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Exactly. A prostitute performs a personal service for you. Not paying directly hurts him/her. When copying information on the other hand, nothing happens, you

Exactly. A prostitute performs a personal service for you. Not paying directly hurts him/her. When copying information on the other hand, nothing happens, you don't feel it when your information is copied. (yes, you can say it does indirectly through some convoluted story, but that's always debatable) The future economy will be more about directly personalized experiences and services that cannot be copied, or are much less interesting when copied, instead of trivial fan-outs of information. It is all about scarcity. Better to let that sink in than try to preserve what is already lost, at the cost of freedom. (edit: why do I say future? It is already the present for many of us)

Silhouette 15y ago
> When copying information on the other hand, nothing happens, you don't feel it when your information is copied. But you surely felt the months of work that went into writing your book in the first place, or the months of practice that allowed you to give that one great performance in the recording studio. > It is all about scarcity. Some of us prefer quality to quantity. Sadly, producing good quality usually requires a significant amount of hard work, and that isn't going to change any time soon.
- wladimir 15y ago
  Some of us prefer quality to quantity. Sadly, producing good quality usually requires a significant amount of hard work, and that isn't going to change any time soon. You just validated my point. The people that prefer quality still pay for people to work (hard?) for them. Without needing any violent enforcement or censorship. Don't fetishize information, focus on what you (and other people) can do with it. Until brain patterns can be copied (if ever), skill and experience will still be scarce.
  - Silhouette 15y ago
    > You just validated my point. Perhaps I don't really understand your point, then. It seems to me that most of the works being ripped off via TPB and the like are the products that many people have worked on to get to a high level of quality, which of course are also the ones that are expensive to make because of that, and yet clearly a lot of people aren't paying for them.
    - wladimir 15y ago
      My point is that a work that is just information, no matter how high quality, will be copied. There is no scarcity. Throughout history, work has always been either about making physical objects, food, or services rendered to either a person or a group interactively. Those are scarce. That's still the case. Yes, the market for cookie-cutter experiences "make once, sell zillion times" will become smaller (or at least, stop growing). I'm not sure whether that's something laudable or something sad, but it is happening before our eyes. Things are changing, let's try to make the transition less painful instead of more painful as we move into the post-information age.
      - Silhouette 15y ago
        OK, I think I understand where you're coming from now. Unfortunately, if we take your idea to its natural conclusion, a lot of industries that create and distribute valuable works are going to change direction or possibly split several ways. Those projects that can be run without ever giving the underlying data to customers, such as interactive software that can be turned into SaaS where the code never leaves a server under the provider's control, might follow that path. This naturally leads to a subscription model, where customers pay over and over for the same functionality, rather than paying a one-off charge as they have in the past. Then you have things like textbooks and training videos, which are based on expert knowledge and insight that took a lot of time to acquire but is relatively stable and easily shared once concentrated and well presented in a fixed medium. These tend to have relatively small but high-value markets, but become commercially unattractive if unrestricted copying becomes legal. A plausible alternative is that experts shut down their open distribution channels and only share their knowledge and advice in person, charging the kind of rates for training and consultancy that make even lawyers and accountants wince. A related case is entertainment performances. The performers themselves can pull the same trick by moving toward live performances as their revenue stream, and some of the production team will be necessary for that as well. It's not clear how key people like songwriters and composers get paid in this set-up, though. Some projects with critical mass could move to essentially a charity model, whether that is by literally accepting donations, by being created directly by volunteer labour, or by appealing to wealthy patrons who can afford to subsidise entire projects single-handed or within a small-group of like-minded philanthropists. This can work, but there is a danger of reducing every work to "good enough". There are some interesting ideas in terms of getting lots of people to pay up-front before a work is created, but then of course they're taking on trust that the work will be good enough to justify the cost. That might be viable for established artists, but seems unlikely to work for many new ones. It also suffers from the "good enough" risk. Some projects would find a business model based on a very large market paying a trivial amount of money to access the data conveniently, but that strategy is more effective against casual piracy today than it would be in a world where commercial alternative services could legally set up, rip your content, and then run in direct competition to you. Realistically, a project trying this approach would probably have to convert to something based more on charity and pitching themselves as the legitimate supplier of the content in some sense. Finally, there are those projects that produce middle-value fixed products for medium-sized markets, such as books and videos catering to a lot of niche markets. These are the ones that are really in trouble, lacking any means to control the data once a customer has bought it, being too expensive and not wide enough in appeal for most charity/trivial money models based on volume to cover the costs, but not being good enough when stacked up against high-end alternatives for charity models based on patronage to kick in. These ideas basically all come down to one of three possibilities: 1. Restrict access to the data to recreate the scarcity (typically with a significant reduction in the number of people who benefit and a significant increase in the cost to those who do). 2. Aim for some sort of charity/trust/volunteer model (which only works if you've have relatively extreme volume of sales or price, and risks reducing everything to "good enough"). 3. Fail. None of these seems likely to be better at either producing high quality works or distributing them to wide audiences than an economic system such as copyright.
  - DirkScheuring 15y ago
    There surely are a lot of people who obtain quality content through TPB without paying for it. However, from what I could observe, attempts at making this group of people pay anyway have been largely fruitless so far, while at the same time they often appear to inconvenience paying customers, e.g. through intrusive "copy protection" schemes. So as a content producer, I tend to think of what I might "loose" through TPB as "promotion expenses".

Silhouette 15y ago

> When copying information on the other hand, nothing happens, you don't feel it when your information is copied. But you surely felt the months of work that went into writing your book in the first place, or the months of practice that allowed you to give that one great performance in the recording studio. > It is all about scarcity. Some of us prefer quality to quantity. Sadly, producing good quality usually requires a significant amount of hard work, and that isn't going to change any time soon.

wladimir 15y ago
Some of us prefer quality to quantity. Sadly, producing good quality usually requires a significant amount of hard work, and that isn't going to change any time soon. You just validated my point. The people that prefer quality still pay for people to work (hard?) for them. Without needing any violent enforcement or censorship. Don't fetishize information, focus on what you (and other people) can do with it. Until brain patterns can be copied (if ever), skill and experience will still be scarce.
- Silhouette 15y ago
  > You just validated my point. Perhaps I don't really understand your point, then. It seems to me that most of the works being ripped off via TPB and the like are the products that many people have worked on to get to a high level of quality, which of course are also the ones that are expensive to make because of that, and yet clearly a lot of people aren't paying for them.
  - wladimir 15y ago
    My point is that a work that is just information, no matter how high quality, will be copied. There is no scarcity. Throughout history, work has always been either about making physical objects, food, or services rendered to either a person or a group interactively. Those are scarce. That's still the case. Yes, the market for cookie-cutter experiences "make once, sell zillion times" will become smaller (or at least, stop growing). I'm not sure whether that's something laudable or something sad, but it is happening before our eyes. Things are changing, let's try to make the transition less painful instead of more painful as we move into the post-information age.
    - Silhouette 15y ago
      OK, I think I understand where you're coming from now. Unfortunately, if we take your idea to its natural conclusion, a lot of industries that create and distribute valuable works are going to change direction or possibly split several ways. Those projects that can be run without ever giving the underlying data to customers, such as interactive software that can be turned into SaaS where the code never leaves a server under the provider's control, might follow that path. This naturally leads to a subscription model, where customers pay over and over for the same functionality, rather than paying a one-off charge as they have in the past. Then you have things like textbooks and training videos, which are based on expert knowledge and insight that took a lot of time to acquire but is relatively stable and easily shared once concentrated and well presented in a fixed medium. These tend to have relatively small but high-value markets, but become commercially unattractive if unrestricted copying becomes legal. A plausible alternative is that experts shut down their open distribution channels and only share their knowledge and advice in person, charging the kind of rates for training and consultancy that make even lawyers and accountants wince. A related case is entertainment performances. The performers themselves can pull the same trick by moving toward live performances as their revenue stream, and some of the production team will be necessary for that as well. It's not clear how key people like songwriters and composers get paid in this set-up, though. Some projects with critical mass could move to essentially a charity model, whether that is by literally accepting donations, by being created directly by volunteer labour, or by appealing to wealthy patrons who can afford to subsidise entire projects single-handed or within a small-group of like-minded philanthropists. This can work, but there is a danger of reducing every work to "good enough". There are some interesting ideas in terms of getting lots of people to pay up-front before a work is created, but then of course they're taking on trust that the work will be good enough to justify the cost. That might be viable for established artists, but seems unlikely to work for many new ones. It also suffers from the "good enough" risk. Some projects would find a business model based on a very large market paying a trivial amount of money to access the data conveniently, but that strategy is more effective against casual piracy today than it would be in a world where commercial alternative services could legally set up, rip your content, and then run in direct competition to you. Realistically, a project trying this approach would probably have to convert to something based more on charity and pitching themselves as the legitimate supplier of the content in some sense. Finally, there are those projects that produce middle-value fixed products for medium-sized markets, such as books and videos catering to a lot of niche markets. These are the ones that are really in trouble, lacking any means to control the data once a customer has bought it, being too expensive and not wide enough in appeal for most charity/trivial money models based on volume to cover the costs, but not being good enough when stacked up against high-end alternatives for charity models based on patronage to kick in. These ideas basically all come down to one of three possibilities: 1. Restrict access to the data to recreate the scarcity (typically with a significant reduction in the number of people who benefit and a significant increase in the cost to those who do). 2. Aim for some sort of charity/trust/volunteer model (which only works if you've have relatively extreme volume of sales or price, and risks reducing everything to "good enough"). 3. Fail. None of these seems likely to be better at either producing high quality works or distributing them to wide audiences than an economic system such as copyright.
- DirkScheuring 15y ago
  There surely are a lot of people who obtain quality content through TPB without paying for it. However, from what I could observe, attempts at making this group of people pay anyway have been largely fruitless so far, while at the same time they often appear to inconvenience paying customers, e.g. through intrusive "copy protection" schemes. So as a content producer, I tend to think of what I might "loose" through TPB as "promotion expenses".