3 ms·

When I use "natural", I don't mean it to express an opinion that I believe that is moral to copy that Disney movie just because I can(1). Natural in this case r

When I use "natural", I don't mean it to express an opinion that I believe that is moral to copy that Disney movie just because I can(1). Natural in this case refers to the economic description of 'free'. An unfettered digital file has unlimited supply at no cost. Therefore supply will be sufficient to meet demand, even at a price point of zero. Things can be sold at arbitrary prices, even given away, but with physical things, the supply will not always be sufficient to meet the demand. A unit with a marginal cost that is given away is not free. This is why using cars or other physical goods produces leaky analogies; there can never be an unlimited supply of any physical good. You are taking something with a marginal cost of 0, but the producer has no way to pay for one-time costs. Distributing them onto the unit price is not a new monkey-patch at all. This is actually a very good observation. We've reached the point where the entire cost of the good is the one time production cost and we've discovered that we've got no good way to collect it. DRM is the best we've got right now, and its awful. You are more than correct in pointing out that 3D printing (and localized digital micro-manufacture in general) is about to make this problem acute. As we stumble into our Star Trek future, we should be expending as much innovative energy as we can into finding a way to solve this issue. (1) At this point in history, with the operation of the market as it currently stands, I lean towards no, it is not moral to bootleg that Disney flick.

gurkendoktor 14y ago
> we've got no good way to collect it. DRM is the best we've got right now While DRM is awful, I think we should keep in mind what advantages we (arguably?) enjoy from this monkey-patch (distributing one-time costs onto an arbitrary unit price). With Kickstarter and other one-time funding, there is no incentive to absolutely excel and make a huge profit from unit prices. There is also little risk in delivering a terrible product because one-time costs have already been covered. > As we stumble into our Star Trek future, we should be expending as much innovative energy as we can into finding a way to solve this issue. If this Star Trek future is anything like an utopia, then I don't see anything wrong with agreeing to keep the monkey-patch in place, even if it is not natural in the economic sense, or even enforcable. (Very much like privacy - it's not really enforcable, but I really hope that society starts to respect it anyway.)

gurkendoktor 14y ago

> we've got no good way to collect it. DRM is the best we've got right now While DRM is awful, I think we should keep in mind what advantages we (arguably?) enjoy from this monkey-patch (distributing one-time costs onto an arbitrary unit price). With Kickstarter and other one-time funding, there is no incentive to absolutely excel and make a huge profit from unit prices. There is also little risk in delivering a terrible product because one-time costs have already been covered. > As we stumble into our Star Trek future, we should be expending as much innovative energy as we can into finding a way to solve this issue. If this Star Trek future is anything like an utopia, then I don't see anything wrong with agreeing to keep the monkey-patch in place, even if it is not natural in the economic sense, or even enforcable. (Very much like privacy - it's not really enforcable, but I really hope that society starts to respect it anyway.)