4 ms·
I see it as a cart-before-the-horse problem. Before the printing press things were more horse-before-cart (no copyright). After the press and the statute of Ann
by vy8vWJlco 13y ago
I see it as a cart-before-the-horse problem. Before the printing press things were more horse-before-cart (no copyright). After the press and the statute of Anne, to today, we have been very cart-first. We paid for physical CDs without knowing if we would like most of what they had on them (we may have heard one song on the radio for free, as advertisement - ie, the pirate bay is a modern radio business - but the rest were a mystery, and distributors exploited our eagerness by adding on a dozen unknowns). We still felt like we were buying something tangible (the medium was tangible), so it was relatively easy to accept trading money in advance for something we couldn't see into first.
I think following that approach further requires an untenable "enforcement" culture on private and social thinking and collaborative efforts. I'd rather put the cart back behind the horse (fund the work itself, to create the first copy, rather than pay mandatory royalties for all future copies - and endure the social unrest of preventing what boil down to thought-crimes, IMHO).
In the past artists (and scientists) had patrons but today we have kickstarter. It is possible to fund the creation of large projects (movies, TV shows, games, hardware, research, etc) without as much risk to the people carrying it out.