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Comment by delackner | Hacker News Reader

The question that you are dancing around is: do we care enough about creative works to support their creation, or do we really care so little about the food for our soul that we look forward to consuming only the side-project crumbs that people make in their evenings and on weekends for fun?

Some artists have a "live" performance that people enjoy paying for that un-copyable experience. But do we really want our authors to make their entire living from tips at book-signings?

Copyright hasn't caught up to the reality of unlimited instant effortless copying, but artists still need to eat, and paying them for what they do is probably going to remain the simplest way to make sure they eat at all.

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If people don't feel like paying for musicians and the like, than it's a signal to the market to stop supporting musicians and force them to work other jobs that people are willing to pay for.

If that what it meant to be, than it will be. Copyright will merely submerge the will of individuals into the underground illegal music scene and not solve any problems for musicians at all.

They can keep busting pirate networks all they want, it won't change a thing in the long run. Musicians will die off and soon we will be left with a frozen archive of musics, though a very large library.

It doesn't matter that much to me anyway. I'll never be able to get all the favorite songs in the world. I'll never be able to remember enough in my lifetime. I am pretty content with this scenarios.

I don't think what artists fear will come true. Instead, many of them will probably find ways to make a living.

For me, it's the same cognitively. There are still tons of artists and songs to discover, too much for a lifetime, and too much for the limited memory capacity of my brain.

And I suspect that in a world with no more musicians and a frozen archive of music, you would see a strong market demand for new music, so people would become musicians to meet that demand. Eventually it will reach a new equilibrium, with fewer musicians than we have today making less money than they make today. Their income would come from their new music, their back catalogues would be worth much less than they are today.

A different music scene, but not necessarily a worse one.

Whoa there. Some of the most awesome things I've ever come across have been "side-project crumbs". I'll take art made for fun over art made for money any day.

Some people have so much fun (and ability) making art, they can make a living off of it. There's a huge overlap between art made for fun and art made for money, and taking away artists' means to make a living takes away a significant amount of art.

The problem is that the content distributors still have not yet grasped the idea that 'scarcity' is moot in an age where information can easily be produced, reproduced, and disseminated at the speed of thought. Actually, they have grasped it, they just have not extracted a method of controlling it outside of the realms of pay walls, destroying UX by forced advertisement campaigns, and the walled-garden that is the iTunes Music Store.

"Do we care enough about creative works to support their creation?"

I have ticket stubs from twelve Dave Matthews Band concerts that say yes, in my case.

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