7 ms·

Information should be free. Humanity as a whole benefits from free access to it.

by gdhbcc 7y ago

chadash 7y ago
> Information should be free. Humanity as a whole benefits from free access to it. There's no question that humanity benefits from free access to information. But humanity also benefits from high quality information, and the way you get there is by rewarding people for producing it. Most great modern literature is the result of publishers who paid authors for their work. Free information is great, but in my opinion, it's not worth losing the literature from Dickens, Tolstoy or Fitzgerald, or countless other great authors whose work is available at a reasonable price and at least some of whom (I'd venture to guess most of whom) might not have written these works without monetary incentive. And that monetary incentive only exists because we grant people exclusive rights to their intellectual property.
- inapis 7y ago
  That monetary incentive is automatically induced in a capitalist society. When people have to pull their own weight, buy their own food + necessities etc, no one can reasonably be expected to spend hours producing high quality information for free.
- gdhbcc 7y ago
  I firmly disagree with pretty much everything you have said. There is no evidence that intellectual property in any way increases production of works, and indeed there is plenty of evidence that inhibits it. See http://dklevine.com/general/intellectual/against.htm http://dklevine.com/general/intellectual/against.htm for a comprehensive look at the subject. While I dont agree with their conclusions, the data they show is solid.
  - chadash 7y ago
    Let's take Game of Thrones, a show that I'm sure many people reading this thread watch. The final season cost $90m to make. Would this investment have been made if not for intellectual property rights that give HBO exclusive license to distribute the content? If Amazon, Google and Netflix could just take the work and distribute it for free, then would HBO have been willing to fund this? The same goes for many things that are costly to produce, such as movies or investigative journalism. Yes, there are people who are willing to work for free, but it's nonsense to argue that "there is no evidence that intellectual property in any way increases production of works". Once upon a time, you had wealthy patrons who were the principle supporters of the arts. The system worked to some extent, but even Jeff Bezos can't afford to foot the bill for every movie made today. EDIT: yes, game of thrones is heavily pirated, but as the article linked to below points out, the only reason this benefits HBO is that it leads to more subscriptions. In a world without copyright, Netflix could take GOT episodes the second they are created and put them up on its own platform, completely legally. I wonder how many people would pay HBO in that scenario. Right now, the benefit to subscribing to HBO is that you get to watch Game of Thrones legally, with a better viewing experience and you save the hassle of going through seedy torrent sites trying to find a high quality copy. The people who feel a moral obligation to pay for what they consume probably were already subscribers anyway.
    - module0000 7y ago
      Erm...I don't think Game of Thrones is what the OP is talking about. You're talking about entertainment, and GP is talking about "information" in the context that "Humanity as a whole benefits from free access to it". Is humanity benefiting from watching actors enact stage combat scenes with makeup and costumes?
      - chadash 7y ago
        I tend to agree with you on this specific example, but there's also plenty of work that IS good quality in my opinion that wouldn't get funded if the entity funding it didn't get exclusive access to distribute. I would say that the New York Times (or pick your favorite paper) is a good example of this. There's a good amount of quality writing that people don't get paid for out there, but funding things like investigative pieces that take months or years to research just doesn't happen much outside of well-funded newspapers that traditionally get that funding because they are the owners of the copyright, so if you want the info, you need to pay them.
    - dublinben 7y ago
      Game of Thrones is a pretty bad example to use. Year after year it is one of the most pirated shows out there, which HBO tacitly approves of. Far more people watch the show for free than actually pay for it, but HBO still indirectly benefits from this massive popularity. https://theconversation.com/game-of-thrones-for-hbo-piracy-is-better-than-an-emmy-as-it-battles-netflix-115384 https://theconversation.com/game-of-thrones-for-hbo-piracy-i...
    - otakucode 7y ago
      You are entering into a much more complicated territory there. The reason things like $90m TV shows and $200m movies get made is due to history. Solving distribution, getting things from point A to point B, was the hardest and most valuable problem to solve, bar none, for a century. It built empires. It made the publishing system that we're familiar with (and growing out of) possible. You see, there is a problem with publishing media that relies upon popular reception. Popular reception is perfectly random. There aren't any trends to identify, and no element of the works themselves can be tailored to increase your chances of success with it. It's been extensively studied. The only way publishers are able to fund projects ahead of time that cost so much and still turn a profit on what is essentially a coin flip is because they control distribution. When a terrible flop hits the theaters, they can pull it immediately and replace it with another attempt. When a film finds success, they can keep it in theaters for ages, minimizing their losses and maximizing their gains. The public response to each work is still random, but since they control what is available at the box office, they can still find success. Now that distribution is so simple a clever 12 year old can do global distribution in their spare time as a hobby, and the publishers don't have control over what options the audience has any more... they are destined to fall apart. It's not the content that made $90m shows possible, and no one remembers the $90m flops. That was entirely a matter of keeping the field of options limited and exercising control over distribution channels.
- bookofjoe 7y ago
  "On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other."—Stewart Brand, in a conversation with Steve Wozniak, recorded by Steven Levy at the first hackers conference in 1984. Source: https://digitopoly.org/2015/10/25/information-wants-to-be-free-the-history-of-that-quote/ https://digitopoly.org/2015/10/25/information-wants-to-be-fr...
- thebooktocome 7y ago
  That's not how capitalism works. The profit incentive, in it's most idealized form, produces books that make money, written by people who make more money writing books than anything else. That doesn't optimize for "literary quality" at all. It optimized for authors like Dan Brown and G. R. R. Martin, authors who can write books than can be converted into media and merchandise with higher profit margins than books.
  - chadash 7y ago
    The quality stuff also doesn't get written without copyright. Take Charles Dickens, who rallied against pirating of his works. Luckily he had the protection of British copyright law, so he still had motivation to publish. Or take the Godfather, a movie that cost $6 million to make in 1972, which was a significant sum. Do you think the studios would have put up the money otherwise? Yes, our current system optimizes for Marvel comics movies and tabloids, but there's also a significant market for high brow stuff, and those people should be entitled to a fair living from the right to exclusively own their work. Otherwise, some of them simply won't be able to afford to that work and we'll lose it. Before the advent of copyright, we had wealthy patrons who supported the arts. Beethoven had many patrons who helped him along (I have no doubt that he loved doing it, but perhaps wouldn't have been able to without support). But is this system really better than what we have now? It just means that instead of the market dictating what gets made, a select group of wealthy people do. Doesn't seem like an ideal system either. Finally, there are things like Patreon, which are a more democratic way to support content creators. But at the end of the day, there's a free-loader problem where I can benefit from your donation, so this system hasn't really taken off. Very few people make a decent living off of patreon and even among those who do, how often can they pay expenses such as editors and the other support staff who help to make great art. At least in the old system, you can get some prestige and bragging rights from being the guy who supports Beethoven. However, there's not much prestige in donating $5/month to your favorite author on Patreon (even though I think it's the right thing to do).
    - 0815test 7y ago
      > But at the end of the day, there's a free-loader problem where I can benefit from your donation, so this system hasn't really taken off. Many crowdfunding systems are in fact specifically designed to be resilient against the free-loader problem. The work doesn't get funded at all unless enough people pitch in, and it doesn't cost you anything to "pledge" support for a work that doesn't make its funding threshold. So, it's rational for anyone who has a genuine interest in the work getting made, to pitch in for it - the only agents who get to "free ride" are marginal contributors who would have little interest in the work in the first place. Rather, I'd argue that crowdfunding (1) is still an emerging model for supporting creators, so we shouldn't be so quick as to label it "unsuccessful" and (2) to the extent that it doesn't routinely fund multi-million dollar content like Game of Thrones-like TV shows or AAA videogames, that's because these media formats themselves are way too costly to make in the first place for users to be willing to transparently fund them - such that they're routinely outcompeted by cheaper alternatives!
Ngunyan 7y ago
Yes, but labor, other incidentals to produce it, and a small incentive for doing it, should be paid.

Information should be free. Humanity as a whole benefits from free access to it.

by gdhbcc 7y ago

Information should be free. Humanity as a whole benefits from free access to it.

> Information should be free. Humanity as a whole benefits from free access to it. There's no question that humanity benefits from free access to information. But humanity also benefits from high quality information, and the way you get there is by rewarding people for producing it. Most great modern literature is the result of publishers who paid authors for their work. Free information is great, but in my opinion, it's not worth losing the literature from Dickens, Tolstoy or Fitzgerald, or countless other great authors whose work is available at a reasonable price and at least some of whom (I'd venture to guess most of whom) might not have written these works without monetary incentive. And that monetary incentive only exists because we grant people exclusive rights to their intellectual property.

inapis 7y ago
That monetary incentive is automatically induced in a capitalist society. When people have to pull their own weight, buy their own food + necessities etc, no one can reasonably be expected to spend hours producing high quality information for free.
gdhbcc 7y ago
I firmly disagree with pretty much everything you have said. There is no evidence that intellectual property in any way increases production of works, and indeed there is plenty of evidence that inhibits it. See http://dklevine.com/general/intellectual/against.htm http://dklevine.com/general/intellectual/against.htm for a comprehensive look at the subject. While I dont agree with their conclusions, the data they show is solid.
- chadash 7y ago
  Let's take Game of Thrones, a show that I'm sure many people reading this thread watch. The final season cost $90m to make. Would this investment have been made if not for intellectual property rights that give HBO exclusive license to distribute the content? If Amazon, Google and Netflix could just take the work and distribute it for free, then would HBO have been willing to fund this? The same goes for many things that are costly to produce, such as movies or investigative journalism. Yes, there are people who are willing to work for free, but it's nonsense to argue that "there is no evidence that intellectual property in any way increases production of works". Once upon a time, you had wealthy patrons who were the principle supporters of the arts. The system worked to some extent, but even Jeff Bezos can't afford to foot the bill for every movie made today. EDIT: yes, game of thrones is heavily pirated, but as the article linked to below points out, the only reason this benefits HBO is that it leads to more subscriptions. In a world without copyright, Netflix could take GOT episodes the second they are created and put them up on its own platform, completely legally. I wonder how many people would pay HBO in that scenario. Right now, the benefit to subscribing to HBO is that you get to watch Game of Thrones legally, with a better viewing experience and you save the hassle of going through seedy torrent sites trying to find a high quality copy. The people who feel a moral obligation to pay for what they consume probably were already subscribers anyway.
  - module0000 7y ago
    Erm...I don't think Game of Thrones is what the OP is talking about. You're talking about entertainment, and GP is talking about "information" in the context that "Humanity as a whole benefits from free access to it". Is humanity benefiting from watching actors enact stage combat scenes with makeup and costumes?
    - chadash 7y ago
      I tend to agree with you on this specific example, but there's also plenty of work that IS good quality in my opinion that wouldn't get funded if the entity funding it didn't get exclusive access to distribute. I would say that the New York Times (or pick your favorite paper) is a good example of this. There's a good amount of quality writing that people don't get paid for out there, but funding things like investigative pieces that take months or years to research just doesn't happen much outside of well-funded newspapers that traditionally get that funding because they are the owners of the copyright, so if you want the info, you need to pay them.
  - dublinben 7y ago
    Game of Thrones is a pretty bad example to use. Year after year it is one of the most pirated shows out there, which HBO tacitly approves of. Far more people watch the show for free than actually pay for it, but HBO still indirectly benefits from this massive popularity. https://theconversation.com/game-of-thrones-for-hbo-piracy-is-better-than-an-emmy-as-it-battles-netflix-115384 https://theconversation.com/game-of-thrones-for-hbo-piracy-i...
  - otakucode 7y ago
    You are entering into a much more complicated territory there. The reason things like $90m TV shows and $200m movies get made is due to history. Solving distribution, getting things from point A to point B, was the hardest and most valuable problem to solve, bar none, for a century. It built empires. It made the publishing system that we're familiar with (and growing out of) possible. You see, there is a problem with publishing media that relies upon popular reception. Popular reception is perfectly random. There aren't any trends to identify, and no element of the works themselves can be tailored to increase your chances of success with it. It's been extensively studied. The only way publishers are able to fund projects ahead of time that cost so much and still turn a profit on what is essentially a coin flip is because they control distribution. When a terrible flop hits the theaters, they can pull it immediately and replace it with another attempt. When a film finds success, they can keep it in theaters for ages, minimizing their losses and maximizing their gains. The public response to each work is still random, but since they control what is available at the box office, they can still find success. Now that distribution is so simple a clever 12 year old can do global distribution in their spare time as a hobby, and the publishers don't have control over what options the audience has any more... they are destined to fall apart. It's not the content that made $90m shows possible, and no one remembers the $90m flops. That was entirely a matter of keeping the field of options limited and exercising control over distribution channels.
bookofjoe 7y ago
"On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other."—Stewart Brand, in a conversation with Steve Wozniak, recorded by Steven Levy at the first hackers conference in 1984. Source: https://digitopoly.org/2015/10/25/information-wants-to-be-free-the-history-of-that-quote/ https://digitopoly.org/2015/10/25/information-wants-to-be-fr...
thebooktocome 7y ago
That's not how capitalism works. The profit incentive, in it's most idealized form, produces books that make money, written by people who make more money writing books than anything else. That doesn't optimize for "literary quality" at all. It optimized for authors like Dan Brown and G. R. R. Martin, authors who can write books than can be converted into media and merchandise with higher profit margins than books.
- chadash 7y ago
  The quality stuff also doesn't get written without copyright. Take Charles Dickens, who rallied against pirating of his works. Luckily he had the protection of British copyright law, so he still had motivation to publish. Or take the Godfather, a movie that cost $6 million to make in 1972, which was a significant sum. Do you think the studios would have put up the money otherwise? Yes, our current system optimizes for Marvel comics movies and tabloids, but there's also a significant market for high brow stuff, and those people should be entitled to a fair living from the right to exclusively own their work. Otherwise, some of them simply won't be able to afford to that work and we'll lose it. Before the advent of copyright, we had wealthy patrons who supported the arts. Beethoven had many patrons who helped him along (I have no doubt that he loved doing it, but perhaps wouldn't have been able to without support). But is this system really better than what we have now? It just means that instead of the market dictating what gets made, a select group of wealthy people do. Doesn't seem like an ideal system either. Finally, there are things like Patreon, which are a more democratic way to support content creators. But at the end of the day, there's a free-loader problem where I can benefit from your donation, so this system hasn't really taken off. Very few people make a decent living off of patreon and even among those who do, how often can they pay expenses such as editors and the other support staff who help to make great art. At least in the old system, you can get some prestige and bragging rights from being the guy who supports Beethoven. However, there's not much prestige in donating $5/month to your favorite author on Patreon (even though I think it's the right thing to do).
  - 0815test 7y ago
    > But at the end of the day, there's a free-loader problem where I can benefit from your donation, so this system hasn't really taken off. Many crowdfunding systems are in fact specifically designed to be resilient against the free-loader problem. The work doesn't get funded at all unless enough people pitch in, and it doesn't cost you anything to "pledge" support for a work that doesn't make its funding threshold. So, it's rational for anyone who has a genuine interest in the work getting made, to pitch in for it - the only agents who get to "free ride" are marginal contributors who would have little interest in the work in the first place. Rather, I'd argue that crowdfunding (1) is still an emerging model for supporting creators, so we shouldn't be so quick as to label it "unsuccessful" and (2) to the extent that it doesn't routinely fund multi-million dollar content like Game of Thrones-like TV shows or AAA videogames, that's because these media formats themselves are way too costly to make in the first place for users to be willing to transparently fund them - such that they're routinely outcompeted by cheaper alternatives!

Ngunyan 7y ago

Yes, but labor, other incidentals to produce it, and a small incentive for doing it, should be paid.