that the artists make their money from tangible goods that come as a result of their popularity.. Selling concert tickets, T Shirts, Merchandising their craft.
Certainly, if I had a lot of music from an artist, I would want to support them in many ways, especially if I knew most of my money was going to him.
Let's cut out the record companies and allow really great music to thrive. I'd like artists to make money from something physical they give me, not just a string of digital 1's and 0's.
Do you think it could work? Do you think people who were really good could still live off their music? I think so.
If I knew how, I'd have fixed it already. But seriously, some musings:
Money is abstract mediated exchange. Profit comes from an unequal exchange. Inequality here implies a power differential. Excepting extortion, this comes from scarcity. How much of scarcity is real nowadays, and how much has been engineered? (grain mountains, one-generation-only seeds, legal mini-monopolies thru intellectual property, etc.) And, how much scarcity need continue, with technologies to come? It does seem quite easy to enforce false scarcity, when backed by a monopoly control over something.
Power differentials seem inevitable. So, any exchange system will become unequal. Any unequal exchange system will of necessity flow into its least-energy form - abstract money. Hence the death of communism - they still wanted to keep exchange, partly because of an unfortunate addiction to the concept of work.
What is the alternative? Gifts. You don't expect recompense, and neither does anyone else. The problems: who will run the sewers? and, how to prevent someone extorting exchange? For the former, are there people who would like to do that? Do we have enough vocations to fill all the slots? Fot the second, only competition can provide protection - by preventing monopolies, no-one can get leverage to force re-commercialisation.
The biggest problem: how to transition, without pain? Now that, I'm working on...
Okay, I'm a weirdo boomer with more money than sense (maybe), but I've bought several CDs based on individual MP3 tracks 'illegally' downloaded from the Net (gotta love ADSL), and will likely buy more as time goes on...and I'm talking disks and artists that don't regularly get into the Top Thirty countdowns too...
I think the music business is missing out on a great opportunity to gain exposure for artists and music via the net by not embracing the MP3 format. Is there any PROOF that the availability of MP3 pirate tracks hurts sales? Did Madonna's Ray Of Light flop because a few tracks got pirated all over the place?
Sure, some people would download 'free' MP3s, listen to them a few times, and never buy the album...but I really believe this would be the exception, rather than the rule...people like that wouldn't be buying the CD in any case.
It would seem to me that ``free'', as it is used for mp3.com isn't at all the same as in ``free software''.
I'm not a composer, but if I would write music, I would release it for free in the sence that anyone could copy it, redistribute it, take it apart, put it together, distribute enhanchements etcetera.
I hope there are composers out there who thinks like me and will release more music to the public in this way.
You can't really sell support for music in the same way as you can for software, but I'm pretty sure that if one thinks about it, one will be able to come up with secondary solutions to this problem. However, I've never really seen music as a sources of income. I would want to write music, not to make money, but rather to share a feeling or a thought with others.
Salon is carrying today an article echoing Davie Bowie's raves about MP3 and the culture it allows.
Ha det!
--algebraist
Jan Theodore Galkowski, (Oo) http://www.smalltalkidiom.net/ MySQL,PHP,ETL,SQL,MinGW C, and plucking the Web
incidentally, the guy who wrote the first linked essay, Ram Samudrala, has a VERY interesting site at www.ram.org. I ordered the CD "traversing a twisted path" from him, and it's really worth it.
Imagine, for instance, that the artists make their money from tangible goods that come as a result of their popularity.. Selling concert tickets, T Shirts, Merchandising their craft.
Certainly, if I had a lot of music from an artist, I would want to support them in many ways, especially if I knew most of my money was going to him.
Please explain something...why is it that you don't feel like you should have to pay an artist for his/her music? If it doesn't provide enough value for you pay for it, what value lies in your desire to listen to it?
In its physical form, you're right - it's nothing but a bunch of 0's and 1's. But you've completely overlooked all the resources necessary to produce the music in the first place.
Ultimately, if good artists can sell a CD's worth of material over the net in MP3 format, charge about $5 per download, this is more than generous. Anyone who can't pay $5 for an MP3, doesn't really deserve to listen to it.
No, it's just that I don't see why they should try to fight piracy so much. It gives them more exposure.
What's exposure without revenue? Granted, some people that listen to pirated music may end up buying it. But how many don't? If someone is really serious about supporting their favorite artist, paying for the music they listen to is one way to do it. Stealing from them isn't.
I really don't think most of these geeks realize what it takes to record a work nor the time involved. I have always had to pay for my instruments and I'd like to make some of my money back one of these days, unfortunately I don't see me going on the road with my baby grand strapped on the back of my bike so I release stuff on the net.
At the moment, I only have my noncommercial stuff out there as I want to put this stuff on disc one of these days. The last time I put out commercial sounding stuff, I found it on a hotline server even though all the instructions said no redistribution...the operator claimed ignorance and mentioned there was nothing preventing him from redistributing it as it was on the net already. Yeah it was on the net, but at my friggin server with appropriate copyright data and credit to those who helped me. Since then, I've only put out my noise works. Music I love dearly but could probably never sell enough copies to buy me lunch. Maybe if MP3 could store (natively) all copyright data and provide a hyperlink back to my website(s), I'd be more interested in releasing more.
Regardless of whether one thinks my stuff is crap or not (a good deal of it is), I paid for the equipment to make this and the cost just keep piling up. As a side note, I program / develop software for a living. Most of the people arguing all software should be OpenSource or free are idiots. These people have no idea of what something takes to create it. If information wants so hard to be free, why did it cost $40k for my education. I don't mind OS but it is only another way to sell your wares. A few years from now after I am a bit more establisheed in my field, I will probably open up all my source to the public and go entirely into consulting. Don't kid yourselves, OS is not altruistic, it is just marketing. I hate capitalism, but the modern alternatives just don't seem to work.
Right. And how are you going to make your living? Welfare? Government subsidies?
Je ne parle pas francais.
It's amazing to me how these ideas of freeing music are so wonderfully visionary on one hand, and so amazingly near-sighted on the other.
The idea that all music should be free because it is only 1's and 0's is interesting. But why does everyone think that the remaining "tangible things" like t-shirts, concerts, etc... are going to remain tangible?
I foresee a day when t-shirts can "download" a pattern off the net, and reconfigure their dye to the appropriate band's logo. Nothing tangible there, just 1's and 0's. So should this be free, too?
I also foresee a day when some simple virtual reality and haptic interfaces will allow anyone to "feel" like they're at a concert. All they will be getting is a bunch of 1's and 0's from the net. Nothing tangible there, either. So I suppose concerts will also soon be free.
In the end, if you consider that 1's and 0's should always be free, you are cutting off every possible source of income for musicians (and any other field that is later attacked by this free-everything frenzy).
Free music today may sound great. But if you follow that path, as amazingly hippy and altruistic as it may sound, you may very well cause an end to music altogether...
The end of money?
What exactly does that mean? Money is simply a way to perform exchanges of property through a common, accepted intermediary. A dollar is no more evil than a pound of hay used as a unit of property. Money is no more evil than the concept of property itself.
If what you are preaching here is some variant of John Lennon's "Imagine," then maybe I'll just step out of the discussion, because this is getting a little bit too off-topic for me. There are some realities that we all must deal with, and imagining a world with no possessions, no right to own, etc.. is quite a bit off today's world. Free Software works today because it's starting to make business sense, not because it's the "right thing to do."
That's not exactly what I was saying, but I didn't express myself correctly.
I'm saying that free software didn't come into the spotlight until it made business sense to a number of organizations, i.e. RedHat saw they could make money by supporting Linux, IBM saw that Apache worked well and would attract customers to other IBM products by supporting it, etc...
In general, free software works because there are definitely other avenues for making money: support, customized software, etc... This is very specific to software, and cannot be generalized to every other field.