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It's not exactly post-scarcity, it's just zero marginal cost. It's true that, given the product has already been created and has zero marginal cost, it "should"
by savanaly 11y ago
It's not exactly post-scarcity, it's just zero marginal cost. It's true that, given the product has already been created and has zero marginal cost, it "should" be free. But for setting the expectations that producers of future products have about what compensation they'll receive we can't simply say it should be free.
- zanny 11y agoThe marginal units absolutely can be free, just pay for the research itself. Fixed cost for fixed work.
- ycmbntrthrwaway 11y agoThat is how private research is funded, say at Microsoft Research. You agree on "deliverables" and get your money for each stage of your work. Deliverables include tech reports, source code, prototypes and things like that. You get nothing after your stop working on the project. For producers, i.e. researchers, this scheme is not worse than grants and getting money for published articles, citations etc., they don't get money for years after the publication anyway.
- stegosaurus 11y agoPosting in a seperate comment here as I was mainly aiming to provoke debate with the original one. This generally chimes with my feeling. It seems to me that the users of research can derive vastly different value from it and so the flat price model doesn't really work. Consider some new research on light emitting diodes and the value Samsung might get from that vs. me reading it out of curiosity. For that reason, to me it makes sense to treat academic research as infrastructure and have free access to all funded via taxation.