Pricing "intellectual property"
tonyp
Did anybody make a living as a writer before Gutenberg?
This question is motivated by the news this week that the record industry is
really pissed off: they are threatening to sue people who share music files on
the net. I can see their dilemma. With the cost of reproducing bits and bytes
approaching zero, we are on the verge of returning to a pre-Gutenberg economics
of intellectual property.
Before the printing press, scribes had to copy books out by hand. This meant
that the 1,000th copy cost pretty much the same as the 1st copy.
For the next few hundred years, things were different: by making an initial
capital investment in presses, type, and so forth, a publisher could drive
marginal cost down, thus making a profit if he could sell enough copies.
Competition between capitalists being what it is, publishers were willing to
share that profit with authors whose writing would keep the presses busy.
Then came the digital age, with broadband thrown in. All of a sudden, the cost
of making the 1000th (or millionth) copy is once again about the same as the
cost of making the 1st copy, only this time it's approximately zero.
So, are writers, musicians, and other creators of disembodied ideas _entitled_
to earn a living doing what they like to do, in this neo-pre-Gutenberg world?
Is there an _economic_ role for "publishers" in a world where concentrated
capital is no longer required to disseminate "intellectual property"?
-- Tony P.
Al
Isn't that the actual issue. With books and records, hasn't the rest of the
world already moved from the "book" model to the "software" model, but the
publishing industry (book and music) have been resisting the change.
"tonyp" <to...@world.std.com> wrote in message
news:bdker1$p89$1...@bob.news.rcn.net...
ro...@telus.net
wrote:
>Did anybody make a living as a writer before Gutenberg?
Depends what your definition of "writer" is.
Some people definitely made a living by writing: writing out copies of
books, writing letters for the illiterate, etc.
>This question is motivated by the news this week that the record industry is
>really pissed off: they are threatening to sue people who share music files on
>the net. I can see their dilemma. With the cost of reproducing bits and bytes
>approaching zero, we are on the verge of returning to a pre-Gutenberg economics
>of intellectual property.
They are just parasites threatening to sue their hosts for using
antibiotics.
>Then came the digital age, with broadband thrown in. All of a sudden, the cost
>of making the 1000th (or millionth) copy is once again about the same as the
>cost of making the 1st copy, only this time it's approximately zero.
The first copy's cost is not zero. If it were, there would be no
issue.
>So, are writers, musicians, and other creators of disembodied ideas _entitled_
>to earn a living doing what they like to do, in this neo-pre-Gutenberg world?
Sure. If they can. But they are not entitled to claim that
publishing their ideas and selling them to the public somehow does not
place them in the public domain.
>Is there an _economic_ role for "publishers" in a world where concentrated
>capital is no longer required to disseminate "intellectual property"?
Sure. Just so long as they don't expect monopoly privileges.
Publishers still publish works that are in the public domain, don't
they?
-- Roy L
tonyp
<ro...@telus.net> wrote
> The first copy's cost is not zero. If it were, there would be no
> issue.
Roy, when I say "1st copy" I mean "1st _copy_".
-- TP
jonah thomas
>>Did anybody make a living as a writer before Gutenberg?
>>This question is motivated by the news this week that the record industry is
>>really pissed off: they are threatening to sue people who share music files on
>>the net. I can see their dilemma. With the cost of reproducing bits and bytes
>>approaching zero, we are on the verge of returning to a pre-Gutenberg economics
>>of intellectual property.
> They are just parasites threatening to sue their hosts for using
> antibiotics.
Their business model doesn't work now. Writers and musicians need a
model that works. The current approach hasn't been working anyway, for
writers and musicians.
>>Then came the digital age, with broadband thrown in. All of a sudden, the cost
>>of making the 1000th (or millionth) copy is once again about the same as the
>>cost of making the 1st copy, only this time it's approximately zero.
> The first copy's cost is not zero. If it were, there would be no
> issue.
He may have meant the first copy off the original.
>>So, are writers, musicians, and other creators of disembodied ideas _entitled_
>>to earn a living doing what they like to do, in this neo-pre-Gutenberg world?
> Sure. If they can. But they are not entitled to claim that
> publishing their ideas and selling them to the public somehow does not
> place them in the public domain.
Writers and musicians need a way to make a profit, or else our music and
writing will be done only by amateurs. Legal methods are not very good,
they give big rich companies a giant advantage. Now that advantage is
getting diluted out even for big companies; they face maybe many
thousands of lawsuits against people who have very shallow pockets.
Plant breeding started going a lot faster after they had hybrids. When
you could spend 30 years coming up with an improved plant that was
public domain once you sold the first seed, people mostly did it as
amateurs. Hybrids were a technological solution. Once karyotyping was
workable people could have back-bred with a whole lot of work but they
mostly didn't. The new molecular techniques make it easier but it still
isn't something for amateurs. So for the moment hybrid strains are
safe. If somebody starts releasing seed that's like valuabe hybrids but
that breeds true, the plant breeders will be as upset as the record
industry. But there won't be much they can do. No trail to follow,
just a lot of people who plant and save seed.
The way it is now, most music and writing is done by amateurs. Say you
want to write a novel. The way to break into the business is to write a
novel and start sending it to publishers. Then write another novel and
start sending that one too. Then write a third novel. At some point a
publisher will decide you're serious and offer to buy one of your books.
Once you have a offer then you can get an agent who will take his 20%
and be worth every penny of it, he knows about all the sneaky tricks
that publishers put into contracts. With luck you will get a $5000
advance and with luck the book will sell that well and you won't have to
give any of it back. Now the agent starts trying to sell your other
books, and your publisher will start telling you what he wants you to
write next. After a series of successful books your advance may go
beyond $5000. A few writers are wildly successful. For most, writing
is like buying lottery tickets except that in addition to spending the
ticket money they also spend time writing.
If there was no publishing business at all would writers be worse off?
Most of them would not. The existing model mostly does not work, except
to provide best-sellers for people to get advertised about.
>>Is there an _economic_ role for "publishers" in a world where concentrated
>>capital is no longer required to disseminate "intellectual property"?
> Sure. Just so long as they don't expect monopoly privileges.
> Publishers still publish works that are in the public domain, don't
> they?
Yes. There will always be some kind of market for paper books. There
will always be some kind of market for paper books with leather covers.
The interesting thing here is the possibility of a market for artists
and musicians and writers, where people who do popular work have a
strong chance of making more than a $3000 or $5000 advance. I don't
know how it would work. But if you can pay the creator 10% of what the
work would cost you now, he'd be doing rather better than he is with a
publisher.
David Friedman
"tonyp" <to...@world.std.com> wrote:
> Folks,
>
> Did anybody make a living as a writer before Gutenberg?
Aretino. But he did it partly by being paid not to write.
> This question is motivated by the news this week that the record industry is
> really pissed off: they are threatening to sue people who share music files
> on
> the net. I can see their dilemma. With the cost of reproducing bits and
> bytes
> approaching zero, we are on the verge of returning to a pre-Gutenberg
> economics of intellectual property.
Note that there was a considerable period of time after Gutenberg and
before copyright law.
> So, are writers, musicians, and other creators of disembodied ideas
> _entitled_
> to earn a living doing what they like to do, in this neo-pre-Gutenberg world?
> Is there an _economic_ role for "publishers" in a world where concentrated
> capital is no longer required to disseminate "intellectual property"?
1. I don't think anyone is entitled to earn a living doing what he likes
to do--after all, you might like to do something that nobody else values
having done.
2. There is still a role for publishers, or something similar, as
filters--ways in which people can find works they want to read/listen
to/etc.
3. There are a variety of indirect ways in which producers of
intellectual property can earn an income, even in a world in which
copyright law is no longer enforceable. One simple example is the band
that gives away MP3's of its music but sells concert tickets.
4. It isn't just the reproduction cost that is creating the problem. It
is the combination of low reproduction cost--which has been true of
software more or less form the beginning--with networks that make it
easy to find what you want in a decentralized way. Centralized
distribution systems, even with low reproduction cost, are easier to
enforce copyright law against.
5. Some forms of IP will still be protectable. Consider a product--say a
computer program--which is divided in two parts. The big part I give
away. The small part sits on my server. You need both parts to use the
program--and I rent access to my server.
For a real world example of some importance, with the size of the parts
reversed, consider Lexis and Westlaw.
Incidentally, I discuss some of these issues (and much else) in a book
draft currently sitting on my web page for comments, at:
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/future_imperfect_draft/future_imperfect.htm
l
C. P. Weidling
> Folks,
>
> Did anybody make a living as a writer before Gutenberg?
>
> This question is motivated by the news this week that the record
> industry is really pissed off: they are threatening to sue people
> who share music files on the net. I can see their dilemma. With
> the cost of reproducing bits and bytes approaching zero, we are on
> the verge of returning to a pre-Gutenberg economics of intellectual
> property.
...<snip>...
> Then came the digital age, with broadband thrown in. All of a
> sudden, the cost of making the 1000th (or millionth) copy is once
> again about the same as the cost of making the 1st copy, only this
> time it's approximately zero.
>
> So, are writers, musicians, and other creators of disembodied ideas
> _entitled_ to earn a living doing what they like to do, in this
> neo-pre-Gutenberg world? Is there an _economic_ role for
> "publishers" in a world where concentrated capital is no longer
> required to disseminate "intellectual property"?
>
> -- Tony P.
There are various kinds of intellectual property. Books, software,
inventions (protected by patents), designs for clothing, architecture,
etc.
I assume (dangerous word I know, all I can do is serve notice up front
that I have nothing to back up my assumption), that intellectual
property, or IP as it's starting to be called, used to be a very small
part of the total value of the world economy, but that is changing
rapidly. Partly this is because (I'm still assuming here)
transportation and manufacturing processes have become so efficient
thanks to various technological advances, even what might be called
services are in many ways more efficient thanks in large part to
automatic computers (how many people even know anymore that 'computer'
used to be a job description for a person?)
However, the economic/legal system hasn't caught up. At this time,
intellectual property is treated in a very crude way. The very word
'property' gives away the fact that it's treated like old fashioned
goods, and the analogy that I'm constantly drawn to is to a kind of
balkanization. I was watching one of those Rich Stevens programs
about travelling in Europe, and he was doing the Rhine River, and
along the Rhine you saw one after another of medieval
castle/fortresses where the local lord would impose a tariff or tax on
river traffic. Some of them even had chains they would raise to block
boat traffic that didn't pay them off. I doubt these lords
contributed anything significant to the economy, maybe some tiny
effort at curbing piracy but very inefficient even at that, so
basically it was extortion. They were leaches.
What's happening now with copyright law (and to some extent patent
law, especially with the plethora of ludicrous software patents going
on), is that a bunch of corporations are becoming like those river
lords, imposing their tariffs, intering with everything, and
contributing practically nothing. I dare say that movies, fiction,
radio (particularly radio!) and television are _worse_ because of
their control.
There's another facet to this I'd like to bring up. I recently read
an article on synethesia.:
http://www.sciam.com/print_version.cfm?articleID=0003014B-9D06-1E8F-8EA5809EC5880000
which had some interesting speculation on the origins of creativity in
the human brain due to a kind of cross-talk that allowed, for example
us to imploy metaphors.
Within a society, intellectual ideas stimulate further ideas, further
refinements. Shakespeare seldom if ever created his plays from whole
cloth for example. This balkanization of intellectual property is
probably costing us in terms of lost creativity as well as other
things.
David Lloyd-Jones
>
> Incidentally, I discuss some of these issues (and much else) in a book
> draft currently sitting on my web page for comments, at:
>
> http://www.daviddfriedman.com/future_imperfect_draft/future_imperfect.htm
> l
Hal Varian and Brian Kahin edited a rather good series of papers,
Internet Publishing and Beyond,
http://mitpress.mit.edu/book-home.tcl?isbn=0262611597
which I recently skimmed. Published in 1996, which is nine years,
six Net generations ago -- but it seemed to me to hold up pretty well.
-dlj.
Darren McHugh
tonyp wrote:
> So, are writers, musicians, and other creators of disembodied ideas _entitled_
> to earn a living doing what they like to do, in this neo-pre-Gutenberg world?
I don't know about "entitled" in any moral sense, but if people cannot ensure that
they are paid for creating ideas, then, by definition, only amateurs will create
them, which may or may not lead to a loss in quality.
I think the very idea of "professional recording musician" is in irrevocably deep
trouble, because music is too easy to share.
> Is there an _economic_ role for "publishers" in a world where concentrated
> capital is no longer required to disseminate "intellectual property"?
I don't think so. Perhaps they can serve as a "recommendation service", but
certainly that is a lot less value-added than a recording label that signs a band
(thereby providing an implicit recommendation) and then packages up a "disc" for
you to use in your "disc player"
Darren
tonyp
"David Friedman" <dd...@daviddfriedman.com> wrote
> "tonyp" <to...@world.std.com> wrote:
> > Did anybody make a living as a writer before Gutenberg?
>
> Aretino. But he did it partly by being paid not to write.
Shades of the Marx Brothers !!
> Note that there was a considerable period of time after Gutenberg and
> before copyright law.
During that time, I am sure, people printed books and sold them. Their
investment was protected economically, rather than legally. I imagine that if
you wanted a copy of "Discourses on Two New Sciences", for instance, the
cheapest way to get one was to buy it from the guy who had gone to the expense
of making up the plates, rather than setting up a press of your own. If you
wanted to _sell_ a bunch of copies, there may not have been a law to forbid you
from "pirating" Galileo's IP, but by the time you got around to it, the market
might have been pretty well saturated.
I wonder, by the way, if there was ever a time when the following model was
roughly workable: you pay a writer handsomely for the manuscript; you read it,
enjoy it, absorb the ideas ("consume the IP") in it; and then you sell the
manuscript on to someone else, for whatever price you can get -- say, what you
paid minus a few ducats. He repeats the cycle. Each successive buyer
effectively ends up paying a small fraction of the author's "advance".
> 1. I don't think anyone is entitled to earn a living doing what he likes
> to do--after all, you might like to do something that nobody else values
> having done.
No argument there.
> 2. There is still a role for publishers, or something similar, as
> filters--ways in which people can find works they want to read/listen
> to/etc.
"Something similar" may already have a name: "critics". Nowadays, still,
critics can point you to books, movies, etc., but not provide them to you at the
click of a mouse. That is rapidly changing.
> 3. There are a variety of indirect ways in which producers of
> intellectual property can earn an income, even in a world in which
> copyright law is no longer enforceable. One simple example is the band
> that gives away MP3's of its music but sells concert tickets.
Sure. Then there are street musicians and "shareware" authors. Their business
model is: put your product out, and ask for donations. Not a way to get rich,
but we already agreed that nobody is entitled to get rich.
Another model: you give away your software, but charge for tech support. It
costs money to keep a staff of people in cubicles answering phones, but if you
can make enough profit on their work to pay the programmers for the development,
you may have a workable business.
> 4. It isn't just the reproduction cost that is creating the problem. It
> is the combination of low reproduction cost--which has been true of
> software more or less form the beginning--with networks that make it
> easy to find what you want in a decentralized way. Centralized
> distribution systems, even with low reproduction cost, are easier to
> enforce copyright law against.
Yeah, but I think the law-enforcement approach is ultimately doomed. For one
thing, laws are decided by the majority in the long run, and the majority is
consumers, not producers, of IP. Real protection has to be based on economics:
if the game is "positive sum", you get fewer arguments about the rules.
By "based on economics" I mean something like this:
Let's say one of your books costs $30 on Amazon. I give one to a friend --
never mind whether I bought it, stole it, or "pirated" it. I am giving my
friend a $30 gift. Sure, it's the _thought_ that counts, but it's a $30 thought
:-) OTOH, if my friend could download a copy of your book for $0.25, I would
literally be giving her a two-bit gift. It would hardly be worth the trouble.
Under present arrangements, I'm guessing, your royalty on a $30 book is more
than a quarter. But a quarter is still better than zero, which would be the
alternative in a world of disembodied IP. You may even make it up in volume!
> 5. Some forms of IP will still be protectable. Consider a product--say a
> computer program--which is divided in two parts. The big part I give
> away. The small part sits on my server. You need both parts to use the
> program--and I rent access to my server.
>
> For a real world example of some importance, with the size of the parts
> reversed, consider Lexis and Westlaw.
I have considered this, and I must say I see some advantages to such an
approach. Instead of buying my own copy of Quicken, say, I just log in to
Intuit's web site over my broadband connection and make my ledger entries,
create my reports, and so forth. Instead of owning and maintaining seat of
Solidworks, I log into SW's web site and design my new product. Believe it or
not, I'd be willing to consider such arrangements, having grown up in the world
of time-share computing. But I bet lots of people would be too paranoid to
trust their financial data and their plans for a better mousetrap to some
software vendor's server. Still, perhaps this approach _will_ become more
popular in the future.
> Incidentally, I discuss some of these issues (and much else) in a book
> draft currently sitting on my web page for comments, at:
>
> http://www.daviddfriedman.com/future_imperfect_draft/future_imperfect.htm
> l
>
> --
> www.daviddfriedman.com
Looks like a fun place to spend a few hours.
-- Tony P.
David Friedman
"tonyp" <to...@world.std.com> wrote:
> > 4. It isn't just the reproduction cost that is creating the problem. It
> > is the combination of low reproduction cost--which has been true of
> > software more or less form the beginning--with networks that make it
> > easy to find what you want in a decentralized way. Centralized
> > distribution systems, even with low reproduction cost, are easier to
> > enforce copyright law against.
>
>
> Yeah, but I think the law-enforcement approach is ultimately doomed. For
> one
> thing, laws are decided by the majority in the long run, and the majority is
> consumers, not producers, of IP. Real protection has to be based on
> economics:
> if the game is "positive sum", you get fewer arguments about the rules.
But if the laws were still enforceable--i.e. if reproduction cost were
low but it had to be centralized, so there was an obvious target to
sue--then the logic of the game would be the same as it has been for the
past two hundred years or so. And during that period we have had
copyright law.
...
> Under present arrangements, I'm guessing, your royalty on a $30 book is more
> than a quarter. But a quarter is still better than zero, which would be the
> alternative in a world of disembodied IP. You may even make it up in volume!
My royalty on a $30 book is typically more than a dollar, although it
would depend on the particular book and details of the arrangement. If
all I got when someone downloaded a copy was a quarter, I think it
unlikely I would make it up on the volume, so far as my published books
are concerned.
On the other hand, I also get paid for giving public lectures. I would
guess that in the average year, my pay for that is within a factor of
two of my royalty income. And having people read my books is one way of
persuading them that they would like to pay me to give a lecture. It's
also a way of persuading my employer, a university, to hire me, since
the fact that my books get read and reviewed probably means that I add a
tiny bit of status to the school. So even under current circumstances, a
noticeable part of the pecuniary income I get from writing, perhaps a
majority, comes in ways that don't depend on copyright law.
In addition, I get a lot of nonpecuniary income from writing--the
pleasure of knowing that other people are reading my ideas and,
hopefully, finding them interesting and persuasive. That's one reason
that three of my books--one out of print, one self-published, and one
commercially published and in print--are on my web site, where they can
be read for free.
So in my case, at least, abolishing copyright enforcement while
replacing the present system with some new mechanisms for demonstrating
quality (partly done at present by the willingness of a publisher to
publish me) and a system of free downloads, wouldn't eliminate my
incentive to write.
> > 5. Some forms of IP will still be protectable. Consider a product--say a
> > computer program--which is divided in two parts. The big part I give
> > away. The small part sits on my server. You need both parts to use the
> > program--and I rent access to my server.
> >
> > For a real world example of some importance, with the size of the parts
> > reversed, consider Lexis and Westlaw.
>
>
> I have considered this, and I must say I see some advantages to such an
> approach. Instead of buying my own copy of Quicken, say, I just log in to
> Intuit's web site over my broadband connection and make my ledger entries,
> create my reports, and so forth. Instead of owning and maintaining seat of
> Solidworks, I log into SW's web site and design my new product. Believe it
> or
> not, I'd be willing to consider such arrangements, having grown up in the
> world
> of time-share computing. But I bet lots of people would be too paranoid to
> trust their financial data and their plans for a better mousetrap to some
> software vendor's server. Still, perhaps this approach _will_ become more
> popular in the future.
Note that, in the model I describe, your data doesn't have to be on the
vendor's server, although it could be. You could be running a program on
your machine and saving all your data on your hard drive. But in order
for your program to work, it would have to frequently interact with the
part of the program that was on the vendor's server.
Jonah Thomas
> "tonyp" <to...@world.std.com> wrote:
>>Yeah, but I think the law-enforcement approach is ultimately doomed.
For
>>one thing, laws are decided by the majority in the long run, and the
>>majority is consumers, not producers, of IP. Real protection has to be
>>based on economics: if the game is "positive sum", you get fewer
>>arguments about the rules.
> But if the laws were still enforceable--i.e. if reproduction cost were
> low but it had to be centralized, so there was an obvious target to
> sue--then the logic of the game would be the same as it has been for the
> past two hundred years or so. And during that period we have had
> copyright law.
So on the one hand, what the voters care about may be primary, and on
the other hand the publishing companies care a lot more.
But once the product is in a form tht's easy to copy, the vendors are in
trouble at that point. And if they sue lots of private citizens or hack
into their computers etc, then the voters will start to care.
There's a long tradition of people copying music. It would be
physically more difficult for random users to scan in a book and send
the resulting file to their friends. A 200 page book would take at
least 100 scans. If books were on long scrolls and we had machines that
copied them automatically....
I don't think this will work for books and music as they currently exist.
If you go through from beginning to end, a user can record the *output*
and that's the product they want to copy. You could send a unique ID
that they wouldn't notice, and then sue the owner of the credit card
that paid for the copy that got spread around. But OK, say you send
them a bitmap over the net, and the ID is hidden in the noise. Someone
who cares could randomise the noise and it wouldn't matter except to
you. You'd stop the naive copyer, but once a copy is out you've lost.
What you *could* do would be to randomise the sense parts. Go through
the music and insert particular wrong notes. Change the text of the
book for each download. No two people get the same product, and you sue
the ones you catch sharing it. But again the public would eventually
rebel -- although they haven't rebelled against the drug laws yet.
Perhaps different products will evolve. Say that instead of just
reading a novel, you get to choose whose point of view you'll read each
scene from. Then no two readings would be alike. You can reread the
same novel over and over and probably never read it quite the same way
or be sure you have it all. Then you could pay for each reading and not
feel cheated, and if you send key scenes to a friend they might like it
or they might feel like you're telling them how it comes out.
There are interactive games online where people download part of the
software to play the game and then pay by the month. They hardly ever
bother to record a transcript and nobody would feel like reading a
transcript was a substitute for playing the game.
But of course it isn't art.
Darren McHugh
tonyp wrote:
> Yeah, but I think the law-enforcement approach is ultimately doomed. For one
> thing, laws are decided by the majority in the long run, and the majority is
> consumers, not producers, of IP.
That's controversial. Others might argue (and I'm not taking a position either way
on this one), that laws are decided by people with power and money, not by the
majority, so that would generally be the producers of IP. If you look at campaign
contributions, and what it costs to get elected, there is something to that idea
(you can't get elected unless you have money.)
Alternatively, one might argue that if a candidate is supported by the majority,
he/she will get elected *regardless* of relative lack of campaign donations, in
which case laws *would* be decided by the majority in the long run.
*However*, there is some suspicion that the majority is rather easily persuaded by
campaigning, and that they don't really think hard enough about things to decide
anything. (IOW, are public tastes endogenous - subject to manipulation- or
exogenous?)
I guess this is what they talk about in 'public choice' courses all day long
Another point: even if the consumers made the law, getting rid of IP law would not
be an unambiguous improvement for them... there might be concerns about the quality
and availabilty of IP in the absence of IP law.
> Real protection has to be based on economics:
> if the game is "positive sum", you get fewer arguments about the rules.
I think another form of "real protection" is technological. See below.
> By "based on economics" I mean something like this:
> Let's say one of your books costs $30 on Amazon. I give one to a friend --
> never mind whether I bought it, stole it, or "pirated" it. I am giving my
> friend a $30 gift. Sure, it's the _thought_ that counts, but it's a $30 thought
> :-) OTOH, if my friend could download a copy of your book for $0.25, I would
> literally be giving her a two-bit gift.
Not quite. A 15MB file on her hard drive is not quite the same product as a nice
beach-friendly hardback copy of 'Hidden Order', with the cool parking meter on the
front cover :) Sure, she can print out the 200 page book for easier reading, but
-that's a pain in the butt, especially with her temperamental 6ppm printer.
-it costs money for paper and toner
-the end result is a floppy sheaf of paper, not a nice bound book that looks good on
the shelf
Bottom line: Part of the IP protection for books is technological: a printed book
is just a lot nicer that a .doc file, and you can only get a printed book from a
publisher. (for now, one can imagine a custom publishing house that would do a
one-off of your doc file)
OTOH, for most people an .mp3 file is every bit as convenient as a CD, if not more
so. There's no difference for me between pressing a button on my computer to hear
music vs. pressing a button on my disc player to hear music.
But I'm not convinced that the recent fall in record sales is due solely to
piracy.... I think the CD demand boom has simply played itself out. I used to buy
tons of reissued CDs to replace my records in addition to 'new' music purchases, but
now after 15 years, everyone who needed to replace their stock of vinyl has done so,
and the "replacement" component of purchases has dried up.
Cheers,
Darren
ro...@telus.net
wrote:
>ro...@telus.net wrote:
>> "tonyp" <to...@world.std.com> wrote:
>
>>>Did anybody make a living as a writer before Gutenberg?
>
>>>This question is motivated by the news this week that the record industry is
>>>really pissed off: they are threatening to sue people who share music files on
>>>the net. I can see their dilemma. With the cost of reproducing bits and bytes
>>>approaching zero, we are on the verge of returning to a pre-Gutenberg economics
>>>of intellectual property.
>
>> They are just parasites threatening to sue their hosts for using
>> antibiotics.
>
>Their business model doesn't work now.
Yet they seem to be making profits....
>Writers and musicians need a
>model that works. The current approach hasn't been working anyway, for
>writers and musicians.
Right. And that is very much the point.
>>>So, are writers, musicians, and other creators of disembodied ideas _entitled_
>>>to earn a living doing what they like to do, in this neo-pre-Gutenberg world?
>
>> Sure. If they can. But they are not entitled to claim that
>> publishing their ideas and selling them to the public somehow does not
>> place them in the public domain.
>
>Writers and musicians need a way to make a profit, or else our music and
>writing will be done only by amateurs.
So? There are many very good amateurs.
>If somebody starts releasing seed that's like valuabe hybrids but
>that breeds true, the plant breeders will be as upset as the record
>industry. But there won't be much they can do. No trail to follow,
>just a lot of people who plant and save seed.
Monsanto has indicated it intends to hunt such people down and
exterminate, imprison, or bankrupt them.
>A few writers are wildly successful. For most, writing
>is like buying lottery tickets except that in addition to spending the
>ticket money they also spend time writing.
Right. And the truth is, the works of the wildly successful writers
aren't really _that_ much better than of the ones who barely make a
living. In many cases, it's worse.
>If there was no publishing business at all would writers be worse off?
>
>Most of them would not. The existing model mostly does not work, except
>to provide best-sellers for people to get advertised about.
Bingo. It's not about the work. It's about using advertising to
create a _brand_ that will yield rents.
> The interesting thing here is the possibility of a market for artists
>and musicians and writers, where people who do popular work have a
>strong chance of making more than a $3000 or $5000 advance. I don't
>know how it would work. But if you can pay the creator 10% of what the
>work would cost you now, he'd be doing rather better than he is with a
>publisher.
Very much the point. The creators aren't the ones profiting now. The
marketers are.
-- Roy L
ro...@telus.net
<dd...@daviddfriedman.com> wrote:
>5. Some forms of IP will still be protectable. Consider a product--say a
>computer program--which is divided in two parts. The big part I give
>away. The small part sits on my server. You need both parts to use the
>program--and I rent access to my server.
>
>For a real world example of some importance, with the size of the parts
>reversed, consider Lexis and Westlaw.
There are also dongle systems, and probably other ways to obtain
payment for information without having to resort to
government-enforced monopoly privileges.
-- Roy L
David Friedman
Jonah Thomas <j2th...@cavtel.net> wrote:
> > Note that, in the model I describe, your data doesn't have to be on the
> > vendor's server, although it could be. You could be running a program on
> > your machine and saving all your data on your hard drive. But in order
> > for your program to work, it would have to frequently interact with the
> > part of the program that was on the vendor's server.
>
> I don't think this will work for books and music as they currently exist.
Correct. I think I specified in my earlier post that it would work only
for some forms of I.P. More precisely, it doesn't work for I.P. that is
fully revealed when it is used.
tonyp
"David Friedman" <dd...@daviddfriedman.com> wrote
> In addition, I get a lot of nonpecuniary income from writing--the
> pleasure of knowing that other people are reading my ideas and,
> hopefully, finding them interesting and persuasive. That's one reason
> that three of my books--one out of print, one self-published, and one
> commercially published and in print--are on my web site, where they can
> be read for free.
And we thank you for that. You seem to appreciate the contradiction between
wanting your ideas to spread, and charging money for them :-)
-- Tony P.
David Friedman
"tonyp" <to...@world.std.com> wrote:
The ideal solution, as for any monopolist, is price discrimination. Sell
the material to those who will pay, give it away to those who won't.
David Lloyd-Jones
>
> The ideal solution, as for any monopolist, is price discrimination. Sell
> the material to those who will pay, give it away to those who won't.
>
Do we see moral risk rearing its ugly head? There is a spectre
haunting the market, it is the spectre of the entire population
becoming converted to the dissimulation of unwillingness to pay you
for your golden words, David. :-)
Cheers,
-dlj.
David Lloyd-Jones
>
> The ideal solution, as for any monopolist, is price discrimination. Sell
> the material to those who will pay, give it away to those who won't.
>
Do we see moral hazard rearing its ugly head? There is a spectre
David Friedman
Monopolists engaging in price discrimination rarely set prices by
asking people how much they would like to pay. As your next post in
the thread points out, the online copy is not a perfect substitute for
the hardcopy--just as a paperback is not a perfect substitute for a
hardcover.
Consider, as the best example of the approach I am describing, my
_Law's Order_. The webbed version of the final draft is in the form of
page images--giving the text about the resolution you would get with
an old dot matrix printer. I put it in that form mainly to support a
system of virtual footnotes, since that makes it easy to have the
layout identical to the printed copy. But a further consequence is
that most people who would be willing to buy the printed copy will
probably not consider the webbed version an adequate substitute.
On the other hand, a student in a third world country who reads
English and is interested in the subject is very unlikely to pay the
cost of the printed version, but might well be willing to put up with
the resolution of the webbed version.