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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!).
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.)
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.
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.
"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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.).
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?"
I personally think copyright can be a good thing. My beef is with the never ending length extensions and that everything including the piece of napkin I used to doodle on earlier is covered by it.
I think the solution is more to push for it to become registration based and offer companies a way to extend the copyright for a fee that increases exponentially with time. Lets say the first 10 years is free everything after starts to cost you more and more.
That way I feel that you let things like orphan works be preserved and used even if they are not longer worth enough money to keep under copyright and publish.
Also have the database of what is under copyright be available to everyone so that right holders can be located and licensing can be made easier. These records can be maintain with the money obtain from copyrighting fees.
And also, fix issues with fair use such as breaking DRM being made not illegal.
This reminds me of a medieval tale, telling the adventures of the Belgian scoundrel Tijl Uilenspiegel:
"Tijl was visiting the market, and noticed a food stand where a butcher was roasting chickens over a fire, spreading a delicious smell.
Tijl stood a while next to the barbecue, sniffing the exquisite smells. Then the butcher noticed him just standing there, sniffing, and not buying anything.
The butcher said: "Hey, you're enjoying the smell of my grilled chickens, not buying anything, you know what? You should pay me for the cooking smells of these chickens instead!"
Upon which Tijl produced his wallet, made tinkling noises with the coins, and replied: "I pay for the smell of these chickens with the sound of my coins!". Faced with such impertinence, the butcher got angry and chased a laughing Tijl away."
The author, and the content industry in general, are misunderstanding basic economics:
Just because there is a cost to produce something does not mean that it has market value.
pg was right in pointing out that the content industry is built on the economics of scarcity, and that this scarcity no longer exists. You could charge someone to see a movie in a theatre when doing so was the only way to see the movie. You could charge for an album when doing so was the only way to hear music on your terms.
That is no longer the case. Scarcity, as far as arrangements of bits is concerned, is over. Period. You can complain about it, you can legislate about it, you can gnash your teeth and prostrate yourself and offer blood sacrifices to your preferred god, but nothing will change this basic fact. If the content industry wishes to persist in this new reality, it will have to adapt to it. That means a business model that is not based on the economics of scarcity.
That does not mean, as the author seems to believe and the content industry threatens, that there will be no money to pay for new content. It means the economic model will have to shift away from one of necessity, to one of value-add.
There is no shortage of cleaning labour. Anyone can pick up a feather duster and go to town. Yet, we have professional cleaners. Why? Because there is an opportunity cost to cleaning. An hour you spend cleaning is an hour that you can't spend doing something else. Too, there is value-add. Perhaps the professional cleans better than you do. Perhaps they clean faster, or clean when you're not home. There is convenience and status involved in having someone clean for you.
All of this adds value to cleaning labour, making it so people can charge for it. Similarly, the content industry can focus on modes of distribution which add value to the content, which is not scarce. The content industry currently pretends it is in the mining business, with large upfront costs to extract a valuable and rare resource then bring it to market. It isn't. It's in the bottled water business. Water's everywhere, and it's free. Yet people buy it bottled. They pay for the convenience, and perhaps they pay for the perceived quality as well.
Just as the water bottlers cannot stop people from getting water for free, so too can the content industry not stop free content. They can only offer it in a better, more convenient form.
Amazon does this incredibly well. I used to download ebook torrents, and read them on my laptop. It sucked, and I stopped. Then I got my Kindle, and started again. It still sucked. The formatting was wrong, it was inconvenient, and the metadata was filled with crap from the rippers that meant it would never sort properly. So I bought an ebook from Amazon.
It was amazing. I got the book I wanted, instantly, in a fantastic format, for cheap. It was a better service than bittorrent, and I paid for it. Gladly. Now, I get all my ebooks this way and I wouldn't think of going back. Certainly, the publishers are pissed at Amazon, but that's because Amazon is rendering them obsolete. So too are studios pissed at Netflix. What they fail to grasp is that Netflix is not the problem, they're just a company that adapted where the studios have not.
There's no going back. The content industry can stamp its feet and huff and puff and sulk all they want, but the genie's out of the bottle.
And you're misunderstanding economics too. Just because you can get it for free that does not mean there is no market for people paying for it.
> Just because there is a cost to produce something does not mean that it has market value.
What shows market value is the desire for that product. The only reason that music is pirated now (when it used to be purchased) is because it's easy and without consequence. Let's say hypothetically in the future stealing a car becomes easy and without consequence (even though it's still illegal) does that mean there is no market value for cars? Of course it doesn't. It shows that people care more about saving money
If pirating music was impossible many people would return to paying for music, the only reason they don't now is because stealing it is consequence free.
The convenience argument is also (for want of a better phrase) complete and utter bullshit. I can switch to itunes right now, type in a search term, hit purchase and have the song on my hard drive (and iphone and any other device I have connected to my itunes account) within 10 seconds. Hell, I'll open my screen recording program now and record me proving this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KA2wzb0-4Pg
People pirate music because it's free, consequence free (the reason they don't steal cars is consequence) and everyone spends all day every day justifying it. It's not a matter of convenience, people go to more effort pirating than they would purchasing (except for cases where the music is not available commercially, but those instances are "rare" and not a worthy consideration for the sake of this argument).
Content is scarce if you think not just about distribution, but creation. As a thought experiment, if no one earned anything off of information goods, at all, then fewer of them would be produced.
That abundance of music isn't created by independent effort. We aren't talking about trade in covers of "Sergeant Pepper." The abundance is created by the violation of the legitimate and rational rights of individuals in the product of their own work.
I can make a lot of things abundant, for a time, with similar violations. But that doesn't mean those are right, or an intelligent way to get along with other people. No one but the strongest and sneakiest have an interest in the economy of what you can get away with.
Currently, musicians and distributors get paid mostly via rent-seeking activities - they forego advance payment for their labor in exchange for the possibility of rents on the products of it.
This has a few advantages - the utility of music is generally unknown at the time of its production. Popularity, especially, adds utility to a piece of music and is very difficult to predict in advance. In fact, I think popularity dominates the utility that many content consumers derive from music. Sometimes auteurs manage to produce something that defies your expectations and gives you much more utility than you thought it would have.
If you retain the right to seek rents on content you've produced, you're able to charge what's appropriate to the utility that consumers currently derive from your music, rather than what they'd have expected to when you made it (nothing, if they'd never heard of you!). If you can't seek rent on the products of your labor, then you have to get compensated for it directly. Currently, musicians do this mostly via live performance, but I suppose holding content for ransom via some sort of kickstarter-analogue might be a viable way forward.
If I had to guess, I'd guess that there's less money in that sort of thing than rent-seeking, but I'm certainly not an expert. If there's less money in it, then there will be less high-quality content. I've thought about it, and I think I'm okay with that. If the market for recorded music contracts due to digital sharing, I think I'll live, and I'd prefer digital sharing to remain possible.
It's unfortunate for musicians, but I guess I'm just a callous soul.
Not sure why you call it economics of scarcity. The distributors want control over the distribution method to make sure they are paid for whatever they are distributing, not to create scarcity. If something is popular, won't distributors try and sell as much of it as is possible.
Water is free but it is still illegal to shoplift bottled water from the 7/11. Just like it is illegal to infringe copyright by redistributing songs without permission. And for the same reason.
The author, and the content industry in general, are misunderstanding basic economics: Just because there is a cost to produce something does not mean that it has market value.
And your are misunderstanding even more basic economics: being able to take something (or a copy of it) without paying, doesn't mean it doesn't have value either.
Value is where there are people willing to pay.
And people ARE willing to pay for music and movies.
So, the problem is not that the content has no value, but rather that the payment step can be bypassed very easily.
But bypassing payment easily != the thing has no value.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I hear this argument a lot. I've heard it in comments sections on HN, on Reddit, and elsewhere. I've heard it from colleagues in the Entertainment business. I've heard it from friends who are artists and producers -- some established, and some just getting started.
Here's the thing: production needs to change. If production is too expensive to justify digital revenue streams, then either we need to get creative about revenue streams or we need to rethink the cost side of the business. I'm less concerned with whether we feel this is "right" or "wrong," as such concerns are largely irrelevant. Arguments about right and wrong are distractions, and they offer us little in the way of practicality.
What's relevant is that a shift has occurred in the marketplace, and now the players in the market needs to adapt to it. Adaptation isn't going to be easy, and the status quo will need to undergo a painful transition. But we need to adapt, one way or the other.
Hoping the genie gets sucked back into the bottle is not a business strategy. But rethinking the revenue and/or cost sides of the business is.
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.
The question isn't whether music and information are property or not ... the question is whether or not our government is protecting it in a way that makes sense for its citizens.
The examples that PG points to are all examples of massive societal and social change (moving to the moon, changing from hunter gathering, and in a comment he nodded to the abolition of slavery). These were situations where we did have a fundamental shift in what our society believed was property. This simply hasn't happened here. Citizens still believe that an idea is yours, that creative works have value and belong to the person who creates them. We desire to protect that.
Where it has all gone wrong is our laws and the industries. Perhaps the value of this property has decreased and the law still protects the ability of the media giants to price beyond that value. That's not working for citizens. Citizens are being held to licenses and contracts they haven't read and don't understand. They can't trade an ebook from their device to their spouse's. When I switch between android and iphone do I no longer own angry birds? The real problem is that the legislature isn't working for us to protect these property rights in a way that makes sense for us as the citizens who made the property a right in the first place. Could this be keeping the market from adjusting to valid pressures?
If we stop thinking of this as a moral issue (stealing music is bad) and more as a business issue (how can I make money making music?) the issue becomes clearer. In my opinion, the laws of copyright were designed to facilitate commerce and are not 'self-evident' in the way human rights are.
If I was in the music industry, my line of reasoning would be thus
1. Can I prevent people from downloading my stuff illegally? (My guess is this very unlikely regardless of lawsuits, drm, etc)
2. Given that some people WILL obtain my goods without having paid for it, how can I still make money from the cheap bastards? (My guess is this will probably involve using assets that I can exert monopoly control to access e.g. live interactions, licensing, early access to stuff, etc)
3. How can I ensure the folks who would still pay for my goods are not tempted to defect and join the pirates? Here's where you make sure your distribution strategy is much better than the pirate experience (It probably wouldn't hurt to help to make the pirate experience suck a little bit by seeding torrents with crappy versions of your goods and hampering companies who want to improve the pirate experience).
I would probably focus more on the 2nd step simply because the 1st and 3rd are just band-aids and can only take you so far. This point of view probably pisses some people off but like everything else, it's not personal, just business
"Graham doesn’t offer any alternatives"...ok, here's an alternative. Let the public pay for music creation in advance. When files are released, they function as advertisements to help the musician sell more creation.
Musicians can help the pledge process along by releasing low-quality or partial files, and releasing the full files once pledge targets are reached.
There's a game theory argument that this won't work, but million-dollar pledges on Kickstarter pretty much prove that it works just fine in the real world.
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.
It seems like the author is missing a huge chunk of this analogy: the aroma from the restaurant is not merely a by-product, but also a free advertising channel. Heck, many restaurants strategically vent exhaust from the kitchen to get more people to notice them. They are paying to distribute the smells for free yet not charging for them! (A fact the author asserts would strictly result in a reasonable charge for the aroma).
Similarly, the recording people have regularly paid big bux to radio station to freely distribute the music. The exposure gets a song popular, hence more sales. Yet, instead of looking at an even greater chance for big exposure, the industry is looking to clamp down on it. Granted, it involves changing the product from the recorded music to something else surrounding that. Still, this I felt was the main point of the analogy, rather than "derp music is just air", like the author suggests.
I will be glad to see the "big music" bubble burst and all these companies go out of business. I find myself hoping the execs stay jobless and penniless for long after they do. I'm not worried about the lower echelon people, skilled talent will find a way to earn their living either in a small scene, specialized way, or in a different industry.
> 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.
[+] [-] InclinedPlane|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] alexgartrell|14 years ago|reply
There are very few viable, large-scale open source projects that are run on developer free time alone.
[+] [-] zasz|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tadfisher|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] haberman|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Androsynth|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ams6110|14 years ago|reply
If nobody could get paid for writing code, there would be less of it. No question.
[+] [-] VMG|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andylei|14 years ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] sp332|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gaius|14 years ago|reply
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!).
[+] [-] vladd|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kahirsch|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notJim|14 years ago|reply
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.)
[+] [-] seunosewa|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] martey|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sheraz|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leon_|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] babarock|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jes5199|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] qdog|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] DanielStraight|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rdw|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] aamar|14 years ago|reply
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.).
[+] [-] anonymoushn|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nkassis|14 years ago|reply
I think the solution is more to push for it to become registration based and offer companies a way to extend the copyright for a fee that increases exponentially with time. Lets say the first 10 years is free everything after starts to cost you more and more.
That way I feel that you let things like orphan works be preserved and used even if they are not longer worth enough money to keep under copyright and publish.
Also have the database of what is under copyright be available to everyone so that right holders can be located and licensing can be made easier. These records can be maintain with the money obtain from copyrighting fees.
And also, fix issues with fair use such as breaking DRM being made not illegal.
[+] [-] Luyt|14 years ago|reply
"Tijl was visiting the market, and noticed a food stand where a butcher was roasting chickens over a fire, spreading a delicious smell.
Tijl stood a while next to the barbecue, sniffing the exquisite smells. Then the butcher noticed him just standing there, sniffing, and not buying anything.
The butcher said: "Hey, you're enjoying the smell of my grilled chickens, not buying anything, you know what? You should pay me for the cooking smells of these chickens instead!"
Upon which Tijl produced his wallet, made tinkling noises with the coins, and replied: "I pay for the smell of these chickens with the sound of my coins!". Faced with such impertinence, the butcher got angry and chased a laughing Tijl away."
[+] [-] redthrowaway|14 years ago|reply
Just because there is a cost to produce something does not mean that it has market value.
pg was right in pointing out that the content industry is built on the economics of scarcity, and that this scarcity no longer exists. You could charge someone to see a movie in a theatre when doing so was the only way to see the movie. You could charge for an album when doing so was the only way to hear music on your terms.
That is no longer the case. Scarcity, as far as arrangements of bits is concerned, is over. Period. You can complain about it, you can legislate about it, you can gnash your teeth and prostrate yourself and offer blood sacrifices to your preferred god, but nothing will change this basic fact. If the content industry wishes to persist in this new reality, it will have to adapt to it. That means a business model that is not based on the economics of scarcity.
That does not mean, as the author seems to believe and the content industry threatens, that there will be no money to pay for new content. It means the economic model will have to shift away from one of necessity, to one of value-add.
There is no shortage of cleaning labour. Anyone can pick up a feather duster and go to town. Yet, we have professional cleaners. Why? Because there is an opportunity cost to cleaning. An hour you spend cleaning is an hour that you can't spend doing something else. Too, there is value-add. Perhaps the professional cleans better than you do. Perhaps they clean faster, or clean when you're not home. There is convenience and status involved in having someone clean for you.
All of this adds value to cleaning labour, making it so people can charge for it. Similarly, the content industry can focus on modes of distribution which add value to the content, which is not scarce. The content industry currently pretends it is in the mining business, with large upfront costs to extract a valuable and rare resource then bring it to market. It isn't. It's in the bottled water business. Water's everywhere, and it's free. Yet people buy it bottled. They pay for the convenience, and perhaps they pay for the perceived quality as well.
Just as the water bottlers cannot stop people from getting water for free, so too can the content industry not stop free content. They can only offer it in a better, more convenient form.
Amazon does this incredibly well. I used to download ebook torrents, and read them on my laptop. It sucked, and I stopped. Then I got my Kindle, and started again. It still sucked. The formatting was wrong, it was inconvenient, and the metadata was filled with crap from the rippers that meant it would never sort properly. So I bought an ebook from Amazon.
It was amazing. I got the book I wanted, instantly, in a fantastic format, for cheap. It was a better service than bittorrent, and I paid for it. Gladly. Now, I get all my ebooks this way and I wouldn't think of going back. Certainly, the publishers are pissed at Amazon, but that's because Amazon is rendering them obsolete. So too are studios pissed at Netflix. What they fail to grasp is that Netflix is not the problem, they're just a company that adapted where the studios have not.
There's no going back. The content industry can stamp its feet and huff and puff and sulk all they want, but the genie's out of the bottle.
Time to adapt or die.
[+] [-] citricsquid|14 years ago|reply
> Just because there is a cost to produce something does not mean that it has market value.
What shows market value is the desire for that product. The only reason that music is pirated now (when it used to be purchased) is because it's easy and without consequence. Let's say hypothetically in the future stealing a car becomes easy and without consequence (even though it's still illegal) does that mean there is no market value for cars? Of course it doesn't. It shows that people care more about saving money
If pirating music was impossible many people would return to paying for music, the only reason they don't now is because stealing it is consequence free.
The convenience argument is also (for want of a better phrase) complete and utter bullshit. I can switch to itunes right now, type in a search term, hit purchase and have the song on my hard drive (and iphone and any other device I have connected to my itunes account) within 10 seconds. Hell, I'll open my screen recording program now and record me proving this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KA2wzb0-4Pg
People pirate music because it's free, consequence free (the reason they don't steal cars is consequence) and everyone spends all day every day justifying it. It's not a matter of convenience, people go to more effort pirating than they would purchasing (except for cases where the music is not available commercially, but those instances are "rare" and not a worthy consideration for the sake of this argument).
[+] [-] davidw|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chernevik|14 years ago|reply
I can make a lot of things abundant, for a time, with similar violations. But that doesn't mean those are right, or an intelligent way to get along with other people. No one but the strongest and sneakiest have an interest in the economy of what you can get away with.
[+] [-] neutronicus|14 years ago|reply
This has a few advantages - the utility of music is generally unknown at the time of its production. Popularity, especially, adds utility to a piece of music and is very difficult to predict in advance. In fact, I think popularity dominates the utility that many content consumers derive from music. Sometimes auteurs manage to produce something that defies your expectations and gives you much more utility than you thought it would have.
If you retain the right to seek rents on content you've produced, you're able to charge what's appropriate to the utility that consumers currently derive from your music, rather than what they'd have expected to when you made it (nothing, if they'd never heard of you!). If you can't seek rent on the products of your labor, then you have to get compensated for it directly. Currently, musicians do this mostly via live performance, but I suppose holding content for ransom via some sort of kickstarter-analogue might be a viable way forward.
If I had to guess, I'd guess that there's less money in that sort of thing than rent-seeking, but I'm certainly not an expert. If there's less money in it, then there will be less high-quality content. I've thought about it, and I think I'm okay with that. If the market for recorded music contracts due to digital sharing, I think I'll live, and I'd prefer digital sharing to remain possible.
It's unfortunate for musicians, but I guess I'm just a callous soul.
[+] [-] grok2|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] snowwrestler|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] batista|14 years ago|reply
And your are misunderstanding even more basic economics: being able to take something (or a copy of it) without paying, doesn't mean it doesn't have value either.
Value is where there are people willing to pay.
And people ARE willing to pay for music and movies.
So, the problem is not that the content has no value, but rather that the payment step can be bypassed very easily.
But bypassing payment easily != the thing has no value.
[+] [-] laglad|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ef4|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] timmm|14 years ago|reply
Land used to make no sense to sell. Shit changes it now makes sense. Copies of music doesn't really make sense anymore either.
[+] [-] crusso|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] JDulin|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jonnathanson|14 years ago|reply
Here's the thing: production needs to change. If production is too expensive to justify digital revenue streams, then either we need to get creative about revenue streams or we need to rethink the cost side of the business. I'm less concerned with whether we feel this is "right" or "wrong," as such concerns are largely irrelevant. Arguments about right and wrong are distractions, and they offer us little in the way of practicality.
What's relevant is that a shift has occurred in the marketplace, and now the players in the market needs to adapt to it. Adaptation isn't going to be easy, and the status quo will need to undergo a painful transition. But we need to adapt, one way or the other.
Hoping the genie gets sucked back into the bottle is not a business strategy. But rethinking the revenue and/or cost sides of the business is.
[+] [-] rdtsc|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aamar|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tissarah|14 years ago|reply
The examples that PG points to are all examples of massive societal and social change (moving to the moon, changing from hunter gathering, and in a comment he nodded to the abolition of slavery). These were situations where we did have a fundamental shift in what our society believed was property. This simply hasn't happened here. Citizens still believe that an idea is yours, that creative works have value and belong to the person who creates them. We desire to protect that.
Where it has all gone wrong is our laws and the industries. Perhaps the value of this property has decreased and the law still protects the ability of the media giants to price beyond that value. That's not working for citizens. Citizens are being held to licenses and contracts they haven't read and don't understand. They can't trade an ebook from their device to their spouse's. When I switch between android and iphone do I no longer own angry birds? The real problem is that the legislature isn't working for us to protect these property rights in a way that makes sense for us as the citizens who made the property a right in the first place. Could this be keeping the market from adjusting to valid pressures?
[+] [-] takinola|14 years ago|reply
If I was in the music industry, my line of reasoning would be thus
1. Can I prevent people from downloading my stuff illegally? (My guess is this very unlikely regardless of lawsuits, drm, etc)
2. Given that some people WILL obtain my goods without having paid for it, how can I still make money from the cheap bastards? (My guess is this will probably involve using assets that I can exert monopoly control to access e.g. live interactions, licensing, early access to stuff, etc)
3. How can I ensure the folks who would still pay for my goods are not tempted to defect and join the pirates? Here's where you make sure your distribution strategy is much better than the pirate experience (It probably wouldn't hurt to help to make the pirate experience suck a little bit by seeding torrents with crappy versions of your goods and hampering companies who want to improve the pirate experience).
I would probably focus more on the 2nd step simply because the 1st and 3rd are just band-aids and can only take you so far. This point of view probably pisses some people off but like everything else, it's not personal, just business
[+] [-] DennisP|14 years ago|reply
Musicians can help the pledge process along by releasing low-quality or partial files, and releasing the full files once pledge targets are reached.
There's a game theory argument that this won't work, but million-dollar pledges on Kickstarter pretty much prove that it works just fine in the real world.
[+] [-] Sambdala|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] porfinollanes|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sophacles|14 years ago|reply
Similarly, the recording people have regularly paid big bux to radio station to freely distribute the music. The exposure gets a song popular, hence more sales. Yet, instead of looking at an even greater chance for big exposure, the industry is looking to clamp down on it. Granted, it involves changing the product from the recorded music to something else surrounding that. Still, this I felt was the main point of the analogy, rather than "derp music is just air", like the author suggests.
I will be glad to see the "big music" bubble burst and all these companies go out of business. I find myself hoping the execs stay jobless and penniless for long after they do. I'm not worried about the lower echelon people, skilled talent will find a way to earn their living either in a small scene, specialized way, or in a different industry.
[+] [-] kijin|14 years ago|reply
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.