16 ms·

Better than Free (2008)

194 points by _pius 9y ago

01572 9y ago
"The internet is a copy machine." This truth is often hidden by some given abstraction. (file, save, download, streaming, etc.) Businesses have been built on such abstractions. Success stories. On the flipside, existing businesses that were built before the internet who do not know the truth have been fed these abstractions. These businesses may stand nothing to gain from participating in the copy machine. Whomever is feeding these businesses with abstractions that hide the truth are not helping these businesses. They are helping themselves and watching these businesses being destroyed by a copy machine.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
danboarder 9y ago
Published January 31, 2008
- noobermin 9y ago
  And how prescient!
- dang 9y ago
  Thanks. We added 2008 above.
- ralfd 9y ago
  I am a bit confused by the website (blog?), as the sidebar links to unrelated strange stuff (graphic novel, pictures of asia). But the site should make sense as a two letter .org url is quite prestigious.
  - jwilk 9y ago
    It's someone's personal website.
  - hoekit 9y ago
    kk.org is by Kevin Kelly of WIRED magazine.
m-j-fox 9y ago
> Even a dog knows you can’t erase something once it’s flowed on the internet. False. Dogs do not know anything about digital technology. Dogs barely understand dog leashes.
- tokai 9y ago
  It is probably a reference to the "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog" cartoon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_you%27re_a_dog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_...
  - jancsika 9y ago
    That may be true, but the further the reference gets from the original context, the more likely it becomes an appeal to authority that ends up misleading people instead of enlightening them. Here are some important examples of quite powerful entities that do not accept the logic that you can't erase something once it's flowed on the internet: the RIAA, MPAA, DEA, various (most?) middle eastern countries, Great Britain (through the influence of the GCHQ), Mastodon servers located in Germany (see their ToS regarding holocaust denial), whitehouse.gov and various other sites that erase public statements after their criticism goes viral, various entities trying to shut down sci-hub (who will probably eventually succeed), and Barbara Streisand. Taken together, these entities can make it practically impossible for non-technical people to access data that has a $0 marginal cost. So it's misleading to flippantly refer to the New Yorker cartoon's implication of general equalizing power of the internet as part of a fundamental critique of business models built around publishing data that has $0 marginal cost. In that context, the comment by m-j-fox-- while maybe low effort-- serves an important function of undercutting the low effort premise upon which the article under discussion depends. Thus I give this higher effort defense of said comment. edit: clarification
majewsky 9y ago
tl;dr: Reasons why people will still pay for digital content even though it can be reproduced at no cost: immediacy, personalization, interpretation, authenticity, accessibility, embodiment, patronage and findability. Advertising is notably absent from the list. Quoting: > Careful readers will note one conspicuous absence so far. I have said nothing about advertising. Ads are widely regarded as the solution, almost the ONLY solution, to the paradox of the free. Most of the suggested solutions I’ve seen for overcoming the free involve some measure of advertising. I think ads are only one of the paths that attention takes, and in the long-run, they will only be part of the new ways money is made selling the free. But that’s another story. Since this is (2008), does anyone know if that blog covered that "other story" at some point? I'm currently digging through a Google search for advertisement site:kk.org inurl:thetechnium ...but cannot see anything useful so far.
teach 9y ago
Thank you so much for posting this! I saw this when it was originally posted back in 2008 and think of it often but could never craft the google-fu needed to unearth it again! (Findability, anyone?)
amelius 9y ago
Immediacy -- who really needs it? I mean, for a movie, just wait a few months and you can download it. If you don't want to wait, you still have to wait for the next movie to come out, so it makes no difference really. To say it another way: no matter where you are in the pipeline, you still have to wait the same amount of time for new data to arrive.
- qrbLPHiKpiux 9y ago
  Better Call Saul fan here. No way am I waiting.
- ptr_void 9y ago
  'need' : no 'preference' : yes The whole entertainment industry can go away over the next month, it wouldn't matter much. But most would prefer it didn't. There's also more than enough movies/tv shows/sports recordings/music etc for anyone's lifetime, but most would prefer to see newer ones. Enough people can afford their preference to have new ones produced every day.
  - Mz 9y ago
    The Roman policy of "bread and circus" helped prevent rioting in the streets. I would much rather our resources go to entertainment than to more police and prisons. So, I am happy to put entertainment in the category of need.
    - coldtea 9y ago
      You seem to have gotten the lesson of bread and circuses backwards. It's not meant to be understood as a good thing. It was meant maintain a docile public that's easily manipulated, taken advantage of and ordered around, as long as it was given enough food to eat and BS arena shows to distract it. Rioting against scum like Nero (and modern equivalents) would have been the good and democratic option.
      - wruza 9y ago
mortiester 9y ago
Thus whoever can seize control of things that can be copied and stop the copying can sell them at any price as long as people need it...an internet monopoly.
dang 9y ago
Discussed (a bit) at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=108559 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=108559.
incompatible 9y ago
"Once anything that can be copied is brought into contact with internet, it will be copied, and those copies never leave." Not really true at all. So many times I've found a dead link, archive.org doesn't have a copy, it's gone. Entire domains loaded with content have disappeared. In general, people don't copy and save other people's material, except temporarily for viewing.
- Iv 9y ago
  Unexpectedly, we have managed to squash the initial carefree copying of the internet with just a few ridiculous court cases. Even the pirate bay founders are starting to feel tired of maintaining it.
  - incompatible 9y ago
    Ultimately we have to live somewhere in the physical world, and facing large fines or imprisonment is unattractive. The real surprise to me is that hard-line intellectual property protection has remained the political status-quo throughout the world. You'd think there'd be at least one or two countries willing to try alternatives, and give sites like Pirate Bay a place to operate in peace. Edit: Legalize Marijuana, vote the likes of Trump into power, leave the EU, threaten to nuke the US, fine, but some things, like intellectual property, are sacred.
    - petra 9y ago
      Those are simply much more important subjects for their votes than copyright.
      - adrianN 9y ago
        Legalizing Marijuana is more important than copyright? I disagree. Copyright is about how we handle our cultural heritage and how we compensate those who produce those artifacts. To me that is a way more important topic than the war on drugs.
superasn 9y ago
This guy gets it. This is one of the reasons that the best way to sell product online is to create a cheap front-end product that delivers insane amounts of value to the Customer and then make profits with the back-end sales over and over, i.e. Repeat customers (because now you have their trust and good will).
- amelius 9y ago
  But it only works in small niche markets, not mass markets.
b1daly 9y ago
A nice essay generalizing about what people might be willing to pay for, in a world where the marginal cost of production of products that people used to pay for has dropped to zero. One category that he missed is embedding digitized products like software into dedicated hardware. It's a form of DRM that is harder to crack (I think). Here's some examples from the audio world, that are variations of this idea. The main audio software platforms, known as Digital Audio Workstations (DAW) have all evolved to a point where they have to support open plugin formats. Plugins are implementations of digital signal processing software, that are used in combination within the DAW to produce the end result, which is a complete, finished sound file, Because audio production and engineering is hard (basically, things tend to not sound good) there is constant development, and fierce competition, in this niche market. Various forms of DRM, or licensing systems, are almost universally used. This provides enough friction, meaning you can get cracked versions of most plugins, but it comes at a cost of inconvenience, malware, or compromised stability, that a modest number of small companies have built business in the market. But the competition is fierce, and the trend in license prices has been steadily down. The cracks do hurt the sales. One company that has thrived in this market is Universal Audio. They put heavy development into making premium, we'll respected plugins, but they only run on their proprietary DSP systems. For a while, this could be seen as a genuine advantage, as users commonly ran up against the limitations of their CPUs. This is no longer the case, but the company has steadfastly stuck to their proprietary system. One technique they used was to embed their DSP in dedicated sound interfaces. The sound interface market is also hotly contested, and companies are constantly fighting against commoditization. So they developed high quality sound interfaces, which is something all audio producers have to have, and use their catalog of exclusive software plugins as a "value added differentiator." CEDAR is the pre-eminent developer of specialized software dedicated to challenging issues of noise reduction. For a long time, they limited the use of their algorithms to their own DSP hardware. If you wanted these industry best algorithms, you had to buy their, relatively, expensive systems. While they now do offer some of their software as plugins, they continue to use dedicated hardware as part of their product strategy. One interesting possibility is the embedding of otherwise unremarkable software into dedicated hardware, because of the user interface advantages. By giving the user access to physical controls, that do nothing but mimic their virtual cousins, the goal would be to dramatically increase the usability of the software. There has been some movement in this direction, which is actually a kind of throwback to how the first generations of audio DSP devices, back when dedicated hardware was the only way to implement such processing. You can see this tension around user interface play out in the realm of audio mixers for life performance. They use dedicated interfaces to run the real time DSP, but combine various virtualization strategies. Some of the biggest audio plugin companies, like Waves, have released versions of their popular software plugins to run on some of the modern live mixing hardware systems, thereby generating new revenue streams from existing products. At this point, while it is entirely possible to run an entire mix of a live show on a PC with a mouse and keyboard, it is such a sub-optimal user experience, that I have never witnessed anyone do this. (Though I'm sure some foolish, Braveheart do, and budget challenged audio engineers have done it!)
davidgerard 9y ago
> A couple of high profile companies, like Red Hat, Apache, and others make their living doing exactly that. Apache??
- kasbah 9y ago
  Yeah, I think Kevin Kelly got the facts wrong on that. >In the 2010–11 fiscal year, the Foundation took in $539,410, almost entirely from grants and contributions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Software_Foundation#Financials https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Software_Foundation#Fin...
dredmorbius 9y ago
I agree with Kelly that the Internet is the modern outgrowth of the publishing and media industry, though I find his focus and conclusions beyond that point lacking. For starters, the Internet itself is far more about distribution than duplicating. It's effect is to achieve distribution of information. Computers alone are sufficient to achieve copying, but it was the distribution component which computers alone, or even low-speed or fixed-location Internet failed to achieve. And though the Internet's distribution involves copying of bits, that's not the critical function. Information theory itself concerns the origination, distribution, receipt, comprehension (or decoding), and possibly redistribution of messages. Those are instantiated through such systems as webservers (or application engines), the Internet, protocols, and ultimately some human or nonhuman interpretation engine. Kelly is also correct in that the Internet removes costs and frictions. Or alternatively, it shifts the cost points of media, and generally reduces the costs of originating and duplicating information, without increasing individual capacity to comprehend or filter it. This gets to the core of what's been called the attention economy, forseen in the 1970s and earlier by Herbert Simon and Alvin Toffler. I've been looking at quantifications of information absorption capacity of people and suspect that that's generally quite low -- a few tens, possibly hundreds, of messages per day, but not much above that. The consequence of filter overload is a real problem. And the attention we can give any one message is directly inversely proportional to the number of messages received, divided by our time to dedicate to such messages. Reducing costs gives rise to the Jevons paradox: It's not that the high-barrier-to-entry messages of the high-cost era suddenly become more available, but that a new flood of low-barrier, low-value (or negative-value) messages appear. Spam. Viruses. Junk mail. Phone solicitations. Web advertising. Clickbait. There's also Woozle's Law of Epistemic Systems: as the audience using any given communications medium increases in number (and especially: in significance), the value of manipulating that audience will increase. In market economics, low marginal costs become a problem as marginal cost is the mechanism by which markets set prices. For goods with high fixed and low marginal costs, market prices are simply insufficient to reward producers (or creators). This is the subject of recent books by Paul Mason (Postcapitalism) and Jeremy Rifkin (The Zero Marginal Cost Society). Gresham's Law is another challenge, multiple ways. The popular form is "Bad X drives out good", though the general mechanism is more nuanced: Greshams mechanisms are complexity constraints applied where a "better" (more complex) good is valued identically to a "worse" one, for whatever reasons, within a given domain. The general result is that the worse goods predominate. The capacity to distinguish better from worse itself affects this, which is why a larger market tends to incentivise worse goods. And, if there is an alternative market in which the better goods are more highly rewarded, you'll see a flight of those goods to those markets. This is often exhibited as brain-drain: flight from low-paid professions such as teaching, government work, politics, or academia, to business, trades, or finance, for example. It can also be exhibited as international flows of capital, coin, or talent. And this plays out in information markets, where the lack of sufficient reward will see authors and creators either depart for realms in which they are appropriately rewarded, or to other fields. Political and ethnic persecution can have similar effects -- the flight of European Jews to the US in the 1930s and 1940s, or the flight of American blacks to Europe from the 1930s through the 1970s and even beyond, as examples. Sorting out the implications of changing relative costs and rewards is key, and that's what Kelly, and a great many others, fail to do.

194 points by _pius 9y ago

"The internet is a copy machine." This truth is often hidden by some given abstraction. (file, save, download, streaming, etc.) Businesses have been built on such abstractions. Success stories. On the flipside, existing businesses that were built before the internet who do not know the truth have been fed these abstractions. These businesses may stand nothing to gain from participating in the copy machine. Whomever is feeding these businesses with abstractions that hide the truth are not helping these businesses. They are helping themselves and watching these businesses being destroyed by a copy machine.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

danboarder 9y ago

Published January 31, 2008

noobermin 9y ago
And how prescient!
dang 9y ago
Thanks. We added 2008 above.
ralfd 9y ago
I am a bit confused by the website (blog?), as the sidebar links to unrelated strange stuff (graphic novel, pictures of asia). But the site should make sense as a two letter .org url is quite prestigious.
- jwilk 9y ago
  It's someone's personal website.
- hoekit 9y ago
  kk.org is by Kevin Kelly of WIRED magazine.

m-j-fox 9y ago

> Even a dog knows you can’t erase something once it’s flowed on the internet. False. Dogs do not know anything about digital technology. Dogs barely understand dog leashes.

tokai 9y ago
It is probably a reference to the "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog" cartoon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_you%27re_a_dog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_...
- jancsika 9y ago
  That may be true, but the further the reference gets from the original context, the more likely it becomes an appeal to authority that ends up misleading people instead of enlightening them. Here are some important examples of quite powerful entities that do not accept the logic that you can't erase something once it's flowed on the internet: the RIAA, MPAA, DEA, various (most?) middle eastern countries, Great Britain (through the influence of the GCHQ), Mastodon servers located in Germany (see their ToS regarding holocaust denial), whitehouse.gov and various other sites that erase public statements after their criticism goes viral, various entities trying to shut down sci-hub (who will probably eventually succeed), and Barbara Streisand. Taken together, these entities can make it practically impossible for non-technical people to access data that has a $0 marginal cost. So it's misleading to flippantly refer to the New Yorker cartoon's implication of general equalizing power of the internet as part of a fundamental critique of business models built around publishing data that has $0 marginal cost. In that context, the comment by m-j-fox-- while maybe low effort-- serves an important function of undercutting the low effort premise upon which the article under discussion depends. Thus I give this higher effort defense of said comment. edit: clarification

majewsky 9y ago

tl;dr: Reasons why people will still pay for digital content even though it can be reproduced at no cost: immediacy, personalization, interpretation, authenticity, accessibility, embodiment, patronage and findability. Advertising is notably absent from the list. Quoting: > Careful readers will note one conspicuous absence so far. I have said nothing about advertising. Ads are widely regarded as the solution, almost the ONLY solution, to the paradox of the free. Most of the suggested solutions I’ve seen for overcoming the free involve some measure of advertising. I think ads are only one of the paths that attention takes, and in the long-run, they will only be part of the new ways money is made selling the free. But that’s another story. Since this is (2008), does anyone know if that blog covered that "other story" at some point? I'm currently digging through a Google search for advertisement site:kk.org inurl:thetechnium ...but cannot see anything useful so far.

teach 9y ago

Thank you so much for posting this! I saw this when it was originally posted back in 2008 and think of it often but could never craft the google-fu needed to unearth it again! (Findability, anyone?)

amelius 9y ago

Immediacy -- who really needs it? I mean, for a movie, just wait a few months and you can download it. If you don't want to wait, you still have to wait for the next movie to come out, so it makes no difference really. To say it another way: no matter where you are in the pipeline, you still have to wait the same amount of time for new data to arrive.

qrbLPHiKpiux 9y ago
Better Call Saul fan here. No way am I waiting.
ptr_void 9y ago
'need' : no 'preference' : yes The whole entertainment industry can go away over the next month, it wouldn't matter much. But most would prefer it didn't. There's also more than enough movies/tv shows/sports recordings/music etc for anyone's lifetime, but most would prefer to see newer ones. Enough people can afford their preference to have new ones produced every day.
- Mz 9y ago
  The Roman policy of "bread and circus" helped prevent rioting in the streets. I would much rather our resources go to entertainment than to more police and prisons. So, I am happy to put entertainment in the category of need.
  - coldtea 9y ago
    You seem to have gotten the lesson of bread and circuses backwards. It's not meant to be understood as a good thing. It was meant maintain a docile public that's easily manipulated, taken advantage of and ordered around, as long as it was given enough food to eat and BS arena shows to distract it. Rioting against scum like Nero (and modern equivalents) would have been the good and democratic option.
    - wruza 9y ago

mortiester 9y ago

Thus whoever can seize control of things that can be copied and stop the copying can sell them at any price as long as people need it...an internet monopoly.

dang 9y ago

Discussed (a bit) at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=108559 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=108559.

incompatible 9y ago

"Once anything that can be copied is brought into contact with internet, it will be copied, and those copies never leave." Not really true at all. So many times I've found a dead link, archive.org doesn't have a copy, it's gone. Entire domains loaded with content have disappeared. In general, people don't copy and save other people's material, except temporarily for viewing.

Iv 9y ago
Unexpectedly, we have managed to squash the initial carefree copying of the internet with just a few ridiculous court cases. Even the pirate bay founders are starting to feel tired of maintaining it.
- incompatible 9y ago
  Ultimately we have to live somewhere in the physical world, and facing large fines or imprisonment is unattractive. The real surprise to me is that hard-line intellectual property protection has remained the political status-quo throughout the world. You'd think there'd be at least one or two countries willing to try alternatives, and give sites like Pirate Bay a place to operate in peace. Edit: Legalize Marijuana, vote the likes of Trump into power, leave the EU, threaten to nuke the US, fine, but some things, like intellectual property, are sacred.
  - petra 9y ago
    Those are simply much more important subjects for their votes than copyright.
    - adrianN 9y ago
      Legalizing Marijuana is more important than copyright? I disagree. Copyright is about how we handle our cultural heritage and how we compensate those who produce those artifacts. To me that is a way more important topic than the war on drugs.

superasn 9y ago

This guy gets it. This is one of the reasons that the best way to sell product online is to create a cheap front-end product that delivers insane amounts of value to the Customer and then make profits with the back-end sales over and over, i.e. Repeat customers (because now you have their trust and good will).

amelius 9y ago
But it only works in small niche markets, not mass markets.

b1daly 9y ago

A nice essay generalizing about what people might be willing to pay for, in a world where the marginal cost of production of products that people used to pay for has dropped to zero. One category that he missed is embedding digitized products like software into dedicated hardware. It's a form of DRM that is harder to crack (I think). Here's some examples from the audio world, that are variations of this idea. The main audio software platforms, known as Digital Audio Workstations (DAW) have all evolved to a point where they have to support open plugin formats. Plugins are implementations of digital signal processing software, that are used in combination within the DAW to produce the end result, which is a complete, finished sound file, Because audio production and engineering is hard (basically, things tend to not sound good) there is constant development, and fierce competition, in this niche market. Various forms of DRM, or licensing systems, are almost universally used. This provides enough friction, meaning you can get cracked versions of most plugins, but it comes at a cost of inconvenience, malware, or compromised stability, that a modest number of small companies have built business in the market. But the competition is fierce, and the trend in license prices has been steadily down. The cracks do hurt the sales. One company that has thrived in this market is Universal Audio. They put heavy development into making premium, we'll respected plugins, but they only run on their proprietary DSP systems. For a while, this could be seen as a genuine advantage, as users commonly ran up against the limitations of their CPUs. This is no longer the case, but the company has steadfastly stuck to their proprietary system. One technique they used was to embed their DSP in dedicated sound interfaces. The sound interface market is also hotly contested, and companies are constantly fighting against commoditization. So they developed high quality sound interfaces, which is something all audio producers have to have, and use their catalog of exclusive software plugins as a "value added differentiator." CEDAR is the pre-eminent developer of specialized software dedicated to challenging issues of noise reduction. For a long time, they limited the use of their algorithms to their own DSP hardware. If you wanted these industry best algorithms, you had to buy their, relatively, expensive systems. While they now do offer some of their software as plugins, they continue to use dedicated hardware as part of their product strategy. One interesting possibility is the embedding of otherwise unremarkable software into dedicated hardware, because of the user interface advantages. By giving the user access to physical controls, that do nothing but mimic their virtual cousins, the goal would be to dramatically increase the usability of the software. There has been some movement in this direction, which is actually a kind of throwback to how the first generations of audio DSP devices, back when dedicated hardware was the only way to implement such processing. You can see this tension around user interface play out in the realm of audio mixers for life performance. They use dedicated interfaces to run the real time DSP, but combine various virtualization strategies. Some of the biggest audio plugin companies, like Waves, have released versions of their popular software plugins to run on some of the modern live mixing hardware systems, thereby generating new revenue streams from existing products. At this point, while it is entirely possible to run an entire mix of a live show on a PC with a mouse and keyboard, it is such a sub-optimal user experience, that I have never witnessed anyone do this. (Though I'm sure some foolish, Braveheart do, and budget challenged audio engineers have done it!)

davidgerard 9y ago

> A couple of high profile companies, like Red Hat, Apache, and others make their living doing exactly that. Apache??

kasbah 9y ago
Yeah, I think Kevin Kelly got the facts wrong on that. >In the 2010–11 fiscal year, the Foundation took in $539,410, almost entirely from grants and contributions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Software_Foundation#Financials https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Software_Foundation#Fin...

dredmorbius 9y ago

I agree with Kelly that the Internet is the modern outgrowth of the publishing and media industry, though I find his focus and conclusions beyond that point lacking. For starters, the Internet itself is far more about distribution than duplicating. It's effect is to achieve distribution of information. Computers alone are sufficient to achieve copying, but it was the distribution component which computers alone, or even low-speed or fixed-location Internet failed to achieve. And though the Internet's distribution involves copying of bits, that's not the critical function. Information theory itself concerns the origination, distribution, receipt, comprehension (or decoding), and possibly redistribution of messages. Those are instantiated through such systems as webservers (or application engines), the Internet, protocols, and ultimately some human or nonhuman interpretation engine. Kelly is also correct in that the Internet removes costs and frictions. Or alternatively, it shifts the cost points of media, and generally reduces the costs of originating and duplicating information, without increasing individual capacity to comprehend or filter it. This gets to the core of what's been called the attention economy, forseen in the 1970s and earlier by Herbert Simon and Alvin Toffler. I've been looking at quantifications of information absorption capacity of people and suspect that that's generally quite low -- a few tens, possibly hundreds, of messages per day, but not much above that. The consequence of filter overload is a real problem. And the attention we can give any one message is directly inversely proportional to the number of messages received, divided by our time to dedicate to such messages. Reducing costs gives rise to the Jevons paradox: It's not that the high-barrier-to-entry messages of the high-cost era suddenly become more available, but that a new flood of low-barrier, low-value (or negative-value) messages appear. Spam. Viruses. Junk mail. Phone solicitations. Web advertising. Clickbait. There's also Woozle's Law of Epistemic Systems: as the audience using any given communications medium increases in number (and especially: in significance), the value of manipulating that audience will increase. In market economics, low marginal costs become a problem as marginal cost is the mechanism by which markets set prices. For goods with high fixed and low marginal costs, market prices are simply insufficient to reward producers (or creators). This is the subject of recent books by Paul Mason (Postcapitalism) and Jeremy Rifkin (The Zero Marginal Cost Society). Gresham's Law is another challenge, multiple ways. The popular form is "Bad X drives out good", though the general mechanism is more nuanced: Greshams mechanisms are complexity constraints applied where a "better" (more complex) good is valued identically to a "worse" one, for whatever reasons, within a given domain. The general result is that the worse goods predominate. The capacity to distinguish better from worse itself affects this, which is why a larger market tends to incentivise worse goods. And, if there is an alternative market in which the better goods are more highly rewarded, you'll see a flight of those goods to those markets. This is often exhibited as brain-drain: flight from low-paid professions such as teaching, government work, politics, or academia, to business, trades, or finance, for example. It can also be exhibited as international flows of capital, coin, or talent. And this plays out in information markets, where the lack of sufficient reward will see authors and creators either depart for realms in which they are appropriately rewarded, or to other fields. Political and ethnic persecution can have similar effects -- the flight of European Jews to the US in the 1930s and 1940s, or the flight of American blacks to Europe from the 1930s through the 1970s and even beyond, as examples. Sorting out the implications of changing relative costs and rewards is key, and that's what Kelly, and a great many others, fail to do.