I would suggest that our expectations are not actually as straightforward as "try to give as much as you take", as the post would seem to imply.
If an experienced commercial programmer were to say that they use a substantial amount of OSS, but had never contributed to any such software themselves, we might be somewhat annoyed with them. However, if a 60-year-old housewife with no computing background were to announce that she were a linux user, we'd probably be pretty happy with that. If a businessman in a developing country were to say that OSS made his business viable, we'd be pretty happy about that too. Developers of open-source screen readers probably don't expect the majority of their users to contribute any code, but I can't imagine any of them are particularly upset by that.
So what moral principle is at work? I'd say it's Marx's "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need".
Yep. As many have suspected, the OSS community are nothing but a bunch of commies. 8^)
(My contributions? Some projects here, plus over a thousand assorted Wiki edits.)
]]>What you may be doing is depriving me of my income stream for creating information, and in the absence of that income stream I'm going to have to Get A Real Job and Stop Doing That Shit (which you seem to like me doing).
Copyright, I will agree, is a broken model for paying artists. Can you suggest a better one? (Note that you will need to find some work-around for the Berne Convention, which is implemented in law by just about every country on the planet, which means your solution needs to be politically acceptable for all the international treaty signatories -- and able to make an end-run past the corporate lobbyists from, for example, the MPAA.)
Jon @101: Reporting of sales in the US is so spectacularly crap -- even via Bookscan -- that there's effectively no way to detect such an uptick. (Bookscan monitors about 50% of retail sales, reporting monthly.) In the UK it might be do-able (Orbit have, I'm told, near-real-time monitoring of over 95% of sales throughout the UK at a per-book/per-bookstore level), but the knock-on effect on sales in the UK from a US website is liable to be minimal.
Alex @106: you're misreading me wilfully, and ascribing beliefs to me which I do not hold and have not expressed. Stop it.
Bruce @112: the Kindle isn't new; Peanut Press were doing this shit on PalmOS in the mid-90s.
More to the point, if you would pause to read the Kindle EULA, the terms it imposes on you are hideous. (Why anyone would want to buy into that commercial library system is beyond me. I'm half-certain that describing what you do with a Kindle as "buying a book" is a violation of the Advertising Standards here in the UK.)
]]>There is a problem with your picking Steam as a model, and highlighting how they boost sales by cutting prices: nobody knows if this will work for books. We might be teetering on the edge of a vast rennaisance in book-reading culture, and if only we cut the retail price to $1 per book we might triple the number of reader -- but somehow I doubt it, because ...
If you pay $8 for a paperback book, you're getting -- assuming you enjoy it and depending on your reading speed and the length of the book -- 3-12 hours of entertainment. Compare that price-per-hour with recorded music or movies on DVD. Books come out way ahead: they're already one of the cheapest forms of immersive entertainment out there. So it's not obvious that cutting the price further is going to generate increased sales.
Note that games, in terms of cost-per-hour for entertainment, are even cheaper than books -- a $40 title will give even a shit-hot gamer at least 40 hours of game-play. It's just the up-front investment that stings. As for Steam? I never heard of it until late last year, and its existence has not caused me to suddenly go out and buy loads of games, because I buy maybe one or two computer games a year, and I haven't finished playing the last one yet.
I probably am to the games biz as J. Random Ordinary Reader is to publishing -- the folks who buy two bestsellers a year to read on the beach, basically. You can't build a profitable industry on people like me (except at the very high end, the 10 annual best-sellers, the Dan Browns and J. K. Rowlings of this world). To run an entertainment industry based on shelf sales (and all ebooks are is a shelf sale in the palm of the consumer's hand) you need to keep a polyculture going with lots of choice and not necessarily great sales of each item, but sufficient sales overall, and you need to target the folks who buy ten a month, because each of them is worth fifty ordinary consumers.
]]>But note that many of those cheaper prices are temporary, Keep it low and those new sales fall off as well as people adjust to thinking of the low price as the normal price instead of as a bargain. We also don't know how it's decided to lower the price, whether temporarily or permanently - if it's because the number of sales is slowing to a trickle then that's hardly an innovation - and we don't actually know how if the extra sales make up for the lost revenue every single time. And when you have a game like Modern Warfare 2 that is going to sell a buttload at a high price, lowering it from the start is crazy-go-nuts. Which is great, because the people who pay $50 no questions asked pre-order help the cost come down quicker.
I love Steam as a service, and I do think publishers could learn a lot about pricing and bundling and promotions from it. But at the same time, I'm aware that now I often wait for the inevitable sale price where I would have bought at full price, that Steam would work less well if it had hundreds of thousands of titles, and that even Valve don't keep their lowest prices on their games (ie Half-Life for 98p to celebrate its 10th anniversary) going for ever.
And, of course, with Steam it looks like (although there's conflicting reports on the Internets) it's the publisher/developer who sets the price - while trying to not set it so it will piss off retailers too much, which is why sometimes its still cheaper to buy retail - with Valve taking a percentage (40%?). Publishers setting prices? It's crazy I tells ya!
]]>Steve @131: It seems to me that anything you create in private is restricted by default until you decide to distribute it to the public. The question is how far you go in de-restricting it, bearing in mind that de-restricting something is a one-way process.
Alex @133: actually, I have paid Moravec (insofar as I've not only bought his books in hardcover, new, over the years, but have actively promoted them to my readers). The Heinlein estate is an iffier question, but pastiche is generally dealt with by considering the boundary between creating a directly derived work. Something like "Sense and Sensibility with Sea Monsters" would need to seek Jane Austen's copyright permission, were she still alive and the work in copyright; but if it's all your own words ... style isn't copyrightable, and it's bloody hard to patent.
Your other point was dealt with at length by Fritz Leiber in "The Silver Eggheads", about forty years ago.
]]>I have a few things which I give away, which are lead-ins to the things I sell. I'm happy to give away the first couple of chapters of whatever I write, without strings attached. But everything after that I am going to charge for, and I don't see that ever changing.
A big part of it is expectations, on both sides of the counter. If I give something away, I not only condition other people to expect future things in the same vein to be given away, I condition myself to think that way as well. I don't want to get into the trap of getting into a race to the bottom with myself.
That said, I also believe the best copy protection for media is a good pricing structure for products which are easy to obtain and aren't in themselves obfuscated.
Also, if there ever comes a day when computers are able to compete creatively with humans, I suspect we'll have MUCH bigger things to worry about than whether or not human writers can compete effectively for a piece of the market.
]]>I'm whole-heartedly willing to pay for only part of the complete cost package that goes into making books: author and editor. If only those people got paid, though, the habits of obsessive and cost-sensitive readers like me probably wouldn't make up for the diminished purchases of more casual readers and the whole system would suffer. Or, even if the total number of dollars flowing to authors didn't decrease, there would probably be a flattening of income distribution. As a reader I'm happier spending $30 on 3 books than $15 on one. Charlie is better served by $2.50 in royalties that go to him than by $5 in royalties that are spread across him and 2 other authors. I don't know how, or even if, it is possible to make the interests of readers productively align with those of authors, and for those of individual authors to align with those of fiction as a whole.
My favorite suggestion so far -- one of the fairest but least likely to be implemented -- is to replace copyright and the retail model of digital distribution with income taxes and free access to any and all digitized information through a centralized non-profit online service. Distribute tax revenues to producers in proportion to the popularity of downloads*. In theory, at least, it could even work internationally. People living in China or Russia wouldn't pay Western-size taxes to support creative endeavors unless they were making Western-size incomes. If Chinese people show that they support Chinese media by downloading it, the money serves to support domestic creators. If they prefer Star Wars, then George Lucas makes at least a little money off China that he'd never get from pirate DVDs. While I'm daydreaming, I'd like to say that I think cheap fusion power and an HIV vaccine would also be swell.
*Obviously some thought is needed here, or the next big botnet work load will be obsessively downloading the works of collaborating authors to inflate their share of the pie.
]]>We can't abolish copyright: it's built into too many national legal systems at too low a level. But we can shove copyright into a legal sandbox where it doesn't affect the ordinary content-using public, where the only people who need to worry about it are creators and for-profit distributors.
We have a precedent in the form of compulsory licensing systems, such as the TV licencing system in the UK, or public lending right programs. I'd envisage a licensing fee levied on bandwidth -- if you have broadband, a mobile phone, or cable TV a tax would be added to your bill. In return for paying the tax, you are indemnified against copyright violation for anything you download for personal noncommercial use. (Don't pay the tax? The RIAA or MPAA lawyers will be watching you.)
The devil in the details is (a) how to track downloads, (b) how to disburse payments to creators, and (c) how to handle international cross-payments (for example, for downloads across international borders). But we've already got a working framework -- in the shape of PLR agencies -- that works surprisingly fairly, albeit on a much smaller scale. And with a blanket immunity clause in effect to shield them, downloaders have no reason to object to suitably anonymized sampling to figure out what's being consumed and therefore who to pay.
]]>... It's an artificial right, created by legal fiat.
It's clearly not the ideal way to arrange remuneration for artists and creators; I think you'd find common ground with Disney and Sony-BMG on that ground. Unfortunately it's what we're stuck with.
When you're stuck with lemons, your choices are to (a) make lemonade, (b) go thirsty, or (c) try to breed a better citrus plant. Unfortunately option (c) -- which in this context means coming up with a viable replacement -- is the harder option of the three.
]]>That's not exactly right. More like: "If I don't get paid enough to write full-time, I will have to seek other sources of income. Back when I had a full-time job, it took me 3-4 years to write each novel, on an unpaid-hobbyist basis. As a full-time author, I can write 1-2 books a year. So my output will drop by 80-90%, assuming I don't run out of ideas or get so demoralized I give up."
I should also like to add that, if we step out from behind these straw men we're bashing, my position on copyright is roughly the same as Eric Flint's.
(The reason for the acrimonious confrontation here is the temporal frame provided by Amazon's helpful "let's you and him fight" gambit of last week.)
See also my post #141 in this thread.
I'd like to add that I, too, have been reading Richard Stallman's effusions over the years. He's principled, alright -- he's also an ideologically committed left-anarchist of a kind so vanishingly rare in US politics today that most folks don't recognize it when they see it. I think this is a good thing -- if we didn't have a Stallman we'd need to invent one, just to pin down one side of the Overton window of debate over freedom in software -- but I think it's a very dangerous mistake to take everything he says at face value without examining the underlying philosophical position behind it.
]]>Wozzat? Can you explain that one a bit?
]]>Okay, I guess I knew about that one -- Robin Hobb / Megan Lindholm was the one I knew of.
]]>It gets a bit wearing, after a while, being told you're a greedy, unimaginative, grasping hack.
]]>Do I need to add that I fear, hate, loathe, and refuse to shop at WalMart (and their UK subsidiary ASDA)?
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