8 ms·

Digital assets can be duplicated for free, but can't be created for free. That holds a conflict, which we've not been good at solving. So far, it's been phrased

by dmos62 7y ago

Digital assets can be duplicated for free, but can't be created for free. That holds a conflict, which we've not been good at solving. So far, it's been phrased as: do we forbid digital asset duplication or do we make the creators carry the cost? There's no win-win from this viewpoint. Which is the lesser evil: architectural technology castration or economic punishment of creators? I'm confident that neither of those is a sustainable solution, and a more fundamental rethink is needed. Currently I'm interested in alternative ways of compensating the creators.

rebuilder 7y ago
There's nothing particularly novel here, IMO. This is exactly why we have copyright in the first place; creating new content is much harder than reproducing it is. There's no obvious optimum AFAIK, which is why IP law is as problematic as it is.
- sbarre 7y ago
  Yeah I am a bit conflicted about the idea that I can pay money to consume the hard work that someone created, and then turn around and sell that work to someone else (and keep the money) and then another person gets to experience the creator's work but the creator doesn't get paid? I know this was possible with physical goods, but I feel like there were real-world constraints on how much this secondary market could affect the primary market due to other costs such as storage and shipping of products, and even basic things like wear and tear. If digital goods can be infinitely resold, we will inevitably have secondary marketplaces that will appear to optimize and streamline the discovery and sale process of these goods (without any of the creator overhead), and I think it will be a bad thing in the long run.
  - BEEdwards 7y ago
    I'm confused by your conflict, you buy a creative work. The artist is paid, you sell that work to someone else, the artist already has their money. They didn't sell two things they sold one, why would they get x2 money?
    - sbarre 7y ago
      In the physical world, sure.. Because there was a cost to producing the physical thing (beyond the creative effort), and it will degrade over time, has costs associated with transfer, etc.. In a digital world, those constraints don't exist, so an artist could in theory get paid once for something they did, but hundreds or even thousands of people could experience their work in a "like new" state. I'm not saying it should not be this way, but our current pricing model for these goods does not account for this possibility. So something will have to change for this new approach to be sustainable. Again, not advocating for either approach in particular, just saying that for an economic model to work, there has to be appropriate incentive and compensation on both the creator and consumer sides.
    - sdenton4 7y ago
      Physical goods have a couple accidental inefficiencies which are beneficial to content creators: a) Physical degradation: The book that's been read 500 times will generally be in pretty bad shape. b) Transaction costs coming from locality: I can't transmit a book from SF to NY for free. It costs time /and/ money. So in the absence of an immediately available copy of the book, I'm likely to pay a bit more for access to a new copy. Without these constraints, the secondhand goods market is potentially much larger, meaning that the creator gets paid less per license. I can read a book, submit it back into the secondhand marketplace, where it immediately gets rebought by someone in NY, and so on, ad infinitum. So, purchases-per-consumer presumably decreases, and authors still need to eat. (As do publishers, editors, and the whole weirds quasi-vampiric ecosystem surrounding them.) This increases first-sale price... which encourages piracy... etc. 'It'll be ok!' isn't a sufficient response, because look at how journalism has been gutted over the last twenty years. It's a genuinely tougher world for content creators that aren't disney...
      - Fnoord 7y ago
        TL;DR: The keyword reply to your post is the word "library". > a) Physical degradation: The book that's been read 500 times will generally be in pretty bad shape. 500 times is a lot, but either way, it still works perfectly fine. Which is why libraries tended to work well. > Transaction costs coming from locality: I can't transmit a book from SF to NY for free. It costs time /and/ money Not much time if they pick it up or if you combine it with grocery shopping. Money: you can sell it. Then the buyer pays the transport costs. Yes, it does add up, but in my country selling a book on a platform only costs about 5 EUR extra. There is a difference between adding such 5 EUR to the total cost of resell, and making it downright impossible to resell (the current situation). It used to be a lot cheaper to sell books before globalism. You'd do it on a flea market, or give it away to the library. Then people get to use it as well. That book you own, you can probably sell it to someone in SF instead of NY (which has less carbon footprint as well). Basically, there is something inherent in humans that yes they like to collect, but they also like to get rid of things and have others reuse it. Which is why books do reach second hand markets. Why can we not do the same for games? Because of artificial barriers, that is why. Artificial barriers like these can be solved by law.
- Supermancho 7y ago
  > There's no obvious optimum There is. Same as music distribution or the calculator profession. It's unpopular, but inevitable. We can recognize that sale of copyrighted digital goods (sans any dependent services) is not practically protected by copyright. It's as impractical as trying to track down and sue the person in my family who took the hi-res picture of a mona lisa picture in France. It might take a couple generations, but it will happen.
  - wyattpeak 7y ago
    How is that an optimum? I think most all of us can agree that we want people to continue making games. You may think it's inevitable, that's fine (though you'll find plenty of people who disagree), but that doesn't make it optimal.
    - michaelmrose 7y ago
      The people who want to "solve" the problem of virtually free distribution of digital goods would have to build all the tools needed to build 1984 and wrest all control and ownership of devices that serve as the gateway to all communication and culture in order to do so effectively. This cure is so much worse than the disease that it would be infinitely preferable to lose the entire gaming industry which is ultimately a triviality of little societal value. I think people will adapt and keep making worthwhile works even with just crowd funding and if not oh well.
user5994461 7y ago
Plot twist: digital assets cannot be duplicated for free. They require storage and transfer. French plot twist: There are already extensive laws to cover copying and in fact every storage medium is (heavily) taxed to cover losses from copying. You're actually paying few cents per GB on ALL storage mediums like DVD/disks/SSD/usbkeys.
- chipperyman573 7y ago
  How are the taxes distributed so that the people who are affected by the copying are the ones who receive the benefits? Do they get tax breaks equal to the amount they are "owed"?
  - user5994461 7y ago
    Unless I am mistaking, that goes into organisations that manage royalties for movies/music/etc, they take care of redistributing it. Originally, this was intended in the era of audio tapes and VHS, where people would typically record off the radio or the TV. It was known exactly which titles were played when and how many times. They'd estimate some distributions from there, I guess it's more complicated today.
- Fnoord 7y ago
  > Plot twist: digital assets cannot be duplicated for free. They require storage and transfer. Digital assets have zero marginal costs. That is to say, yes, storage and transfer is not free as in beer, but it is very cheap. Which is why we have that tax to cover losses from copying. Not just in France, also in Germany, The Netherlands, and probably many more countries in EU.
  - user5994461 7y ago
    I can be wrong but I doubt that Germany has anything similar because one way to avoid the tax in France was to buy from Germany. The French tax is pretty high. It could be something like 50€ out of a 150€ hard drive.
dleslie 7y ago
The large players in the game industry have been making strategic moves in this regard for a few years now. In all likelihood, AAA titles and similarly high-production cost products will be available via streamed SaaS models. Stadia isn't a lone abherration; Sony, Microsoft, Activision, Ubisoft et al have all various experiments and/or large strategic positions in this regard. The fact is, the market is hostile to creators that rely on purchasers to finance them. We're moving rapidly away from that model, and it will be considered as old-fashioned as renting time with a human calculator. Indie games are their own thing. Only time will tell how they persist, but I suspect it will be via passion rather than any reasonable chance at profit.
- michaelmrose 7y ago
  Streaming games inevitably burns substantial resources per hour for compute and streaming while not generating revenue commensurate to costs unless you convince people to pay more for less and worse. It's tempting to compare $60 to say 30 hours of usage and ignore the fact that multiple people per household and in fact multiple households may have shared or bought and sold a disk. Every user buying a new copy and paying by the month will be more expensive than the cost of a console. Even the machine you access it is liable to be more expensive than a ps4. This isn't even touching the actual hard problem of latency and increasing hardware burden over time. Rendering the game at the users premises just makes too much sense to go away.
  - dleslie 7y ago
    Many households are already streaming multiple high resolution feeds at once; and availability of the appropriate connectivity will improve with time. The vast majority of gamers hardly spend more than an hour or two in total on each game they own, on average. The proposition isn't to aim to serve 40 to 100 hours of gameplay per purchaser, it's to provide a couple of hours for most and unlimited for the minority. Latency isn't that big of a deal. The industry giants involved can afford to be within 30ms round trip of most anyone in EU/NA/Jp, and most people can tolerate a 100ms+ input latency. Their TVs are slow as it is, many consumer models having a 100+ms latency already. And the big wins? No hackers. No secondary markets. No patching. No consumer hardware/software incompatibility. And so on.

by dmos62 7y ago

rebuilder 7y ago

There's nothing particularly novel here, IMO. This is exactly why we have copyright in the first place; creating new content is much harder than reproducing it is. There's no obvious optimum AFAIK, which is why IP law is as problematic as it is.

sbarre 7y ago
Yeah I am a bit conflicted about the idea that I can pay money to consume the hard work that someone created, and then turn around and sell that work to someone else (and keep the money) and then another person gets to experience the creator's work but the creator doesn't get paid? I know this was possible with physical goods, but I feel like there were real-world constraints on how much this secondary market could affect the primary market due to other costs such as storage and shipping of products, and even basic things like wear and tear. If digital goods can be infinitely resold, we will inevitably have secondary marketplaces that will appear to optimize and streamline the discovery and sale process of these goods (without any of the creator overhead), and I think it will be a bad thing in the long run.
- BEEdwards 7y ago
  I'm confused by your conflict, you buy a creative work. The artist is paid, you sell that work to someone else, the artist already has their money. They didn't sell two things they sold one, why would they get x2 money?
  - sbarre 7y ago
    In the physical world, sure.. Because there was a cost to producing the physical thing (beyond the creative effort), and it will degrade over time, has costs associated with transfer, etc.. In a digital world, those constraints don't exist, so an artist could in theory get paid once for something they did, but hundreds or even thousands of people could experience their work in a "like new" state. I'm not saying it should not be this way, but our current pricing model for these goods does not account for this possibility. So something will have to change for this new approach to be sustainable. Again, not advocating for either approach in particular, just saying that for an economic model to work, there has to be appropriate incentive and compensation on both the creator and consumer sides.
  - sdenton4 7y ago
    Physical goods have a couple accidental inefficiencies which are beneficial to content creators: a) Physical degradation: The book that's been read 500 times will generally be in pretty bad shape. b) Transaction costs coming from locality: I can't transmit a book from SF to NY for free. It costs time /and/ money. So in the absence of an immediately available copy of the book, I'm likely to pay a bit more for access to a new copy. Without these constraints, the secondhand goods market is potentially much larger, meaning that the creator gets paid less per license. I can read a book, submit it back into the secondhand marketplace, where it immediately gets rebought by someone in NY, and so on, ad infinitum. So, purchases-per-consumer presumably decreases, and authors still need to eat. (As do publishers, editors, and the whole weirds quasi-vampiric ecosystem surrounding them.) This increases first-sale price... which encourages piracy... etc. 'It'll be ok!' isn't a sufficient response, because look at how journalism has been gutted over the last twenty years. It's a genuinely tougher world for content creators that aren't disney...
    - Fnoord 7y ago
      TL;DR: The keyword reply to your post is the word "library". > a) Physical degradation: The book that's been read 500 times will generally be in pretty bad shape. 500 times is a lot, but either way, it still works perfectly fine. Which is why libraries tended to work well. > Transaction costs coming from locality: I can't transmit a book from SF to NY for free. It costs time /and/ money Not much time if they pick it up or if you combine it with grocery shopping. Money: you can sell it. Then the buyer pays the transport costs. Yes, it does add up, but in my country selling a book on a platform only costs about 5 EUR extra. There is a difference between adding such 5 EUR to the total cost of resell, and making it downright impossible to resell (the current situation). It used to be a lot cheaper to sell books before globalism. You'd do it on a flea market, or give it away to the library. Then people get to use it as well. That book you own, you can probably sell it to someone in SF instead of NY (which has less carbon footprint as well). Basically, there is something inherent in humans that yes they like to collect, but they also like to get rid of things and have others reuse it. Which is why books do reach second hand markets. Why can we not do the same for games? Because of artificial barriers, that is why. Artificial barriers like these can be solved by law.
Supermancho 7y ago
> There's no obvious optimum There is. Same as music distribution or the calculator profession. It's unpopular, but inevitable. We can recognize that sale of copyrighted digital goods (sans any dependent services) is not practically protected by copyright. It's as impractical as trying to track down and sue the person in my family who took the hi-res picture of a mona lisa picture in France. It might take a couple generations, but it will happen.
- wyattpeak 7y ago
  How is that an optimum? I think most all of us can agree that we want people to continue making games. You may think it's inevitable, that's fine (though you'll find plenty of people who disagree), but that doesn't make it optimal.
  - michaelmrose 7y ago
    The people who want to "solve" the problem of virtually free distribution of digital goods would have to build all the tools needed to build 1984 and wrest all control and ownership of devices that serve as the gateway to all communication and culture in order to do so effectively. This cure is so much worse than the disease that it would be infinitely preferable to lose the entire gaming industry which is ultimately a triviality of little societal value. I think people will adapt and keep making worthwhile works even with just crowd funding and if not oh well.

user5994461 7y ago

Plot twist: digital assets cannot be duplicated for free. They require storage and transfer. French plot twist: There are already extensive laws to cover copying and in fact every storage medium is (heavily) taxed to cover losses from copying. You're actually paying few cents per GB on ALL storage mediums like DVD/disks/SSD/usbkeys.

chipperyman573 7y ago
How are the taxes distributed so that the people who are affected by the copying are the ones who receive the benefits? Do they get tax breaks equal to the amount they are "owed"?
- user5994461 7y ago
  Unless I am mistaking, that goes into organisations that manage royalties for movies/music/etc, they take care of redistributing it. Originally, this was intended in the era of audio tapes and VHS, where people would typically record off the radio or the TV. It was known exactly which titles were played when and how many times. They'd estimate some distributions from there, I guess it's more complicated today.
Fnoord 7y ago
> Plot twist: digital assets cannot be duplicated for free. They require storage and transfer. Digital assets have zero marginal costs. That is to say, yes, storage and transfer is not free as in beer, but it is very cheap. Which is why we have that tax to cover losses from copying. Not just in France, also in Germany, The Netherlands, and probably many more countries in EU.
- user5994461 7y ago
  I can be wrong but I doubt that Germany has anything similar because one way to avoid the tax in France was to buy from Germany. The French tax is pretty high. It could be something like 50€ out of a 150€ hard drive.

dleslie 7y ago

The large players in the game industry have been making strategic moves in this regard for a few years now. In all likelihood, AAA titles and similarly high-production cost products will be available via streamed SaaS models. Stadia isn't a lone abherration; Sony, Microsoft, Activision, Ubisoft et al have all various experiments and/or large strategic positions in this regard. The fact is, the market is hostile to creators that rely on purchasers to finance them. We're moving rapidly away from that model, and it will be considered as old-fashioned as renting time with a human calculator. Indie games are their own thing. Only time will tell how they persist, but I suspect it will be via passion rather than any reasonable chance at profit.

michaelmrose 7y ago
Streaming games inevitably burns substantial resources per hour for compute and streaming while not generating revenue commensurate to costs unless you convince people to pay more for less and worse. It's tempting to compare $60 to say 30 hours of usage and ignore the fact that multiple people per household and in fact multiple households may have shared or bought and sold a disk. Every user buying a new copy and paying by the month will be more expensive than the cost of a console. Even the machine you access it is liable to be more expensive than a ps4. This isn't even touching the actual hard problem of latency and increasing hardware burden over time. Rendering the game at the users premises just makes too much sense to go away.
- dleslie 7y ago
  Many households are already streaming multiple high resolution feeds at once; and availability of the appropriate connectivity will improve with time. The vast majority of gamers hardly spend more than an hour or two in total on each game they own, on average. The proposition isn't to aim to serve 40 to 100 hours of gameplay per purchaser, it's to provide a couple of hours for most and unlimited for the minority. Latency isn't that big of a deal. The industry giants involved can afford to be within 30ms round trip of most anyone in EU/NA/Jp, and most people can tolerate a 100ms+ input latency. Their TVs are slow as it is, many consumer models having a 100+ms latency already. And the big wins? No hackers. No secondary markets. No patching. No consumer hardware/software incompatibility. And so on.