China, to a certain degree, already operates on the information is free model. Much as international companies get pirated, other Chinese companies are pirated just as badly. It really inhibits a lot of industries. Sure, Chinese companies have ridden the free IP for a good ride, but for example there is no real software industry in China. Chinese software companies generally give away their software and make money on service contracts or consulting.
No and no. Why would I attend a “story telling festival” where a speaker talks at the rate of 100 words a minute when I can read 600? To save money, you’re asking me to waste time. I’d rather have the time.
There’s also the critical issue of choice. I’ve never gone into a bookstore or library and just picked a random book off the shelf to read. There are books I want to read. What are the chances that some festival is just going to happen to be featuring that book at the time I want to read it?
And speaking of reading on my own schedule, it’s just past 1:00 am and I’m getting ready to go to bed. I’ll be reading a book before I go to sleep. I don’t see how a story telling festival is going to replace that.
A “story telling festival”? What’s that? Do you have any idea how long it takes even the best reader to read a short novel out loud? Hours. And I hate to be read to. My reading speed is…well, I don’t know what it is, exactly, but it’s a lot faster than intelligible speech. I process and retain information much better if I read it, rather than hear it. I’ve always been this way.
I live right next to Fort Worth. I used to live IN Fort Worth. There have been a lot of performances that I’d have liked to go to (concerts and plays and such) but they only opened in Dallas, and frankly, no, I don’t feel like driving an hour or more each way to hear or watch these performances. I’ve also lived in much smaller towns, where the nearest venue was several hours away.
I’ve gone to book signings, and I’ve even gone to conventions, but as entertaining as it is to hear an author talk about his/her work and even maybe read a bit from it, it’s not the same as reading the whole work for myself. And what happens when the author dies? I bought a collection of Agatha Christie novels for my Nook, some of which I’d read before, and some of which were new to me.
Finally, if a book is worth reading, it’s usually worth re-reading. Same thing with a piece of music, I don’t just listen to my music once. For that matter, I tend to replay my games, too, unless they suck.
There’s plenty of free content out there already. If you want free content, search it out. But don’t deprive ME of more professional content because you’re too cheap to pay for your stuff.
Steal the song I just wrote, and I hope you and your loved ones won’t mind me killing you for it. 
Hey, if it’s all free, who would create?
Well, if there were technology to infinitely replicate food at virtually no cost, I’d hope we could get our system modified enough to reach the ‘food is free’ stage… If not, then really we should scrap that whole ‘society’ endeavour and start over. Plus, if food were free, artists could produce content for free (or significantly less, at least), so that way, everybody wins!
Less ironically, I of course understand and accept the whole ‘artists need to live, so they need money, so they must sell their work; if they can’t sell their work, they won’t be able to produce any work’-line of reasoning, but I think it’s important to realize that this is just the state of things the way they are, not the way they must (or ought to) be, it’s just descriptive. A ‘post-scarcity’ society where nobody has unmet needs would have no need for copyright law, and still, art would be created, by those who do it just because they love doing it – which might have the benefit of keeping away those just hoping to make a quick profit by engineering the latest Britney Spears-type quickly burned out megastar.
That’s of course a somewhat unrealistic and utopian scenario, but the point is that things don’t have to be the way they are now. That reasoning leads to artificially limiting the supply of goods we otherwise would have plenty of, just to keep the current model of profiting-from-need going – and really, where’s that gotten us? A world in which most artists struggle to make a living, while few hacks that happen to hit the common denominator make gazillions by just getting out of bed in the morning. I think cutting down on that disparity would go a long way towards a fairer distribution of both content and reward for producing this content.
Besides, lots of things, I already get for free – news, TV programming (at least that coming from ad-funded private stations), tons of content on the internet, etc. And still, subscription- or retail-based alternatives exist, and apparently aren’t doing too badly. So it’s not quite that much of a ‘if content were free, the whole market would collapse!’-black and white situation.
Steal the song I just wrote, and I hope you and your loved ones won’t mind me killing you for it.
Hey, if it’s all free, who would create?
You feel the solution to the problem of it being difficult for an artist to make a living is to make it impossible for an artist to make a living? It should be obvious you’re heading in the wrong direction. You want more art and better art? Figure out ways to make it easier for artists to sell their work.
Incorrect. Many copyrights in the USare now at least for the life of the creator, plus 70 years.
I’d be fine with abolishing copyrights, as long as they also abolish laws against assault and battery, so I could go beat smarmy little dickhead music thieves upside the head with a shovel.
Do you realize that an “artist” putting out a CD isn’t some schmoe with a guitar on his home computer? There are hundreds of people involved in the production of a big name CD production, and recording studios with equipment worth millions of dollars (post-scarcity? Yeah, right). Backup singers, orchestras, microphone manufacturers, soundboard and computer manufacturers, the cleaning lady who sweeps the studio’s floor - they should all work for free because they care about the art so much?
What you are proposing might (just might) work for literature, where it’s really conceivably one person sitting at a desk for a year, but once you make such an enormous group effort (to say nothing of making a movie, I’m sure you understand the cost involved in that) you need to create an incentive for people to put out great, not mediocre, work. “Because they love the art” isn’t gonna cut it.
Does everybody here think ideas spring forth fully formed from the minds of godlike creators? Culture evolves, drawing on previous ideas. Technology evolves, too. Everyone stands on the shoulders of giants.
I fully believe that the flow of information is the ONLY driver of human progress, and that anything which impedes that flow hinders progress and is wrong. This includes patents and copyrights, though I’m ambivalent about trademarks.
There is also the economic point that when supply is essentially unlimited, price tends towards zero. Ideas in the mind are worth money. Ideas released into the wild are driven towards a price of zero, regardless of their worth. Free market types should be against government sponsored monopolies as distorting the market.
This is entirely besides the pragmatic point of incentivizing creation. I think that is important, but that the current setup is horrifically wrong headed. For one thing, we need to get the problem right. The problem isn’t securing “property” rights as long as humanly possible, the problem is incentivizing creation. And 120 years (or even 20 in the case of patents) worth of monopoly is absolutely misguided and wrong.
Again, how do you propose to do that? How do you incentivize the Dixie Chicks to record another album or Warner Bros. to produce The Hobbit? Those are multiple-million dollar ventures that require hundreds of people.
The fact that they’re standing on the shoulders of giants is true, but completely irrelevant. You’re not going to get people to produce truly great works of art unless you pay them for it.
As previously noted, though, patents and copyrights were created for the express purpose of actually improving the flow of information. By patenting something, you tell the public how it’s made in exchange for the guarantee of temporary exclusivity. You share your secret in exchange for the concession that you need to be able to profit from it – for awhile.
By eliminating copyright and patents, you would guarantee that the only way of protecting information from immediate use by competitors would either be to keep it secret, or not to create it at all. The end result wouldn’t be a wonderful land where everyone created content for free for everybody – because nobody can make money that way. The end result would be the return of keeping trade secrets indefinitely, as well as regressive technology and other methods that would be intended to control content as much as possible. It would hold back information even more, not make it ultimately freer.
Let me give an example. Let’s say it was completely legal for any company to buy and sell ANY information about you, whatsoever. There are no more privacy restrictions. If a doctor wants to sell your name and address, along with your medical history, he can do that, fully legally; now a business can start up selling all your medical records with future employers, potential dates, neighbors, whomever wants to pay up. If a company wants to sell your telephone records to a company so that they can pool a list of your friends and social contacts, that’s legal, too. Now marketing firms can send targeted advertisements to your friends about stuff that you bought.
What would be your response to this? It’s to everyone’s advantage but yours, as the person who normally would control that information to some extent – companies who want to employ you, companies who want to sell things to you, that’s all great for them. It would probably even be great for society; you could easily study behavioral patterns in regards to medical illnesses you have based on what you really buy and use, not just what you say you do. Tons of new information would benefit all kinds of industries. Would you say “Hey, let’s go wild and free, knowing everything about me is a-ok!” or would you go out of your way to mislead and obfuscate such data collecting, and avoid it as much as possible, because it is ultimately to your detriment to share that to the world free of charge?
Let’s face it, forcing ‘information’ or ‘content’ to be free is about taking something you want from someone else. Nobody really wants information in general to be free, people want certain types of information to be free – specifically, non-physical products, mostly in entertainment, that they believe they should have a right to because they can be copied. It’s meaningless hand-waving intended to excuse personal behavior as OK.
How is that going to work for authors?
For that matter, how is it going to work for the guy or company who invents, at great expense and effort, the newest widget, if anybody else can swoop in and benefit from their labor and/or investment?
I am responding to this post only to applaud.
But copyright doesn’t protect ideas. It protects the expression of ideas. I work in a creative field (videogames) and everyone understands that IDEAS are a dime a dozen. What makes a videogame worth something is not the idea behind it but the 10’s of thousands of man-hours that go into turning that idea into something someone can actually play.
There’s nothing stopping you from taking the *idea *behind a videogame and creating one of your own – except access to thousands of man-hours of skilled labor. And in order to convince 30 or 40 artists, programmers, and designers to spend two years working on your project you need to offer them something more tangible than the thrill of creating.
Most opponents of copyright I’ve encountered don’t seem to grasp the sheer amount of *labor *required to realize a work of art. They have romantic notions about artistic genius and flashes of inspiration, when often creative work is a long and stressful slog.
Oh, I’m not advocating this. Certain types of creation would absolutely suffer. I’m just pointing out that professional art won’t be extinguished by lack of copyright. It will just be driven into controlled venues that make it much harder for the average consumer to access.
Copyright is often defended as protection for the creators. What’s often overlooked however, it that it also benefits consumers.
What the “information should be free” crowd doesn’t seem to get is that it already is free.
Facts about what happened you read in a book or see on the news are free. The ideas you pick up by watching someone do something on TV, or the way music flows in a song you hear, or the concepts displayed in that film or cartoon are all free. Boy wizards, jazz notes, sports scores, points of history, boy meets girl and falls in love, philosophical theories, plot points, interesting trivia, splattery brush strokes, camera angles, guitar riffs, recipes – all free!
What is not free is the time of organizing those facts, thoughts and ideas into a specific expression of art (copyrights), or the research to put together a new procedure used in business (patents), or the money involved of marketing an image or catchphrase so the public associates it with your business (trademarks).
You want to share a news story some journalist wrote with other people because you think it’s important information they should know? Fine. The facts and opinions reported are freely distributable - just put it into your own words. What, you don’t want to be bothered to take the time to do all that, or you don’t write very well and people wouldn’t understand? Then send the people to the website that has the news story on it so the company paying the journalist gets the ad impressions.
You were really excited because there was this great love story and neat action sequences in this film you saw, and you think it says a lot about the human condition and want to share those concepts with others? OK, so make some puppets or learn to draw or recruit all your actor friends to get in front of your web cam, create some characters and your own dialog, come up with different expressions of the same concepts and put on a show! Too much work? Your version would suck and no one would want to sit through it? Yes, exactly! Your friends can buy movie tickets or rent it on DVD if they want to see the original.
Information is and always has been free. Work is not free. If someone with the artistic skill puts in the time and effort to put information and ideas into an educational and/or entertaining product, if you want that product you need to pay for it. Copy ideas, not work.
knowledge communicated or received concerning a particular fact or circumstance
knowledge gained through study, communication, research, instruction, etc.;
You want all information to be free so you don’t have to expend energy or sacrifice time to get it but rather rely upon others to get it for you. Well where do they get it?
They obviously can’t get it from you as you are merely a consumer not a provider. Again, Where are they going to get it?
Oh, I get it, you want them to pull it out of their ass like that woman in Chicago said about where Obama was going to get her welfare check.
Society would suffer unquestionably.
Information has not been free since the first creature swam the sea or crawled the ocean floor or inhabited the landmass. Life has flourished without free information for 2 billion plus years, There is no evidence to suggest that now is a good time to change?
So you believe that musicians and artist are in general altruistic and want to “change the world” or as you say have an “impact”. No, musicians and artist in general don’t give a rats ass about the rest of the world, all they care about is doing what gives them succor and relief from their torments. And I might add they are mostly incapable of creating something real, their products are of but fantasy.
By liberalization you really mean Marxist over throw of the high tech industry.
Your question becomes can a high tech industry exist where “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” is the game of the day?
You are able and we need the information that only you have. Give all of us on this message board all the answers to all the chem eng tests you have taken and not copied from your classmates!
On second thought give us all the answers you copied as well. And gives us your personal information so we can let the chemical plants know that we don’t want you anywhere near them.
Listen kid let me give you some information:
The Marxist thought police separate you from a faith in anything, even yourself.
Then The Marxist thought police instill fear through alarmist claims, that the “sky is falling” and there ain’t anything you can do about it
Then The Marxist thought police breed vindictive hate for whoever you might think is responsible for “the sky falling”. Those that withhold information, for example!
All of this is orchestrated using the Hegelian dialectic with the specific purpose of controlling your mind.