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Jaron Lanier has written about the hallowing out of the middle class due to intellectual and creative property being accepted as "free on the internet". As it s

by wturner 10y ago

Jaron Lanier has written about the hallowing out of the middle class due to intellectual and creative property being accepted as "free on the internet". As it stands the Googles of the world have private servers, patents and proprietary technology, ( and the money to protect themselves) but Google can scrape the creative resources of billions of individuals without paying them. In that regard a return to creative/intellectual property rights specifically for individuals might be a forward thinking move assuming it leads to payouts. I know the details are more complicated ( and I might be wrong) but I thought I would chime in.

toyg 10y ago
The middle class has never been involved in creative IP in huge numbers. What they were involved in is a lot of officework which has been automated away, and union-protected jobs that have now disappeared. Stuff like designing presentations now done in Powerpoint, typing up reports now autogenerated, doing typographical work now completely removed, manning and stocking a shop you can now bypass with Amazon, distributing products to such shops which are now gone, raising ads for now-dead newspapers, managing factory processes that are now in China, working for local authorities now so cash-strapped they're literally bankrupt... The IP industry actually boomed in the late '90s, as the Internet was booming. We now produce more IP content than ever before, selling to the entire planet. I don't see any relationship whatsoever between IP and middle-class crisis, tbh. Disintermediation simply kills people in the middle. Some of those middlemen might have been IP-related, but they were few.
- edraferi 10y ago
  You should read his book, "Who Owns the Future?" He was mainly talking about how hard it is for individuals to capture value they create online. For example, it's very difficult to make money off of a viral video, popular Pinterest page, or a niche blog. Basically, only the biggest silos have reasonable monetization options, and the individual users who are creating value get screwed. I agree there's a technology gap there, as would anyone watching the adblocker war. My biggest criticism is economic: there are so many people online that massive supply dwarfs demand, pushing prices to zero (Exhibit A: journalism). Conveniently, zero is the only price you can really charge online, and you get a feedback loop. Patreon is my favorite answer to this problem so far.
  - Natanael_L 10y ago
    That problem is entirely disconnected from the concept of IP. Draconian enforcement would kill Internet virality, not enable anybody to make money from it. The real problem is to incentivize payment. As Valve says, piracy is a service problem. First your service must be wanted, then it must be valuable enough to pay for, and payment has to be easy too.
quadrangle 10y ago
Jaron Lanier also talks about a mythical 20th century that was good for middle-class artists and musicians, completely in contrast to evidence from reality. He's 100% right that hollowing out of the middle class is a serious problem for a free society. His prescriptions about IP are mostly nonsense.
- maus42 10y ago
  I suspect some perception bias. There weren't that many artists and musicians around to have significant effect on the middle class whole (and artists and such weren't especially middle class).
Natanael_L 10y ago
The Internet (including their imagined markets!) would be entirely dead without the likes of Google search. Those who see these technologies as infringing and as leeches have no understanding of where value comes from.

by wturner 10y ago

toyg 10y ago

The middle class has never been involved in creative IP in huge numbers. What they were involved in is a lot of officework which has been automated away, and union-protected jobs that have now disappeared. Stuff like designing presentations now done in Powerpoint, typing up reports now autogenerated, doing typographical work now completely removed, manning and stocking a shop you can now bypass with Amazon, distributing products to such shops which are now gone, raising ads for now-dead newspapers, managing factory processes that are now in China, working for local authorities now so cash-strapped they're literally bankrupt... The IP industry actually boomed in the late '90s, as the Internet was booming. We now produce more IP content than ever before, selling to the entire planet. I don't see any relationship whatsoever between IP and middle-class crisis, tbh. Disintermediation simply kills people in the middle. Some of those middlemen might have been IP-related, but they were few.

edraferi 10y ago
You should read his book, "Who Owns the Future?" He was mainly talking about how hard it is for individuals to capture value they create online. For example, it's very difficult to make money off of a viral video, popular Pinterest page, or a niche blog. Basically, only the biggest silos have reasonable monetization options, and the individual users who are creating value get screwed. I agree there's a technology gap there, as would anyone watching the adblocker war. My biggest criticism is economic: there are so many people online that massive supply dwarfs demand, pushing prices to zero (Exhibit A: journalism). Conveniently, zero is the only price you can really charge online, and you get a feedback loop. Patreon is my favorite answer to this problem so far.
- Natanael_L 10y ago
  That problem is entirely disconnected from the concept of IP. Draconian enforcement would kill Internet virality, not enable anybody to make money from it. The real problem is to incentivize payment. As Valve says, piracy is a service problem. First your service must be wanted, then it must be valuable enough to pay for, and payment has to be easy too.

quadrangle 10y ago

Jaron Lanier also talks about a mythical 20th century that was good for middle-class artists and musicians, completely in contrast to evidence from reality. He's 100% right that hollowing out of the middle class is a serious problem for a free society. His prescriptions about IP are mostly nonsense.

maus42 10y ago
I suspect some perception bias. There weren't that many artists and musicians around to have significant effect on the middle class whole (and artists and such weren't especially middle class).

Natanael_L 10y ago

The Internet (including their imagined markets!) would be entirely dead without the likes of Google search. Those who see these technologies as infringing and as leeches have no understanding of where value comes from.