Paul Graham has lost the plot

http://mishandrob.com/paul-graham-has-lost-the-plot/

by porfinollanes • 14 years ago

170 290 14 years ago

Sambdala2• 14 years ago

So, some sort of modified Labor Theory of Value?

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.

Sambdala2• 14 years ago

My point is his whole argument consisted of an emotional appeal about a. the intention of the 'creator' and b. the cost of creating XYZ piece of 'IP' as defenses of copyright.

scottmey• 14 years ago

I agree with Paul in some respects. But I did feel that his analogy was a bit strange, although kind of creative.

laglad• 14 years ago

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.

ef4• 14 years ago

> Doesn't it cost money to produce the smell?

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.

guard-of-terra3• 14 years ago

In fact it is so.

There's already a paying customer who receives meal: local distributors who the content is licensed to. They get exclusive rights to the content (meal).

Now, internet services receive smells: non-exclusive rights which are valid in some countries and not others, like cheese with holes.

Now there's this huge problem where I can't go to 99% of internet services and pay for music because they don't want my money because I live in a wrong country. This is what we'd call "smell", and while I would pay for "meal" (ability to use any music service in the world according to its pricing and model), I'm only offered "smell" (the suggestion to go elsewhere and figure a way to actually pay for stuff).

And this smell, I won't buy.

timmm2• 14 years ago

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.

J3L24043• 14 years ago

What about copies of software?

Hype (which is great) for example. Can he really tell his investors that people downloading it from TPB is no problem? In theory his thesis is fine, in reality not so much.

timmm2• 14 years ago

Clearly he is talking about copies of software too. It's changing from Adobe PS type software to a subscription cloud based software. You can still certainly make money with software but your not gonna make as much selling just copies of software.

jes51996• 14 years ago

"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.

GiraffeNecktie4• 14 years ago

"Well, all of the music available on iTunes, Amazon, and the Pirate Bay has already been produced, it just needs to be distributed."

Just because it has already been produced, doesn't mean that it has already been paid for. The studio and the session musicians have probably been paid, but the artist should be compensated on a scale commensurate with the popularity of the work and that needs to be measured across whatever timescale people are still buying or downloading it.

jes51996• 14 years ago

As a consumer, I don't actually have much power over who does and doesn't get paid for various things.

J3L24043• 14 years ago

>If I want to pay for music to be produced, I use Kickstarter.

If I want to pay for software to be produced, I use kickstarter.

Now I can download AutoCAD, Illustrator and Photoshop guilt free.

anonymoushn4• 14 years ago

Why would you feel guilty? You don't deprive anyone of anything by downloading Photoshop.

jes51996• 14 years ago

I actually have paid for software to be produced using Kickstarter. And I donate to open source projects, too.

I happen to use the GIMP, Inkscape, and FreeCAD for free, and I don't feel guilty about that.

jbigelow767• 14 years ago

So in your view the entirety of the 99 cent charge should go to Apple? The song you wanted to download just popped into existence before hand with no time, effort or talent from an artist at all (or discovery by a label)? Please tell me more about this magical music tree.

jes51996• 14 years ago

I didn't say anything about where the money should go.

huherto• 14 years ago

My guess is that distribution is virtually free, productions is inexpensive, marketing can be very expensive.

crusso• 14 years ago

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.

rdw• 14 years ago

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.

anonymoushn4• 14 years ago

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?"

aamar3• 14 years ago

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.).

barrkel2• 14 years ago

As Bruce Waria says in a comment on his own Music Think Tank piece, by Graham’s logic he should force all the companies he invests in to open source the code which he funded, or allow anyone to embed their technology without compensation or conditions attached.

This wouldn't actually follow PG's logic. Using code does not necessarily require the end user copying it, especially for web-based software which is mostly run remotely. Consuming media necessarily requires copying it to somewhere - to your nerve endings, at the very least.

drumdance2• 14 years ago

If you classify nerve endings as part of the value chain, then the UI of web apps certainly qualifies.

barrkel2• 14 years ago

For sure; and that's why most web UIs rely heavily on open source frameworks. I don't think this disproves my point at all; I think it strengthens it.

jjcm• 14 years ago

Your analogy is flawed. Air doesn't cost anything, but sound waves dont cost anything either. The data that's embeded in it (whether it's a smell or a song) has a cost to produce. It costs money and experience to cook the food. It costs money and experience to produce the songs.

kirinan• 14 years ago

I disagree with the point of the blog post. While it doesn't make sense that we people would charge for air pipes to be dragged to earth from the moon in order to use the smells produced (because of legislation), it is perfectly analogous to what the RIAA and MPAA do when they try to influence legislation to stop pirating. Instead of targeting the root cause of the problem (cost and quality), they chose to legislate away rights (SOPA) on the internet. This is similar to the smells example because instead of allowing you to breath the free air, we are going to make you breath our air because we feel its better. This makes no sense, and is hazardous to not only open enterprise but the freedoms that we have.

chernevik2• 14 years ago

Piracy is abuse of open networks and speech right. I don't want a government sufficiently powerful (per the RIAA) to stop it, such powers would would themselves be a serious danger to society.

I suppose that amounts to a freedom to piracy. But that doesn't mean piracy is somehow right, or even intended. It's an injustice, of individuals, persisting in the space needed to maintain a free society.

Nor am I much impressed by the argument that with so many people pirating, it must actually be moral. Probably most of them think it's moral, given that they take their norms from the people around them. And the offenses are largely minor. But I think the steps from principle to copyright are pretty clear, and I don't see how anyone concludes that it's actually right.

It's like littering: no one actually thinks it's okay, but they do it because it's convenient, they won't get caught and it isn't a big deal. The consequences of those calculations are obvious.

FrojoS• 14 years ago

'When you're abusing the legal system by trying to use mass lawsuits against randomly chosen people as a form of exemplary punishment, or lobbying for laws that would break the Internet if they passed, that's ipso facto evidence you're using a definition of property that doesn't work.' - PG

Brilliant. I was expecting something controversial. But, I assume, that at least within this community what PG says here, is the opinion of the majority.

rdtsc2• 14 years ago

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.

aamar3• 14 years ago

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.

rdtsc2• 14 years ago

I think it is prescriptive for the distributor and creators, but descriptive for consumers. He is not admonishing consumers to pirate, as it seems many have misunderstood, he just describes what is happening and what will happen with information. But he asks distributors and creators to change and adapt to a new way of doing things.

The original blog didn't claim pg was encouraging piracy directly, so my post was a bit off topic, but I wrote it because I found when discussing this essay/talk with others, many tend to draw that conclusion.

kijin• 14 years ago

> 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.

Edit: Added paragraph.

rlpb• 14 years ago

Music existed before copyright did. I remain unconvinced that music costs money to produce. Art gets produced for the sake of art, not for compensation. Specific forms of art (say for example big budget movies) may be an exception, but then the argument needs to shift accordingly.

drumdance2• 14 years ago

Music existed, but not recording devices, microphones etc. There is a hard cost associated with all of those. Granted, those costs have come down over time, but the rental of a decent studio is not $0.

GiraffeNecktie4• 14 years ago

The cost of studio rental is irrelevant. What musicians want to be compensated for is the lifetime of study, dedication to a craft, years of poverty and uncertainty, risk of repetitive stress injuries, etc.

qdog3• 14 years ago

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.

seunosewa2• 14 years ago

> People paint, write, sing and act all the time without compensation of any kind.

Because they choose not to exercise their right to profit from it?

MBlume• 14 years ago

Who ever said they have the right to profit from it? There was a century or two there where they had the ability to profit from it. Now? Looks like we might be done with that. Kinda sad, but these things happen.

DanielStraight3• 14 years ago

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.

qdog3• 14 years ago

I'm saying it's not a 'right' to expect profit from something. The right to pursue a profit exists as long as the law of the land allows it.

Markets already provide a "pay-what-you-want" model, it just happens that not everyone is willing to accept what you want to pay.

Selling capital goods is very different than selling digital copies of something. There is a limited amount of corn in the world, you can purchase it at the going rate generally set by the supply and demand. In digital goods, the supply is unlimited, there are no natural market forces.

Apple heavily protects its products with patents and copyright where it can. You cannot take an ipad design and improve upon that design without cutting a deal with Apple. I think that strongly supports the case that the few (Apple) benefit from the current system while the many (anyone who thinks they could enhance the design of ipad) do not.

There are, however, a few open and free items of software, Linux, MySQL, Apache, Firefox to name a few. Arguably, depending on what you want to do, there isn't even a better closed alternative (yes, yes, substitute whatever SQL package you prefer for MySQL).

I personally have a cable provider (so I pay for the minimal tv package to get internet), a netflix account, Amazon Prime, see the occasional movie in the theater, etc.

When people talk about copyright though, I generally see some stuffed suit making a bonus, not a bunch of creative people.

4ydx• 14 years ago

So the right to pursue an old business model is dead. Good riddance.

superuser22• 14 years ago

If you believe people have no right to recoup the time you invest in writing code (or whatever it is you do for a living), then you would continue to show up for work every morning if your paycheck stopped?

DannoHung• 14 years ago

> 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.

Would there? Really? Like, are we absolutely sure there would be less of it? Are we also ruling out the possibility that someone would pay you to produce specific lines of code or just that once you produce code, you can't sell it?

It used to commonly be the case that you got paid to make music for someone. Now you make the music and then try to sell it to people.

It just seems like there is an implicit assumption that the marketplace model is the best way to encourage the creation of all things.

wam• 14 years ago

Curiously omitted from both essays (unless I somehow completely overlooked it) is the ending of this apocryphal story. The judge asks the accused infringer to take a coin out of his pocket and drop it on the table, saying "The sound of the coin shall pay for the smell of the food."

barce• 14 years ago

Thanks for adding this. This is brilliant on the part of the judge.

InclinedPlane5• 14 years ago

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.

seunosewa2• 14 years ago

Where would Linux be without Windows and Mac OS X to borrow ideas from?

jjtheblunt• 14 years ago

I'd argue Linux is an open source reimplementation of Solaris more than of OSX or Windows.

steve-howard• 14 years ago

Moreover, much as I love it, most free software usually has a huge gap in usability and QA, because those are the boring parts of writing software.

tikhonj3• 14 years ago

Probably somewhere more efficient but with less useless (but admittedly cool looking :)) eye-candy.

The main reason common distributions have features similar to Windows and OS X is to make transitioning easier. Really serious people using e.g. Arch with XMonad are more efficient with very little Windows/OS X influence.

And hey, Linux could borrow those features even more easily if Windows or OS X were open source. Windows being open source would be complicated, but Apple is a hardware company and would work well enough with an open source OS at its heart.

Androsynth2• 14 years ago

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.

anonymoushn4• 14 years ago

Certainly people are certainly attracted to iOS dev because it produces money, but iOS users do not have to pay for apps. It is easy to get apps without paying for them, but Apple has made it very easy to pay for them. I doubt that the absence of copyright would significantly change the proportion of iOS users who use apps without paying for them.

tadfisher• 14 years ago

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.

guard-of-terra3• 14 years ago

Because they needed that code in the kernel.

Now, there would always be people who want to have that music recorded, so it would still flow.

alexgartrell2• 14 years ago

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.

angersock16• 14 years ago

Tell that to the GCC folks, GIMP developers, Blender developers, Tremulous developers, Firefox developers, Mono developers, Rails developers, Python developers...

(we all know GTK is a labor of love, 'cause you couldn't expect people to pay for it.)

jerf• 14 years ago

Do you think you're countering InclinedPlane's point? Because you haven't. You've explained the how to InclinedPlane's what, but that hardly constitutes a disproof.

notatoad• 14 years ago

bringing the discussion back to its original topic, the music industry is subsidized by large players as well. every famous musician makes good income from just the fact that they are a celebrity. product endorsements, festival and tour sponsorships, etc. companies pay musicians to produce music in a way that is totally abstracted from the actual sale of music.

snowwrestler4• 14 years ago

For those wondering how this translates to the music industry, there are a few analogies.

- Independent bands who sign corporate contracts--see The Roots. - Major labels who create teen brands like Justin Bieber or Selena Gomez. They don't care if you steal the music as long as you buy the t-shirt, buy the book, see the movie, come to the show, etc. - Sync licenses. More and more mid-level bands are depending on getting their songs into movies, commercials, tv shows, etc. to bring in revenue. This is another form of corporate funding.

sheraz• 14 years ago

You cannot simply substitute software for music, literature, or film. It does not work that way.

notJim2• 14 years ago

> How much of the internet runs on it?

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.)

guard-of-terra3• 14 years ago

Site on the internet is something like a live performance.

You can't have copies of it because of its transient nature. Sometimes you do have a bootleg but your mileage may vary still.

ams6110• 14 years ago

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.

tikhonj3• 14 years ago

Yes, if nobody could get paid for writing code, there would probably be less of it. (Barring some sort of post-scarcity economy, I guess.)

However, your original assumption does not flow from the premise--just because selling software becomes impossible does not mean programmers won't get paid. I recall reading somewhere (too lazy to find the source) that the majority of programmers work on bespoke, in-house software rather than consumer-facing proprietary software. Even if it is not a majority, it still shows that there are viable ways for programmers to get paid outside creating scarcity with copyright.

Just because people contributing to the kernel get paid does not mean they would not get paid without copyright. Companies like Google and Red Hat do not really rely on copyright for money.

kahirsch• 14 years ago

He said "there’d be less of it", not "there'd be none of it".

VMG5• 14 years ago

Out of interest: are you in the software industry? How much of your work is open source?

haberman3• 14 years ago

> 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.

Tloewald• 14 years ago

And it's an argument, but it's not necessarily true.

Consider the costs of production and distribution.

Production. Frank McCourt's memoirs were the end result of a life of telling stories socially and on stage. People who heard him tell the stories would say "you should write a book". Today his listeners wold have videoed his performances with a camera phone, posted them on YouTube, and he would be a viral star before he knew it.

Distribution. Suppose I have a head mounted camera that simply records everything I see — it's part of version 5 of the android glasses google is working on. Then along comes a third party and releases an app that simply recognizes anything I look at that's a printed page and captures it. If I read a book, I have an digital image of its pages and an OCRed text for indexing.

The cooking smells analogy is actually more accurate than the writer realizes, because all this technology makes production easier too.

zasz4• 14 years ago

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.

InclinedPlane5• 14 years ago

Apache, Wordpress, nginx, node.js, coffeescript, ruby, rails, python, django, chromium, firefox, webkit, drupal, varnish, memcached, 7zip, postgresql, mongodb, php, clang, wine, dosbox, vlc, virtualbox, truecrypt, calibre, audacity, openoffice, cygwin, flac, ogg, perl, synergy ...

dsr_• 14 years ago

Let me offer an argument which I haven't seen, but is probably not novel: people will continue to make music, tell stories and make short films even if there's no likelihood of making much money from it. It's a creative impulse that, happily, has allowed some people in the last few decades to make a living at it -- but that's not the long term history, and it may not continue.

We might not get epic movies... or we might, if CGI continues to dwindle in cost. We probably won't get as much pop/dance music... but we might.

There won't be as many huge star winners, that's all that can really be said to be likely.

icebraining7• 14 years ago

Asking musicians to produce music for nothing more than the sheer joy of it is exploiting them, and impolite

Don't fall for their mental trap: questioning copyright doesn't mean that: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/apr/21/study-finds-pira...

besides. If someone gives you value, you ought to give value back.

And people shouldn't be dicks, doesn't mean we should make it a crime. Morality != Law.

meow3• 14 years ago

Exception ?

MongoDB, Wordpress (and all other blogging frameworks), MySQL, the list keeps going... they are out there for free because the creators figured out a way for it to be free why still getting paid (service contracts in most cases).. Being free didn't even reduce their quality (it probably enhanced it)...

martey• 14 years ago

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.

vladd• 14 years ago

Naming an example (Linux) doesn't contradict "there's be less of it".

jfoutz• 14 years ago

That's right. Charging for software was microsoft's big invention. It took, what, 30 years to realize that the software had enough value beyond the hardware.

I guess the flip side is, if there was no free software, there would be no pay software.

sp3323• 14 years ago

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.

davidw11• 14 years ago

> IBM, RedHat, the US National Security Agency, Canonical, DARPA, Google, etc. all pay for open source code to be written.

IBM: sells tons of proprietary software.

Redhat: genuine open source deal. Legit example.

Government: money comes from taxes. I don't think I fancy a world where information goods are mostly paid for through taxes.

Google: makes most of their money from the proprietary bits of their software.

andylei4• 14 years ago

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.

leon_2• 14 years ago

> Linux

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.

gaius2• 14 years ago

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!).

babarock• 14 years ago

"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.

VMG5• 14 years ago

The difference is that nobody stops you from making "Open-Source" films and music, and many people do.

The masses however seem to prefer commercial films, music and software.

angersock16• 14 years ago

Er, the number of views we get on places like Youtube and 4chan and YTMND seem to present a convincing counterargument.

scelerat• 14 years ago

Just to supplement another response to this point... commercial entertainment does compete directly with free/amateur/semipro/fansourced material all the time.

I would argue that this is more of a danger to Big Content's bottom line. There are only 24 hours in a day. Youtube and reddit compete directly with Universal, Sony, and the New York Times for people's attention.

The fact is that entertaining videos and music are not only easier to distribute than ever, but also easier to produce. You don't need a degree or the backing of a large corporation to be funny, insightful or clever. IMO there is a lot of noise about piracy which masks this even larger "problem" for traditional media.

handelaar• 14 years ago

"commercially released music is produced specifically for the purpose of being heard, and paid for (whether by the buyer, or by a royalty from a radio station)"

Remind me again how much radio stations in the US pay in performance royalties?

kreek2• 14 years ago

Not sure in the US but I remember hearing around £200 for day-time airplay (more listeners) to £40 at late-night is what an artist can expect to earn from a play on the BBC.

JDulin2• 14 years ago

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.

VMG5• 14 years ago

There was little scarcity before. The production costs of CDs and LPs were much lower than what they were priced in the shops.

JDulin2• 14 years ago

But it looked like there was scarcity to the consumer. When you are the one means of distribution, you can create as much scarcity as you want. It just seems that the record labels and movie industry have carried out that ruse for so long, they actually believe it.

ziadbc• 14 years ago

I don't think PG was saying that music equals smells. He's saying piracy = smells, some of them good, some bad.

It's just silly that the industry spent a decade suing people, and probably could have made 10x their money by giving up the 'suing people for smells' and started other music/content related businesses.

mindslight• 14 years ago

PG's analogy is only flawed in that it's meant to be prescriptive and not fundamental, so it admits arguments like this. Producing content costs money, yes. But once it's been released to the public, it's impossible to restrict copying. Cold hard fact, move on. Sorry if it's not the way you'd like - you can take your ball and go home, but you can't go back in time.

All the interest and investment in new distribution services is basically looking to be part of RIAA 2.0 - continuing profitable distribution channels based on consumer laziness. The goal of the record industry has never been to compensate artists, and the decreasing prevalence of big-name acts means there's even fewer lucky ones with the power to demand so. Meanwhile, the pirate side has accepted that distribution is free and is trying to usher in the future so sustainable artist-beneficial (whatever that turns out to mean) structures can be created. Oink was responsible for my going to many shows, while the risk of being hassled over torrenting (I've become more risk-adverse) has resulted in me knowing very few bands on the concert listings.

rytis• 14 years ago

one line of thinking is this: "if it's not re-sellable it's not worth paying for". I buy a hammer, and once I'm done with it I can sell it. If I buy an MP3 file, can I resell it? Not that no one's going to buy, it's even 'illegal'...

cturner4• 14 years ago

Although there was some to disagree with in Graham's essay, he had some interesting insight. The restaurant smells analogy is the least bad I've heard so far.

This response was flimsy.

    > This is a flawed analogy. Cooking smells are a
    > positive externality – they’re generated as a
    > by-product of providing a service to paying patrons.
    > But commercially released music is produced
    > specifically for the purpose of being heard, and
    > paid for (whether by the buyer, or by a royalty
    > from a radio station).

So let's consider that you commercialised the sale of cooking smells. What would be the result? A bunch of providers would crop up dedicated to providing smells. They wouldn't bother with the food - they'd just sell the smells. And they'd talk about "smell innovation".

That's similar to the situation we have with commercial music venues. The government extends property rights to things that are both (1) not property and which (2) have a very different dynamic to property. And then dedicate operators set up to harvest that.

The people producing cooking smells wouldn't be restaurants producing food innovation. The restaurants themselves wouldn't have time to spend chasing after fiddly smell licensing arrangements, and paying up lawyers to go chasing after freeloaders. They're too busy running actual restaurants. Just as it is where the people producing music aren't themselves the music artists, and except for a tiny (although highly visible) fraction, music artists (even world class music artists) do not benefit from copyright protection.

The article goes on to claim that music costs money to produce - ludicrous. You can put a microphone under a jazz musician and then publish it on the internet and it's first class music. You can take a laptop into a symphone orchestra concert and record it. Recording and distributing things is so free of cost that the commercial music industry has to go out of its way to find mechanisms to shut down the people who do it, and to get the government to protect it.

I'm in the privacy of my room. Someone is broadcasting radio into my space. Why the hell shouldn't I flip some magnetic signals and bottle it, and give it to my friends if I want to? Or sell it? It's my damn room and media.

It significantly impedes our freedom. It makes us criminals in our own homes. And it doesn't delivery to the people whos interest it is justified by. It creates a sea of lobbyists who need to extend the policy further and further into our lives just so they can stay in the same place. It is indefensible, disgusting policy failure on a grand scale.

It's important to stress that intellectual property innovation occurs because people have a problem to solve. I wrote a franchise system for an events company because - surprise surprise - they had a franchise, and wanted software to better run it.

Mendellsohn wrote the Scottish symphony because he was inspired to do so. Orchestras perform works because people come to their concerts to experience the sound and atmosphere and variation, despite having high quality recordings at home. IBM funds linux because it wants an operating system capability for its servers.

However, the mamoth presence of things that leverage copyright in the market and in our lives distorts our perspective. Because of its legal advantages and the privilege it pushes focus away from artists, and leads to crazy circular logic of the sort shown in this article. You could simplify many of the points as, "The world is this way, therefore the world must be this way."

There was a time hundreds of years ago when the church had a monopoly on education. They would have tried to claim that without strong privilege, education would not happen. It's a lie.

IP law is holding us back, but you need to use your brain to see past the world we live in to the opportunities we're missing out of because of all these protected gangsters who dominate the channels.

Near the end I see bold text,

"What would happen if creators couldn’t charge for their creations?"

You can charge for your creation. Steam has mechanisms for getting people to buy from them, and to make it difficult for people to run steam software they haven't paid for. Good for them.

But you shouldn't have the right to get the government to annoint business models for you, or to be your enforcer. Copyright and patents are not property, and they should be described that way or treated that way in law.

pemulis2• 14 years ago

Would you have a problem with it if Steam started serving games without paying the developers? Also, when he talks about the cost of producing music, he isn't referring to the cost of setting up a microphone, which is miniscule. What he's talking about is the fact that it might take an artist over a month to create a two-and-a-half-minute song.

cturner4• 14 years ago

    > What he's talking about is the fact that it might
    > take an artist over a month to create a two-and-
    > a-half-minute song.

I covered that music innovation happens without requiring us to relinquish our rights in my original post.

But let's expand, because I can raise Jade Ewen now.

The only musicians who benefit from copyright in a significant way are a few that get hand-picked as front-men by the gansters who run the music industry. These are the ones they can point to.

Consider Ms Ewen. Successful artist, national treasure who performed well in Eurovision for the UK, one of the handful of music artists from the billion around the world who probably makes something a sliver over minimum wage from leveraging copyright. Her record label (who make the real money) tell her to move her life to Los Angeles without telling her what she'll be doing there. http://www.eurovision.tv/page/news?id=4373&_t=jade_had_n...

Her company would have had a choice of twenty girls with excellent looks and high quality vocals when they decided to pick her as their next star. They have some brand invested in her, but they can replace her when they like. They already started the process when they pushed her into the sugarbabes.

She is cattle to them.

But she puts a smile on it in the end, because she has no options.

All those kids who sign on to those talent shows are. They have to sign away their rights to the sponsoring organisations just to get in.

I'm on the lookout for a news story to demonstrate a culture of mates agreements between studios and compliant "managers". It will reveal itself in time.

koblas• 14 years ago

Smells are covered by copyright, it's a $20 billion dollar industry. http://bit.ly/GKyiOa

tissarah2• 14 years ago

Smells are currently being sold -- as advertisement for products held within stores (big box stores are known to pipe in smells of baked goods at the front etc...)

What if consumers don't pay for music? There have been many suggestions about how this will play out, but maybe it will be that Pepsi and McDonalds will decide the music that is best suited for selling their products. Brittany Spears will stick around for sure (love her), but I'm not sure where this leaves us.

cturner4• 14 years ago

Sure, but we're talking about smells in the context described in the original PG essay and the response to it that this thread is attached to.

nkassis• 14 years ago

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.

jbigelow767• 14 years ago

Why does YCombinator deserve equity (value) from successes of the YC program, these are internet companies, aren't msot of the company's benefits intangible "smells" much like music?

Wait. Let me guess... because they invested, so they deserve to profit right?

So somebody please explain to me why the media industries are different. If anybody thinks music is free please go price out studio time before replying.

angersock16• 14 years ago

$400 dollars for a full day of recording (http://www.inthejarstudios.com/rates.htm).

I have to pay for my own woodworking tools and computers, but I don't expect people to subsidize me in my hobby. And if I decided to go pro--which in the case of computers I have--I would make sure I only make things the market wants, and not take on shitty contracts signing away future sale equity until some vaguely defined point in the future.

jbigelow767• 14 years ago

Subsidizing a hobby is not an accurate analogy. Is a doctor practicing medicine for pay subsidizing their hobby or are they trying to derive value from their efforts? Just because somebody may enjoy what they do to produce that value doesn't mean it de facto becomes "free".

dclowd9901• 14 years ago

I just turned on my laptop and hit the record button.

And the other day, I turned on a $20 tape recorder.

Perhaps you should expand your ideas of what constitutes publishable music.

jbigelow767• 14 years ago

If you get somebody to pay for either one of your masterpieces feel free to post sales numbers.

Edit: And perhaps you should expand on why YC deserves value from its investments and other industries do not. That's more important than either of our snarkiness.

fellowniusmonk• 14 years ago

Music is like air in the sense that it will always be created, it is as natural as speech for humans, stories and song are to people as oxygen creation is to a plant, the amount of funding may effect the quality (subjective) and quantity (unlikely), but that is the entire point of funding new distribution channels that pay artists directly (which this author equates with "Not respecting the funding of Creation").

Coming from Nashville/Austin I can assure you, the reason people are interested in distribution channels is because that IS the music industry.

All this copyright hubbub is just a natural protectionist attempt to keep the high cost/barrier of entry for musicians (not just to distribution but profitability) by established entities like clearchannel, et al. You can't convince a new musician to sign a predatory contract when they have reached profitability through an easier distribution channel.

From an artists perspective: Talent isn't going away, at first the internet made the talent acquisition process easier and faster for studios, but Talent now has easier options for sustainable profitability through these new distribution channels. Studios have come to simply hate how much harder contract negotiations become when the artist they are targeting is already "making enough".

There is a lot more nonsense in this article regarding "Lines of Computer Code", "Forced Open Source" and the like, along with absurdist FUD like "What would happen if creators couldn’t charge for their creations?", give me a break.

J3L24043• 14 years ago

tl;dr The smell analogy stinks.

redthrowaway4• 14 years ago

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.

Time to adapt or die.

citricsquid4• 14 years ago

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).

angersock16• 14 years ago

And they are welcome to keep paying for it--as the rest of us download free copies.

As for convenience, I may find it more convenient to download music from TPB or a college FTP than from iTunes, because I don't want to deal with their installer or give away my billing info. Convenience is an utterly subjective measure.

(also, your car analogy is shitty and bad and you should feel shitty and bad)

guga31bb• 14 years ago

> If pirating music was impossible many people would return to paying for music

I think you've missed the parent's point. We have left the world where pirating is impossible. The question is how to deal with it. Thinking in unrealistic hypotheticals does little to inform the debate.

joelhaus• 14 years ago

So off base. Where to begin...

> 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.

He says the opposite of this. Redthrowaway on free vs. paid content:

  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.

> 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.

What are you saying? Are you advocating for harsher consequences and more enforcement of existing law or more DRM? It's unusual to see so many luddites on HN. Personally, I'd prefer to see modernization of IP laws.

garyrichardson• 14 years ago

If/when stealing cars becomes easy and without consequence (ie, I can copy yours and have my own), I suspect the auto industry would be in the exact same boat as the record industry is now.

I look forward to that day so we can all have awesome hybrid vehicles that run on garbage. I suspect people will also be able to make awesome mashups so I can get an EV Jeep pickup or a 2012 convertible beetle.

maratd4• 14 years ago

> 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.

Please don't conflate tangible goods with intangible goods. Intangible goods are patterns. You can't steal a pattern, because a pattern can't be "owned" in any sense that a physical object can.

Now, you can have rights to a pattern and that right stops others from exploiting that pattern commercially, but you don't own the pattern. Even our current laws recognize this. After all, your right will expire, but if you own a car, you own it forever and without limits.

So enough with this "theft" bullshit.

icebraining7• 14 years ago

the reason they don't steal cars is consequence

Are you saying that 46% of US citizens* would steal a car if it was consequence free? Because I'd like to see some evidence of that.

* The number who have said to have committed copyright infringement.

joering2• 14 years ago

> 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.

so basically $10 per CD, everyone CAN AFFORD a wall full of CDs, lets say 10,000 of them, but they choose to steal instead? OK.

imgabe• 14 years ago

> What shows market value is the desire for that product.

I disagree with this completely. There's a tremendous desire for oxygen. Literally every human being needs it nearly every second of their life. However, it has no market value because it's freely available wherever you go. You're basically saying that price should be determined solely by demand, regardless of supply. You're ignoring fully half of economic theory.

Yes, there is a huge demand for digital copies of music and video, but there's also an infinite supply of them.

doki_pen2• 14 years ago

The free market is meant to make prices as low as possible, not as high as possible. That is why we have laws against monopolies and encourage competition. The argument that things should cost as much as people will pay for them is a pleasant fallacy of a businessman.

wazoox• 14 years ago

> 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.

This is the utilitarian, simplistic, convenient and completely false view. People are definitely NOT perfectly rational beings working towards their maximal, personal profit. This is why, BTW, libertarianism is a silly, childish pipe dream.

Coming back to the subject, people are perfectly aware that taking someone else's physical good may harm this person directly, that's why it's always carefully regulated by many told and untold rules. Even the most small, primitive societies have mechanisms for goods exchange and appropriation.

Digital goods aren't goods, they're information; when they're shared, the originator keeps them. Nobody never sold "information", only convenient, easy or practical access to it. People never bought "music" in the form of CDs, they bought CDs as the way to listen to the music they wanted.

vibrunazo3• 14 years ago

> People pirate music because it's free

I do think that's incorrect, but there's a broader picture issue that makes this irrelevant: Why does it even matter?

You're misunderstanding the original argument. Of course it's possible to make some money for selling something that is free. Specially if you convince people that it's not free, and that you'll go to jail if you do otherwise. But what they mean with "there's no market value", is that it doesn't create any new value to the economy. It's just money changing hands. If you ask me for 5 bucks and I say "yes, of course, no need to pay me back", we didn't just magically create value in the economy because I payed you 5 bucks for nothing. The value in the economy is the same, that's just money changing hands.

If I pay money for a copy of a song, that's just money changing hands. It didn't add any new value to the economy. If I didn't pay money for that copy of the song. The song would still be there. No change in value.

Unless, of course, if you make the argument that music would cease to exist if we start sharing it for free. Which I would honestly rather not get into.

grok2• 14 years ago

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.

InclinedPlane5• 14 years ago

The distributors wish to control the scarcity of the copies of content. If there is an overflowing abundance of copies then their model of enforcing a 1:1 sale for every copy breaks down.

tikhonj3• 14 years ago

The two are one and the same--the only way to force people to pay for something is to make that thing scarce. In the case of information, which is not naturally scarce, that scarcity has to be entirely artificial.

If something wasn't scarce--e.g. information sans copyright--then anybody could get it without paying. This is a practical reality that copyright attempts to change by legal means; the argument is that the legal means impose a larger cost than benefit on society.

davidw11• 14 years ago

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.

angersock16• 14 years ago

What? Are you unable to understand the difference between making a statement with unspecified assumptions, and making a crafted argument with carefully specified axioms and clear logical reasoning--while also noting obvious facts about the real-world implementation of the topic you debate?

How many songs/stories/etc. are dreamed up by kids and never published? How many love poems are written and not saved?

Content is far, far from scarce.

(also, that isn't a thought experiment you suggested: it was an assertion provided without reasoning.)

EDIT: Amended to better address inflammatory language.

sophacles7• 14 years ago

No, go to any mid-sized town or bigger, there is at least one recording studio, making decent or good recordings for bands that never hit the "*AA lottery", but make decent money (either in the form of door fees and schwag, some even enough to live on) giving away CDs at shows to keep people coming to the next show. Even more that do the same thing, but keep a day job and do music for the love of it.

For every band you've heard of and hated, there are several you've never heard of, but probably would enjoy.

chernevik2• 14 years ago

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.

batista7• 14 years ago

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.

angersock16• 14 years ago

Market value is determined by scarcity and demand, right? Scarcity is finished for digital items. Sorry, but that train has left.

This very much follows economics.

(and stop conflating utility with market value...argh....)

neutronicus• 14 years ago

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.

snowwrestler4• 14 years ago

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.

psb217• 14 years ago

This is exactly the same flawed analogy, in slightly different dress, used in the "you wouldn't download a car" argument.

padobson• 14 years ago

Are we forgetting the difference between free as in freedom and free as in $0? Isn't that what open source is all about.

I would never make the argument that musicians shouldn't get payed and payed well for their work, but for the copyright holders to dictate how, where, and under what circumstances I listen to music that I've payed is the problem with copyright law.

I should have to pay for music. I shouldn't have to pay for the same song four different ways so I can listen to it in my car, on my Ipod, computer, and home stereo.

The problem is the distribution companies. When artists wise up and realize they don't need record labels or movie studios anymore, we'll all be paying for DRM free content - and the artists will get rich.

This is why we have lobbyists for these big companies trying to avoid extinction.

wisty• 14 years ago

I'll just recycle my comment I made on the PG's article:

PG seems to be advocating a pragmatic approach, based on the difficulty of enforcement. Goods can be excludable or non-excludable. Excludable goods are anything that can be effectively locked down (like most physical goods, or movie tickets). Non-excludable goods can't (like air, fish in the sea, and IP). You can make a non-excludable good excludable by creating laws (like Carbon Taxes or IP laws), but it's not always practical.

But he kind of misses the other half - rivalry.

Goods can also be rivalrous or non-rivalrous. Ideas are non-rivalrous as you don't lose anything (except a competitive advantage) if other people also have it. In fact, IP may be the opposite to rivalrous (which is a rare enough thing to not have a name, though I like the name "network goods"), because it's worth more if everyone has it. If more people can speak a language, it's more useful to everyone. The Lord of the Rings is more interesting if you can talk to your friends about it.

While there's a good reason to try to make common goods (rivalrous but non-excludable) goods more excludable (by introducing laws which prevent over-exploitation), it's perverse to make non-rivalrous excludable. You don't tax breathing if there's plenty of air.

The main reason you want to make a public (non-rivalrous non-excludable) good more excludable is to incentize its creation (another reason might be because it's judged to be a "de-merit" (bad) good - such as a porn or a method of manufacturing weapons). But since IP is an input to creating IP, there's very good reasons why you want to make copyright and patents expire in a short time - bringing down the cost of creating new IP may outweigh the lost incentive. Also, the anti-rivalrous nature of IP may even encourage people to make more, simply because it's so useful have more people using it - Linus got his own private kernel debugged and extended at a lower cost by sharing it.

If a good cannot be easily made excludable, then it's all very sad (assuming that the lost incentive to create more of it outweights the loss from more people having access to the existing stuff, and the stuff that's made voluntarily) but there's not much you can do without heavy regulation.

Music will still be made. Musicians will make money on gigs. Advertisers will pay musicians for annoying jingles. It's not the 1700s, there's literally millions of talented musicians who will eke out a living actually connecting with the community (concerts, teaching, playing in pubs) who should be able to produce far more (in aggregate) than Mozart, Beethoven and the like. Without copyright, many of those musicians may make a better living, as they can draw on other people's material more easily.

The fat distribution pipe (distributors, promoters, producers, broadcasters) will mostly die, but no-one really cares - they don't create much value. OK, the definition of value is rubbery, but if you make money by convincing people that they need something (i.e. tell them that folk music is daggy, and you have to buy the latest pop hit to be cool) then you're really destroying value, then offering a band-aid.

trotsky• 14 years ago

I'd offer the idea that a significant amount of what YC offers is a brand, the essays are marketing, and anti-entertainment industry sentiment is very high in their target market of young technologists.

jonnathanson• 14 years ago

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.

Luyt• 14 years ago

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."

DennisP• 14 years ago

"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.

npsimons• 14 years ago

TL;DR: "Paul Graham has written some very insightful and entertaining essays, but I disagree with one of his more recent ones, so he has obviously 'lost the plot'. PS, I make my money from imaginary property, which is what the Paul Graham essay I don't like argues against."

batista7• 14 years ago

Graham draws a comparison between the ridiculous situation of a shop owner wanting to charge passers-by for smelling the delicious cooking smells coming from restaurant, and record companies going after people who’ve illegally downloaded music or movies. The supposed point of comparison is that ‘information is like air’ and can be freely transmitted, so it can’t be treated as the property of one party.

If PG is making that point, it's stupid. How about someone stealing his ViaWeb source back in the day before the Yahoo acquisition? (Actually, it wouldn't even be stealing, because he would still have the source himself).

Would he still be using that "information wants to be free" meme?

jes51996• 14 years ago

even up to the acquisition, ViaWeb's source code wasn't that valuable. What was really valuable is the knowledge of the code that its developers have, and the relationships with the customers, the minds of the leaders who made the company successful, and the brand.

Plenty of companies get their source code leaked, and yet they keep on selling the software. The code itself is treated like a curiosity - some people play with it, but not many, and I've never heard of anyone building and selling a closed-source project once they obtained the source for it.

batista7• 14 years ago

So, if a guy more connected than PG in the Valley at the time stole the code, and had some top notch Lisp guys study it and expand it, and had $$$ to spend for marketing, it would still be OK to take ViaWeb's code?

It's not that any or all of those things are an impossible secret sauce. For example, they guy could be an ex-employer, familiar with the source code AND with relations to existing customers.

I've never heard of anyone building and selling a closed-source project once they obtained the source for it

That's mostly because they would be sued to oblivion in a case like we describe. But in other cases, where they legally obtained the code to a project used by some business (e.g if it was open sourced) people HAVE built competing businesses. From MariaDB to Slashdot clones to OpenStack, to competing Unices, etc.

sophacles7• 14 years ago

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.

toddnessa• 14 years ago

To me the article speaks to the frustration of past funding models giving way to new ways of monetizing creative works. The gateways that have been necessary for works to be promoted are changing from an executives sitting in an office somewhere to everyday people who like your work and have the ability to spread word of it throughout their social networks. As the technology is further developed to further empower these everyday people with even greater ability to spread creative content, such as Spotify is doing, this will accelerate even more. It's my feeling that a new way of monetizing creative works is underway. This will be a paradigm change that will allow works to be seen or heard that would have otherwise never been allowed to see the light of day. We all win when we have the greatest number of individuals having more of a say in things rather than just a select few. Authors, musicians & other creators in the future will be more in the driver seat than in the past and will be given new & different options for monetizing their products.

tissarah2• 14 years ago

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?

dusklight• 14 years ago

What if musicians freely allowed the distribution of their music, but charged for concerts? That would be a clear parallel to the "smells" analogy. Many musicians would be able to survive, and it will encourage them to put on more spectacular shows to draw in the crowds.

tzm• 14 years ago

The mechanism for vending the rights and distribution to sound waves has changed. If all you need is a sound recorder to capture the IP of a work of art, then the governing environment must change.

Smells are similar, but are not yet distributed as a temporal frequency.

Software is much easier to control, since after all, logic is embedded in the work of art, an OS can govern the rights and/or TCP requests can act as a conduit for authentication.

takinola• 14 years ago

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

nhebb• 14 years ago

> It sounds ridiculous to us to treat smells as property. But I can imagine scenarios in which one could charge for smells.

It's called perfume.

Tycho• 14 years ago

Is copyright the only way for content-creators to make money? No. Is it an honourable, respectful way and probably the best option we have? Yes.

(also the smells equivalent in music would be more like trying to charge people who happen to overhear music while going about some other activity)

doki_pen2• 14 years ago

I think pg is spot on. Record companies make money on distribution. They are no longer needed. Artist always have made more money on live concerts, with a few notable exceptions. The thing record companies are trying to hold on to is controlling distribution, because if artists realize they don't need a record company, record companies will cease to exist.

functionform• 14 years ago

There are ethical and economical reasons for low to zero-cost mp3s.

1. The artist actually gets even more of a shit deal with digital distribution than they did with physical media. You are supporting the machine, not the musician.

2. The cost of developing a quality recording has plummeted dramatically, the only substantive cost remaining is the advertising. The exception might be for faux artists like Rihanna that hire top notch songwriters to pen hits, but for lesser known musicians, mp3 distribution has been shown in studies to have a positive impact.

3. mp3s can function as the advertising medium itself. The money can be made elsewhere like endorsements, or touring. Live music can never be "stolen".

bootload• 14 years ago

"... Rob has seven years of PR experience ..."

Steps to increase exposure: I read PG essays, PG has a of exposure. I don't agree & write counter arguments. Post article & submit.

acroyear• 14 years ago

re : "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. Some people would keep on producing for the public good, just for the joy of it – in the same way that people contribute to open source software. But plenty of people wouldn’t be able to do it anymore."

so what if there's less of it?? .. necessity is the primal driver - if society as a whole really needs your shitty music (or whatever widget you want), it will get made by some avenue of support. PERIOD. we don't _need_ most of this bullshit anyhow .. so boo f'ing hoo.

if you distribute something outside of your garden, it has gone wild and you have no right to restrict how anyone can then play with it. .. imho

oz• 14 years ago

I have always found it difficult to understand how people manage to convince themselves that the creator of a work does not have the right to charge for it. For

To those who make impassioned pleas that technology has made copyright obsolete, what if there were a technology that allowed the wholesale copying of your profitable Saas/PaaS from AWS? Sure, the code you wrote is still on the server, but is that something you would condone? All the months of hard work and crunch mode, being made to benefit another without your consent? Does that feel right?

Didn't think so.

jongraehl• 14 years ago

Horrible writing.

Orlowski• 14 years ago

>>Spotted the massive, gaping flaw in the argument yet?

Yes, in your analogy

it's

air:internet smell:music

NOT

air:music smell:???

also, from above...

Water is free, but bottled water has essentially added 'smell', or, the convenience of having it in a bottle and across the street, refrigerated.

Paul Graham has lost the plot

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