Sure, but you are not free to make additional copies. 
Your right. If this was the point or your original arguments, then I did miss it altogether. I have no idea what marginal costs has to do with the claim that an artists work should or should not be considered “public goods”. Can you explain the link?
Not FACTS, FCTS (although FACTS is a quicker way of pronouncing it).
FCTS is system I came up with based on an idea by another poster. Read all about it on page3 of this thread.
The short version is it allows artists to get paid and people to get all the downloads they want.
[note: I thought that the quoted mateiral would transfer over, but it hasn’t, and I’m too lazy and too busy to go back and cut and paste, much less skim…but I did see this, so let me comment]
Actually, this is a big deal in copyright law (which is much different from patent law, I would post the difference to help out the debate, but I’m too lazy and people get the gist anyway, it seems…) in Europe where Europeans have a this sense of adroit moral (i.e. “moral rights”). Alot of your examples, Gygan9, which aren’t software (from what I can tell over my glossed over skimming), wouldn’t apply to the realm of IP. For instance, the plot device, e.g. a son killing his father and marrying his mother, in of itself, is not protected by any IP law. The specific example is, see e.g. Oedipus Rex (well this is a bad example b/c it falls into the public domain, but let’s just say that that point is moot).
Anyway, back to adroit moral, this is highly contested and there was, iirc, a movement to have it included in the copyright law (it worked in some instances, but not enough to warrant a change, i.e. change the mind of the legislators). In Europe, you’ll see such cases where a painter has sold his art to a hotel and they want to change it or put it on t-shirts or something and they are forbidden to do so, even though such clauses are not written on the contract. In the US, this concept is illegal b/c it extends beyond the protections available to the copyright holder (making it more akin to patents).
I’ll stop debating you on this point or any other point similar to this. As someone has already pointed out, human beings are not Borg. To think that anyone could’ve created Mona Lisa based on the sheer fact of living around people is an extreme view, analogous to saying that there are no individuals or such thing as individuality.
And yet, people continue to produce, in fact, more people continue to file for patents and copyrights – every year is an all time high (last I saw was 1999, sorry, no cite, I’m just extrapolating).
This is because there are countless examples of public domain works becoming marketable. It’s a good balance, arguably, given the current changes in technology, and, b/c a lot of people starve their whole life and are not recognized until they are dead. It’s more a reflection of society’s values more than a way for Disney to protect the Little Mermaid.
Lastly, in all my IP classes and my history of econ class, the notion of copyright existed prior to 1690. The US put such notions in the Constitution less than one hundred years later. The founding fathers realized that without such protections, creativity, and the like, would be stifened.
It seems there are really three different debates going on here: the economic debate the ethical debate, and the debate about potential solutions. Isolating the economics debate for a minute:
JS_africanus argues that sunk costs have no bearing on the best way to maximize the producer’s profits; and, in the short term, he’s absolutely right. But this doesn’t actually relate to the issue we’re discussing. For long term decisions (about, for instance, whether a music seller should stay in business, or whether a songwriter should produce another album to sell) a producer doesn’t only consider the interplay of marginal cost and marginal revenue (the amount of money you can sell one more unit for vs. the cost of producing one more unit), but also overhead. For the production of a new album, for instance, the marginal cost of each new CD is very low, and of a new MP3 is zero, overhead (the ‘sunk costs’ of writing, recording, and marketing the album) is very high. While the size of the overhead doesn’t affect decisions made after the overhead has been spent, it definitely affects the decision about whether you pay up the next time the overhead payment comes due–or the next time you’re asked to write another album. So overhead doesn’t affect short-term decisions, but it’s a major player in deciding whether to stay in business.
Second, there’s no universal reason that everything has to be sold where marginal product equals marginal cost. This is only true in a model embodying two assumptions:
1: marginal product is relatively stable over a long range of production scales (you can sell any amount of stuff for roughly the same price).
2: the cost of producing each successive unit of product is higher (usually, but not universally true).
The logic behind the price-setting model js_africanus provides is that if you can produce one more unit for less than you can sell it for, it’s profitable to produce it. However, if the first condition isn’t true (as it usually isn’t when facing a non-homogenous product), increasing the amount produced requires you to cut the price for all the products you sell; if you sell 100 units of something for $5 each, and it costs you $4 each to produce them, you don’t want to cut the price to $4.10 just so you can sell another five units. If the first condition is true but the second isn’t, then you can increase profit by producing more, since you can sell for roughly the same amount and produce the next unit for less. While there are certain industries where both these conditions generally hold (industries engaged in ‘perfect competition,’ with large numbers of buyers and sellers of a homogenous product), many other industries don’t feature this model.
Producers, therefore, don’t actually determine prices by the marginal cost/product calculation. The main consideration, as js_africanus states, is profit maximization; profit is maximized when the difference between total product and total costs is maximized. In an industry like music, the cost of producing each CD is minimal (as discussed above), and cost doesn’t increase significantly as the number of units produced increases (I believe; if I’m wrong correct me. In any case, the cost-per-product is so low that it has little effect). Thus the record company, or writer, or singer, or whoever tries to maximize the average product-per-unit (otherwise known as the ‘price’) times the number of units sold. The best method to maximize this is determined by consumer preference—the amount of money people are willing to pay to get the CDs.
Now, the paper js_africanus cites seems to advocate forcing the music industry to move closer to perfect competition by allowing multiple sellers to sell the same music tracks. As the number of sellers increases, the effect any one seller has on the price drops, so they can sell more and more without driving the price down much individually. However, the collective effort to sell more CDs drives the price down through competition, pushing it as close to marginal cost as the consumer wishes. However, this plan overlooks two key factors.
The first is the ethical issue; I won’t get into that here (I may come back and address it later), but the question is why the producers of artwork don’t have a right to what they’ve produced. I believe that they do, but will discuss later.
The second is the issue I raised at the beginning of this post—the fact that by denying songwriters exclusive rights to distribute their songs, you deny them the incentive to distribute. Js_africanus concedes this, but dismisses it as a ‘public-goods’ problem, an example of ‘market failure.’ First, the article he cited at the beginning of this discussion explicitly denies this—it claims that elimination of copyright won’t affect the number of new works to be produced. I find this highly unlikely, and it’s been beaten into the ground so long and so often—by the beginning of my post, among other places—that I don’t feel like going into it again. Suffice it to respond to one more objection that even if some people are motivated by pure love of the art, this 1) doesn’t account for those who aren’t—losing some producers is still bad; 2) takes away some incentive from those who are—I might love to write, and thus do it on my own, but I’ll do it even more with more incentive (the Law of Supply, for those of you with economics training); and 3) doesn’t help people who are too busy trying to support themselves in their ‘day jobs’ to do any substantive work. The great triumph of the Renaissance was providing artists, thinkers, and other intellectuals a way to support themselves by their work, and thus allowed more than the wealthy elite to produce art.
Going back to the discussion of public goods and market failure: first, for anyone who slept through econ 101 (tempting, I know), let’s define the two terms. Market failure is simply a condition where the market produces a sub-optimal outcome because a person can’t reap all the benefits or doesn’t suffer all the harms of his own actions—he produces ‘externalities,’ or benefits and harms that happen externally to the deals he’s making and affect people who had no influence in the occurrences. Public goods are goods or products that fit two conditions. First, they have a marginal cost of zero or near-zero. That is, once the good has been initially provided, increasing the number of consumers doesn’t impose significant further costs on producers. The classic example is the city playground, where letting one kid play on the playground doesn’t reduce the amount of ‘playground-ness’ out there, and thus deprives no one of any goods. Another common example is a highway—when I drive on the highway, that doesn’t keep you from driving on it. Second, you can’t exclude people from enjoying a public good. For instance, if I plant a bed of flowers in a public place, I can’t charge people money to see it because they can look without paying me. The incidence of public goods is usually used to justify government intervention—private suppliers of the good can’t make their money back because they can’t make people pay them, and producing a good once benefits a theoretically infinite number of people.
Is the music industry a public good? It is—but only if we accept the policy recommendations of the paper js_africanus cites. It easily meets the first criterion, probably better than my examples. If I copy one of your MP3’s I haven’t denied anything to you; thus once the song’s written, benefiting a second person carries no marginal cost. If copyright is eliminated, it also meets the second—the provider can’t make people pay him for the MP3 because others are attempting to offer it for free. However, the key phrase in that sentence is ‘if copyright is eliminated.’ Js_africanus has correctly identified an example of market failure. Legislators identified this example centuries ago, before anyone had coined the phrase, and came up with a solution—copyright law. By giving the original creator rights over his work, he is able to reap the benefits of his work, and market failure is eliminated. Music is also no longer a public good because it is now possible to exclude people from enjoying the good. Thus, js_africanus inadvertently justified copyright law—it’s a solution to the market failure that would exist in unprotected intellectual property.
As to his final claim—that 0 is somehow a ‘fairer’ price for the music than the price people pay—there’s no real justification for this. I understand that this is the price that would be reached under a different legal situation, but that doesn’t make it ‘fair’ by default. If we passed a law requiring consumers to buy any record that producers asked them to buy, at whatever price the producers set, the price would approach infinity; that doesn’t mean infinity is a fair price any more than js_africanus’s arguments mean 0 is, In fact, the ‘fair’ price is somewhere in between—the price arrived at when both producer and consumer are free to negotiate, when neither has to give up the goods for whatever price the other asks—in short, a copyright system that empowers the free market.
What I believe you’re describing, and what the entertainment industry wants, isn’t just “a right to what they’ve produced”, but a right to tell others how to use what they’ve produced. You can only use this DVD in these countries, for these purposes. You can play it, but you can’t back it up. You can play it for your family, but not for your customers. You can play it on this computer, but not that one, because the DVD player for that one doesn’t have a license or doesn’t comply with how we think a DVD player should behave. You can let your friend borrow the movie, but you can’t give him the information on the disc without also giving him the disc itself.
That kind of “empowering” isn’t necessarily a good thing. It takes something that would otherwise be abundant and uses legal restrictions to make it scarce.
The price of a handshake is currently 0. If the government were to decree that handshakes can only be given by people who’ve studied the art of hand shaking, posted a bond, and applied for a license, then we’d see the price of handshakes rise. That doesn’t mean the market is suddenly able to distribute handshakes fairly; it means something that used to be free is now only available to those who pay for it.
You say “give up the goods” - that phrase simply does not apply when nothing is being given up. You must “give up” a football or a car if you want to sell it, but you can sell a song and keep it too.
We’ve gone through this before. They will price the products a lot higher for all these other things.
You pay for what you get and what you want to use the thing for. Want to use it for everything? Pay for it. Want to use it for a few smaller things? Pay less. But don’t buy something that is sold for the “smaller things” price and then expect to get everything.
So, if you want these items to be sold with “all rights” attached to them, expect for all prices to skyrocket. You can’t make the owners of intellectual property give you the whole enchilada for pennies. Sorry.
OK, Mr2001 do we have to have this out again?
This is almost certainly not the case. The fact is that an abundance of music exists because of this legal protection, not dispite it. Can you point to any reasonble argument suggesting that people would continue to create music if copyrights were eliminated? And of course, you do understand the difference between a handshake and copying music created by someone else.
This does not apply to our discussion in the way you think it does. If I sell you 1 copy of my new CD and then you are free to legally copy and distribute it to anyone you want you most certainly have taken my market away. So, you cannot give a song away and still keep it in this sense.
Let me diverge back into history for a moment. Does anyone have a good understanding about the death of Vaudville? My understanding was that one of the reasons it died is that movies came along. When that happened, people could watch big name acts even though they might never see the act in person. Specifically, a particular act could perform once and many audiences could see it. Might there be parrallels to our discusion?
I am sorry if I am misreading your response, but it comes off as your against space-shifting for personal use.
Please explain how MP3s, OGG, WMA (ugh, microsoft), ect. space-shifting of CDs that a person owns has caused CD prices to get alot higher?
Are your against the popular notion of what is fair use? I have alot of books I bought, the author has gotten compensation for writting them from me in other words. Since the author has been compensated, I don’t see any reason I shouldn’t be able to scan them on to my laptop so I can take my book case with me. Why shouldn’t I be able to do this with my CD spindle? How about my DVD shelf?
Another argument against your statement (if you intended space-shifting as part of it) is that using that logic one would come the conclusion that it’s wrong to plug a speaker into the microphone jack to get a crude microphone, because you only paid for a speaker. How about putting a tow knob on your car? You bought a car without towing ability, you should have to pay the maker for the right to tow things.
Not sure about all rights, but space shifting rights are a reasonable desire and do not seem to increase the price.
js_africanus, actually, since you claim that your example about the shovels was an analogy regarding Hillary Duff’s sunk costs, it was you that made the misrepresentation, not I. Your analogy fails because you do not take into account that the wholesale price that all CD’s sell at, is more or less fixed. For the analogy to work here, both diggers would have to charge the same amount, because that’s what it costs to get a hole dug. If one charges more, they are priced out of the market.
But as the price of digging a hole is not generally fixed, especially between a guy with a shovel and someone with a backhoe, this line of thinking doesn’t work as that pricing can vary a lot.
jadagul’s post seemed to state what I have been trying to say on this particular issue better than I. But let me break down how I view this in to try and make my point concrete.
Regardless of whether the CD cost the artist/record company $ 25,000 dollars to record, or $250,000 to record, or $1,000,000 to record, a single CD is sold by the record company, both majors and independents, for somewhere around $5.00 to $7.00 each I believe (some pricing has come down a lot in the past year and I’d guess some product is just being dumped on the market).
To make the sound recording itself, the primary overhead is recording time. This could be $15.00 an hour, or $200.00 an hour; to some extent, the result is that you get what you pay for. Sometimes it’s out of the artist’s control. There are costs of marketing the CD such as videos, magazines, billboards, payola…er fees for independent record pushers, costs of mastering the CD, costs of the artwork that will be used, and sometimes the cost of a person who might be the producer for the CD, who is similar to a movie director. Let’s forget about the dozen other incidental costs involved. By the way, ALL these costs are all billable to the artist by the record company. So far, the artist sees nothing until the record company is fully reimbursed.
The new artist gets a standard share of around 10% to 12 % for each one sold, which in real life is only about 7% to 9% after they pay for the artwork, the producer, free goods (10% of the product is promotional and [usually] sees no sales) and broken goods which is about another 10% of the CD’s produced although breakage has been next to nothing since we went to vinyl. Then there is the cost of distribution, which is usually performed as a service by the people who get the CDs into stores.
In any case, the cost of the CD’s themselves is very low. I’d guess the majors probably can make them for about $.50 each. As you can clearly see, the cost is not in producing the CD’s. It’s in all the other overhead.
The usual markup that you buy them for at a record store is around 40% - 45%.
So now, Hillary Duff writes 10 songs for her new CD. Lets say, that when it’s all said and done Hillary and her record company are in the hole for $250,000. That money has been spent. They are negative cash, right? Or are these sunk-in costs that shouldn’t be counted? Like maybe betting your house that your venture will be successful? Honestly, I’m not quite clear where you stand on this point.
Anyway, *recoupment of that money depends on the number of units sold. * Each unit represents a part of the whole cost. To recoup $250,000 at $6.00 apiece, Hillary and her record company must sell 41666 units. So, if they decided to produce 50,000 (part of the $250,000 spent) not counting the 4166 CDs that will be given away to radio stations, record clubs, etc, as free goods, they have 45834 CD’s to sell. If they all sell at $6.00 each, and none are returned (did I mention record stores return what they can’t sell?), they stand to make $275,004, or a profit of $25,004.
When someone goes out and buys Hillary’s new CD, likes it a lot and decides to share it with her friends who all have Kazaa on their computers Hillary & Co. have recouped only $6.00. Meanwhile, that one upload can produce thousands of copies. There may be twice as many versions of the song in existence with half of them being unrecoupable.
When you download the song that fan put up instead of buying the CD, at the very least, one could say Hillary and Co. are out at least. .60, as there are 10 songs on the CD and that song you take is 1/10 the cost of it. That the song you kept, at .60 is worth more that the cost of the CD you might have bought, which cost them $.50 to make.
If this happens 49,000 more times, at the very least they are now out $30,000. This is more than the cost to press the all the CDs. They’ve received nothing and it seems to me that you are saying that is fair? Sorry, I don’t understand.
Considering the song otherwise would not be available without buying the CD, another way to look at it is they are now out $300,000, assuming at least that many people download it without making a later purchase of the CD.
Getting on to the part about Intellectual Property, I assume that Hillary Duff writes her material, I don’t honestly know. If so, without her experience and talent at creating such works, there is no record to be made. This time spent and skill developed I can see being considered sunk costs, she spends the time and does it, partly for the love of it, partly because it may be the strongest skill set she has.
Yet, can you deny that without that effort done gratis, there will be no song? Whether it takes 3 days 3 years. No need for the overhead, nor would you ever enjoy that song that you might really, really like. IP cannot be separated from its implementation. Perhaps it can be argued that sunk costs are absorbed by the production of the idea, but the production cannot be done for free. And, in addition I say that sunk costs have value because there is no idea to implement without them.
Now she is compensated, by law, to receive royalties on her copyrights for these songs, about 10 cents per song per CD. She can go to find a record company to sign her in the first place once they’re written. Because these songs are protected, no one can record and release them behind her back with other musicians. Once she has published the songs on a CD, she has a way of making a living and to further promote her talents. Someone else might pay to cover her song on his or her CD. Also, she will receive royalties that the record company does not get as compensation for writing those songs. That might be her rent money for the next 6 or 7 years while she hopes to sell enough CD’s to pay off the million and a half dollars she will incur doing this over and over to make a living and get her 8% out of that seven figure recoupment.
Yes, she can do well for herself touring and selling merchandise at her shows, (after reimbursing the company for any tour support they provide). And, she could tour without putting out CDs, but her shows will be a lot smaller and pay far less if no one knew her outside of the region her home town is in.
Oops, then again, she can also loose her royalties on 50,000 units copied. Depriving musicians of units sold this way can deprive them of their careers. Not because there wasn’t a market for them, but because the market was subverted.
shrug That doesn’t contradict what I said. The industry doesn’t just want the right to use their creation, they want the right to tell everyone else how to use it.
I don’t think there’s any other product like that. If I buy a coffee maker, I can use it to make coffee for anyone I want. I can use it to make tea or cocoa instead of coffee. I can put it in my luggage and use it in England or Japan. I can open it up, see how it works, then make and sell my own identical coffee makers. And yet, the coffee maker company still has rights to what they create - they just don’t have the right to tell me what to do, once I buy it.
So where can I buy a DVD of a popular movie that’ll work on both an American DVD player and a Japanese DVD player? How about one that’ll let me skip the commercials and multilingual FBI warnings at the beginning of the disc? Or one that won’t get brighter and darker, brighter and darker when I hook my DVD player up through my VCR?
Surely if money were the only thing keeping these features from being available, DVDs would cost a couple bucks more and the features would be available by now. No one likes having to watch 3 minutes of commercials when they put a disc in.
Music has been around as long as mankind. People even created music before copyright existed, as impossible as that might seem. 
That’s only true if no one who gets a copy from me will want to buy anything from you. Real-world evidence has shown that they will still buy your product. (In fact, I contributed to that evidence at the Santana Row Best Buy in San Jose just last week. I don’t have the receipt to scan in, so you’ll have to take my word for it.)
They haven’t because the artists and (ugh) Microsoft are not selling all rights to those products. People are just stealing them. They are paying pennies and expecting the whole enchilada.
If you wanted the laws or policies changed so that there were no restrictions on the sales of these items (the buyer was buying “all rights”) then damned well the prices would skyrocket.
For instance, if I had a little doodle that took 5 minutes to do, and you want to buy it to display on your wall, the price might be $10. If you want to publish it and make it the logo for your multi-national business, the price is $5,000. If I, as an artist, could not restrict the use of the things I sell, then I’d assume that every doodle I sold was worth $5000. (Or, I might average things out and charge $100 for the doodle—which is way too much if all you want to do is display it on your wall, but a steal if you are going to use it for a business logo.)
I’d price it this way because I can’t guarantee that it won’t be used as a big business logo, and you are not obligated (under law) to not make it one. Don’t like it? Not my problem. Want to give me analogies and explanations and ramble on and on? Not interested. I’m enititled to price my work in any damned way I please, last I heard.
I’m getting to the point where I just don’t care anymore about this whining and bellyaching about reasonable prices. I have always had low prices, but am amazed at the greedy, ungrateful leeches who want something for nothing, and assume that because we’re artists, we’ll just give it up for nothing.
We’re not talking about “fair use,” we’re talking about “all rights.” All Rights means that you can do anything to it—sell prints of it, make a profit off of it, use it in your huge business’s ad campaign—whatever. For that, you will pay more. Unless you think that the government should start to control what artists charge for their work.
I’m talking about all rights.
:shrug:
Don’t care, don’t care, don’t care why you don’t like it or don’t think it’s fair, or whatever. If intellectual property came with “all rights,” the prices would be higher.
If a copy of Windows XP had to be sold with “all rights,” (meaning that the buyer could make multiple copies and sell them on eBay, or make their own “enhanced” version of XP or whatever they wanted) then Microsoft would probably charge $10,000 or more for each copy of XP. Probably a lot more than that, knowing Microsoft.
Don’t like it? Want to tell me all about coffee pots? Once again, don’t care. It won’t change the fact that companies and artists will price their works differently if “all rights” must come with them.
And unless you want to the owners of intellectual property to be forced to price things the way you like, there’s not one damned thing you can do about it.
yosemitebabe, we all read that the first time. Go ahead… ignore my post, stamp your feet and rant about prices; I wasn’t talking about prices, so you’re only making yourself look shrill and zealous.
No one needs to be forced. If Windows were priced at $10,000, Microsoft wouldn’t sell more than a handful of copies, and they’d quickly lose the OS market. That’s simple economic sense - their product just isn’t worth that much to consumers, especially when there are free alternatives.
The same would happen with music. There’s plenty of free, legal music out there. Most people don’t care about it because they don’t mind paying $15-$20 for a CD, but if major-label CDs were priced at $10,000, you can’t seriously believe people would buy them. Unknown bands would suddenly become a lot more popular.
You’re ignoring my post: you can’t expect artists and owners of intellectual property to “give away” all rights.
Ain’t going to happen.
You can’t seriously believe that artists and owners of intellectual property will sell “all rights” for peanuts, do you? You’re putting the cart before the horse. If record labels (or anyone else) knew beforehand that they had to sell all rights, things would be radically changed before that $10,000 CD ended up in music stores.
Go ahead and huff and puff about coffee pots. Don’t care. Won’t change the fact that owners of intellectual property won’t sell “all rights” without a major fight.
Naturally. That’s how we got where we are today - the entertainment industry didn’t like the old laws, so they bought new ones.
Since I didn’t claim they would, I don’t know why you’re still harping on this. Have some dignity.
:rolleyes:
Let’s try this on for size: If the laws were changed so that all rights had to be given away with each sale, artists like me (and most artists who are not financially dependent on our art, and many who are) would probably say, “Fine. Never mind then. No way am I agreeing to those terms.”
In many of our cases, we don’t depend on our income from art to survive. So all of our art would magically be removed from the market. Pretty much all if it. Why should we release work to the public, only to find it being used in an expensive ad campaign, screwed up, or whatever? The hell with that. The supply of creative works would seriously start to dry up.
And yes, it would even the case with your independents who “give away” their work. Do you seriously think that they are all going to give away all rights? Maybe a few will, but not many. Charging nothing for their work is not the same as giving away all rights, you know. I give away plenty of stuff on my websites, but I don’t give away all rights.
You’re missing the point: you act as if these changes you’d like will actually happen. But there’s probably zero chance of that happening, at least not remotely in the way you envision. If by some bizarre happenstance they are allowed to happen, there would definitely be consequences that probably you wouldn’t anticipate, and trust me, you won’t like these consequences at all.
yosemitebabe
I am not talking file sharing, selling copies, using it in a corporate logo or anything like that. Your post came off as your against space-shifting (taking content you own in one medium and converting it another) to me. Are you?
Some space shifting is probably not fair use, some is. I have no problem with taping a CD to play in the car, or copying a CD as a “backup.” I don’t even have a problem with sharing samples of a CD with a few friends, or so they can sample it before they buy it, as long as that’s as far as it goes. Hell—I don’t even have a problem with people xeroxing off a few pages of my book to share with someone else. Small scale stuff I don’t think is out of line at all. It’s the free-for-all, “it’s now all free!” part that is never going to happen.
I have a problem with no restrictions being attached to intellectual property, which seems to be something that some here would like. To complain that low (or at least lower priced work) does not come with all rights is as silly as complaining that when you pay for a Hyundai, you aren’t getting a Rolls Royce. You didn’t pay for it, and you ain’t, no how, no way, getting it. (And yes, I am aware that Rolls Royces are physical objects and not like music, but my point stands: creators of intellectual property still retain the right to price their work in any manner they please.) When there is more “value” attached to the work being sold, the price goes up. More rights=more value. That’s how they are going to continue to price intellectual property, in some way or another, whether or not you think it’s “fair” or “reasonable.” Unless, of course, you want to force people to price things in the way that you like, which, once again, is probably going to happen around the same time when monkeys fly out of everyone’s asses.
First, let me apologize for one of the comments in my last post. I tried to post something that only covered the economics, but got subverted into discussing the ‘fairness’ of a price. So please, disregard my claim about fairness at the end of the post as an unwarranted assertion. Other people explained why it’s fair, I didn’t in that post. But remember what I did say, that there’s no particular reason that a price of 0 is fair, either. Economics as a discipline certainly can’t say anything about fairness.
Second, here’s an interesting idea I got playing off yosemitebabe’s posts. She pointed out that if copyright was eliminated, record companies would effectively only be able to sell ‘all-rights’ copies, and prices would skyrocket to tens of thousands of dollars. Now, suppose we’re in this environment of $30,000 dollar CDs, and the record company comes up to me and says, 'Hey, do you want a copy of that CD? We’d be happy to sell one to you for $15–if you’ll sign a contract with us first, that you’ll never make a copy of the material (you have to pay us $5 for every copy you make), and you’ll never transfer rights to the CD to anyone else without making him sign a contract with the same terms." Would that be illegitimate? If so, why? If not, how is that any different from copyright?
Yeah, that could be done. Only, it would be far more convoluted and complicated than what we have now. Now, we have the default assumption that all rights are not attached to works sold. So, unless there is a contract presented proving that all rights were sold, one assumes that all rights do not come with the sale. I’d guess that 99% of the time, all rights are not sold. So only maybe (I’m guessing) 1% of the items sold require this contract (proving that all rights are sold).
If all rights were the default, then everyone who wanted the lower price (not all rights) would have to sign a contract. So, instead of the scenario above, where only 1% of the items sold having a contract attached to them (showing that all rights have been sold), 99% of the items being sold would require contracts (showing that all rights are not sold).
Which sounds less convoluted to you? Which sounds less expensive to implement?
We went over this in another thread, but I contend that this is exactly what we have now. When you buy a CD for $15, you know that all applicable copyright laws apply. You certainly know that the publisher expects you to follow copyright law. If you don’t want to abide by copyright laws, you don’t have to buy the CD. But if you do buy the CD, you in effect accept the limitations of copyright law.