Not really, because no-one would argue that a creative work has more value just because it took longer/more work to produce. If that were true, people would value the hell out of Chinese Democracy.
My point is his whole argument consisted of an emotional appeal about a. the intention of the 'creator' and b. the cost of creating XYZ piece of 'IP' as defenses of copyright.
Good argument. I thought PG had some good points, but I also think that the problem is not only the RIAA and MPAA (among others), but it is our government, which is incapable of handling the complexity of copyright and trademark infringement issues without screwing up something. It is a terrible thing that the creators or copyrighted material are suffering.
But the biggest issue is that we have a means to transfer almost any audio or video data almost anywhere and copy it almost indefinitely. No matter what laws were created and will be created, they can't beat that force. Data is and/or will tend to be free, like it or not, and that has changed everything.
To solve this we all pay subscription fees for some music service and some video streaming service and hope that it all works out in the end. Why? Subscriptions don't inflict as much pain as paying for a song or video every time you want one. So they are the best way for the creators to get compensated.
Doesn't it cost money to produce the smell? As pg mentioned, if on the moon, they charged for smells because they had a delivery mechanism to ration the smell to you, wouldn't that be accounted for in their value offering?
The reason that point is important is because regardless of the value derived by the end user, it is the ability to extract value that counts for the producer. And when smell cannot be rationed, or music supply cannot be controlled, you change your model.
The author's point on this is that there's already a paying customer who covers the cost of producing the smell (by buying the meal).
Which just goes to show you can't push a metaphor too far. I still agree more with PG's conclusion. It really is a strawman to claim that copyright is the only way to pay creators.
There's already a paying customer who receives meal: local distributors who the content is licensed to.
They get exclusive rights to the content (meal).
Now, internet services receive smells: non-exclusive rights which are valid in some countries and not others, like cheese with holes.
Now there's this huge problem where I can't go to 99% of internet services and pay for music because they don't want my money because I live in a wrong country.
This is what we'd call "smell", and while I would pay for "meal" (ability to use any music service in the world according to its pricing and model), I'm only offered "smell" (the suggestion to go elsewhere and figure a way to actually pay for stuff).
I haven't heard anyone articulate the problem better than PG. The analogy isn't perfect but it's sufficient. The point, Paul Graham says, is that in our history we've limited what we sell to what makes sense to sell.
Land used to make no sense to sell. Shit changes it now makes sense. Copies of music doesn't really make sense anymore either.
Hype (which is great) for example. Can he really tell his investors that people downloading it from TPB is no problem? In theory his thesis is fine, in reality not so much.
Clearly he is talking about copies of software too. It's changing from Adobe PS type software to a subscription cloud based software. You can still certainly make money with software but your not gonna make as much selling just copies of software.
"The distribution might be virtually free, but the production certainly isn’t."
Well, all of the music available on iTunes, Amazon, and the Pirate Bay has already been produced, it just needs to be distributed.
If I want to pay for music to be produced, I use Kickstarter. (Or go to concerts, since playing a song live could be considered a new production)
It's a historical accident that we use charging for distribution of music to pay off debts incurred while producing the music.
Of course, paying 99cents to have my phone download a song in the background so I can play it in the next five minutes is worth it to me - cheaper than a cup of coffee, and I don't have to do any work. So the old system of charging for distribution isn't totally dead.
"Well, all of the music available on iTunes, Amazon, and the Pirate Bay has already been produced, it just needs to be distributed."
Just because it has already been produced, doesn't mean that it has already been paid for. The studio and the session musicians have probably been paid, but the artist should be compensated on a scale commensurate with the popularity of the work and that needs to be measured across whatever timescale people are still buying or downloading it.
So in your view the entirety of the 99 cent charge should go to Apple? The song you wanted to download just popped into existence before hand with no time, effort or talent from an artist at all (or discovery by a label)? Please tell me more about this magical music tree.
Well, from my perspective as a consumer, yes, it's a convenience charge. I would be happier if some of it went to the artist. I don't actually know how much of it does.
I'm not sure it's possible to actually curate a comprehensive MP3 catalog without active cooperation from the musicians, at some level. But, if the Pirate Bay surprised me and made a fast way to search and download music that was as easy as iTunes or Amazon MP3, and they had a library of songs that was at least as comprehensive as the for-pay versions, then I might decide that the hassle of keeping my billing info up to date in the other databases was more trouble than changing to the Pirate App. I'm not sure. The actual 99cent charge is so close to free that it doesn't factor into my decision.
But that's theoretical. Right now, the musicians get a few cents, Apple and Amazon get legitimacy and a little bit more of my money.
My few cents per mp3 doesn't add up to much. When I actually want to support an artist, I use Kickstarter, or I buy some merch, or click a donate button.
I viewed Paul's essay as more pragmatic than philosophical.
Whether or not there is some truth in the philosophical view that "illegal copying is theft", the reality is that the characteristics that make it easy to copy digital works makes it really difficulty to maintain a business model that relies on everyone paying for the bits they copy... as difficult as charging for smells.
It bugs me that we haven't moved past "What would happen if creators couldn’t charge for their creations" in these discussions. It's an extreme strawman. No one -- not Graham, not Richard Stallman, not Julian Assange -- is interested in making it impossible to make money from creating stuff.
Copyright is simply one means of accomplishing the end goal of paying creators, and certainly not the only one. I'd like to hear an argument in favor of copyright-exactly-as-it-is that doesn't involve this logical fallacy.
It bothers me as well. Perhaps OP should change his question to "What would happen if creators couldn't police the area outside of the music festival to make sure that nobody benefits from the sound that happens to escape the fences?"
Copyright has on its side reams of academic literature and centuries of apparently successful implementation. Some alternate systems, like patronage, have been tried at relatively limited scales, but there are in general strong theoretical or evidentiary reasons to believe that none of those would produce as much media as we have today.
That doesn't mean that there isn't some better system out there, but I think the burden is on the copyright-dissenters to develop a theoretically sound alternative and implementation plan. Stallman's work in this area is incredible and inspiring, but there isn't, so far, nearly as much theory or evidence on that side (despite the work of Benkler et al.).
Meanwhile, low protectionists--like most people here, myself included--are frequently going to assume a version of the current system stays in place, while proposing tweaking some of the knobs (types of content covered, expiration, penalties, enforcement mechanisms, etc.).
As Bruce Waria says in a comment on his own Music Think Tank piece, by Graham’s logic he should force all the companies he invests in to open source the code which he funded, or allow anyone to embed their technology without compensation or conditions attached.
This wouldn't actually follow PG's logic. Using code does not necessarily require the end user copying it, especially for web-based software which is mostly run remotely. Consuming media necessarily requires copying it to somewhere - to your nerve endings, at the very least.
Your analogy is flawed. Air doesn't cost anything, but sound waves dont cost anything either. The data that's embeded in it (whether it's a smell or a song) has a cost to produce. It costs money and experience to cook the food. It costs money and experience to produce the songs.
I disagree with the point of the blog post. While it doesn't make sense that we people would charge for air pipes to be dragged to earth from the moon in order to use the smells produced (because of legislation), it is perfectly analogous to what the RIAA and MPAA do when they try to influence legislation to stop pirating. Instead of targeting the root cause of the problem (cost and quality), they chose to legislate away rights (SOPA) on the internet. This is similar to the smells example because instead of allowing you to breath the free air, we are going to make you breath our air because we feel its better. This makes no sense, and is hazardous to not only open enterprise but the freedoms that we have.
Piracy is abuse of open networks and speech right. I don't want a government sufficiently powerful (per the RIAA) to stop it, such powers would would themselves be a serious danger to society.
I suppose that amounts to a freedom to piracy. But that doesn't mean piracy is somehow right, or even intended. It's an injustice, of individuals, persisting in the space needed to maintain a free society.
Nor am I much impressed by the argument that with so many people pirating, it must actually be moral. Probably most of them think it's moral, given that they take their norms from the people around them. And the offenses are largely minor. But I think the steps from principle to copyright are pretty clear, and I don't see how anyone concludes that it's actually right.
It's like littering: no one actually thinks it's okay, but they do it because it's convenient, they won't get caught and it isn't a big deal. The consequences of those calculations are obvious.
'When you're abusing the legal system by trying to use mass lawsuits against randomly chosen people as a form of exemplary punishment, or lobbying for laws that would break the Internet if they passed, that's ipso facto evidence you're using a definition of property that doesn't work.' - PG
Brilliant. I was expecting something controversial. But, I assume, that at least within this community what PG says here, is the opinion of the majority.
There is a difference between a prescriptive argument and descriptive (and I just made these up on the spot). A prescriptive argument admonishes others to do something. So for example he would admonish people to pirate because information is like smells. A descriptive argument describes what the situation is without necessarily telling others what to do. This is the argument that I see pg making. Basically the idea that information is easily distributed, and that it will be distributed. Trying to contain it with more antiquated laws is like trying to plug all the holes in a sieve. In other words the future is looking this way whether recording companies want it to or not. And then he proposes thinking about a different way of distributing music.
But pg's argument is prescriptive. For example, it includes the question "Should people not be able to charge for content?" and then gives a (conditional) answer.
There's nothing wrong with writing a prescriptive essay; it doesn't make it in any sense weaker. But it is prescriptive, and Rob's argument here is specifically with the prescriptive part of the argument--in other words, he argues that music is not so much like smells that it supports the overall prescription pg is making.
I think it is prescriptive for the distributor and creators, but descriptive for consumers. He is not admonishing consumers to pirate, as it seems many have misunderstood, he just describes what is happening and what will happen with information. But he asks distributors and creators to change and adapt to a new way of doing things.
The original blog didn't claim pg was encouraging piracy directly, so my post was a bit off topic, but I wrote it because I found when discussing this essay/talk with others, many tend to draw that conclusion.
I do agree that pg's essay was not encouraging piracy. Its main thrust was prescriptive with respect to public policy-- that means prescriptive to legislators, voters, and to a degree industry. Rob's essay, as I understand it, disagrees on the policy advice.
> Cooking smells are a positive externality ...[snip]... But commercially released music is produced specifically for the purpose of being heard, and paid for ...[snip]... The true equivalent would be someone standing outside the fence of a music festival, enjoying the sounds without having paid.
It depends on what you mean by "being heard". Some people think the only acceptable business model for music is for musicians to perform live. If we were to follow this line of thought, what's the difference between listening to music outside the concert grounds and listening to music stored on a digital device? In neither case are you participating in the live performance. In neither case have you reduced the artist's net worth by a single penny, provided that you never intended to attend the live performance anyway.
> What would happen if creators couldn’t charge for their creations? The same as if you couldn’t charge for lines of computer code: there’d be less of it.
And maybe that would be a good thing, as some other commenters have already suggested. Maybe it's not a morally acceptable business model to charge money for making copies of existing code. More companies should be charging money for the value-added services they offer, like making it easier for us to access music and apps, and offering subscriptions. If you don't want people to copy your code without paying, don't release it publicly in the first place, and only release it to people who sign NDAs. That's how business secrets work, right?
I'm not sure if I want to agree 100% with these lines of thought, but it's an interesting thought experiment.
Music existed before copyright did. I remain unconvinced that music costs money to produce. Art gets produced for the sake of art, not for compensation. Specific forms of art (say for example big budget movies) may be an exception, but then the argument needs to shift accordingly.
Music existed, but not recording devices, microphones etc. There is a hard cost associated with all of those. Granted, those costs have come down over time, but the rental of a decent studio is not $0.
The cost of studio rental is irrelevant. What musicians want to be compensated for is the lifetime of study, dedication to a craft, years of poverty and uncertainty, risk of repetitive stress injuries, etc.
"And they do, whenever they perform those skills for an audience. "
The overwhelming majority of musical work -writing, recording, practicing etc - is done in private with no audience present. Many musicians perform very little in public.
That doesn't mean the market values such effort. They have no right to demand to be paid just because something takes skill. Lots of skilled activities are of no value to the market. And I say this as a musician who's very aware of the effort involved.
Not necessarily. They can of course charge before demonstrating said skill, but if someone else happens to be witness, or copy the output in some way, it doesn't mean he controls all future uses of the result of said skill.
"The market doesn't pay for effort, it pays for things people want."
The problem is that people still want the the product as much as they ever did, but they've discovered that they can always get it without paying a penny. The producer produces and the consumer consumes but the producer is not compensated. That's not a market.
I don't know why this is upvoted so much. PG's article seems pretty clear.
The problem I have with this article is the association of investment with a 'right' to recoup that investment. There is no inherent right to recoup investment money of this type. NONE! It doesn't matter how hard something is to produce, there is no inherent right to make a profit based on that effort. People paint, write, sing and act all the time without compensation of any kind.
The argument that creators must be compensated to keep creating is a bit of a straw man. The idea that someone can spend some time writing or making music and then deserves compensation seems to be strongly held, but the ones who vastly profit from the copyright law are not the creators. Disney, for instance, has been dead a very long time, but his company defends copyright extension into perpetuity.
Right now, there are far more people unable to create because of copyright/patent law than there are people getting compensated for their creations.
Who ever said they have the right to profit from it? There was a century or two there where they had the ability to profit from it. Now? Looks like we might be done with that. Kinda sad, but these things happen.
The question is not whether there is a right to make a profit but whether there is a right to pursue a profit.
Free, instantaneous distribution of all music as soon as it is produced (an exaggeration of torrents, but not by much) seems to take away the right to pursue a profit, at least profit by distribution of recordings.
Or perhaps there is no right to pursue profit by distribution. Perhaps there is only a right to pursue profit by live performance. But what happens if that becomes copyable? We already have at least one instance of a holographic singer (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatsune_Miku). What if holographic recorders and projectors become as cheap as cameras and microphones and screens and speakers? Live performance could be copied about as effectively as live sound is now (recorded music is not a perfect reproduction of what was played in studio or on stage). What then?
Is there no right to pursue profit by live performance either? Decreasing costs of production seem likely to make copying merchandise reasonably possible (you can already just draw a design and have someone print a T-shirt or such for you). So is there no right to pursue profit by merchandise either?
If there is no right to pursue profit by distribution, live performance, or merchandise, I think it is safe to say there is no right to pursue profit at all. But is that really fair? Musicians don't even deserve the right to try to get people to buy their product out of anything other than sympathy?
Frankly, I think pay-what-you-want is great. But I don't think it can provide the same level of economic activity and technological development we are used to. The most advanced personal computing company in the world is also the most closed or near it. The iPhone, iPad, corresponding retina displays, the Macbook Air... all produced under tight control and for direct profit only. Why isn't an open, pay-what-you-will hardware company beating Apple? We all like our i-things, so why aren't we paying people to develop them? Why is Apple's cheapest product $129, and the cheapest Kickstarter level usually $1? Why won't we pay $129 for Kickstarter projects that sound interesting to us if pay-what-you-will really works?
Similarly, the most advanced synthesizers, digital mixers, even music software are all produced to be sold. Why is there no open, pay-what-you-will synthesizer to match Kurzweil?
Why is there no open, pay-what-you-will library to match O'Reilly's? Why no open, pay-what-you-will coffee to match Starbucks? Why no open, pay-what-you-will transportation system to match the U.S. interstates and European and Japanese light and high-speed rail?
I would argue it's because accepting only the payment you can convince people to offer voluntarily doesn't work in most cases at an advanced level.
And either way, it doesn't seem to right to force people into a pay-what-you-will model.
I'm saying it's not a 'right' to expect profit from something. The right to pursue a profit exists as long as the law of the land allows it.
Markets already provide a "pay-what-you-want" model, it just happens that not everyone is willing to accept what you want to pay.
Selling capital goods is very different than selling digital copies of something. There is a limited amount of corn in the world, you can purchase it at the going rate generally set by the supply and demand. In digital goods, the supply is unlimited, there are no natural market forces.
Apple heavily protects its products with patents and copyright where it can. You cannot take an ipad design and improve upon that design without cutting a deal with Apple. I think that strongly supports the case that the few (Apple) benefit from the current system while the many (anyone who thinks they could enhance the design of ipad) do not.
There are, however, a few open and free items of software, Linux, MySQL, Apache, Firefox to name a few. Arguably, depending on what you want to do, there isn't even a better closed alternative (yes, yes, substitute whatever SQL package you prefer for MySQL).
I personally have a cable provider (so I pay for the minimal tv package to get internet), a netflix account, Amazon Prime, see the occasional movie in the theater, etc.
When people talk about copyright though, I generally see some stuffed suit making a bonus, not a bunch of creative people.
Except Apple is a bunch of creative people. So is Kurzweil and O'Reilly and, heck, even Starbucks.
Markets are not pay-what-you-want, because pay-what-you-want implies $0 is an acceptable price. At least that's how I was using the term. Apple will not accept $0 for an iPad. If you don't accept their price, you don't get the iPad. That's why people buy it.
Copying media lets you get it even if you don't accept the price. Which means the only reason to pay is because you want to.
My contention is that making people pay in order to enjoy a product is often what provides the money necessary to exercise creativity. The iPad could be improved by an individual working alone with their own funds, but it never could have been created that way. Without profits from previous products, the creative people at Apple who designed the iPad never would have had the resources to do so. We have iPads today precisely because Apple is closed.
What is the next innovation in personal computing? Who will come up with it? Will it be Apple or someone on Kickstarter? My money is on Apple. Even if it is someone on Kickstarter, will they be able to raise the probably millions of dollars necessary to make a viable consumer product? Unlikely.
A system in which producers pay upfront and then recoup costs is actually better for consumers. You get to see the finished product before deciding whether or not to spend your money. If the finished product sucks, only the producer loses. If the finished product of a Kickstarter project sucks, everyone who contributed loses.
How many iterations do you think it took Apple to perfect the iPad? Each of those would have to have been separately funded on Kickstarter for that system to produce the iPad. I doubt even the costs of one iteration could be raised.
But when you cut off the ability to recoup production costs, you cut off the incentive to pay upfront production costs. Which cuts off the funding to creative people who are doing important work.
The problem with only being able to collect voluntary payments (pay-what-you-want, Kickstarter, etc.) is that people don't necessary know they want something until it's done. The 1st iteration iPad probably sucked. So why would people fund it? If Apple builds an iPad, it only takes a few people's shared vision to make it happen. If a Kickstarter project wants to build something as innovative, it will required the shared vision of everyone contributing. You'll have to convince thousands of people that it's worth funding numerous iterations at thousands, or possibly even millions, of dollars, in the hopes that the final product will be good. I just don't see this happening.
It did happen quite often in the past. See much of the research done over the last hundred or so years in public universities.
I didn't say we should arbitrarily limit the amount of profit one can make by investing capital, but the current copyright law and patent law is very stifling to innovation.
Apple employs some people, sure. Monopolies (not implying apple is a monopoly to be hit by anti-trust laws, btw, but copyright and patent are monopoly powers) are very, very profitable for the few people that hold them.
I don't have my copy of Wealth of Nations in front of me (out of copyright, but I purchased the penguin classics paperback anyways, go figure), but Adam Smith made a very compelling argument that things like entertainment are not acretive to the capital of a country. At the time of publication (1776), Smith noted actors and musicians expected no more compensation than what they received for peformances. They produced no lasting product that could be added to the 'capital' of the company. Recordings you might say add this value because of copyright, but if you cannot sell your copy that would mean it's not a capital good.
So, yes, creative works existed before the current distribution model.
I'm not arguing people cannot profit from their works, far be it. I'm arguing that the current model for profit favors a very few at the expense of very many, and does not meet the needs of either creators or consumers as well as it does the distributors!
Movies are perhaps the most dependent on the current model, as yes, it takes significant capital to make most movies. However, is it truly more creative to see the 3D version of Star Wars Episode I? Or would it be better to see "Star Wars Episode I: As written By Kickstarter Member XYZ". I'm fairly certain Option B would be more creative at this point. Lucas and everyone involved with Star Wars has already made plenty of money, but you can't expand on those works just because you have a great idea, you'd need Lucas' permission.
Anyways, copyright/patents are a very complex thing right now. I can't tell you exactly how the Ipad came to be (although it wasn't the first tablet), so I can't really say if Apple had the best idea, or just the right polish at the right time. All the patent infringement lawsuits surrounding the ipad seem to support my view that they stifle innovation more than they support the "It required this closed model" argument, if you ask me. Apple is almost assuredly infringing a lot of patents (which many may be invalid), and I would argue they are really so successful because they have deep enough pockets to fight all those legal wars.
I could write a lot and end up saying very little, it is very hard for me to boil down all my thoughts on copyright and patents into a HN comment.
If you believe people have no right to recoup the time you invest in writing code (or whatever it is you do for a living), then you would continue to show up for work every morning if your paycheck stopped?
> What would happen if creators couldn’t charge for their creations? The same as if you couldn’t charge for lines of computer code: there’d be less of it.
Would there? Really? Like, are we absolutely sure there would be less of it? Are we also ruling out the possibility that someone would pay you to produce specific lines of code or just that once you produce code, you can't sell it?
It used to commonly be the case that you got paid to make music for someone. Now you make the music and then try to sell it to people.
It just seems like there is an implicit assumption that the marketplace model is the best way to encourage the creation of all things.
Curiously omitted from both essays (unless I somehow completely overlooked it) is the ending of this apocryphal story. The judge asks the accused infringer to take a coin out of his pocket and drop it on the table, saying "The sound of the coin shall pay for the smell of the food."
I'll just cherry pick this gem here: "What would happen if creators couldn’t charge for their creations? The same as if you couldn’t charge for lines of computer code: there’d be less of it."
Spotted the massive, gaping flaw in the argument yet?
It's 2012, if you make this argument then I am done with you. Linux is how old? How much of the internet runs on it?
Done.
Edit: Wow, really? Why is this still a necessary argument?
The linux kernel is utterly free. Yet it's still developed. It's still a state of the art product. And people still make money off of linux and linux-based products.
Do I honestly have to connect the dots here?
Spoilers: if you can't or don't want to charge for the code directly then maybe you find some alternate way to charge for something else or you use another form of supporting development.
The analogy to the creation of music and movies should be so frelling obvious I shouldn't even need to make it.
Probably somewhere more efficient but with less useless (but admittedly cool looking :)) eye-candy.
The main reason common distributions have features similar to Windows and OS X is to make transitioning easier. Really serious people using e.g. Arch with XMonad are more efficient with very little Windows/OS X influence.
And hey, Linux could borrow those features even more easily if Windows or OS X were open source. Windows being open source would be complicated, but Apple is a hardware company and would work well enough with an open source OS at its heart.
On the other hand, how many iOS apps would there be if Apple wouldn't allow you to charge for them? It would still be an ok ecosystem, but not great like it is now.
Certainly people are certainly attracted to iOS dev because it produces money, but iOS users do not have to pay for apps. It is easy to get apps without paying for them, but Apple has made it very easy to pay for them. I doubt that the absence of copyright would significantly change the proportion of iOS users who use apps without paying for them.
you're totally missing the point. the question is whether the ability to charge money incentivizes programmers to produce code. androsynth argues that the app store shows that it does. there are hundreds if not thousands of apps that would not exist if all apps in the store had to be free.
The OP strongly implies that "The presence of copyright" is the same as "The ability to charge money," and much of the discussion here also assumes that. It is simply not true, though. I would rather discuss what the OP is actually about than the thing that the OP would prefer to substitute for its subject matter to make its case seem better than it is.
Well sure, I imagine there would be less apps produced (certainly less me too and shovelware apps where the author is trying to make a quick buck). My point is simply that apps will continue to be produced, regardless.
Besides, even if its perfectly legal to copy apps (or music or movies) and distribute them however you like, that doesn't necessarily mean you can't monetize them. It doesn't even mean that you have to completely give up the pay-for-app model either - people will still be willing to pay for something they really like (I bought a CD online direct off a musician a few months back despite already having the mp3's and I've never even opened the CD!), but obviously a lot fewer people than now. Perhaps a pay what you want model would work. This can be offset in other ways - paid support, physical merchandise (printed documentation perhaps) and kickstarter-style "I'll finish the app for $X" are just a few ideas.
I'm not saying that this would definitely be sustainable, because I don't know, but I do see some potential there and either way, people will still make apps, music and movies regardless (though it will be less[1]).
I wonder is B2B sustainable on support contracts and custom work?
[1] Maybe hobbies of the future will revolve more around the production of (free) content and less about the consumption of (free or otherwise) content? Evolution and adaptation of human behavior?
I agree. I view copyrights as unfair business practices, enforced by the government. My original comment was really in response to the open-source comment. I believe money is a bigger incentive than open-source development in the software engineering industry. Software certainly doesn't need to be copyrighted in order to sell it.
That the majority of Linux contributions are made by employees of companies that sell Linux nullifies your argument. Take that away, and Linux would not be near the state it is in today.
Linux is subsidized by large players who need an open platform on which to provide other services. This includes companies like Google who provide advertising based upon things that run on linux and companies like IBM who sell proprietary software that runs on Linux and support contracts for those products.
There are very few viable, large-scale open source projects that are run on developer free time alone.
How many closed-source, for profit software projects were rescued after the supporting company went under? (I am intentionally conflating closed-source and for profit as the majority of financed projects are closed source).
What you have to consider here is the rate of progress, as well as the length of development time. Open source projects have essentially infinite development time, whereas closed-source, for profit projects have a finite development time (whenever the company decides further development isn't worth it anymore)+. However, open source projects tend to have a slower rate of progress versus financed projects.
After 6 months or 1 year, sure, the financed project will probably be ahead. How about the 5 year mark? 10 year? It becomes much less clear which project will have accumulated more man-hours.
+very rarely, closed-source projects are released as open source (e.g. Doom 3), but I think we can all agree that that is the exception to the norm
very rarely, closed-source projects are released as open source (e.g. Doom 3), but I think we can all agree that that is the exception to the norm
Well, if we compare to the list in the parent, it's much more. At least Firefox, Blender, Rails qualify. These were products that had no future in closed-source form. If they had, it would have been financial madness to open source them.
Just because there is some open source code doesn't mean that there is an "optimal" level of it. In other words, maybe due to the relative lack of funding, there's a lot less open source than there could be if there was a better financial feedback loop between people getting value from the software and those developing it.
This isn't just something I'm making up - I've spent a lot of time around open source, and seen a lot of good people who could have done lots more if they had had more time to dedicate to working on the code, rather than working a "day job".
Do you think you're countering InclinedPlane's point? Because you haven't. You've explained the how to InclinedPlane's what, but that hardly constitutes a disproof.
bringing the discussion back to its original topic, the music industry is subsidized by large players as well. every famous musician makes good income from just the fact that they are a celebrity. product endorsements, festival and tour sponsorships, etc. companies pay musicians to produce music in a way that is totally abstracted from the actual sale of music.
For those wondering how this translates to the music industry, there are a few analogies.
- Independent bands who sign corporate contracts--see The Roots.
- Major labels who create teen brands like Justin Bieber or Selena Gomez. They don't care if you steal the music as long as you buy the t-shirt, buy the book, see the movie, come to the show, etc.
- Sync licenses. More and more mid-level bands are depending on getting their songs into movies, commercials, tv shows, etc. to bring in revenue. This is another form of corporate funding.
How many of the sites on the internet are open source though? A quick glance through the top 100 according to Alexa gives me 2 or 3 (wordpress and wikipedia, and really wordpress is more about the content, which is not open source, generally speaking.)
I mean the code. The argument was “there would be less code if you didn't have the right to own code”, and I'm saying that although the internet runs on open source software, the vast majority of popular internet sites run closed-source software.
Code creators can charge for their creations, though. They don't have to, but they can. And some significant portion of open contributors are paid for their contributions, if indirectly, by working as employees of organizations that contribute to or allow employees to work on those open source projects.
If nobody could get paid for writing code, there would be less of it. No question.
Yes, if nobody could get paid for writing code, there would probably be less of it. (Barring some sort of post-scarcity economy, I guess.)
However, your original assumption does not flow from the premise--just because selling software becomes impossible does not mean programmers won't get paid. I recall reading somewhere (too lazy to find the source) that the majority of programmers work on bespoke, in-house software rather than consumer-facing proprietary software. Even if it is not a majority, it still shows that there are viable ways for programmers to get paid outside creating scarcity with copyright.
Just because people contributing to the kernel get paid does not mean they would not get paid without copyright. Companies like Google and Red Hat do not really rely on copyright for money.
> Linux is how old? How much of the internet runs on it? Done.
The argument is that there would be less computer code, not no computer code. Saying that one specific project would still exist is not a counterexample.
And it's an argument, but it's not necessarily true.
Consider the costs of production and distribution.
Production. Frank McCourt's memoirs were the end result of a life of telling stories socially and on stage. People who heard him tell the stories would say "you should write a book". Today his listeners wold have videoed his performances with a camera phone, posted them on YouTube, and he would be a viral star before he knew it.
Distribution. Suppose I have a head mounted camera that simply records everything I see — it's part of version 5 of the android glasses google is working on. Then along comes a third party and releases an app that simply recognizes anything I look at that's a printed page and captures it. If I read a book, I have an digital image of its pages and an OCRed text for indexing.
The cooking smells analogy is actually more accurate than the writer realizes, because all this technology makes production easier too.
OP said that there would be less of it, not that it would be nonexistent.
Linux is probably an exception, and not the rule, and it is such an exception that large companies are willing to subsidize it. I've been looking for some good sound editing software, and the only solution I could find that was good at altering tempo without creating weird artifacts was closed-source and proprietary. I've also rarely played any open-source games that were as good as the closed-source ones.
The point is, if someone does something that creates value, they should get compensated somehow. Asking musicians to produce music for nothing more than the sheer joy of it is exploiting them, and impolite, besides. If someone gives you value, you ought to give value back. I don't agree that the RIAA's way of getting back that value is correct, but that doesn't mean that copyright is a bad idea.
I'm both enjoying and cringing at all of these HNers indicating that Linux is the only major exception they can think of(thus open/free source is obviously a novelty), when many of our livelihoods likely depend on these products.
It just feels like fighting the same battles from 15 years ago. How long will it take? Before people stop trotting out the argument that "you gotta charge for everything! otherwise how does stuff get made eh?" It's old guys. It's been debunked a billion times over.
Open source ain't communism, nor is it doomed to failure. Even if you bind your hands to make it legally impossible for you to control the distribution of your work that doesn't mean that you can't make money off of it or that you must stop working.
Video games alone are a 16 billion dollar per year industry. It employs over 22,000 software developers. (http://www.theesa.com/games-improving-what-matters/economy.a...) Are you seriously suggesting that this industry would produce just as much software if their work wasn't copyrighted, or that listing 35 open-source projects says anything about what would happen to the industry overall?
You're focusing on one very small part of the software industry and ignoring the rest.
It's funny you trot out that example just as so many games are switching to "free to play" models.
I'm focusing on a "very small part of the software industry" which creates the software which runs the vast majority of web servers. Oh, and every android phone too.
All I'm saying is that if you can't accept that there is "another way" of making stuff, even hugely important stuff, then you simply have not been paying attention.
The argument that failing to charge for every single copy of software/music/books/movies must necessarily translate to a diminution of those works has been made time and time again, but there are so many counter examples today that it's patently ridiculous to make it yet again.
Do you have a better argument to make or are you going to stick with this one?
Because honestly I would imagine that reusing the same old tired FUD that companies like MS have tried to use to scare people away from using Linux or Apache back in the mid-90s would have a limited shelf-life.
> All I'm saying is that if you can't accept that there is "another way" of making stuff, even hugely important stuff, then you simply have not been paying attention.
I have done open source development for over 10 years (I was developer #3 on one of the open-source projects you mentioned), have used Linux for about 15 years, and use it every day at my job working at the company that develops the Android code that you mention. That you would question my open source credential is... amusing.
I believe in open source too (and have spent a significant portion of my life developing it). That doesn't mean that I'm naive enough to think that you can take away the licensing-based revenue from the for-pay software industry and continue to get just as much software.
It's not a matter of being open source or not. I think his argument is that you can make money without copyright. Regardless if you open source your software or not. And not only you "can", but it's also the most profitable choice of today. You pointed to the gaming industry, which is an interesting example because our industry is moving toward free to play exactly because copyright haven't been paying off recently. Although I'd argue companies are doing this extremely slow because of their own bureaucracy and incompetence.
So my answer to your question of "do you think they would be making as much money without copyright" is that they would be making much more without copyright.
Let me offer an argument which I haven't seen, but is probably not novel: people will continue to make music, tell stories and make short films even if there's no likelihood of making much money from it. It's a creative impulse that, happily, has allowed some people in the last few decades to make a living at it -- but that's not the long term history, and it may not continue.
We might not get epic movies... or we might, if CGI continues to dwindle in cost. We probably won't get as much pop/dance music... but we might.
There won't be as many huge star winners, that's all that can really be said to be likely.
I don't think that's really an argument that has anything to do with what I said. If someone does something to benefit you, in this case, writing a song that you enjoy, you should reciprocate somehow, preferably with money. It doesn't matter if they enjoyed doing it or not. I know lots of people who like their jobs, but they would be pretty sad about not getting paid.
That's cool, but some people in this thread are arguing that you shouldn't have to pay for music at all, beyond a small Kickstarter investment. I disagree with that. And apparently, so do the majority of pirates.
MongoDB, Wordpress (and all other blogging frameworks), MySQL, the list keeps going... they are out there for free because the creators figured out a way for it to be free why still getting paid (service contracts in most cases).. Being free didn't even reduce their quality (it probably enhanced it)...
Reading the article now (15 minutes later), the objections seem to be addressed in the next sentence. Was the essay edited after publication because of InclinedPlane's comment? If so, I wish writers wouldn't make "phantom edits" that add or remove substantial content, as it makes it difficult to engage with their writing.
That's right. Charging for software was microsoft's big invention. It took, what, 30 years to realize that the software had enough value beyond the hardware.
I guess the flip side is, if there was no free software, there would be no pay software.
couldn't charge for their creations but of course people do charge for open-source code to be made. IBM, RedHat, the US National Security Agency, Canonical, DARPA, Google, etc. all pay for open source code to be written. If the programmers weren't allowed to charge for their code, a lot less code would be written.
I don't get the difference? The NSA hiring experts to work on SELinux extensions is the same as the NSA paying some experts for the SELinux extensions.
The scarce good in this case is the experts' time. In some cases, this works out well as a way to create open source software: if there's a big entity with lots of cash, who really needs that thing and can pay for it in its entirety. But what's being charged for is generally the developer's time, not the software. This is easy to see because, whereas the NSA may pay for SELinux, the next person down the line does not pay for it - they're getting it for free.
This has important implications in terms of the ability to spread the costs around. With proprietary software, it's possible to do so: charge 100 people $10 instead of charging one person $500 and letting the other 99 people copy it for free. You make more money, and in some cases, the market will clear when it wouldn't for the single-payer model.
I think this actually shows up fairly clearly in what's open source and what isn't: stuff that would be a one-off consulting job in any case may or may not be, stuff that's more consumer-oriented is more often proprietary, and stuff that's used by lots of developers as infrustructure is quite often open source.
you're logical reasoning is incredibly flawed. please stop arguing by way of pleading obviousness ("OMG ARE YOU SERIOUS, MY ARGUMENT IS SO OBVIOUS THAT I WONT EVEN MAKE IT!!!11")
> What would happen if creators couldn’t charge for their creations ... there’d be less of it
the claim here is that if you disallowed charging for software, there would be less software.
> Linux is how old? How much of the internet runs on it?
great, linux exists and is awesome. nobody disputes that. this fact does not contradict the claim in question.
the existent / awesomeness of linux contradicts claims such as: "people who don't get paid will not create things" and "unpaid creators cannot create great things". however, the original claim is none of those statements. the original claim is merely that when you don't let people charge for software, fewer people will write it.
> Do I honestly have to connect the dots here?
i honestly have no idea what you think the connection between the dots is.
Only most lines of linux code are written by people who are paid for doing so. If it wasn't for companies that put money into linux development linux would be a lot less useful.
It's 2012, if you make this argument then I am done with you. Linux is how old? How much of the internet runs on it?\
I guess you don't know much about either Linux or business. Let me give you an example. Red Hat pays people to work on Linux, because that increases the market for people who will buy Linux support. IBM pays people to work on Linux, because that increases the market for people who will buy servers. Linux even only has a GUI because a bunch of old Unix companies sat down and formed the X consortium and paid people to write it, which they did because a common GUI would mean more software got written for Unix in general.
So go and head and make your point but do it with a Linux made ONLY of hobbyist code. If you can even compile such a thing (don't forget Cygnus funded a lot of GCC development so they could sell embedded hardware!).
"What would happen if creators couldn’t charge for their creations? The same as if you couldn’t charge for lines of computer code: there’d be less of it."
This sums up why I disagree with the author. People have been playing and composing music way before "selling records" was the way to make money. Just like people don't contribute to open source "for the joy of it".
Very serious business is being done around open source, and the same could happen around the music industry. I personally wouldn't mind settling for an industry where artists get paid for their performances (getting paid for the "actual" hours put in, not just a one-off recording session decades ago that's making them fat millionaires), using their records as promotional tools. Parallel business would develop, they would charge for packaging, interviews, talks, God-knows-what. Let the next generations be creative.
The industry may not seem as lucrative as it may sound today, but frankly I could do without the MBA consultant in a suit. Cut off his salary and most of the middle men and you're good to go. Despite what the article says, the cost of producing and publishing new material isn't that high. My closest friend took a couple months off to record a home made 6 song album. With an iMac and some amateur equipment. The result is simply bluffing. Even a small team on a low budget can definitely invest this money as part of their promotion campaign.
"What would happen if creators couldn’t charge for their creations? The same as if you couldn’t charge for lines of computer code: there’d be less of it."
This sums up why I disagree with the author. People have been playing and composing music way before "selling records" was the way to make money. Just like people don't contribute to open source "for the joy of it".
Very serious business is being done around open source, and the same could happen around the music industry. I personally wouldn't mind settling for an industry where artists get paid for their performances (getting paid for the "actual" hours put in, not just a one-off recording session decades ago that's making them fat millionaires), using their records as promotional tools. Parallel business would develop, they would charge for packaging, interviews, talks, God-knows-what. Let the next generations be creative.
The industry may not seem as lucrative as it may sound today, but frankly I could do without the MBA consultant in a suit. Cut off his salary and most of the middle men and you're good to go. Despite what the article says, the cost of producing and publishing new material isn't that high. My closest friend took a couple months off to record a home made 6 song album. With an iMac and some amateur equipment. The result is simply bluffing. Even a small team on a low budget can definitely invest this money as part of their promotion campaign.
We recently gave up casual TV and movies cold-turkey. Frankly, the studios and networks just couldn't figure out how to target us properly. I'm not going to pay $120 / mo. to get my favorite channels (eg. Science and NatGeo) just because ESPN has Comcast by the balls. Similar arguments for movies.
FWIW, I don't use TPB either. But I can imagine the appeal of choice, freedom, and having archival copies of the bits locally.
Just to supplement another response to this point... commercial entertainment does compete directly with free/amateur/semipro/fansourced material all the time.
I would argue that this is more of a danger to Big Content's bottom line. There are only 24 hours in a day. Youtube and reddit compete directly with Universal, Sony, and the New York Times for people's attention.
The fact is that entertaining videos and music are not only easier to distribute than ever, but also easier to produce. You don't need a degree or the backing of a large corporation to be funny, insightful or clever. IMO there is a lot of noise about piracy which masks this even larger "problem" for traditional media.
Thank you for your excellent expansion of my point. I wager that they either haven't identified the boulder rushing down at them...
...or are trying to win the piracy/IP battle enough that it gives them a credible position from which to attack the populist works that remix what they perceive to be their IP.
Especially if, for example, they've succeeded in making faceless/nameless/processless takedowns possible--a pretty solid weapon against populist entertainment.
"commercially released music is produced specifically for the purpose of being heard, and paid for (whether by the buyer, or by a royalty from a radio station)"
Remind me again how much radio stations in the US pay in performance royalties?
Not sure in the US but I remember hearing around £200 for day-time airplay (more listeners) to £40 at late-night is what an artist can expect to earn from a play on the BBC.
At first I wasn't sure if "Defining Property" was one of the most insightful essays I read in a long time, or lazy logic on Paul's part trying to protect the internet in the copyright debate. But I'm pretty sure Paul is talking about something important now.
What he hits on is that there is no scarcity anymore. Media is reproduced and shared freely and instantly, because that is the nature of the internet. The 'pipes' (expensive, physical means of distribution) the recording industry pumped music through for decades have now dissappeared and have been replaced with an open environment. Anything that tries to close that environment is just trying to create artificial scarcity.
It's true that media costs money to produce. And the publishers can still charge for it, if they make the distribution model convenient (or not). But that is still a one time cost which promotes the artist. And let's not act like artists are going to just stop making media if they don't think publishers are going to give them a big payday. They aren't. The more likely scenario is that the distribution will shift to being handled by the artists and that money will be made through concerts and merchandise. Downloaded music will be paid for sometimes, but mostly used for advertisement.
But it looked like there was scarcity to the consumer. When you are the one means of distribution, you can create as much scarcity as you want. It just seems that the record labels and movie industry have carried out that ruse for so long, they actually believe it.
I don't think PG was saying that music equals smells. He's saying piracy = smells, some of them good, some bad.
It's just silly that the industry spent a decade suing people, and probably could have made 10x their money by giving up the 'suing people for smells' and started other music/content related businesses.
PG's analogy is only flawed in that it's meant to be prescriptive and not fundamental, so it admits arguments like this. Producing content costs money, yes. But once it's been released to the public, it's impossible to restrict copying. Cold hard fact, move on. Sorry if it's not the way you'd like - you can take your ball and go home, but you can't go back in time.
All the interest and investment in new distribution services is basically looking to be part of RIAA 2.0 - continuing profitable distribution channels based on consumer laziness. The goal of the record industry has never been to compensate artists, and the decreasing prevalence of big-name acts means there's even fewer lucky ones with the power to demand so. Meanwhile, the pirate side has accepted that distribution is free and is trying to usher in the future so sustainable artist-beneficial (whatever that turns out to mean) structures can be created. Oink was responsible for my going to many shows, while the risk of being hassled over torrenting (I've become more risk-adverse) has resulted in me knowing very few bands on the concert listings.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 109 ms ] threadBut the biggest issue is that we have a means to transfer almost any audio or video data almost anywhere and copy it almost indefinitely. No matter what laws were created and will be created, they can't beat that force. Data is and/or will tend to be free, like it or not, and that has changed everything.
To solve this we all pay subscription fees for some music service and some video streaming service and hope that it all works out in the end. Why? Subscriptions don't inflict as much pain as paying for a song or video every time you want one. So they are the best way for the creators to get compensated.
The reason that point is important is because regardless of the value derived by the end user, it is the ability to extract value that counts for the producer. And when smell cannot be rationed, or music supply cannot be controlled, you change your model.
The author's point on this is that there's already a paying customer who covers the cost of producing the smell (by buying the meal).
Which just goes to show you can't push a metaphor too far. I still agree more with PG's conclusion. It really is a strawman to claim that copyright is the only way to pay creators.
There's already a paying customer who receives meal: local distributors who the content is licensed to. They get exclusive rights to the content (meal).
Now, internet services receive smells: non-exclusive rights which are valid in some countries and not others, like cheese with holes.
Now there's this huge problem where I can't go to 99% of internet services and pay for music because they don't want my money because I live in a wrong country. This is what we'd call "smell", and while I would pay for "meal" (ability to use any music service in the world according to its pricing and model), I'm only offered "smell" (the suggestion to go elsewhere and figure a way to actually pay for stuff).
And this smell, I won't buy.
Land used to make no sense to sell. Shit changes it now makes sense. Copies of music doesn't really make sense anymore either.
Hype (which is great) for example. Can he really tell his investors that people downloading it from TPB is no problem? In theory his thesis is fine, in reality not so much.
Well, all of the music available on iTunes, Amazon, and the Pirate Bay has already been produced, it just needs to be distributed.
If I want to pay for music to be produced, I use Kickstarter. (Or go to concerts, since playing a song live could be considered a new production)
It's a historical accident that we use charging for distribution of music to pay off debts incurred while producing the music.
Of course, paying 99cents to have my phone download a song in the background so I can play it in the next five minutes is worth it to me - cheaper than a cup of coffee, and I don't have to do any work. So the old system of charging for distribution isn't totally dead.
Just because it has already been produced, doesn't mean that it has already been paid for. The studio and the session musicians have probably been paid, but the artist should be compensated on a scale commensurate with the popularity of the work and that needs to be measured across whatever timescale people are still buying or downloading it.
If I want to pay for software to be produced, I use kickstarter.
Now I can download AutoCAD, Illustrator and Photoshop guilt free.
I happen to use the GIMP, Inkscape, and FreeCAD for free, and I don't feel guilty about that.
But then ... tell me ... for what do we need the pirate bay?
I'm not sure it's possible to actually curate a comprehensive MP3 catalog without active cooperation from the musicians, at some level. But, if the Pirate Bay surprised me and made a fast way to search and download music that was as easy as iTunes or Amazon MP3, and they had a library of songs that was at least as comprehensive as the for-pay versions, then I might decide that the hassle of keeping my billing info up to date in the other databases was more trouble than changing to the Pirate App. I'm not sure. The actual 99cent charge is so close to free that it doesn't factor into my decision.
But that's theoretical. Right now, the musicians get a few cents, Apple and Amazon get legitimacy and a little bit more of my money.
My few cents per mp3 doesn't add up to much. When I actually want to support an artist, I use Kickstarter, or I buy some merch, or click a donate button.
It's already being done; it's just not public.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oink%27s_Pink_Palace http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What.cd
Whether or not there is some truth in the philosophical view that "illegal copying is theft", the reality is that the characteristics that make it easy to copy digital works makes it really difficulty to maintain a business model that relies on everyone paying for the bits they copy... as difficult as charging for smells.
Copyright is simply one means of accomplishing the end goal of paying creators, and certainly not the only one. I'd like to hear an argument in favor of copyright-exactly-as-it-is that doesn't involve this logical fallacy.
That doesn't mean that there isn't some better system out there, but I think the burden is on the copyright-dissenters to develop a theoretically sound alternative and implementation plan. Stallman's work in this area is incredible and inspiring, but there isn't, so far, nearly as much theory or evidence on that side (despite the work of Benkler et al.).
Meanwhile, low protectionists--like most people here, myself included--are frequently going to assume a version of the current system stays in place, while proposing tweaking some of the knobs (types of content covered, expiration, penalties, enforcement mechanisms, etc.).
This wouldn't actually follow PG's logic. Using code does not necessarily require the end user copying it, especially for web-based software which is mostly run remotely. Consuming media necessarily requires copying it to somewhere - to your nerve endings, at the very least.
I suppose that amounts to a freedom to piracy. But that doesn't mean piracy is somehow right, or even intended. It's an injustice, of individuals, persisting in the space needed to maintain a free society.
Nor am I much impressed by the argument that with so many people pirating, it must actually be moral. Probably most of them think it's moral, given that they take their norms from the people around them. And the offenses are largely minor. But I think the steps from principle to copyright are pretty clear, and I don't see how anyone concludes that it's actually right.
It's like littering: no one actually thinks it's okay, but they do it because it's convenient, they won't get caught and it isn't a big deal. The consequences of those calculations are obvious.
Brilliant. I was expecting something controversial. But, I assume, that at least within this community what PG says here, is the opinion of the majority.
There's nothing wrong with writing a prescriptive essay; it doesn't make it in any sense weaker. But it is prescriptive, and Rob's argument here is specifically with the prescriptive part of the argument--in other words, he argues that music is not so much like smells that it supports the overall prescription pg is making.
The original blog didn't claim pg was encouraging piracy directly, so my post was a bit off topic, but I wrote it because I found when discussing this essay/talk with others, many tend to draw that conclusion.
It depends on what you mean by "being heard". Some people think the only acceptable business model for music is for musicians to perform live. If we were to follow this line of thought, what's the difference between listening to music outside the concert grounds and listening to music stored on a digital device? In neither case are you participating in the live performance. In neither case have you reduced the artist's net worth by a single penny, provided that you never intended to attend the live performance anyway.
> What would happen if creators couldn’t charge for their creations? The same as if you couldn’t charge for lines of computer code: there’d be less of it.
And maybe that would be a good thing, as some other commenters have already suggested. Maybe it's not a morally acceptable business model to charge money for making copies of existing code. More companies should be charging money for the value-added services they offer, like making it easier for us to access music and apps, and offering subscriptions. If you don't want people to copy your code without paying, don't release it publicly in the first place, and only release it to people who sign NDAs. That's how business secrets work, right?
I'm not sure if I want to agree 100% with these lines of thought, but it's an interesting thought experiment.
Edit: Added paragraph.
The overwhelming majority of musical work -writing, recording, practicing etc - is done in private with no audience present. Many musicians perform very little in public.
But they do have a right to demand to be paid when someone chooses to experience the result of their skill.
The problem is that people still want the the product as much as they ever did, but they've discovered that they can always get it without paying a penny. The producer produces and the consumer consumes but the producer is not compensated. That's not a market.
The problem I have with this article is the association of investment with a 'right' to recoup that investment. There is no inherent right to recoup investment money of this type. NONE! It doesn't matter how hard something is to produce, there is no inherent right to make a profit based on that effort. People paint, write, sing and act all the time without compensation of any kind.
The argument that creators must be compensated to keep creating is a bit of a straw man. The idea that someone can spend some time writing or making music and then deserves compensation seems to be strongly held, but the ones who vastly profit from the copyright law are not the creators. Disney, for instance, has been dead a very long time, but his company defends copyright extension into perpetuity.
Right now, there are far more people unable to create because of copyright/patent law than there are people getting compensated for their creations.
Because they choose not to exercise their right to profit from it?
Free, instantaneous distribution of all music as soon as it is produced (an exaggeration of torrents, but not by much) seems to take away the right to pursue a profit, at least profit by distribution of recordings.
Or perhaps there is no right to pursue profit by distribution. Perhaps there is only a right to pursue profit by live performance. But what happens if that becomes copyable? We already have at least one instance of a holographic singer (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatsune_Miku). What if holographic recorders and projectors become as cheap as cameras and microphones and screens and speakers? Live performance could be copied about as effectively as live sound is now (recorded music is not a perfect reproduction of what was played in studio or on stage). What then?
Is there no right to pursue profit by live performance either? Decreasing costs of production seem likely to make copying merchandise reasonably possible (you can already just draw a design and have someone print a T-shirt or such for you). So is there no right to pursue profit by merchandise either?
If there is no right to pursue profit by distribution, live performance, or merchandise, I think it is safe to say there is no right to pursue profit at all. But is that really fair? Musicians don't even deserve the right to try to get people to buy their product out of anything other than sympathy?
Frankly, I think pay-what-you-want is great. But I don't think it can provide the same level of economic activity and technological development we are used to. The most advanced personal computing company in the world is also the most closed or near it. The iPhone, iPad, corresponding retina displays, the Macbook Air... all produced under tight control and for direct profit only. Why isn't an open, pay-what-you-will hardware company beating Apple? We all like our i-things, so why aren't we paying people to develop them? Why is Apple's cheapest product $129, and the cheapest Kickstarter level usually $1? Why won't we pay $129 for Kickstarter projects that sound interesting to us if pay-what-you-will really works?
Similarly, the most advanced synthesizers, digital mixers, even music software are all produced to be sold. Why is there no open, pay-what-you-will synthesizer to match Kurzweil?
Why is there no open, pay-what-you-will library to match O'Reilly's? Why no open, pay-what-you-will coffee to match Starbucks? Why no open, pay-what-you-will transportation system to match the U.S. interstates and European and Japanese light and high-speed rail?
I would argue it's because accepting only the payment you can convince people to offer voluntarily doesn't work in most cases at an advanced level.
And either way, it doesn't seem to right to force people into a pay-what-you-will model.
Markets already provide a "pay-what-you-want" model, it just happens that not everyone is willing to accept what you want to pay.
Selling capital goods is very different than selling digital copies of something. There is a limited amount of corn in the world, you can purchase it at the going rate generally set by the supply and demand. In digital goods, the supply is unlimited, there are no natural market forces.
Apple heavily protects its products with patents and copyright where it can. You cannot take an ipad design and improve upon that design without cutting a deal with Apple. I think that strongly supports the case that the few (Apple) benefit from the current system while the many (anyone who thinks they could enhance the design of ipad) do not.
There are, however, a few open and free items of software, Linux, MySQL, Apache, Firefox to name a few. Arguably, depending on what you want to do, there isn't even a better closed alternative (yes, yes, substitute whatever SQL package you prefer for MySQL).
I personally have a cable provider (so I pay for the minimal tv package to get internet), a netflix account, Amazon Prime, see the occasional movie in the theater, etc.
When people talk about copyright though, I generally see some stuffed suit making a bonus, not a bunch of creative people.
Markets are not pay-what-you-want, because pay-what-you-want implies $0 is an acceptable price. At least that's how I was using the term. Apple will not accept $0 for an iPad. If you don't accept their price, you don't get the iPad. That's why people buy it.
Copying media lets you get it even if you don't accept the price. Which means the only reason to pay is because you want to.
My contention is that making people pay in order to enjoy a product is often what provides the money necessary to exercise creativity. The iPad could be improved by an individual working alone with their own funds, but it never could have been created that way. Without profits from previous products, the creative people at Apple who designed the iPad never would have had the resources to do so. We have iPads today precisely because Apple is closed.
What is the next innovation in personal computing? Who will come up with it? Will it be Apple or someone on Kickstarter? My money is on Apple. Even if it is someone on Kickstarter, will they be able to raise the probably millions of dollars necessary to make a viable consumer product? Unlikely.
A system in which producers pay upfront and then recoup costs is actually better for consumers. You get to see the finished product before deciding whether or not to spend your money. If the finished product sucks, only the producer loses. If the finished product of a Kickstarter project sucks, everyone who contributed loses.
How many iterations do you think it took Apple to perfect the iPad? Each of those would have to have been separately funded on Kickstarter for that system to produce the iPad. I doubt even the costs of one iteration could be raised.
But when you cut off the ability to recoup production costs, you cut off the incentive to pay upfront production costs. Which cuts off the funding to creative people who are doing important work.
The problem with only being able to collect voluntary payments (pay-what-you-want, Kickstarter, etc.) is that people don't necessary know they want something until it's done. The 1st iteration iPad probably sucked. So why would people fund it? If Apple builds an iPad, it only takes a few people's shared vision to make it happen. If a Kickstarter project wants to build something as innovative, it will required the shared vision of everyone contributing. You'll have to convince thousands of people that it's worth funding numerous iterations at thousands, or possibly even millions, of dollars, in the hopes that the final product will be good. I just don't see this happening.
I didn't say we should arbitrarily limit the amount of profit one can make by investing capital, but the current copyright law and patent law is very stifling to innovation.
Apple employs some people, sure. Monopolies (not implying apple is a monopoly to be hit by anti-trust laws, btw, but copyright and patent are monopoly powers) are very, very profitable for the few people that hold them.
I don't have my copy of Wealth of Nations in front of me (out of copyright, but I purchased the penguin classics paperback anyways, go figure), but Adam Smith made a very compelling argument that things like entertainment are not acretive to the capital of a country. At the time of publication (1776), Smith noted actors and musicians expected no more compensation than what they received for peformances. They produced no lasting product that could be added to the 'capital' of the company. Recordings you might say add this value because of copyright, but if you cannot sell your copy that would mean it's not a capital good.
So, yes, creative works existed before the current distribution model.
I'm not arguing people cannot profit from their works, far be it. I'm arguing that the current model for profit favors a very few at the expense of very many, and does not meet the needs of either creators or consumers as well as it does the distributors!
Movies are perhaps the most dependent on the current model, as yes, it takes significant capital to make most movies. However, is it truly more creative to see the 3D version of Star Wars Episode I? Or would it be better to see "Star Wars Episode I: As written By Kickstarter Member XYZ". I'm fairly certain Option B would be more creative at this point. Lucas and everyone involved with Star Wars has already made plenty of money, but you can't expand on those works just because you have a great idea, you'd need Lucas' permission.
Anyways, copyright/patents are a very complex thing right now. I can't tell you exactly how the Ipad came to be (although it wasn't the first tablet), so I can't really say if Apple had the best idea, or just the right polish at the right time. All the patent infringement lawsuits surrounding the ipad seem to support my view that they stifle innovation more than they support the "It required this closed model" argument, if you ask me. Apple is almost assuredly infringing a lot of patents (which many may be invalid), and I would argue they are really so successful because they have deep enough pockets to fight all those legal wars.
I could write a lot and end up saying very little, it is very hard for me to boil down all my thoughts on copyright and patents into a HN comment.
Is it just pay-what-you-want? Because I'm not sure that's any more "alive".
Would there? Really? Like, are we absolutely sure there would be less of it? Are we also ruling out the possibility that someone would pay you to produce specific lines of code or just that once you produce code, you can't sell it?
It used to commonly be the case that you got paid to make music for someone. Now you make the music and then try to sell it to people.
It just seems like there is an implicit assumption that the marketplace model is the best way to encourage the creation of all things.
Spotted the massive, gaping flaw in the argument yet?
It's 2012, if you make this argument then I am done with you. Linux is how old? How much of the internet runs on it?
Done.
Edit: Wow, really? Why is this still a necessary argument?
The linux kernel is utterly free. Yet it's still developed. It's still a state of the art product. And people still make money off of linux and linux-based products.
Do I honestly have to connect the dots here?
Spoilers: if you can't or don't want to charge for the code directly then maybe you find some alternate way to charge for something else or you use another form of supporting development.
The analogy to the creation of music and movies should be so frelling obvious I shouldn't even need to make it.
The main reason common distributions have features similar to Windows and OS X is to make transitioning easier. Really serious people using e.g. Arch with XMonad are more efficient with very little Windows/OS X influence.
And hey, Linux could borrow those features even more easily if Windows or OS X were open source. Windows being open source would be complicated, but Apple is a hardware company and would work well enough with an open source OS at its heart.
no one thinks that not being able to charge money = no apps. the argument is over whether not being able to charge money = less apps.
Besides, even if its perfectly legal to copy apps (or music or movies) and distribute them however you like, that doesn't necessarily mean you can't monetize them. It doesn't even mean that you have to completely give up the pay-for-app model either - people will still be willing to pay for something they really like (I bought a CD online direct off a musician a few months back despite already having the mp3's and I've never even opened the CD!), but obviously a lot fewer people than now. Perhaps a pay what you want model would work. This can be offset in other ways - paid support, physical merchandise (printed documentation perhaps) and kickstarter-style "I'll finish the app for $X" are just a few ideas.
I'm not saying that this would definitely be sustainable, because I don't know, but I do see some potential there and either way, people will still make apps, music and movies regardless (though it will be less[1]).
I wonder is B2B sustainable on support contracts and custom work?
[1] Maybe hobbies of the future will revolve more around the production of (free) content and less about the consumption of (free or otherwise) content? Evolution and adaptation of human behavior?
Now, there would always be people who want to have that music recorded, so it would still flow.
There are very few viable, large-scale open source projects that are run on developer free time alone.
(we all know GTK is a labor of love, 'cause you couldn't expect people to pay for it.)
How many closed-source, for profit software projects were rescued after the supporting company went under? (I am intentionally conflating closed-source and for profit as the majority of financed projects are closed source).
What you have to consider here is the rate of progress, as well as the length of development time. Open source projects have essentially infinite development time, whereas closed-source, for profit projects have a finite development time (whenever the company decides further development isn't worth it anymore)+. However, open source projects tend to have a slower rate of progress versus financed projects.
After 6 months or 1 year, sure, the financed project will probably be ahead. How about the 5 year mark? 10 year? It becomes much less clear which project will have accumulated more man-hours.
+very rarely, closed-source projects are released as open source (e.g. Doom 3), but I think we can all agree that that is the exception to the norm
Well, if we compare to the list in the parent, it's much more. At least Firefox, Blender, Rails qualify. These were products that had no future in closed-source form. If they had, it would have been financial madness to open source them.
http://bastiat.org/en/twisatwins.html
Just because there is some open source code doesn't mean that there is an "optimal" level of it. In other words, maybe due to the relative lack of funding, there's a lot less open source than there could be if there was a better financial feedback loop between people getting value from the software and those developing it.
This isn't just something I'm making up - I've spent a lot of time around open source, and seen a lot of good people who could have done lots more if they had had more time to dedicate to working on the code, rather than working a "day job".
Just because you're not paying for these products directly, doesn't mean someone else isn't.
Linux is used everywhere, but it's also paid for. If it weren't paid for, it wouldn't be used everywhere.
- Independent bands who sign corporate contracts--see The Roots. - Major labels who create teen brands like Justin Bieber or Selena Gomez. They don't care if you steal the music as long as you buy the t-shirt, buy the book, see the movie, come to the show, etc. - Sync licenses. More and more mid-level bands are depending on getting their songs into movies, commercials, tv shows, etc. to bring in revenue. This is another form of corporate funding.
How many of the sites on the internet are open source though? A quick glance through the top 100 according to Alexa gives me 2 or 3 (wordpress and wikipedia, and really wordpress is more about the content, which is not open source, generally speaking.)
You can't have copies of it because of its transient nature. Sometimes you do have a bootleg but your mileage may vary still.
If nobody could get paid for writing code, there would be less of it. No question.
However, your original assumption does not flow from the premise--just because selling software becomes impossible does not mean programmers won't get paid. I recall reading somewhere (too lazy to find the source) that the majority of programmers work on bespoke, in-house software rather than consumer-facing proprietary software. Even if it is not a majority, it still shows that there are viable ways for programmers to get paid outside creating scarcity with copyright.
Just because people contributing to the kernel get paid does not mean they would not get paid without copyright. Companies like Google and Red Hat do not really rely on copyright for money.
The argument is that there would be less computer code, not no computer code. Saying that one specific project would still exist is not a counterexample.
Consider the costs of production and distribution.
Production. Frank McCourt's memoirs were the end result of a life of telling stories socially and on stage. People who heard him tell the stories would say "you should write a book". Today his listeners wold have videoed his performances with a camera phone, posted them on YouTube, and he would be a viral star before he knew it.
Distribution. Suppose I have a head mounted camera that simply records everything I see — it's part of version 5 of the android glasses google is working on. Then along comes a third party and releases an app that simply recognizes anything I look at that's a printed page and captures it. If I read a book, I have an digital image of its pages and an OCRed text for indexing.
The cooking smells analogy is actually more accurate than the writer realizes, because all this technology makes production easier too.
Linux is probably an exception, and not the rule, and it is such an exception that large companies are willing to subsidize it. I've been looking for some good sound editing software, and the only solution I could find that was good at altering tempo without creating weird artifacts was closed-source and proprietary. I've also rarely played any open-source games that were as good as the closed-source ones.
The point is, if someone does something that creates value, they should get compensated somehow. Asking musicians to produce music for nothing more than the sheer joy of it is exploiting them, and impolite, besides. If someone gives you value, you ought to give value back. I don't agree that the RIAA's way of getting back that value is correct, but that doesn't mean that copyright is a bad idea.
Open source ain't communism, nor is it doomed to failure. Even if you bind your hands to make it legally impossible for you to control the distribution of your work that doesn't mean that you can't make money off of it or that you must stop working.
You're focusing on one very small part of the software industry and ignoring the rest.
I'm focusing on a "very small part of the software industry" which creates the software which runs the vast majority of web servers. Oh, and every android phone too.
All I'm saying is that if you can't accept that there is "another way" of making stuff, even hugely important stuff, then you simply have not been paying attention.
The argument that failing to charge for every single copy of software/music/books/movies must necessarily translate to a diminution of those works has been made time and time again, but there are so many counter examples today that it's patently ridiculous to make it yet again.
Do you have a better argument to make or are you going to stick with this one?
Because honestly I would imagine that reusing the same old tired FUD that companies like MS have tried to use to scare people away from using Linux or Apache back in the mid-90s would have a limited shelf-life.
I have done open source development for over 10 years (I was developer #3 on one of the open-source projects you mentioned), have used Linux for about 15 years, and use it every day at my job working at the company that develops the Android code that you mention. That you would question my open source credential is... amusing.
I believe in open source too (and have spent a significant portion of my life developing it). That doesn't mean that I'm naive enough to think that you can take away the licensing-based revenue from the for-pay software industry and continue to get just as much software.
So my answer to your question of "do you think they would be making as much money without copyright" is that they would be making much more without copyright.
We might not get epic movies... or we might, if CGI continues to dwindle in cost. We probably won't get as much pop/dance music... but we might.
There won't be as many huge star winners, that's all that can really be said to be likely.
Don't fall for their mental trap: questioning copyright doesn't mean that: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/apr/21/study-finds-pira...
besides. If someone gives you value, you ought to give value back.
And people shouldn't be dicks, doesn't mean we should make it a crime. Morality != Law.
MongoDB, Wordpress (and all other blogging frameworks), MySQL, the list keeps going... they are out there for free because the creators figured out a way for it to be free why still getting paid (service contracts in most cases).. Being free didn't even reduce their quality (it probably enhanced it)...
I guess the flip side is, if there was no free software, there would be no pay software.
IBM: sells tons of proprietary software.
Redhat: genuine open source deal. Legit example.
Government: money comes from taxes. I don't think I fancy a world where information goods are mostly paid for through taxes.
Google: makes most of their money from the proprietary bits of their software.
It's pretty difficult to charge for goods that are not scarce.
This has important implications in terms of the ability to spread the costs around. With proprietary software, it's possible to do so: charge 100 people $10 instead of charging one person $500 and letting the other 99 people copy it for free. You make more money, and in some cases, the market will clear when it wouldn't for the single-payer model.
I think this actually shows up fairly clearly in what's open source and what isn't: stuff that would be a one-off consulting job in any case may or may not be, stuff that's more consumer-oriented is more often proprietary, and stuff that's used by lots of developers as infrustructure is quite often open source.
> What would happen if creators couldn’t charge for their creations ... there’d be less of it
the claim here is that if you disallowed charging for software, there would be less software.
> Linux is how old? How much of the internet runs on it?
great, linux exists and is awesome. nobody disputes that. this fact does not contradict the claim in question.
the existent / awesomeness of linux contradicts claims such as: "people who don't get paid will not create things" and "unpaid creators cannot create great things". however, the original claim is none of those statements. the original claim is merely that when you don't let people charge for software, fewer people will write it.
> Do I honestly have to connect the dots here?
i honestly have no idea what you think the connection between the dots is.
Only most lines of linux code are written by people who are paid for doing so. If it wasn't for companies that put money into linux development linux would be a lot less useful.
I guess you don't know much about either Linux or business. Let me give you an example. Red Hat pays people to work on Linux, because that increases the market for people who will buy Linux support. IBM pays people to work on Linux, because that increases the market for people who will buy servers. Linux even only has a GUI because a bunch of old Unix companies sat down and formed the X consortium and paid people to write it, which they did because a common GUI would mean more software got written for Unix in general.
So go and head and make your point but do it with a Linux made ONLY of hobbyist code. If you can even compile such a thing (don't forget Cygnus funded a lot of GCC development so they could sell embedded hardware!).
This sums up why I disagree with the author. People have been playing and composing music way before "selling records" was the way to make money. Just like people don't contribute to open source "for the joy of it".
Very serious business is being done around open source, and the same could happen around the music industry. I personally wouldn't mind settling for an industry where artists get paid for their performances (getting paid for the "actual" hours put in, not just a one-off recording session decades ago that's making them fat millionaires), using their records as promotional tools. Parallel business would develop, they would charge for packaging, interviews, talks, God-knows-what. Let the next generations be creative.
The industry may not seem as lucrative as it may sound today, but frankly I could do without the MBA consultant in a suit. Cut off his salary and most of the middle men and you're good to go. Despite what the article says, the cost of producing and publishing new material isn't that high. My closest friend took a couple months off to record a home made 6 song album. With an iMac and some amateur equipment. The result is simply bluffing. Even a small team on a low budget can definitely invest this money as part of their promotion campaign.
This sums up why I disagree with the author. People have been playing and composing music way before "selling records" was the way to make money. Just like people don't contribute to open source "for the joy of it".
Very serious business is being done around open source, and the same could happen around the music industry. I personally wouldn't mind settling for an industry where artists get paid for their performances (getting paid for the "actual" hours put in, not just a one-off recording session decades ago that's making them fat millionaires), using their records as promotional tools. Parallel business would develop, they would charge for packaging, interviews, talks, God-knows-what. Let the next generations be creative.
The industry may not seem as lucrative as it may sound today, but frankly I could do without the MBA consultant in a suit. Cut off his salary and most of the middle men and you're good to go. Despite what the article says, the cost of producing and publishing new material isn't that high. My closest friend took a couple months off to record a home made 6 song album. With an iMac and some amateur equipment. The result is simply bluffing. Even a small team on a low budget can definitely invest this money as part of their promotion campaign.
The masses however seem to prefer commercial films, music and software.
We recently gave up casual TV and movies cold-turkey. Frankly, the studios and networks just couldn't figure out how to target us properly. I'm not going to pay $120 / mo. to get my favorite channels (eg. Science and NatGeo) just because ESPN has Comcast by the balls. Similar arguments for movies.
FWIW, I don't use TPB either. But I can imagine the appeal of choice, freedom, and having archival copies of the bits locally.
I would argue that this is more of a danger to Big Content's bottom line. There are only 24 hours in a day. Youtube and reddit compete directly with Universal, Sony, and the New York Times for people's attention.
The fact is that entertaining videos and music are not only easier to distribute than ever, but also easier to produce. You don't need a degree or the backing of a large corporation to be funny, insightful or clever. IMO there is a lot of noise about piracy which masks this even larger "problem" for traditional media.
...or are trying to win the piracy/IP battle enough that it gives them a credible position from which to attack the populist works that remix what they perceive to be their IP.
Especially if, for example, they've succeeded in making faceless/nameless/processless takedowns possible--a pretty solid weapon against populist entertainment.
Remind me again how much radio stations in the US pay in performance royalties?
What he hits on is that there is no scarcity anymore. Media is reproduced and shared freely and instantly, because that is the nature of the internet. The 'pipes' (expensive, physical means of distribution) the recording industry pumped music through for decades have now dissappeared and have been replaced with an open environment. Anything that tries to close that environment is just trying to create artificial scarcity.
It's true that media costs money to produce. And the publishers can still charge for it, if they make the distribution model convenient (or not). But that is still a one time cost which promotes the artist. And let's not act like artists are going to just stop making media if they don't think publishers are going to give them a big payday. They aren't. The more likely scenario is that the distribution will shift to being handled by the artists and that money will be made through concerts and merchandise. Downloaded music will be paid for sometimes, but mostly used for advertisement.
It's just silly that the industry spent a decade suing people, and probably could have made 10x their money by giving up the 'suing people for smells' and started other music/content related businesses.
All the interest and investment in new distribution services is basically looking to be part of RIAA 2.0 - continuing profitable distribution channels based on consumer laziness. The goal of the record industry has never been to compensate artists, and the decreasing prevalence of big-name acts means there's even fewer lucky ones with the power to demand so. Meanwhile, the pirate side has accepted that distribution is free and is trying to usher in the future so sustainable artist-beneficial (whatever that turns out to mean) structures can be created. Oink was responsible for my going to many shows, while the risk of being hassled over torrenting (I've become more risk-adverse) has resulted in me knowing very few bands on the concert listings.