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antigonemerlin | 2 years ago
At the end of the day, people have to eat. We're going to have to pay people somehow, either by buying a product, buying merchandise, paying taxes / donating to fund grants, or through patreon or github sponsors. The topic is fairly broad, and so it's less one system than a bunch of different industries with their own funding models, so this is going to be speaking fairly generally. A lot of our present funding models are a hybrid of these systems. Some combination of ads, small dollar donations, institutional sponsorship, and public grants broadly help pay for anything from a new software library to webcomics. Sometimes it's enough, and sometimes it's not, but there are alternative funding models to the present winner-take-all model of big publishing houses. It's good to recognize that a lot of open source can only exist because a lot of us work in high paying tech jobs, and that model will not work for traditional books, but that doesn't mean we should give up trying to find a better solution than the patchwork system we have today.
So, why don't we just subsidize authors?
Arguably, access to more information drives more technological growth, which benefits us all. How many discoveries have been delayed because journal articles are behind a paywall? How many wasted manhours were spent on that? Grad students make even less money and arguably spend even more time creating intellectual property. It's frankly ludicrous to gate scholarly articles behind a $20 paywall, because for one, the burden of payment in those cases tends to fall upon those least able to pay for it, who are students and researchers, while the publishers make all the money by extorting institutions who can pay, all while profiting off of publicly funded research. This is the least morally objectionable point, and probably why newer fields (especially in compsci) post all their articles for free on arXiv, or else host somewhere else, since the price of hosting is extremely cheap compared to the actual work.
Less arguably, art itself is the same kind of public good; We have PBS, for programs that one can broadly say is "enriching" because a bunch of people a hundred years ago said so; we surely recognize that Shakespeare ought to be publicly funded. Why not modern forms of entertainment?
Failing that, let's look at this purely from a cost perspective. We'll assume if we're paying 100% of a writer's salary, their work is in the public domain, and that counts as savings to consumers. Let's suppose we wanted to fund every single writer in America to do writing full time. Let's do some back of the envelope calculations here. Supposing I spent $40 on books per year, for the sake of argument. There are 330m people in the US, median income for writers is around $20k USD [1] (but those are poverty wages) to $50k USD [3] (I think those include industry), and there are anywhere from 50k to 200k active writers right now [2][3], depending on how you count. So, that's anywhere from $3.3 (probably add an extra few cents for admin costs) to $33 per person per year in additional taxes, if we literally subsidized every single writer in the US. I'm certain I spent more than $33 on books this year, though one could probably quibble on that. 'course, that's probably overkill, and it doesn't account for support staff, admin, editors, marketing etc, but evenly naively taken, it doesn't seem out of the realm of economic possibility.
Of course, we probably won't pursue such an extreme solution. So let's look at another one. Consider the question of the library. Surely every author would be against an institution distributing their work for free (even having paid the publisher for one copy). For sake of money, should Stephen King be removed from circulation of libraries? But that fails to recognize that physical libraries target a market segment that cannot afford to buy a book; when it is more convenient, people tend to want to buy books for themselves. Digital removes these inconvenient constraints and will require a renegotiation in this space as it shifts to much in the other direction; the internet archive's unilateral action is at best, controversial. Streaming services like spotify initially gave a lot of consumer surplus at the expense of the artists (and is now, like every platform, trying to claw that surplus to themselves). The library model may not work for digital. Consumers or publishers can capture all the surplus in this new shakeup, but some balance is probably the most acceptable/optimal solution to most people.
And like it or not, with AI, artists will be devalued, even if that work isn't done. Amazon is already killing traditional publishing houses with its own platform. While we're having a debate on copyright, the market is going to shift even more in favor of consumers and less in favor of authors. We're going to have to address these issues anyways, like it or not, because we're already on this path, so we might as well figure out a more robust solution now. Failing everything, why not have a national system of grants for writers to produce public domain works?
(And yes, I know this naive solution probably has many holes in it. I'd be delighted to be corrected, even more so with another solution. But at the very least, shouldn't we at least try something else than the endless morass of DRM and copyright?)
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/05/books/authors-pay-writer....
2. https://www.statista.com/statistics/572476/number-writers-au...
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