(no subject)
Sep. 5th, 2004 04:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
raxSo I was reading a post of a friend's:
Here.
I ended up commenting on it, because I have some fairly strong opinions on the matter. They're the kind of things I would probably not send to first-coming* because they seem too wankly, so I will include them here, behind what I am told is called a "cut tag." You can also just go read the whole thread, if you care.
I think that the current state of copyright law is unfortunate. I agree that it is stifling to content producers, and also to the consumer. However, I believe that simply making everything free would be equally stifling to both content producers and consumers. Open source software works for a number of reasons:
1. It serves a niche market. Yes, Linux is getting bigger in the corporate world. Yes, Solaris is going to go open source (ish). Yes, ninety percent of the world still uses mostly proprietary software. The people using open source software are mostly tech experts who are able to deal with the trials and tribulations of the open source process. While certain open source projects have been bundled into software that "normal people" use, it looks like we are a long way from getting rid of commercial software, even in the business world.
2. Open source programmers are serving a business purpose, and thus are able to make a living. Furthermore, many open source programmers make their money through the MySQL model: producing an open-source product, and then selling closed-source extensions and support contracts for that open-source product. Note that bit about selling closed-source extensions; this is very important. This is, in fact, how my company makes money, and how I have a job. Clients from large corporations to individuals want something that is specific to them, that their competitors cannot just download from sourceforge and install. While this type of development-for-pay may be different from boxing Windows and selling it in K-Mart, it is also very different from open source software, and copyright law of some form becomes important to protecting it.
3. Code is something that programmers are allowed and encouraged to borrow. Many different programmers find themselves needing to do the exact same thing, and being able to use someone else's 500 lines of perl is a tremendous savings in time --- and being the person who wrote those 500 lines of perl is a tremendous ego boost. This replication of uninteresting work is not unique to programming, but is certainly not true of all or most of the things covered by copyright law.
4. Open-source developers and their clients are Internet dorks who have grown up on slogans like "Information wants to be free!" They Believe In The Cause. While business are starting to pick up on the bandwagon, that took time, and the belief in The Real World among people thirty and up is still largely that money can be exchanged for goods and services, and things like computer software and knitting patterns qualify as goods and services.
There are three things that I intend to do for money. First, I am an open source developer with a small startup company, serving clients from small companies to the Fortune 500 with open source and custom-developed scalable solutions for their system administration needs. (Can you tell that I do the business writing?) This has a relatively natural way of making money attached to it: My boss sells software, hardware, installation and support to people, and uses some of that money to pay me a salary.
The second thing is that I intend to become a tournament chessplayer. This goal is largely not germane to this discussion. :) The structure for doing this is much like being a professional athlete --- you work your way up through lower leagues and tournament brackets --- except that no one wants to sleep with you or pay you to wear tennis shoes. It actually costs money at first.
The third thing that I do is write fiction. Now, I don't have any expectations of making a living wage off of this anytime soon, but it would be nice to do at some point. It is the writer in me who is most distressed by what you say here. I like the thought that, like most other members of society, I should receive a wage for my work, and that my work is not the equivalent of slinging my own feces. (My poetry may not be very good, but still.) Now, I don't like the thought that some large company is going to make most of the money from selling my books, but I like that thought more than I like spending all of my time in a printing press making each page by hand, and then binding them all with thread and glue, toiling away eighteen hours a day in my basement. I have heard a lot of suggestions for making money while giving away content, and here is what I think of them:
1. opendocs.org model: Free book text online, purchase the hard copy. This sounds like a _great_ idea, but I don't think that it would work for most types of writing. I'm unclear it has even worked for them, if you look at their news and how few of the books they intended to put out they actually put out successfully. Note that they are selling their books for $20-$50; this is much more profit per book than your average hardcover or softcover fiction. High price, low quantity works in some cases, but it often leads to prices that are kind of stupid --- think $100 for the 18.100B book when my hardcover copy of _Ulysses,_ which probably cost much more to produce, was only $15. (And it's not like any given edition of Ulysses is going to sell millions, either.) Selling fiction in this way requires a larger readership, which is hard to build up without the advertising and bookstore placement a publishing company provides, and also requires that a larger percentage of the readership be willing to pay for a hard copy. I am skeptical that this is a valid profit-making genre for writers in most genres.
2. Donations: the webcomics model. There are a few lucky people out there who got into the game early, built up a devoted following, and have the people in that devoted following giving them enough money to live off of in exchange for producing art. Don't get me wrong, this is _wicked cool_. But I do not think it is a valid model for most people to follow. First, it has a large amount of startup time and cost. You can't sign a contract with the Internet and get a front payment in exchange for future produced work. Second, this works better in some genres than others. The comics I have seen that pay for themselves tend to cater to Internet geeks, usually gamers of some sort who tend to be in their 20s or 30s with disposable income sitting around and the desire to do something they consider good with it without actually wanting to waste it. And, I mean, that's great, but it won't work for everyone, and there is only room for a small number of people to succeed in this space. (There certainly isn't much room in syndicated comics, either, but that is another rant entirely.) Third, there is no guarantee that donations will just keep coming.It is also worth noting that people are essentially paying for information, here, just not in any equitable way spread out across the people who want the information. You might think this is OK, and I'm not sure I disagree, but it does feel vaguely skanky.
3. Live performance: what I will call the Dresden Dolls model. This is not to say that people do not and should not buy Dresden Dolls CDs, but that their profit margin on these CDs is very limited and they seem not all that pissy about their music going around for free. They make most of their money off of concerts, which is really awesome. I think there is some merit to this model, but that it (a) doesn't work for all things --- when was the last time you paid to go to a poetry reading? and (b) runs into the "pirated movies"
problem; that is, you can't really pirate a live show, but any performance art that is basically the same each time can just be distributed for free. Unless you think that part of the joy of going to the movies is watching the other people there, or you are incapable of purchasing popcorn, a movie download off the Internet is probably as good as a theater, and certainly as good as a DVD.
4. Advertising: the TV/magazine model. Sure, cable companies charge you for service, but that's largely to get extra money and make you feel like you are paying for something. In television --- especially network television --- money goes from the advertisers to the content providers, who then bundle this advertising. This is also true of magazines, many of which are completely free these days and many more of which are sold at below printing costs to regular subscribers. (Can _you_ print 200 color pages for a dollar? If so, tell me where.) This model is the most proven, and also the one that makes me feel the most dirty. It's an interesting idea, I must admit: can I really give away my content for free and get paid to bundle in advertising? The problem with this is that advertisers then gain indirect control over artistic content, and the best thing I can think of to describe this is "That shit be mad wack, yo." I don't want to write only what will allow me to keep the most advertisers, and to depend on them for my livelihood.
I guess my point is that while it's all nice and good to talk about making things free, until you have a coherent plan for causing content providers to be able to make a living, you're just talking, and making us content providers nervous. :)
(Yes, I do post most of my writing on the web; my website is down now or I would prove this. I do refrain from posting things I hope to sell, though, because doing so actually decreases its value to a publisher. Making people exchange money for the time you spent producing something they want to see seems reasonable enough to me.)
If you do have other ideas about how to make money as a content provider without charging for content, I would love to hear them :)
-r.
*first-coming is my email list where I send periodic updates that are also, theoretically, funny. If you are not on it and are bothering to read this, you probably should be; first-coming mail is my primary means of sharing my thoughts with my friends.
Here.
I ended up commenting on it, because I have some fairly strong opinions on the matter. They're the kind of things I would probably not send to first-coming* because they seem too wankly, so I will include them here, behind what I am told is called a "cut tag." You can also just go read the whole thread, if you care.
I think that the current state of copyright law is unfortunate. I agree that it is stifling to content producers, and also to the consumer. However, I believe that simply making everything free would be equally stifling to both content producers and consumers. Open source software works for a number of reasons:
1. It serves a niche market. Yes, Linux is getting bigger in the corporate world. Yes, Solaris is going to go open source (ish). Yes, ninety percent of the world still uses mostly proprietary software. The people using open source software are mostly tech experts who are able to deal with the trials and tribulations of the open source process. While certain open source projects have been bundled into software that "normal people" use, it looks like we are a long way from getting rid of commercial software, even in the business world.
2. Open source programmers are serving a business purpose, and thus are able to make a living. Furthermore, many open source programmers make their money through the MySQL model: producing an open-source product, and then selling closed-source extensions and support contracts for that open-source product. Note that bit about selling closed-source extensions; this is very important. This is, in fact, how my company makes money, and how I have a job. Clients from large corporations to individuals want something that is specific to them, that their competitors cannot just download from sourceforge and install. While this type of development-for-pay may be different from boxing Windows and selling it in K-Mart, it is also very different from open source software, and copyright law of some form becomes important to protecting it.
3. Code is something that programmers are allowed and encouraged to borrow. Many different programmers find themselves needing to do the exact same thing, and being able to use someone else's 500 lines of perl is a tremendous savings in time --- and being the person who wrote those 500 lines of perl is a tremendous ego boost. This replication of uninteresting work is not unique to programming, but is certainly not true of all or most of the things covered by copyright law.
4. Open-source developers and their clients are Internet dorks who have grown up on slogans like "Information wants to be free!" They Believe In The Cause. While business are starting to pick up on the bandwagon, that took time, and the belief in The Real World among people thirty and up is still largely that money can be exchanged for goods and services, and things like computer software and knitting patterns qualify as goods and services.
There are three things that I intend to do for money. First, I am an open source developer with a small startup company, serving clients from small companies to the Fortune 500 with open source and custom-developed scalable solutions for their system administration needs. (Can you tell that I do the business writing?) This has a relatively natural way of making money attached to it: My boss sells software, hardware, installation and support to people, and uses some of that money to pay me a salary.
The second thing is that I intend to become a tournament chessplayer. This goal is largely not germane to this discussion. :) The structure for doing this is much like being a professional athlete --- you work your way up through lower leagues and tournament brackets --- except that no one wants to sleep with you or pay you to wear tennis shoes. It actually costs money at first.
The third thing that I do is write fiction. Now, I don't have any expectations of making a living wage off of this anytime soon, but it would be nice to do at some point. It is the writer in me who is most distressed by what you say here. I like the thought that, like most other members of society, I should receive a wage for my work, and that my work is not the equivalent of slinging my own feces. (My poetry may not be very good, but still.) Now, I don't like the thought that some large company is going to make most of the money from selling my books, but I like that thought more than I like spending all of my time in a printing press making each page by hand, and then binding them all with thread and glue, toiling away eighteen hours a day in my basement. I have heard a lot of suggestions for making money while giving away content, and here is what I think of them:
1. opendocs.org model: Free book text online, purchase the hard copy. This sounds like a _great_ idea, but I don't think that it would work for most types of writing. I'm unclear it has even worked for them, if you look at their news and how few of the books they intended to put out they actually put out successfully. Note that they are selling their books for $20-$50; this is much more profit per book than your average hardcover or softcover fiction. High price, low quantity works in some cases, but it often leads to prices that are kind of stupid --- think $100 for the 18.100B book when my hardcover copy of _Ulysses,_ which probably cost much more to produce, was only $15. (And it's not like any given edition of Ulysses is going to sell millions, either.) Selling fiction in this way requires a larger readership, which is hard to build up without the advertising and bookstore placement a publishing company provides, and also requires that a larger percentage of the readership be willing to pay for a hard copy. I am skeptical that this is a valid profit-making genre for writers in most genres.
2. Donations: the webcomics model. There are a few lucky people out there who got into the game early, built up a devoted following, and have the people in that devoted following giving them enough money to live off of in exchange for producing art. Don't get me wrong, this is _wicked cool_. But I do not think it is a valid model for most people to follow. First, it has a large amount of startup time and cost. You can't sign a contract with the Internet and get a front payment in exchange for future produced work. Second, this works better in some genres than others. The comics I have seen that pay for themselves tend to cater to Internet geeks, usually gamers of some sort who tend to be in their 20s or 30s with disposable income sitting around and the desire to do something they consider good with it without actually wanting to waste it. And, I mean, that's great, but it won't work for everyone, and there is only room for a small number of people to succeed in this space. (There certainly isn't much room in syndicated comics, either, but that is another rant entirely.) Third, there is no guarantee that donations will just keep coming.It is also worth noting that people are essentially paying for information, here, just not in any equitable way spread out across the people who want the information. You might think this is OK, and I'm not sure I disagree, but it does feel vaguely skanky.
3. Live performance: what I will call the Dresden Dolls model. This is not to say that people do not and should not buy Dresden Dolls CDs, but that their profit margin on these CDs is very limited and they seem not all that pissy about their music going around for free. They make most of their money off of concerts, which is really awesome. I think there is some merit to this model, but that it (a) doesn't work for all things --- when was the last time you paid to go to a poetry reading? and (b) runs into the "pirated movies"
problem; that is, you can't really pirate a live show, but any performance art that is basically the same each time can just be distributed for free. Unless you think that part of the joy of going to the movies is watching the other people there, or you are incapable of purchasing popcorn, a movie download off the Internet is probably as good as a theater, and certainly as good as a DVD.
4. Advertising: the TV/magazine model. Sure, cable companies charge you for service, but that's largely to get extra money and make you feel like you are paying for something. In television --- especially network television --- money goes from the advertisers to the content providers, who then bundle this advertising. This is also true of magazines, many of which are completely free these days and many more of which are sold at below printing costs to regular subscribers. (Can _you_ print 200 color pages for a dollar? If so, tell me where.) This model is the most proven, and also the one that makes me feel the most dirty. It's an interesting idea, I must admit: can I really give away my content for free and get paid to bundle in advertising? The problem with this is that advertisers then gain indirect control over artistic content, and the best thing I can think of to describe this is "That shit be mad wack, yo." I don't want to write only what will allow me to keep the most advertisers, and to depend on them for my livelihood.
I guess my point is that while it's all nice and good to talk about making things free, until you have a coherent plan for causing content providers to be able to make a living, you're just talking, and making us content providers nervous. :)
(Yes, I do post most of my writing on the web; my website is down now or I would prove this. I do refrain from posting things I hope to sell, though, because doing so actually decreases its value to a publisher. Making people exchange money for the time you spent producing something they want to see seems reasonable enough to me.)
If you do have other ideas about how to make money as a content provider without charging for content, I would love to hear them :)
-r.
*first-coming is my email list where I send periodic updates that are also, theoretically, funny. If you are not on it and are bothering to read this, you probably should be; first-coming mail is my primary means of sharing my thoughts with my friends.
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Highly Simplistic Rant on Copyright
Date: 2004-09-05 07:59 pm (UTC)I think that the new models for making money by giving away information aren't fully developed yet, which is why it is difficult to make money that way, but I am unconvinced that you are more likely to make money by hoping to sell out to a big publisher (and, odds are, failing). One method of payment which you didn't mention, probably because it hasn't really been worked out yet, is micropayments. I think that if smart people like Rivest can figure out a good way to charge people 5 cents to look at a site and make the payment method popular, it will suddenly become a lot easier to make money on free (if payment is optional) or almost-free content. This is essentially the webcomics model, but it means that more people are likely to pay a more even amount.
In response to your comment elsewhere about bandwidth, I'm guessing that with things like RSS and bitorrent coming together, high bandwidth costs will not be so much of an issue. At any rate, in the current environment, if you have high bandwidth costs, you can probably find a good way to make money.
At any rate, imagine the "worst case scenario" of free information, where it is no longer possible to make a living as an artist, for some value of artist. Since there are plenty of people creating art for its own sake and not for profit right now, it's ridiculous to think that art would die out. In all likelihood, the same people who are artists now would still be artists (since who becomes an artist for the money?), only they would not need to worry about gatekeepers, though they would need to worry about getting a job on the side. In exchange for this, all possible artistic content would be at everyone's fingertips. This scenario is pretty farfetched, since there will probably be some way for artists to make money. But as a worst case, it really doesn't sound so terrible to me. Are you really unwilling to trade your 5% (or whatever) shot at making real money from writing for the possibility of totally free information?
This sounds cheesy and oversimplistic, but art is what makes civilization. I think it's pathetic that copyright has gone from being an encouragement for artists to produce their work, to benefit civilization, to being a tool for corporations that can afford to buy legislation. It's more gut feeling than logic, but given the track record of content publishing industries (mostly music and movies here, I suppose, in the case of tape recording/VCRs/CD-Rs/DVD-Rs/etc.) sobbing that they will be destroyed as their art becomes easier to distribute, when it really just increases their profits at the expense of their control, I'm fairly confident that the freeing of information will not make it any harder to make a living as an artist. Not that that's saying much.
Re: Highly Simplistic Rant on Copyright
Date: 2004-09-05 08:20 pm (UTC)Re: Highly Simplistic Rant on Copyright
Date: 2004-09-05 09:46 pm (UTC)I agree that art makes civilization. I wonder why you want to pay the people who make the technological infrastructure for civilization but not the people who make the civilization. Or do you also think that the people designing the protocols and micropayment systems should not be making any money? I mean, if you think that money is an outdated concept and we should all live in a commune, I am totally with you, but it's nice to want things :) But barring that, I think artists, who are actually producing something that, to be incredibly trite, feeds the soul, should be making _more_ money than anyone else, except maybe the people who feed my body.
That, of course, leads you to wanting to pay the people who make it possible for those people to feed you, and then the people who design the tools they use, and then the people who manufacture those tools, and then... ... ... to an economy.
I could care less about totally free information. If food is not free, then I want to get paid to do what I am doing. All of the free information in the world will do me jackshit of good if I am eating my own hand to survive. If I am getting paid to make my information, I will be able to afford other people's information. It will be great.
I mean, sure, large companies suck. But if you get rid of them, what are all of those people going to _do_? And how will information be transferred from person to person? Will we eventually pay the companies that give us Internet access just like we pay the companies that now sell us CDs? At least the companies selling us CDs give some of the money to the artist.
Re: Highly Simplistic Rant on Copyright
Date: 2004-09-05 10:14 pm (UTC)More broadly, I want society to value the sames things I do, at the same relative importance that I do, and I wantwhat I consider "common sense" to be generally accepted. As you said, "It's nice to want things."
Re: Highly Simplistic Rant on Copyright
Date: 2004-09-05 11:41 pm (UTC)As a side note, _good_ bookstores, like Barnes And Noble, will not bat an eyelash if you spend nearly every day in the store, reading books from cover to cover, if you buy one that you like now and then, and occasionally get a coffee. I know this because this is what my girlfriend did during a long period when she had no TV, phone or internet.
Also, good music stores will let you listen to any (or in some cases, nearly any) CD in the store before you buy it.
Re: Highly Simplistic Rant on Copyright
Date: 2004-09-05 10:20 pm (UTC)Part of my argument above is that people will still produce content even without pay, because it gives them pleasure to do so. They would still be paid in spiritual harmony or sexual favors or popularity or whatever. But this is the "worst case scenario" that anti-"free"dom people sometimes pretend will happen for the sake of argument. I think there's little reason to think that it would happen, and I certainly don't want it to happen. I'd love to see artists getting paid like normal human beings. Since freedom of information allows artists to make money without the publishing industries being paid as middlemen, maybe they'd make more money. I just think whether they get paid or not isn't the most important thing, even if it is an important thing.
I'm willing to believe that reducing the copyright period to 20 years or so along with a couple laws to try to hurt the power of the publishing industry (making it impossible to sell your copyright, making sure the artist and not the recorder gets the copyright, etc.) would probably help a great deal. Less radical strategies would make me perfectly happy.
As for your last point.. I'm a little confused. Are you saying that somehow we're going to be paying extra to our ISP for music? Huh?
Re: Highly Simplistic Rant on Copyright
Date: 2004-09-05 10:41 pm (UTC)(You can take the Geoff Goodell approach to this argument and say "Well, all information can be turned into huge binary numbers, whereas my apartment cannot," and I guess that is true, but to me it seems true in the same way that various things in math are true. That is, Theorem Blah may be true, but it doesn't have any rational bearing on how I should choose to live my life. If I found a way to encode every apartment as a different huge binary number, I would still think I would need to pay for one.)
So, if you cut out the middlemen, who is going to publish the art? Who is going to distribute it, market it, and filter it for quality? How are people going to be connected with the prose, music, and movies that they want to see? Someone has to do that. And even if you say "The Internet will do it!," someone has to write that code, write that advertising copy, etc. It's just a different method of publishing being done by different people. That is what I was trying to say in my last point; you can't cut out the middleman, you can just put a different middleman in place. Maybe the Internet is a better middleman, but I'm not certain.
Also: "I just think whether they get paid or not isn't the most important thing, even if it is _an_ important thing." I think that is a lot easier to say when you aren't working to make money to eat, and having this seriously get in the way of your art.
I'm all for systems which will make it _easier_ to get paid. I am all for less radical strategies. :) Your first post, which maybe I misread, made me think you would not accept such a strategy, and I think that while the more radical strategy might sound good in theory, it would make it more difficult to be an artist.
Re: Highly Simplistic Rant on Copyright
Date: 2007-09-18 03:28 am (UTC)[1] well, to a degree. From the point of view of your average American - which I appreciate neither of you are - I am purely by being an old-school socialist.
This is mostly a brane placeholder to come back and write about this when I'm less totally drunk.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-09-05 10:39 pm (UTC)People who self-publish books generally outsource the manufacturing process. So your argument seems like it's at least exagerating a bit there.
I think you ought to consider the model of publishing some good short stories for free on the web, and then telling people ``if you liked these stories, you might also like my book, and here's how to order it''.
I think it's also important to recognize that there are usually multiple ways of getting access to the same copyrighted material. You can buy a copy of a book, which has one price. But you can also generally get books from the library (depending on the selection, but interlibrary loan tends to be able to get almost anything), if you only need to look at the material for a couple weeks.
And movies are available in theaters for a little while at a high price, and then they become cheaper as rental DVDs (and you can also buy the DVD for typically less than two theater admissions). LSC only sees the studios at all concerned about people recording the movies for sneak previews, apparently the assumption being that by the time movies have been out long enough for LSC to get them not-as-a-sneak, they've probably found their way to the internet long ago. People do still pay admission, though. Out of guilt? I don't know.
But I think the key is to have literature that people really want, and make sure that there's a good reason why people will want to buy the dead trees. If it's easier to read it for free on the web, you don't get much money, I suspect. And this is a lot more about how you handle marketing than about what the copyright law says.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-09-05 11:47 pm (UTC)