6 ms·

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

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.
  - sdenton4 7y ago
    Again, libraries have a finite supply of media: If a book isn't available, many library users trade money for time and buy a new copy. Indeed, new and popular books may have a wait time of months to get a copy. The library model is very different from the unbounded-online-secondhand-store (UOSS). The library will typically scale the number of copies of a popular book, but with some limit and longterm lookahead. The UOSS will get new used copies of a book until saturated, and then have effectively infinite copies going forward, like a used bookstore that never has to worry about floorspace for inventory. Now, it actually hurts my soul a bit to argue this side of things. I completely get, sympathize, and 99% of the time am on the side of making content available by any means necessary... It might be a good compromise would be something like limiting resale of a given copy to one per year. The concern is making sure content creators can get paid during periods of 'hotness' while still making things easily available during the cool (or deep-freeze) periods. In any case, actual modeling is needed... 'It'll be ok, libraries exist' doesn't cut it.
magicalhippo 7y ago
In your example, the work got experienced twice. So it's really a question of who do we think should get paid when some work is experienced. For example, a fine meal is experienced by consuming it. It cannot be resold afterwards. The only way for another person to experience it, is for the chefs to make a new copy. Most of the price of a fine meal is the raw ingredients and labor required to make a copy. But part of it is the IP of the meal, which ingredients to use and how to combine them into a meal. If you like the meal a lot, you come back and you buy the meal several times. Then you've paid for the IP several times. Similarly, when you go to a live concert, part of what you pay is for the IP of the songs (albeit fairly indirectly in most cases). So what is it about the ability to produce a copy at essentially zero cost that changes this? Why shouldn't the artist get paid each time the work is experienced?
ineedasername 7y ago
I think it looks a little different if you don't think of it from the perspective of how many times it was sold. Think of it from the perspective of how many times it was consumed. The first consumer's enjoys the material and the creators get paid. The second consumer enjoys the material and the creators get nothing. In your example the creators only sold it once, but in mine it was consumers twice-- two sides of the same coin, and either perspective is accurate (though I would also say both are incomplete) The difference from physical goods is really only one of degree though: Reselling physical goods has a lot more friction, especially when compared to something like the Steam marketplace that has something like a stock market's bid/ask price, which is a much more efficient and friction-less method of price-finding and connecting buyers with sellers.

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.
- sdenton4 7y ago
  Again, libraries have a finite supply of media: If a book isn't available, many library users trade money for time and buy a new copy. Indeed, new and popular books may have a wait time of months to get a copy. The library model is very different from the unbounded-online-secondhand-store (UOSS). The library will typically scale the number of copies of a popular book, but with some limit and longterm lookahead. The UOSS will get new used copies of a book until saturated, and then have effectively infinite copies going forward, like a used bookstore that never has to worry about floorspace for inventory. Now, it actually hurts my soul a bit to argue this side of things. I completely get, sympathize, and 99% of the time am on the side of making content available by any means necessary... It might be a good compromise would be something like limiting resale of a given copy to one per year. The concern is making sure content creators can get paid during periods of 'hotness' while still making things easily available during the cool (or deep-freeze) periods. In any case, actual modeling is needed... 'It'll be ok, libraries exist' doesn't cut it.

magicalhippo 7y ago

In your example, the work got experienced twice. So it's really a question of who do we think should get paid when some work is experienced. For example, a fine meal is experienced by consuming it. It cannot be resold afterwards. The only way for another person to experience it, is for the chefs to make a new copy. Most of the price of a fine meal is the raw ingredients and labor required to make a copy. But part of it is the IP of the meal, which ingredients to use and how to combine them into a meal. If you like the meal a lot, you come back and you buy the meal several times. Then you've paid for the IP several times. Similarly, when you go to a live concert, part of what you pay is for the IP of the songs (albeit fairly indirectly in most cases). So what is it about the ability to produce a copy at essentially zero cost that changes this? Why shouldn't the artist get paid each time the work is experienced?

ineedasername 7y ago

I think it looks a little different if you don't think of it from the perspective of how many times it was sold. Think of it from the perspective of how many times it was consumed. The first consumer's enjoys the material and the creators get paid. The second consumer enjoys the material and the creators get nothing. In your example the creators only sold it once, but in mine it was consumers twice-- two sides of the same coin, and either perspective is accurate (though I would also say both are incomplete) The difference from physical goods is really only one of degree though: Reselling physical goods has a lot more friction, especially when compared to something like the Steam marketplace that has something like a stock market's bid/ask price, which is a much more efficient and friction-less method of price-finding and connecting buyers with sellers.