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Comment by analognoise | Hacker News Reader

That sequence of 0s and 1s cost money to make.

But it's free to distribute. So instead of charging customers for distribution, they should be charging customers the up-front cost of production.

How do you suggest that they do that?

Crowd fund production

That is a good question, and I'm not sure I have a good answer. Kickstarter and Patreon seem to be doing pretty well, but AFAIK they haven't been used to such a scale so they may not work for this.

This is a big issue and our economy is largely suffering for it, but old-world thinking about treating digital goods like physical goods is a poor response.

Veronica Mars movie was made through kickstarter way back when. That was successful, and specifically covered cost of production. I can't remember the donation system, but most tiers got free digital copy of the film.

It was a total failure at release though, since WB didn't make it available DRM-free[1]. It's a counter example of how to do things. The end result was - never trust WB.

A proper example would be something like Kung Fury[2].

1. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140314/23410326583/warne...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kung_Fury

I'm not against this, but it goes against the grain of a capitalist economy as it does not maximize overall profits. For this concept to work at scale, we might need to rejigger the whole economy.

It goes against the concept of commercialized art I'd say. Which is probably a good thing.

and?

Just because our economic models are out of date doesn't mean we need to change the way we behave to keep shoe-horning them in. It means we need to change our models to reflect reality.

To be clear, I am totally on board with reimagining the economy. Sorry, that didn't come through in my post.

My apologies. I feel my response was a bit defensive. I guess I'm just used to people arguing that "it would hurt because of $short_term_economic_issue, so we shouldn't consider it at all!"

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