Exactly Pervert. Thanks, you said it better than I. Another thing to keep in mind is that payments might be scaled differently for different usage’s of a work. For a quote or a song, a smaller payback would be fine if one isn’t buying the whole e-book or album. A good idea, as in a quote from an e-book, might get $.01 per copy. Now if it gets copied only a few times as if for home use, it amounts to at least a tacit acknowledgement of someone’s authorship. But if I use that person’s quote in a widely published article for either a major magazine, or something a million people copy off of the web, that comes out to $10,000 for one quote of their useful idea. Occasionally, that little bit might make more income than the sale of the complete work.
Hopefully though, it would help promote the complete work, which would usually generate much greater income. A song that someone copies and puts online might be worth .03 or .05 as opposed to a quote as it presumably costs more to produce in the recording proceses.
Better yet, (magically waves hands) if there were an altruistic reason for my saying ‘Hey! I sampled this quote from Yosemitebabe for my article!” from her book, which is not as easily copied as something digitally stored, and she gets her small scale payment from each of my sales, then she benefits more than my simply giving her credit in a footnote. I see this as an appeasement to the information-should-be-shared way of thinking by suggesting that if there is a reasonable valued added to the sharing, that will encourage innovation even more. And shared in different media as well.
In either case, digital based work or not, to take this one step further, if someone re-uses my work with Yosemitebabe’s quote, she might still get a smaller payment of .0055 USD from that persons work. The idea here is to both compensate a works originator using even more resources down the line than what we can now draw some income from, and at the same time, to scale smaller payments for additional reuses, it helps to put well received ideas into the public domain sooner than they are at this point. Paying out tenths or even hundreths of a penny is practically free. Yet a million re-uses of Yosemitebabe's quote at .0055 nets her a cool $5500.
Now, Gyan9, if information is free, then howz’about you share your bank account number with us, and perhaps a credit card or two? C’mon, don’t be holding out on us friend, it’s only information, just numbers on a page…
Here’s my problem with what you’re saying: A person invests several thousands of hours training themselves and producing a work that is based on ideas and the development of those ideas. They spend several thousands of dollars on the overhead it takes to produce their work, musical equipment, art supplies, a machine shop, whatever tools are required for making those ideas something concrete that people can touch, see, listen to. To go to all that effort, to simply have someone else copy that song, or, pick up that painting and walk off with it, or, have a friend reverse engineer the invention and produce as many copies as they wish with their much larger machine shop, all for free after buying one unit, doesn’t compensate the author / innovator.
The artist or innovator needs a roof over their head, bread on the table, braces for the kids’ teeth. Where does it come from if the ideas are just given away? Without the idea, there is nothing to work from.
You can give people at random the same art supplies, or musical equipment or a film crew as the artist has and tell them “create something that people are likely to enjoy”. You can give a thousand monkeys a typewriter. But the only people that will create something valid with those resources are those that have the ideas, the intellectual moxie, to do so. You can’t separate the idea from the effort to produce the original work. It’s one and the same. Nor can you make a workable computer chip without both the fabrication plant and the intellectual know-how to create the chip’s architecture. We’re talking about a lot more effort than a few hours modifying a code or researching a Wikopedia entry.
Specifically, please, how does your model get around this problem?