It is very strange that we have to emulate physical goods with music and videos. The underlying technology would allow copying with a marginal cost of zero. The problem of course is how to feed the artists and all the other people in the industry if we give out the content for free.
One thing that I believe doesn't work is a "culture flatrate" where you pay a fee and can access what you want. In the end, this is not much different from having a tax, and having the state pay the artists. And I really don't want the state to decide what is art and what not.
What I really think we have to do long term, and I'm totally serious, is to move to a post-capitalist society, and get rid of money and the requirement to do wage labor. I'm convinced there are many pressing problems - climate change, rising inequality, the fact that many people are overworked despite productivity increases - that we cannot easily solve in our current society. It's like our political system has collected too much technical debt.
I know, Joel Spolsky says you should never do a total rewrite, and I think this applies even more for your whole society :-) but I believe strongly we're in for a serious refactoring and core replacement. And the content industry is only one small symptome of that.
It's not so much "emulating" physical goods as it is trying to capture separate costs that physical goods link intrinsically and (mostly) effectively.
With physical media (paper books, boards games, records, film, etc) the cost of creating+distributing copies is so high that it meets or exceeds the cost of creating (or, curating/funding an environment/projects that enables the creation of) the original work. Creation and distribution of physical copies is challenging and profitable enough that creators can be paid by a portion of the profits from distribution.
In contrast, copying + distributing digital media is so phenomenally easy and egalitarian that there is very little opportunity to add value and create profit. So the method of paying creators that is essentially "built in" to physical media does not exist for digital media.
One thing that I believe doesn't work is a "culture flatrate" where you pay a fee and can access what you want. In the end, this is not much different from having a tax, and having the state pay the artists. And I really don't want the state to decide what is art and what not.
What I really think we have to do long term, and I'm totally serious, is to move to a post-capitalist society, and get rid of money and the requirement to do wage labor. I'm convinced there are many pressing problems - climate change, rising inequality, the fact that many people are overworked despite productivity increases - that we cannot easily solve in our current society. It's like our political system has collected too much technical debt.
I know, Joel Spolsky says you should never do a total rewrite, and I think this applies even more for your whole society :-) but I believe strongly we're in for a serious refactoring and core replacement. And the content industry is only one small symptome of that.