License Zero: Comments on “The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free”

https://blog.licensezero.com/2020/08/03/truth-paywall.html

by joelellis • 6 years ago

34 30 6 years ago

blog.licensezero.com

pwinnski• 6 years ago

That's quite some hand-waving. If news organizations (like newspapers) give away their content for free, they lay off staff. We know this because we've seen it happen in newsrooms around the country as Craigslist dried up newspapers' primary source of revenue.

So this seems either false or completely irrelevant to the topic at hand: "I happen to believe that in most areas of creative work, and in most adjacent industries, giving more away for $0 online would improve outcomes for most players, overall."

Kednicma4• 6 years ago

The author is so very close to realizing that intellectual property is incoherent in the fact of information theory, and also that universal basic income is an essential component of a hyperwealthy neoliberal democracy. We could be a culture of creators, with every person having a relatively small but fluid audience who supplements their income and contributes to their work, but no starving artist dependent on their employer for their living wage.

As the slogan goes, "All of our grievances are connected: Eat the rich."

kemitchell5• 6 years ago

Intellectual property law is only coherent in the face of information. It's the property law of intangibles.

Economics didn't run up to the industrial revolution and stop. The book I cited, Slauter's Who Owns the News?, gives a great history of English law from before the Statute of Anne. For a view from the Internet era back, on an economics angle, Shapiro and Varian's Information Rules is a great read. For a more nuanced view from those who lean open, James Boyle's books are all worthwhile.

The author is, as it happens, an open-leaning intellectual property lawyer.

Kednicma4• 6 years ago

The author is dangerously close to realizing that all property rights are incoherent! Just take the contrapositive of your current position, and then keep going.

Economics still works fine. The funny thing, though, is that information doesn't behave like a typical good; it's only got marginal cost to duplicate, and is usually too cheap to meter, and every purchase adds a new seller to the market. Thus, it's kind of hard to even justify applying the economic question to information. Indeed, our societies are so drenched in information that we put price tags on tooling which can reduce, filter, aggregate, summarize, and otherwise lower the total number of bits of information within our control.

Any pragmatic and ethical intellectual property law regime must account for the practical truth that artists and scientists can only receive a full education by participating in an underground copyright-infringement movement which consists of private libraries, ad-hoc study sessions, thumb drives full of art and philosophy, and most recently Bittorrent and Sci-Hub. Our current law regime is completely out of touch with this reality, and fixing it will require drastically shortening the length of copyright, ending works-for-hire, and taking other big actions to destroy the media cartels.

MattGaiser5• 6 years ago

My view of work is that you can be paid in 4 ways:

1. Paid in cash.

2. Paid in power.

3. Paid in social status.

4. Paid in deferred career benefit.

Because of the reach of content with the internet, the pay in categories 2 and 4 has gone up. It depends on what you do, but pay in category 3 may also have increased. Unsurprisingly the cash pay is going to decline.

In my own case, I write a fair bit. I gain career benefits. I gain contacts from Hacker News as I write under my own name. There are friends who find it cool that I am published on Stack Overflow. I have a regular software engineering job, so the money now is not a priority.

Eventually most content creation is just going to be supported by people doing other things to earn a living. Only deep investigative journalism would require someone to earn a full time living doing it.

rtlfe3• 6 years ago

Eventually most content creation is just going to be supported by people doing other things to earn a living.

That's fine for many types of content, but do we really want world news and investigative journalism to be done exclusively by amateurs with no resources?

MattGaiser5• 6 years ago

I actually think you could get some excellent investigative journalism from subject matter experts working part time.

But yes, that is one of the few areas where you still need permanent full-time people.

jszymborski• 6 years ago

I think you might have missed a fifth: paid with passion.

Whether it nets as much long-term happiness or food in your mouth is free to debate, but I think a lot of people are just content with the idea of creating something they wanted.

I think you see this a lot in OSS (linux, git, gnu) as well as e.g. the video games industry.

I don't think it's a particularly sustainable way to get paid, but it can exit into the other 4 you mentioned.

MattGaiser5• 6 years ago

Quite true.

Aerroon2• 6 years ago

Isn't there also "not paid at all"?

MattGaiser5• 6 years ago

If you include the 5th point about passion that someone just below added among my 4, why would anyone do anything which did not pay them in some way?

rtlfe3• 6 years ago

I really can't tell what they're trying to say here.

giving more away for $0 online would improve outcomes
there is nothing inherently worse about paying a fee

Aren't these contradictory? Is the author taking any position?

MattGaiser5• 6 years ago

The author is generally in favour of free content and argues that it is good for both the consumer (as there is no hassle) and the content creator as there are other avenues for earning money.

kemitchell5• 6 years ago

I'm just as in favor of paid content as free. But I also think creators tend to see the free-paid and open-closed questions too black-or-white, and therefore err on the side of closing things too tightly or giving too much away. There are many, perhaps happier, middle ways.

blahbhthrow3748• 6 years ago

I don't understand what this is even about? They didn't bother to get the original author's name right ("Nathan Robinson"), and they seem to be arguing with some strawman that every piece of creative output must be compensated? But there's no substance to that argument either, just a bald assertion that sometimes you don't get paid for things?

rtlfe3• 6 years ago

I don't understand what this is even about?

Agreed. I read the whole thing twice and couldn't identify any thesis.

DubiousPusher• 6 years ago

I think the author's point is inferable from these two observations.

Creators needn’t be compensated well just because they are creators.
Neither must useful works of every kind cost nothing to everyone.

Obviously this author knows that if poor quality cheap information proliferates and high quality information remains costly then people will prefer the former to the later.

The author is effecting a denial of the implicit argument of the "post truth" panic, which is that it is important that the public have a high quality and cheap information source.

It's not utterly unreasonable to argue against an assumed premise such as this but it would've been nice if they had been a bit clearer about it.

wombatmobile• 6 years ago

I think he's saying

"Build it and they will come."

"The universe will provide..."

and sometimes, it does. Like in Wayne's World.

jandrese• 6 years ago

This doesn't seem to address the problem outlined in the original article. It seems to be arguing that people shouldn't be paid for lousy work, but that isn't at all what the original article was talking about.

Being rich inherently gives one a voice, being right does not. If the truth is inconvenient to the rich then it will face an uphill battle against the well funded lies.

beepboopbeep• 6 years ago

Well said.

kanobo• 6 years ago

Is it just me or was this very confusing to read? In some spots I thought it was written by a bot or generated by a gpt3 script.

fangorn• 6 years ago

I think it may be a deliberate example of poor quality writing that should not be compensated.

rmah• 6 years ago

It's annoying that the author takes the original article about paywalls by Nathan Robinson so literally at some points.

For example, the Robinson wrote "Creators must be compensated well. But at the same time we have to try to keep things that are important and profound from getting locked away where few people will see them." To which the commenter replied "None of the above is true." Then explains that only some creators and some works should be compensated well. As if it wasn't clear that the Robinson was referring to creators and works that he felt was of value.

In rebuttal, he only provides his opinion that "I happen to believe that in most areas of creative work, and in most adjacent industries, giving more away for $0 online would improve outcomes for most players, overall." without any evidence that is the case for journalism (or even software for that matter). Not even a weak "logical" argument.

Perhaps he's right, perhaps he's not. I don't know, it it's annoying that this response has somehow hit #2 on HN. It's as weak as this post :-)

kemitchell5• 6 years ago

Picking quotes as I did does lend to an impression of nitpicking literalism. But to quote myself now, my point was at a higher level than refuting factual assertions:

... the problem here is evident: black-and-white, either-or thinking.

If you put the problem in terms of creators needing to be well paid, on the one hand, and their creations needing to be free and universally accessible, on the other, you've set yourself up a zero-sum cage match. The first quote I pulled from Nathan was more nuanced than that, lamenting paywalls but accepting them, because "it's complicated". The second quote I pulled, from the end of Nathan's piece, puts things more absolutely, leaving less hope.

If the problem is being stuck between the rock of creator comp and the hard place of free, universal access, the solution is recognizing that neither of those is absolute, immovable, or perfect. Not all creation requires or deserves compensation. Not all information needs be free and convenient to everyone.

If you stop thinking of open/closed and free/paid as toggle switches, and embrace that they're actually pretty fine-grained dials, it's no longer a war between creators and consumers, and there are lots of practical things to try. Find the optimum balance in the situation and over time. As I suggest:

When the works we need or want come readily available at affordable costs that we can pay, and paying is easy, there’s no great harm to access or progress or truth. That cost many not be great. But if a great many pay it, the results can be.

To make that more concrete: I don't think I'd pay $10 a month for Current Affairs. But I'd darn sure pay $3. Or up to $10, scaling up with how many articles I read in a month. Perhaps on top of free access to an archive of articles more than a year old.

I'm not sure how this ended up on HN, either.

rootsudo• 6 years ago

Powerful sentence.

License Zero: Comments on “The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free”

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