Some of us prefer quality to quantity. Sadly, producing good quality usually requires a significant amount of hard work, and that isn't going to change any time soon.
You just validated my point. The people that prefer quality still pay for people to work (hard?) for them. Without needing any violent enforcement or censorship.
Don't fetishize information, focus on what you (and other people) can do with it. Until brain patterns can be copied (if ever), skill and experience will still be scarce.
There surely are a lot of people who obtain quality content through TPB without paying for it. However, from what I could observe, attempts at making this group of people pay anyway have been largely fruitless so far, while at the same time they often appear to inconvenience paying customers, e.g. through intrusive "copy protection" schemes. So as a content producer, I tend to think of what I might "loose" through TPB as "promotion expenses".
Perhaps I don't really understand your point, then. It seems to me that most of the works being ripped off via TPB and the like are the products that many people have worked on to get to a high level of quality, which of course are also the ones that are expensive to make because of that, and yet clearly a lot of people aren't paying for them.
My point is that a work that is just information, no matter how high quality, will be copied. There is no scarcity.
Throughout history, work has always been either about making physical objects, food, or services rendered to either a person or a group interactively. Those are scarce. That's still the case.
Yes, the market for cookie-cutter experiences "make once, sell zillion times" will become smaller (or at least, stop growing). I'm not sure whether that's something laudable or something sad, but it is happening before our eyes.
Things are changing, let's try to make the transition less painful instead of more painful as we move into the post-information age.
OK, I think I understand where you're coming from now.
Unfortunately, if we take your idea to its natural conclusion, a lot of industries that create and distribute valuable works are going to change direction or possibly split several ways.
Those projects that can be run without ever giving the underlying data to customers, such as interactive software that can be turned into SaaS where the code never leaves a server under the provider's control, might follow that path. This naturally leads to a subscription model, where customers pay over and over for the same functionality, rather than paying a one-off charge as they have in the past.
Then you have things like textbooks and training videos, which are based on expert knowledge and insight that took a lot of time to acquire but is relatively stable and easily shared once concentrated and well presented in a fixed medium. These tend to have relatively small but high-value markets, but become commercially unattractive if unrestricted copying becomes legal. A plausible alternative is that experts shut down their open distribution channels and only share their knowledge and advice in person, charging the kind of rates for training and consultancy that make even lawyers and accountants wince.
A related case is entertainment performances. The performers themselves can pull the same trick by moving toward live performances as their revenue stream, and some of the production team will be necessary for that as well. It's not clear how key people like songwriters and composers get paid in this set-up, though.
Some projects with critical mass could move to essentially a charity model, whether that is by literally accepting donations, by being created directly by volunteer labour, or by appealing to wealthy patrons who can afford to subsidise entire projects single-handed or within a small-group of like-minded philanthropists. This can work, but there is a danger of reducing every work to "good enough".
There are some interesting ideas in terms of getting lots of people to pay up-front before a work is created, but then of course they're taking on trust that the work will be good enough to justify the cost. That might be viable for established artists, but seems unlikely to work for many new ones. It also suffers from the "good enough" risk.
Some projects would find a business model based on a very large market paying a trivial amount of money to access the data conveniently, but that strategy is more effective against casual piracy today than it would be in a world where commercial alternative services could legally set up, rip your content, and then run in direct competition to you. Realistically, a project trying this approach would probably have to convert to something based more on charity and pitching themselves as the legitimate supplier of the content in some sense.
Finally, there are those projects that produce middle-value fixed products for medium-sized markets, such as books and videos catering to a lot of niche markets. These are the ones that are really in trouble, lacking any means to control the data once a customer has bought it, being too expensive and not wide enough in appeal for most charity/trivial money models based on volume to cover the costs, but not being good enough when stacked up against high-end alternatives for charity models based on patronage to kick in.
These ideas basically all come down to one of three possibilities:
1. Restrict access to the data to recreate the scarcity (typically with a significant reduction in the number of people who benefit and a significant increase in the cost to those who do).
2. Aim for some sort of charity/trust/volunteer model (which only works if you've have relatively extreme volume of sales or price, and risks reducing everything to "good enough").
3. Fail.
None of these seems likely to be better at either producing high quality works or distributing them to wide audiences than an economic system such as copyright.
None of these seems likely to be better at either producing high quality works or distributing them to wide audiences than an economic system such as copyright
I think that was a common sentiment at the end of each "age". How to go from here, all the alternatives suck from our point of view. I really like (2) myself, but it might not be everyone's cup of tea.
But no matter what, copyright is harder and harder to enforce as copying of information becomes cheaper, and it has the potential to get really messy.
At a certain point, the ends don't justify the means anymore. DMCA was ok-ish, but I think we reached that point with SOPA and similar laws. Especially as those means are the same as can be used to censor other things, and will very likely be abused for that, with the militarization happening all over the world.
So that solution falls under (3) fail as well. Which leaves the other options, including those we haven't thought of yet. People are creative and will find ways to get by...
> I really like (2) myself, but it might not be everyone's cup of tea.
I think there's potential there, but there would need to be a dramatic cultural shift so it didn't just become a case of anything "good enough" was done, with no meaningful incentive to put the final polish to turn good works into great ones. Take a look at the Open Source software community today: it's full of "good enough" products, which do the basic jobs perfectly well for a lot of people, but which often lack the power, flexibility or usability of commercial software because no-one wanted to write the edge cases or spend the time doing tedious polishing-up work.
> But no matter what, copyright is harder and harder to enforce as copying of information becomes cheaper, and it has the potential to get really messy.
Unfortunately, that isn't really true. It would be relatively easy to enforce copyright on the Internet with modern technology. It's just that I (and, I suspect, most other people here) would prefer not to accept the unfortunate side-effects that come with compulsory mass surveillance and automated charges.
but which often lack the power, flexibility or usability of commercial software because no-one wanted to write the edge cases or spend the time doing tedious polishing-up work.
Yes, the edge cases, the personalization, the polishing. There will always be work in that. Adapting systems to their specific surroundings. Every place, every person is unique, and has specific demands. That's what I meant with the cookie-cutter stuff going away.
it would be relatively easy to enforce copyright on the Internet with modern technology
Sure, but is just as easy to avoid copyright enforcement with the current technology. And for those desperate there is always the analog hole. That kind of summarizes the DRM "war".
compulsory mass surveillance and automated charges
Because that'd effectively be an Orwellian world. So we'd need to go to a total surveillance state, centrally controlled world, just to make sure things keep working as they do now. Just to make some people happy at the expense of the rest. That's not only inhuman, but very unstable as well.
"Unfortunately, if we take your idea to its natural conclusion, a lot of industries that create and distribute valuable works are going to change direction or possibly split several ways."
This is not a strong argument. I could equally look at the time of the enlightenment and say "if people weren't forced to give their money to the Catholic church, think of all the lovely buildings and choral music we'd be denied. Therefore - people should be forced to give money to the church!"
In the case of copyright, you need to consider this opportunity cost. i.e. things we don't have because copyright has made them impossible. As with the church example, there is also a significant cost of freedom.
There is no demonstration that an economy with copyright is superior to an economy without copyright, and plenty of current and historical annecdotal evidence to suggest that copyright is strongly detrimental to economic success.
> There is no demonstration that an economy with copyright is superior to an economy without copyright, and plenty of current and historical annecdotal evidence to suggest that copyright is strongly detrimental to economic success.
Which you haven't cited, I notice.
If an alternative economic model provides a more effective incentive than copyright, then it is unlikely that today's copyright laws prevent anyone from adopting that model instead and reaping the rewards. Obviously you can give lots of examples where this has been done successfully to back up your case, then?
There is compelling evidence that Prussia's explosive progress in the 19th century was due to the lack of copyrights. At the same time, England's progress was smothered under strong copyrights. The historian Eckhard Höffner has done a lot of research in this area. Here's a taste:
I'll take another angle. Live-and-let live should be the default case. Copyright is an intrusion on this. If someone wants to drive a tank through freedom by introducing something like copyright, then the onus is on the tank drivers to make the case that the benefits justify the intrusion on freedom.
I've never seen a remotely reasonable attempt at putting that case. The best you get is claims that people wouldn't produce things unless they had vast legal protections and that's plainly false. Mendelssohn wrote symphonies. I write code, in a commercial setting, with copyright not being the justification for it.
Handel is an even better example, because it's well documented that he rearranged lots of previous stuff. We wouldn't have any record of some of those earlier tunes had he not repurposed them in his own works. Handel's _Israel in Egypt_ could not be performed or distributed under current western-world copyright law.
"If an alternative economic model provides a more effective incentive than copyright, then it is unlikely that today's copyright laws prevent anyone from adopting that model instead and reaping the rewards."
When you have copyright law it creates a powerful lobby group and any attempt at reform will come up against them. Much as with my discussion about the church above - an institution that impeded progress and freedom, but which fought ferociously to retain privilege at every step.
What could cause the dam to break would be a major economic slump and a desperate move to try something new to attract smart people. Or something like SOPA may be a step too far, and cause Sweden or New Zealand or Singapore or a special economic zone in China to make a play at being a free-state-style intellectual capital.
You just validated my point. The people that prefer quality still pay for people to work (hard?) for them. Without needing any violent enforcement or censorship.
Don't fetishize information, focus on what you (and other people) can do with it. Until brain patterns can be copied (if ever), skill and experience will still be scarce.