3 ms·

> There are many ways to earn money from films, music, art, books, etc., without needing copyright. For any of those ways, it will always be cheaper to copy so

> There are many ways to earn money from films, music, art, books, etc., without needing copyright. For any of those ways, it will always be cheaper to copy someone else's films, music, art, books, etc. rather than spend time and effort to produce them yourself. This is more true where only some works are popular (e.g., where a publisher publishes 50 books for every hit), because a copier can just copy the popular works and skip the unpopular ones.

jongjong 4y ago
Exactly, we will end up with a handful of 'attention monopolists' who will just take people's best works and reap 100% of profits by acting as centralized publishers and gatekeepers for the world's content... Kind of like what we have in the software industry with open source.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  What gatekeepers are there with open source? I don't recall asking anybody for permission to develop the D programming language and give it away for free.
  - jongjong 4y ago
    Sure, anyone can create a project, but what's the point if nobody will hear about it and nobody will use it regardless of how good it is? This is the reality for many projects; they may have added massive value but we don't know that they exist. It doesn't make sense to compare modern open source projects with projects from a previous era. More new open source projects are created each day than used to be created each year but we hardly ever hear about any of these new projects. We only hear about corporate sponsored 'open source' projects... Which, for the most part are terrible; people would realize how terrible they are if only they could see what else is out there, but they don't. Even with my skeptical mindset (actively trying to find indie/underdog projects), I only know about a tiny fraction of open source projects which would interest me (if I could know about their existence). I can't even dream of using indie projects during my day job... Every single employer has been brainwashed into using only 'approved' big-tech OSS projects and this effect is getting worse each year.
WalterBright 4y ago
I see publishers making money off of public domain books all the time. They usually do it by making handsomely bound editions you can show off on your bookshelf. Germany didn't have copyright in the 1800s, and the publishing industry thrived.
- bdowling 4y ago
  Those aren’t books, they’re props that signal to others that you’re the kind of person who values the works of Shakespeare enough to buy a handsomely-bound edition that you probably haven’t read. They could contain gibberish and they would have almost the same cultural value.

jongjong 4y ago

Exactly, we will end up with a handful of 'attention monopolists' who will just take people's best works and reap 100% of profits by acting as centralized publishers and gatekeepers for the world's content... Kind of like what we have in the software industry with open source.

WalterBright 4y ago
What gatekeepers are there with open source? I don't recall asking anybody for permission to develop the D programming language and give it away for free.
- jongjong 4y ago
  Sure, anyone can create a project, but what's the point if nobody will hear about it and nobody will use it regardless of how good it is? This is the reality for many projects; they may have added massive value but we don't know that they exist. It doesn't make sense to compare modern open source projects with projects from a previous era. More new open source projects are created each day than used to be created each year but we hardly ever hear about any of these new projects. We only hear about corporate sponsored 'open source' projects... Which, for the most part are terrible; people would realize how terrible they are if only they could see what else is out there, but they don't. Even with my skeptical mindset (actively trying to find indie/underdog projects), I only know about a tiny fraction of open source projects which would interest me (if I could know about their existence). I can't even dream of using indie projects during my day job... Every single employer has been brainwashed into using only 'approved' big-tech OSS projects and this effect is getting worse each year.

WalterBright 4y ago

I see publishers making money off of public domain books all the time. They usually do it by making handsomely bound editions you can show off on your bookshelf. Germany didn't have copyright in the 1800s, and the publishing industry thrived.

bdowling 4y ago
Those aren’t books, they’re props that signal to others that you’re the kind of person who values the works of Shakespeare enough to buy a handsomely-bound edition that you probably haven’t read. They could contain gibberish and they would have almost the same cultural value.