4 ms·

>Free market hardly work there. You literally have a government granted monopoly on producing books. How can you even bring in the free market into this?

thaumasiotes 3y ago
I mean, the free market is working pretty well. http://libgen.rs/ http://libgen.rs/ The government-granted monopoly, not so much.
- aleph_minus_one 3y ago
  > I mean, the free market is working pretty well. > http://libgen.rs/ http://libgen.rs/ Exactly. What a lot of economists tend to "forget" is that markets also include black/illegal markets and markets that are hardly controllable by the government.
  - j_maffe 3y ago
    Unfortunately many are misled to believe that pirating books published by cartels is unethical.
    - c0pium 3y ago
      Please explain your alternative mechanism for compensating the author for their work.
      - j_maffe 3y ago
        I'm not proposing an alternative mechanism. I think people who can comfortably afford to pay the asked price for a book should of course do just that. On the other hand, for the billions of those who do not have that privilege, I wholeheartedly recommend piracy. It is of no cost to the author/publisher (since they weren't going to pay anyway) and of tremendous positive impact for equality and social mobility for the community. In a perfect world piracy would be an unfair and unnecessary venture. In this one, for many people it is absolutely justified.
    - aleph_minus_one 3y ago
      > Unfortunately many are misled to believe that pirating books published by cartels is unethical. It's not a question of ethical vs unethical, but about which evil you consider to be the worse.
      - j_maffe 3y ago
        Yeah, I agree. I think it can be a case-by-case situation depending on both the reader and the publishere/author. An undergrad needing a course textbook that's published by a monopolistic cartel with a 300% markup? Absolutely. For well-paid worker in a developed country buying a novel written by a niche author? probably not the right thing to do.
        akho 3y ago
        It's very unclear how book sales translate into income for authors. You are rewarding middlemen; these middlemen have a role that may or may not be important these days.
- ClumsyPilot 3y ago
  How is this a market if Boone is paying? If anything, this is communism? You can’t even have a market of IP without government granted ownership of IP. This tired old trope that Government vs market doesn’t work here
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    The bad communism is when the government takes your stuff and you don't have it anymore. This is "communism" in the same way that everyone being able to breathe the air or speak English without paying a proprietor for the right is "communism". This is often a motte and bailey that communists use, but you're attacking the motte. You're essentially arguing that there isn't a market for air. But there is. This is the market served by submarines and firefighting gear and spacecraft and HEPA filters. If no one had a monopoly over copies, you'd still have a market to supply them, they'd just generally be really cheap and the supplier would be someone like Cloudflare. Likewise there would still be a market for creating works, because people would pay for commissions. There might not be as many of them, but there would still be a market.
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    > You can’t even have a market of IP without government granted ownership of IP. Sure you can. See Germany in the 19th century with no IP protections. Business and prosperity boomed! Consider also the incredible success of open source software.
  - thaumasiotes 3y ago
    > You can’t even have a market of IP without government granted ownership of IP. What on earth are you thinking? For essentially all of human history, every work of art was produced for the market, and it was impossible to own any IP.
    - ClumsyPilot 3y ago
      I mean digital - of course you can have a market for physical things.
harvey9 3y ago
On producing specific books. Nothing to stop me writing a novel with the same themes as yours has.
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  If one company has a monopoly on faucets, another has one on pipes, another has one on valves, you're trying to argue that there is plenty of competition for "plumbing supplies" but that doesn't help you if you need a faucet and there's only one supplier. Notice how your argument, if true, would defeat the point of the monopoly. If there were ten books that were all fungible with one another then each of the suppliers would want to lower prices to increase sales and you'd end up at the marginal cost, which for digital products is zero. And sometimes this even happens -- there is a lot of free-as-in-beer software, free-with-ads news websites etc. But the context of lending libraries is for when that isn't the case. You don't need to get a copy of nginx from the local library because you can get it for free from the authors.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - c0pium 3y ago
    That’s not how this marketplace works at all. A better analogy is to say that BMW has a monopoly on making BMWs, yet they are still forced to compete with Porsche, who has their own monopoly on creating Porsches. There’s a two-sided marketplace for creative works, where publishers need to get works from creators and license them to customers. They want to maximize their own profits, but they also need to make a certain amount revenue as all methods of distribution have fixed costs.
    - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
      > A better analogy is to say that BMW has a monopoly on making BMWs BMW is a trademark. You can't take a Kia and put a BMW badge on it. You can, in principle, make an exact replica of a particular BMW model and put your own badge on it, and in that sense BMW doesn't have a monopoly on "BMWs" except insofar as some of the parts may be patented or (for the software) copyrighted. But that isn't an analogy, it's the original thing. Notice what happens when you take the original thing (intellectual property) out of the equation, your statement becomes "Bayer has a monopoly on aspirin", which they don't, because the Aspirin trademark became generic and it's not under patent.

thaumasiotes 3y ago

I mean, the free market is working pretty well. http://libgen.rs/ http://libgen.rs/ The government-granted monopoly, not so much.

aleph_minus_one 3y ago
> I mean, the free market is working pretty well. > http://libgen.rs/ http://libgen.rs/ Exactly. What a lot of economists tend to "forget" is that markets also include black/illegal markets and markets that are hardly controllable by the government.
- j_maffe 3y ago
  Unfortunately many are misled to believe that pirating books published by cartels is unethical.
  - c0pium 3y ago
    Please explain your alternative mechanism for compensating the author for their work.
    - j_maffe 3y ago
      I'm not proposing an alternative mechanism. I think people who can comfortably afford to pay the asked price for a book should of course do just that. On the other hand, for the billions of those who do not have that privilege, I wholeheartedly recommend piracy. It is of no cost to the author/publisher (since they weren't going to pay anyway) and of tremendous positive impact for equality and social mobility for the community. In a perfect world piracy would be an unfair and unnecessary venture. In this one, for many people it is absolutely justified.
  - aleph_minus_one 3y ago
    > Unfortunately many are misled to believe that pirating books published by cartels is unethical. It's not a question of ethical vs unethical, but about which evil you consider to be the worse.
    - j_maffe 3y ago
      Yeah, I agree. I think it can be a case-by-case situation depending on both the reader and the publishere/author. An undergrad needing a course textbook that's published by a monopolistic cartel with a 300% markup? Absolutely. For well-paid worker in a developed country buying a novel written by a niche author? probably not the right thing to do.
      - akho 3y ago
        It's very unclear how book sales translate into income for authors. You are rewarding middlemen; these middlemen have a role that may or may not be important these days.
ClumsyPilot 3y ago
How is this a market if Boone is paying? If anything, this is communism? You can’t even have a market of IP without government granted ownership of IP. This tired old trope that Government vs market doesn’t work here
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  The bad communism is when the government takes your stuff and you don't have it anymore. This is "communism" in the same way that everyone being able to breathe the air or speak English without paying a proprietor for the right is "communism". This is often a motte and bailey that communists use, but you're attacking the motte. You're essentially arguing that there isn't a market for air. But there is. This is the market served by submarines and firefighting gear and spacecraft and HEPA filters. If no one had a monopoly over copies, you'd still have a market to supply them, they'd just generally be really cheap and the supplier would be someone like Cloudflare. Likewise there would still be a market for creating works, because people would pay for commissions. There might not be as many of them, but there would still be a market.
- WalterBright 3y ago
  > You can’t even have a market of IP without government granted ownership of IP. Sure you can. See Germany in the 19th century with no IP protections. Business and prosperity boomed! Consider also the incredible success of open source software.
- thaumasiotes 3y ago
  > You can’t even have a market of IP without government granted ownership of IP. What on earth are you thinking? For essentially all of human history, every work of art was produced for the market, and it was impossible to own any IP.
  - ClumsyPilot 3y ago
    I mean digital - of course you can have a market for physical things.

harvey9 3y ago

On producing specific books. Nothing to stop me writing a novel with the same themes as yours has.

AnthonyMouse 3y ago
If one company has a monopoly on faucets, another has one on pipes, another has one on valves, you're trying to argue that there is plenty of competition for "plumbing supplies" but that doesn't help you if you need a faucet and there's only one supplier. Notice how your argument, if true, would defeat the point of the monopoly. If there were ten books that were all fungible with one another then each of the suppliers would want to lower prices to increase sales and you'd end up at the marginal cost, which for digital products is zero. And sometimes this even happens -- there is a lot of free-as-in-beer software, free-with-ads news websites etc. But the context of lending libraries is for when that isn't the case. You don't need to get a copy of nginx from the local library because you can get it for free from the authors.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- c0pium 3y ago
  That’s not how this marketplace works at all. A better analogy is to say that BMW has a monopoly on making BMWs, yet they are still forced to compete with Porsche, who has their own monopoly on creating Porsches. There’s a two-sided marketplace for creative works, where publishers need to get works from creators and license them to customers. They want to maximize their own profits, but they also need to make a certain amount revenue as all methods of distribution have fixed costs.
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    > A better analogy is to say that BMW has a monopoly on making BMWs BMW is a trademark. You can't take a Kia and put a BMW badge on it. You can, in principle, make an exact replica of a particular BMW model and put your own badge on it, and in that sense BMW doesn't have a monopoly on "BMWs" except insofar as some of the parts may be patented or (for the software) copyrighted. But that isn't an analogy, it's the original thing. Notice what happens when you take the original thing (intellectual property) out of the equation, your statement becomes "Bayer has a monopoly on aspirin", which they don't, because the Aspirin trademark became generic and it's not under patent.