(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.