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> Are you looking for a 100% solution? If so, you'll never find it. I dunno, getting paid to make information-based content (which includes anything you can s

by zanny 14y ago

> Are you looking for a 100% solution? If so, you'll never find it. I dunno, getting paid to make information-based content (which includes anything you can stick on a hard drive) by the people that want the content, rather than by people who want to try to profit off its artificial scarcity, could probably be a 100% solution. Because then the information you have you can treat like anything else you own - you can share it, spread it, etc, without fear, and the content creator got paid by people that wanted it made. I mean, it would be a culture shift, but it is a 100% solution. Piracy doesn't matter if the point of profit isn't in per-goods sales but in goods creation, where the actual costs lie.

deleted 14y ago
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tjcelaya 14y ago
I'm having trouble understanding what you mean by people paying for the creation of goods by the people that want the content. The division between paying for DRM-free content and the creation of that content seems contrived unless you're saying that consumers would pay the content creators directly so that more content can be produced, but that would make it problematic for up and coming artists to break into the market. Don't take this as an argument, I'm just asking for clarification.
Silhouette 14y ago
I dunno, getting paid to make information-based content (which includes anything you can stick on a hard drive) by the people that want the content, rather than by people who want to try to profit off its artificial scarcity, could probably be a 100% solution. Unfortunately, by simple economics, that works only if you can find a sufficient number of people to entirely fund the sunk costs and an acceptable level of profitability up-front, allowing the low marginal costs to be written off. This is the classical patronage model, or in more modern terms, something like Kickstarter. On Kickstarter, a project that has experienced, well-known, credible people behind it might reach seven figures of funding, though that is a significant success and relatively rare. I'm all for cutting out the middle man and for curtailing the exorbitant fees commanded by a handful of A-lister actors/singers/producers/whatever, but raising a few million a handful of times each year still isn't going to fund the big media industries, not by a long shot. That culture shift you're talking about would be necessary and dramatic for this idea to work, and that's not going to happen any time in the immediate future, so what's your proposed solution to keep people getting paid to make good content tomorrow?

by zanny 14y ago

deleted 14y ago

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tjcelaya 14y ago

I'm having trouble understanding what you mean by people paying for the creation of goods by the people that want the content. The division between paying for DRM-free content and the creation of that content seems contrived unless you're saying that consumers would pay the content creators directly so that more content can be produced, but that would make it problematic for up and coming artists to break into the market. Don't take this as an argument, I'm just asking for clarification.

Silhouette 14y ago

I dunno, getting paid to make information-based content (which includes anything you can stick on a hard drive) by the people that want the content, rather than by people who want to try to profit off its artificial scarcity, could probably be a 100% solution. Unfortunately, by simple economics, that works only if you can find a sufficient number of people to entirely fund the sunk costs and an acceptable level of profitability up-front, allowing the low marginal costs to be written off. This is the classical patronage model, or in more modern terms, something like Kickstarter. On Kickstarter, a project that has experienced, well-known, credible people behind it might reach seven figures of funding, though that is a significant success and relatively rare. I'm all for cutting out the middle man and for curtailing the exorbitant fees commanded by a handful of A-lister actors/singers/producers/whatever, but raising a few million a handful of times each year still isn't going to fund the big media industries, not by a long shot. That culture shift you're talking about would be necessary and dramatic for this idea to work, and that's not going to happen any time in the immediate future, so what's your proposed solution to keep people getting paid to make good content tomorrow?