Not to mention licensing an existing intellectual property almost always subjects you to strict oversight by the property owner. I once worked on a product using a Star Trek license from Paramount, and it was a nightmare. Everything had to be approved by Paramount licensing, who really didn’t care if their demands degraded the product. I would much prefer creating from scratch, but marketing is always seduced by known quantities like a successful franchise.
Tell me about it. I started off doing Tom Clancy games. Fortunately, Tom didn’t pay much attention to us at first so we could pretty much do what we wanted. After I left Red Storm his brand managers got more intrusive and the development process got much more fraught. Derivative works are a pain in the ass.
JK Rowling: I’ve written a prequel to the Harry Potter books. It’s all about a little girl named Gwendolyn who grows up to establish the Hogwarts School of Magic! Would you be interested in publishing my work?
Publisher: Yes, I do believe we would. You fool! You gave us a copy of it! Now we can publish it to our hearts content without reimbursing you at all. Mwa ha ha ha ha ha ha!
Oay everybody – why are these publisher stil trying to sell books when “information” is all free? Shouldn’t all books be distributed on teh Internet for anyone who wants to download them? (of course, I don’t see why anyone would bother proofreading the e-manuscripts or uploading them to the servers if they weren’t able to be paid for it, but I do not live in a cyberUtopia.)
JK Rowling: Ha! I saw through your scheme. I’ll show you. I’ll publish my book myself and print all the copies on my personal printing press.
Publisher: Gosh, I guess you outfoxed us. Well, go ahead and self-publish your book. In fact, just to show there’s no hard feelings, we’d like to pre-order a copy from the first run that comes off your one printing press.
JK Rowling: What was that last part? I couldn’t hear you over the noise on your end.
Publisher: Oh, I’m sorry. That’s just the sound of the five hundred printing presses we have. We’re gearing them up for a special print run we’re planning. Looking forward to receiving a copy of your book.
I may have skimmed over some posts, but I don’t think this is a very good characterization of anyone’s argument. You have claimed that the end of copyright would make no difference to big name authors, and others have questioned how this could possibly be true.
Earlier you posted:
and then you were asked how writers would continue to make money in this copyright-free world. You replied:
Then you were asked how big name authors were going to sell bucketloads of books when anyone could copy and distribute these books without paying the author a dime. You haven’t come up with any good answer to this question. In a copyright-free world, any new book by a big name author would be available free on the Internet within days, if not hours.
In this brave new world few people would risk publishing books by unknown authors in the first place, unless the book was considered likely to be immediately popular (e.g. dealt with a currently trendy topic). There’d be no point taking a chance on something new and hoping that the book would gradually become popular after getting good reviews and generating good word of mouth, because as soon as that happened rival publishers would start cranking out their own, cheaper editions of this book. Publishers could only expect to make money on “opening weekend” sales of books by established big name authors, so that would be where they would focus their energies. Both the authors and the official publishers would make less than they do now though, because competing editions would be released by rival publishers as soon as possible. There’d also be those free scanned copies online that I mentioned before.
And you’ve come up with nothing compelling. Only the most devoted fans of a few big name popular authors would care about getting the “authorized” edition of a book. There’s no reason why anyone else should care.
If you go naked in your own home, you have a right to prosecute peeping toms. If you walk nude down crowded streets, you can’t demand the law force everyone else to go blindfolded.
There is a way to abolish copyright and still have artists/creators paid for their work: patronage.
That doesn’t mean you have to find a rich duke who likes blockbuster movies. It means that the way to get paid for creative work is before you do/release the work, rather than after.
The model for this is that a creator lets it be known that for $x, he will make his next work available, and people pledge to contribute some amount. When $x is reached, the money is put taken from the donors and put into escrow. When the work is released, the money is taken from escrow and given to the artist. Obviously, you can have more complicated setups where some or all of the money can be tapped immediately to pay for things like production costs, or where the artist can start working at some fraction of $x, but not release until $x, etc. See kickstarter.com for an example of this sort of setup.
This will cause a number of changes to the way art and culture are created, but there are many good ones as well as bad. On the balance, I think the positives outweigh the negatives. You may disagree. I think it’d make an interesting discussion. Whatever the changes, this system might actually work in a world where we have computers. Social norms for copyrights might make it through the digital transition, but so far it doesn’t look like they’re going to. And in the absence of strong social norms, you need draconian rule to maintain copyright in an age of ubiquitous networked computers. It’s just not going to happen, no matter how much you call people thieves and villains.
It’s trickier to do away with trademark law, but I believe it can be handled with cryptographic signing. You’ll know it’s a real Gucci bag the same way you know that you’re really talking to gmail.com. The real Gucci will have a secret key that they can sign their bags with that other people’s augmented reality equipment can recognize. That’s a few years out, but I think it’ll be there when we need it.
Are all you people janitors or something?? Aren’t most of us already knowledge workers? Artists will eventually do what all the rest of us have been doing all along – earn a salary.
Like I said before, knowledge in the brain is valuable. If you establish your credentials, somebody will pay to get it out (see: consulting). Sure, the days of writing a 3 minute song and coasting on the royalties for the rest of your life will be over, but music, movies, writing and programming will still be big business. The change will be in getting paid for the faucet, rather than yesterday’s water, so to speak.
So I can pay up front for a work of unknown quality, or I can wait until it’s done (and I know I like it) and get it for free.
Tell me again how this is a viable business model?
If you don’t pay, it doesn’t get done. Have you ever met an engineer? Or any other office worker, perhaps? When the secretary quits, the boss doesn’t owe her royalties to continue using her filing system. When the boss quits, the VP doesn’t owe him royalties to continue using his organizational structure, or even his management style. Do you owe your teachers royalties for all that valuable information they provided you with that you still use today?
You’re setting aside certain bits and treating them as a special class. The trend of the last century is against you here. Information is information.
Only because the law says you can. If society decides peeping should be unrestricted, you no longer have a right to privacy in your own home.
That’s kind of the point the rest of us have been making. If artists don’t get paid, art doesn’t get done.
You seem to believe that somebody will step forward and volunteer either to produce art for nothing or to pay an artist to produce art which anyone will then be free to use.
Why should I, as an author, spend a year writing a book if at the end of the year anyone can publish it? Why should I, as a publisher, pay an author a year’s salary to write a book if at the end of the year anyone can publish it? Why don’t I just sit back and wait for some other sucker to pay somebody to write a book and then I publish it at no cost to myself?
Because somebody who can afford it wants it done? Or else maybe there are ways to turn a buck on content that don’t include legally mandating zero competition?
Look, I can’t afford to have a secretary come and organize my paperwork at home. But that is a valuable enough resource that some companies hire a full-time employee to create and maintain that file system. I can’t afford to have a programmer personally design some software tool for me to use. But banks and insurance companies have armies of programmers who write internal code that never gets sold to anybody. Just because the information isn’t destined to be sold on a shelf doesn’t mean it isn’t valuable to somebody.
I can’t afford to make a high-budget movie or studio album (although technology has made it possible within almost any middle class budget to create or commission high-quality low-budget movies and music). But maybe Steve Jobs can, or President Obama. Or just maybe, Warner Brothers. And without copyrights, some enterprising soul can take Bill Gates’s “Terminator 5” and sell copies on DVD, or on his website, or whatever. Warner Brothers can sell high quality discs with posters and a full-color insert. Or maybe a subscription to the latest content, fresh off the content farm. And if you feel like waiting a week, it will no doubt be free on Bittorrent, sans fancy disc and poster.
People will pay for atoms, or access to a reliable pipe. Naked bits are worthless. That doesn’t mean you can’t still monetize content. You just have to do it in different ways. Of course, innovative business models are anathema to big content. Unless you count copyright lawyers and the DMCA as “business models”.
It’s a mistake to thnk this is only about “big content.” it’s also about the creator. As a creator, I wNt control over my creation, meaning not only plain copying but also any modification or derivative of that creation. A sent copyright law, you also lose any such moral protection if the creator’s right to credit or to block any k jectoonable modification of the work.
You’ve totally lost any sense of economic reality here. Things like books and music albums and movies are nothing like business software - they are produced to be sold to an audience not used exclusively by one business.
And you want to have a system of art that depends on Steve Jobs and Bill Gates - and Barack Obama of all people - deciding to pay people to make a movie for them. Where on Earth did you come up with this idea? Even if in some bizarre parallel universe, they decided to make a movie, how would this insane system work? There would be maybe five or ten movies being made each decade. And the only people who’d watch them would be the President and a couple of billionaires.
Yeah, there’s a healthy artistic community. This is even worse than the story telling festival idea.
Royalties? What are you talking about? What do royalties have to do with copyright?
Anyway, if I, as a creator, decide to enter into a private contract with a publisher where I agree to a smaller payment up front in exchange for the possibility of royalties on the back end, what business is that of yours?
(BTW, when I worked as an engineer, I was partially compensated with stock options. I accepted a smaller salary up front in exchange for a chance to gamble on potentially receiving a larger payout down the road if the company wound up being successful. Like royalties, stock options provided a strong incentive for me to do my best possible work. Are you similarly opposed to paying employees with stock options?)
Lots of people produce art without much hope of getting paid for it. Lots of content is offered for free, with people making a living on it (there are numerous examples in this thread).
Already, if you’re looking to employ, say, a graphics artist, you’ll typically look at some of the artists prior work – which he then must have created either just for this purpose, as a sort of ‘demo reel’, or just because he enjoys doing it – and based on this, you either hire him, or not. The same can be tried for funding authors, musicians, or others – they work out something like a ‘grant proposal’ (this is what I’ve already done, this is what I’m planning to do, etc.), like scientists do, and if there’s interest in the project, it may get funded. It’s not paying upfront for something of unknown quality, at least not any more than going to the cinema to watch a movie you haven’t seen or buying an album you haven’t heard is; it’s investing in the future possibility of enjoying the outcome of somebody’s creative work. There’s also always the possibility of commissioned work: say, you want some specific work of art, like a portrait in the olden days – so you find an artist you judge capable of producing it, and hire him; after all, it’s the artists skill and creativity that’s his true resource, and that can’t be copied, at least not by anybody of lesser skill and creativity, in which case, it’s really just a market.
Yes, it was just a short-hand expression for “copies made without a prior agreement with the author”. sigh
Ok, perhaps it doesn’t happen much in video games. It happens a lot when making videos and in studios. It was just a simple example of a cost that would no longer apply to some people.
Which is the exact opposite of what you previously said. Either the “knock-off” publishers copy everyone, disadvantaging the lesser known authors, or they only target the best-sellers, leaving the lesser known alone. When the copyright supporters have collectively decided which it is, then I’ll discuss it more, but I’m not going to argue both ways.