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> The problem with these "many many ways" are that those that tend to work better also tend to be user hostile (subscriptions for things that have no reason to
by alexwennerberg 7y ago
> The problem with these "many many ways" are that those that tend to work better also tend to be user hostile (subscriptions for things that have no reason to be provided as a service instead of as a product), make the users the products themselves (e.g. advertising), be privacy nightmares (like both the previous examples, at least for the majority of cases), etc.
Public money and grants avoid all of these problems. In my view, we should dramatically expand public funding for technology and the arts, especially in a world where distribution is nearly free.
- Silhouette 7y agoIn my view, we should dramatically expand public funding for technology and the arts, especially in a world where distribution is nearly free. But then we need a way to decide what is or is not worthy of funding. The effect of copyright is to create a market-based approach to this, where something similar to the familiar economics of trading goods allows us to direct money to those who provide value. A move to publicly funded creative works would prompt the kind of debates we have today about public service broadcasters in particular and about pork barrel politics in general, but on a scale several orders of magnitude larger. I find it hard to imagine how that could possibly be as effective as what we have today. The power wielded by the gatekeepers of taxpayer-funded financial support would be immense and inevitably deeply corrosive.