> we should move to models of publishing that do not require this restriction of information.
It’s interesting how this comment veers into a completely hypothetical overhaul of society in which money doesn’t matter, for reasons which of course are hand-waved away.
On one hand: Sure! Sounds great! If someone can reinvent all of society in a way that everyone is free to do whatever they want and not worry about getting paid, then by all means let’s go for it.
On the other hand: These proposals are so fanciful and far-fetched (at least in our lifetimes) that these comments read more like a tacit admission that the current system is indeed necessary.
I don’t really understand this logic. Are you saying that multi generational projects are… well I don’t really know what you’re saying. When the world was dominated by the divine right of kings, and changing that was going to take hundreds of years… should people not have discussed what to do to move down a better path?
My plan as a robotics engineer is to prove that open source robotics can be a viable industry by building open source farming robots (see my profile) so that a generation of children grow up understanding that community owned community built robotics are a perfectly viable option, and we don’t need venture capital for robotics infrastructure development.
There’s a generation of adults today who grew up watching Carl Sagan’s COSMOS from 1980 and are now adults working in law to combat climate change - a major call to action in his show the fruits of which Sagan would never live to see.
I fully believe that the world I advocate for will never be fully realized by the time I die. This does not discourage me from laying the ground work and having the conversations. Just as I am working on open source robotics for farming, I encourage other people to contribute to open culture so that we can some day build a better world.
In fact that’s what the people at the internet archive are doing too. Building a better future by fighting now to establish precedent and prove to people what is possible. Human lifetimes are short and I see no reason to restrict our projects to things which can be achieved today.
>When the world was dominated by the divine right of kings, and changing that was going to take hundreds of years… should people not have discussed what to do to move down a better path?
We could. But historically, it ends in a bloody battle of nobles vs nobles and sometimes they break off and become the next generation of noble. Despite the name, their goals are not necessarily that.
>This does not discourage me from laying the ground work and having the conversations. Just as I am working on open source robotics for farming, I encourage other people to contribute to open culture so that we can some day build a better world.
What ultimately discourages me is that the person who does this will not reao the rewards they sow. On the contrary, the next generation noble may contort it into something absolutely dysyopic.
Conversation doesn't mean much without action. But us non-nobles talking about bloodshed is seen as passe and uncouth. Not much will happen until we take it back by force (not necessarily violent, but a huge, unignoreble gesture coordinated by millions... A very hard problem to do as a grassroots movement)
> My plan as a robotics engineer is to prove that open source robotics can be a viable industry by building open source farming robots (see my profile) so that a generation of children grow up understanding that community owned community built robotics are a perfectly viable option, and we don’t need venture capital for robotics infrastructure development.
Spotify has a free tier where you can listen to any song for free. YouTube lets you watch almost anything for free. Both of these also pay the creators. There are many more services peddling free content and even covering hosting costs.
Libraries are free.
We have plenty of completely non-hypothetical non-society-overhauling ways to access information for free. Lots of information is free, lots of it is accessible.
> the current system is indeed necessary.
Not all of the current system is equally necessary. Maybe not necessary at all, it just so happens to be the system we have now. There have been plenty of radically different models of society over the years. Yea, they're gone now, but this current one isn't particularly old either.
Just to be more concrete - if you stop using and protecting your trademark, you can lose it. If you just hoard and don't use a copyright, you won't lose it. We already have systems in place that can provide similar info exchange for free.
Libraries tend not to put ads into books to fund them.
The physical restrictions in a library - ala, only 1 person could read it at a time - is what prevents publishers from trying to charge more or prevent it.
The basic issue is that if a library is filled with electronic books, the publishers will stand to lose a lot of profit. Now I'm not arguing that they deserve this profit, but there's no good model so far that both preserves the profit motive, but also make available the copyrighted material digitally and unrestrictedly.
Perhaps there could be a form of library "fee" that is funded by tax payers, in a similar way to how public radio gets funded. The state pays some amount to each published author who make their book available in the library, from a pot of money collected from taxation.
> Libraries tend not to put ads into books to fund them.
They do not, they are government funded. But to say they are funded insufficiently as is (without this advent of better electronic resources) is under selling the issue.
>Perhaps there could be a form of library "fee" that is funded by tax payers, in a similar way to how public radio gets funded.
If your local, that's called taxes. And people reaction to paying more taxes is pretty much why corporations always win. We'd rather sacrifice time with intrusive ads than pay more for a community effort.
The majority in the west value their time as basically zero. They’d rather watch 20 minutes of adverts an hour than pay a couple of dollars.
The cost of advertising on the Super Bowl is about $8/hour, so not only are people selling g their time for $8 an hour, they are then paying more than that on top in extra costs in buying things (the only reason someone advertises is because they make more profit then by not advertising, the expected return on an hour of Super Bowl adverts is more than $8 per viewer)
> The basic issue is that if a library is filled with electronic books, the publishers will stand to lose a lot of profit.
Profit they're only getting because they figured out a way to cheat the concept of ownership and get around the first sale doctrine.
> The physical restrictions in a library - ala, only 1 person could read it at a time - is what prevents publishers from trying to charge more or prevent it.
Publishers hate digital lending that doesn't give them money, even when it acts just like a physical book: one person at a time, takes hours to be restocked, etc. Restrictions like that don't stop publishers from fighting back; only precedent keeps them in check.
>they figured out a way to cheat the concept of ownership and get around the first sale doctrine.
How do you figure we get around this problem? The ability to reshare infinite electronic copies of a work does make this a legitimate issue compared to a physical good. I don't have any good answer.
The problem here isn't that we need to find a way to compensate authors for their work, it's that people can't survive without compensation, so writing for the sake of writing, without compensation, often isn't viable.
If we had some form of universal income, or other form of distribution of goods such that people didn't need to labor for a living (at least not with the current US norm of 40-50 hours a week), then it would be much more practical to say that all books are free for mass consumption. Then authors can write not for compensation, but for the pleasure of writing and knowing their works will be appreciated. And writers with a famous profile, who want the spoils of compensation, can be sponsored/patronized, like artists in the Renaissance.
I don't have a full plan, but I know exactly where I'd start:
A scheme where you lend each copy you own to one person at a time and don't use it yourself, with them deleting the loaned copy at the end, and with a reasonably large granularity like "1 day", needs to be legal. And probably disallow publishers from blocking such a scheme.
Without draconian DRM to enforce, this is only going to work in a fantasy. I mean, piracy already exists today, and this could be achieved if people voluntarily follow these rules outlined.
I thought the same but imagine we put books in our ads(!) The newspaper is a pretty low effort barely useful thing. We could chop a book by its charters, put ads on every other page and stuff the 20 chapters into peoples mailbox. One per week. They are more likely to go on shelves than the current product has odds for eyeballs before bedding the litterbox.
Yes, I agree with you about this comment specifically. But on this issue in particular, we do not need to overhaul society so drastically. We have laws about lending out books one has purchased. We have laws about how long copyright should last. We can change these laws but still retain much of their benefit while allowing much more freedom to access knowledge.
There is a line here and we may be walking too far on one edge of it. But the comment you replied to does have a utopian tone far from the pragmatism this case actually revolves around.
The US book market is 0.5% of the GDP. The government could subside every author with the same salary they make today and it would only be a small fraction of the amount we spend on the military.
This is true of many, many careers: if you take that career in isolation, you could fund just the people in that career at their current salaries, for a tiny fraction of GDP. That doesn't scale to the entire populace, and there's no good justification for subsidizing this group and not others.
UBI, on the other hand, is entirely feasible, not least of which because it ditches the completely infeasible "at their current salary" in favor of "enough to live, not enough that most people won't want more". And you'd create substantial growth via startups and other creative endeavors. UBI gives everyone the option to try experiments that might not pay off right away.
A reason for subsiding this group but not others is that our economic system is so bad at utilizing the potential of their work.
It's literally free to distribute all books/newspapers/magazines to all people in the world. Why aren't we?
It's common to have state intervention in markets that are unable to utilize resources efficiently on their own.
About UBI, sure! The point of my comment was that this isn't a "fanciful overhaul of society" but a real possibility that could be implemented given some though and political will. UBI also fits that category, but is probably a bit more expensive and disruptive than financing authors.
I'm glad that the wages for teachers come from the government. Imagine a world with only private schools.
Same with books. Easy access to books was a huge contributor to the industrial revolution and especially Germany profited from weak copyright laws. Would you rather insist on your rights for a few coins more - or transform an entire generation?
How would you determine if someone qualifies as an author deserving full salary? Can I become an author by simply meeting a word count quota? What prevents a large portion of the population from quitting their jobs and becoming authors instead?
My understanding is that most bands make more on merch than the actual distribution of their music, because fans always want more and are willing to pay them directly to encourage more works.
There has to be a better way than the model we have now where everything is so tightly controlled.
The US subsidizing the book market would be an incredible waste of my taxes, given that the majority of published works are fiction, political drivel, and non-fiction memoirs that provide near-zero value to "humanity" that the root poster is clutching pearls about.
The IA's collection of books they had to remove almost certainly has the same composition, and therefore the same loss in value (roughly zero) after being made inaccessible.
You're right, I confused "misanthropic" and "misogynistic".
That turns out to not make your comment any less incorrect or manipulative, though. Requiring people to pay for the stuff they consume isn't even remotely misanthropic.
Didn't mean that either. I meant that saying the entire book industry is a waste not worth tax money, implying other uses of taxes like military spending is more valuable, is something that could have been said by a fictional character conjured by a person who thinks lowly of humankind.
Memoirs, political books, fiction - no need for the taxpayer to subsidize, people can buy themselves.
Actually useful technical material: already available for free on the internet.
Poor people are not dying on the streets because they can't read the autobiography of the latest president. Tax dollars going to that instead of climate change or cancer research or something similar is incredibly immoral.
2. Your view on books and by extension, long term education is well, short term. A classic issue used to defund libraries. You don't give proper resources and knowledge to get the homeless today off thr street. It's to ensure much less of the next generation isn't also on the street.
There were a vast number of technical books on the internet archive, that was mostly what I used it for. They’re not easily accessible elsewhere, maybe pirated from random torrent sites but they’re not discoverable or easily searched.
Why should we turn information into a "product", introducing scarcity where none is required? It's just a misguided attempted to force every part of society into a capitalist system, regardless of whether it makes any sense. It will probably fail in the long run anyway, since who wants to pay for something that they can get for free, even it involves circumventing the rules. How many here would pay $30 to take a casual look at a journal article, when they could get it from Sci-Hub?
If we are sticking with a mostly capitalist system so that money is so important to get things created, then a government can provide some for this purpose (and they often do already). It's not like they don't borrow or print money in whatever quantity is needed.
I suspect that it's the same issue that has led certain neoliberals and libertarians to denying that various forms of pollution are a problem. There's just no way that it can be fixed within capitalism, so better just deny that there's any problem at all.
>Why should we turn information into a "product", introducing scarcity where none is required
Because expert information comes from experts who are paid a lot to do stuff not involving the authoring of their ideas. And we need to incentivize them to get said valuable information. How many people here have some novel expertise in their fields? How many would help produce technical articles pro Bono? Or for pay but end up mass pirated?
I 1000% agree the publishers themselves take way too much off the top of these authors, but the concept of "just provide knowledge out of thr good of your heart" doesn't work at scale.
>If we are sticking with a mostly capitalist system so that money is so important to get things created, then a government can provide some for this purpos
Which runs into all the problems we all know too well. Something something politics, something something taxes, something something lobbying.
On top of all that, the government just simply doesn't compensate as well as the private sector. I'm not sure if this will ever change.
> we need to incentivize them to get said valuable information.
Why should that incentive take form of making information a product?
"just provide knowledge out of thr good of your heart" is a gross misrepresentation of what the person before said, and you even quote the passage indicating as much.
It seems like you're trying to portray the problem as a dichotomy: "product" vs "goodness of heart". That other ways pose problems doesn't mean much. The current side of the false dichotomy causes problems as in the OP.
>It seems like you're trying to portray the problem as a dichotomy: "product" vs "goodness of heart". That other ways pose problems doesn't mean much. The current side of the false dichotomy causes problems as in the OP.
Their suggestions last people who "just want to deny it happens" and their solution is to just let the government pay for it (spoilers: it's allready subsidized), so I don't exactly understand why you think I'm establishing a dictonimy.
Yes. People are unironically arguing to simply abolish copyright. It's an extreme solution and I disagree. I haven't heard many good moderate solutions out there because people are so pro-piracy that I'm inclined to think they don't care about the people behind novel ideas, just benefiting off their work. You get tit for tat with that sort of thinking.
I have moderate ideas, but as I've learned moderate tales fade to the extremities if you aren't even slightly aligned. We're very disaligned here, so the starting step to to show why that extreme take is bad and work from there.
Now that I never said the current system is fine. Because that's not my argument, nor the one the other extreme take needs to hear. But if that's all you got from my chain I suppose I need to do the same thing with you.
Why did you react to "but people need to survive" with "well it NEEDS to be a product"? Compensation comes in many ways, and I was simply saying that the government has historically been horrible at compensating most parts of any industry. What makes this time with books different?
>>Why should we turn information into a "product"[...]
> Because [...]
That clearly indicates that you're in fact advocating it to be a product. Perhaps I misunderstood your post, but then I'm afraid you're not making yourself very clear. I'm also not seeing any references to survival in your post, just of incentivizing where work goes, so I am fairly certain what you think you write is not what you actually write.
I've gotten 15 other responses and the ideas I write and respond to inevitably blend together. So I apologize if I make some assumptions based on statements from other parts of the post that I have answered.
Regardless, I am a huge fan of the devil's advocate. You can talk about points without them being your complete world view. That's the assumption that we seem misaligned with. Just because I don't want all information to be free the moment it is published (or stolen) doesn't mean I want to abolish copyright.
> And we need to incentivize them to get said valuable information.
Are we sure about this? It seems to me that a lot of those experts become experts despite the incentive structures that they are in. And, there are those to-be experts who had to quit, because they didn't have enough resources to fight the established “incentive” structures. Maybe if we could let people do what they could become an expert in, we would all be better off.
There will always be nigh-altruistic people, but I'm talking more in tiers than absolute:
1. How many people can and do become experts?
2. How many of those experts interact at all outside of their career? Even just posting about work rants on social media?
3. Of 2), how many take the time to author any sort of content on the side? From an unknown blog to a conference talk to podcasts, contributing to open source,, etc. we can break this down further to those who do it outside of the company sponsoring them to do so.
4. Of 3), how many go on to extensively share knowledge? In things like journals or technical deep dives or books? Things that take months of the writing process to formalize
5. And lastly how many of 4) would happen without any sort of incentive structure? No grants, no compensation, no time off work to do this, etc.
I'm mostly talking about group 5 here, and then dividing it into 6) how many of those would then be okay with people (mostly other companies) immediately implementing those ideas, potentially making millions while they may not even get shallow platitudes of thanks? It feels like exploitation of their knowledge, and depending on the product it may indeed be) have some ethical quandary the creator fundamentally disagrees with. But it's for "the advancement of humanity" so the just need to accept that and let people extract their knowledge.
>? It seems to me that a lot of those experts become experts despite the incentive structures that they are in
It'll vary by industry, yes. I'm sure authors don't write expecting to make the next Dune. But in the context of this audience: I have definitely seen enough discussion here and on other social media that I wouldn't be uncomfortable asserting that a good 70% of tech workers would not be here without high compensation to education ratio (and I apologize for not providing any hard evidence, this is simply a gut feeling from my own statistical samples from years of discourse). Many people are indeed here for the money first and foremost.
>Maybe if we could let people do what they could become an expert in, we would all be better off.
I don't disagree, I'd love a post scarcity society that doesn't need to perform labor to survive. But that's an even loftier goal than abolishing copyright.
I can see other crowds completely disagreeing with the notion of "not all knowledge is equal", however. Definitely a savory group out there that believe that everyone needs to contribute to society somehow and not "leech off our taxes".
It’s a shame we still haven’t built a simple, universal direct payment system that anyone can use to send money to anyone else. By simple I mean my grandparents can figure it out themselves so don’t say bitcoin.
Can you prove your first statement? I assume you cannot as it's nonsense. Lookup how /dev/random is not really random, but relies on interrupts occuring at random timestamps.
That's like saying f(x)=x is a random function, if x is random.
It’s interesting how this comment veers into a completely hypothetical overhaul of society in which money doesn’t matter, for reasons which of course are hand-waved away.
On one hand: Sure! Sounds great! If someone can reinvent all of society in a way that everyone is free to do whatever they want and not worry about getting paid, then by all means let’s go for it.
On the other hand: These proposals are so fanciful and far-fetched (at least in our lifetimes) that these comments read more like a tacit admission that the current system is indeed necessary.