Comment by michaelchisari | Hacker News Reader

Comment by michaelchisari | Hacker News Reader

I recognize that I'm posting an article by Cracked here, but anybody who's a regular reader knows that Cracked hits the nail on the head at least 2% of the time. They recently had an article about the future and artificial scarcity (using a colorful acronym), and this is a perfect example.

You don't have to "lend" books, you can just make a digital copy and give it to your friend. Anything less than that is software and hardware that is purposely crippled in order to manufacture an artificial scarcity.

http://www.cracked.com/article_18817_5-reasons-future-will-b...

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#4 To Stay Afloat, Businesses Have to Pretend Unlimited Goods are Limited

A. Why can't the library just buy as many digital copies as are needed for the customers, and keep them forever, if they don't naturally degrade?

B. Wait a second. It's just a digital file. Why not just buy one copy, and just copy and paste it for every customer who wants to read it?

C. Wait a second. Why do you need the library at all? Why can't a customer just buy a copy from the publisher and "lend" copies to all of his friends?

D. Wait a second. If no printing and binding needs to be done, why do you need the publisher? Just buy it directly from the author.

E. Waaaaait a second. Why buy it? Once the author makes one copy available, why can't everyone just grab it for free?

F. Waaaaaaaaait a second. Why would the author write a book of which he can only sell 1 copy? There is no book.

G. Waaaaaaaaaaaait a second. People currently write books and software and distribute them free.

Out of the books I've read in the last 5 years, I believe the only ones that were free were those whose copyright had expired. Yes, there's lots of good free software, but that's most often because the software, once written, scratched an itch for someone. The same phenomenon doesn't really exist with books: nearly nobody writes books for themselves; we write books to share our knowledge, stories, and opinions with others.

The same phenomenon doesn't really exist with books

I would argue that a budding hobby novelist culture already exists, and will only grow, just like the free software movement did.

Heck, we're already seeing open source movies.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source_film

It's almost impossible to make a living writing technical books, worse yet if they're actually good (because the best technical books tend to have a smaller audience since they tend to be targeted at the best developers).

Technical books aren't written because they are profitable, they are written out of passion or pride.

Edit: the same is true for a great many non-technical books. The average writer has a day job, writing is for most a questionably lucrative hobby.

I'm sure if you ask Jessica why she wrote founders at work, it was more about sharing knowledge than making money.

Yes, but that doesn't mean it's not at all about money or that she could have even feasibly done it if she didn't get paid at all.

For many people, while writing may not be their only job, they still need that part of their income.

The vast majority of books from academic presses are basically written for free. Even books that sell fairly well from relatively well-known presses like MIT Press make their authors very little money. They do it because publishing your book through MIT Press is a great way to get your ideas out there (and get paid indirectly in academic cred / CV lines). True to some extent with other nonfiction publishers too, e.g. I believe HN user lsc gets "paid" for his Xen book primarily in publicity driving sales to his VPS business, not because the royalties are something to live on.

What do you do for a living?

I write software and give it away for free, how about you? :P

Also, there's a whole culture of free fiction on the internet. It's pretty huge, although most of it is crap, there are some real nuggets of goodness out there.

Of course, most of the stuff people charge for is crap, too.

> I write software and give it away for free, how about you?

For a living, eh? So do we presume you feed yourself with soup kitchens, and live in a cardboard box on the street?

Open source economic models have been pretty well established, no? My income is through payment for services, not software. My software may be free, but my labor is not.

The same is being applied to music, artists like Unwoman regularly write songs and albums on spec and through crowd-sourcing. A friend of mine is a huge fan, and donated money for her to write a song using a Voltairine DeClayre poem.

http://www.unwoman.com

So what you do for a living is provide (consulting? programming?) services related to open-source software, not write free software.

I write free software for a living, because the result of my programming services are GPL licensed.

My software may be free, but my labor is not.

In other words, your previous answer was a cutesy lie. You do not, in fact, earn a living giving away software. You earn a living getting people to pay you to to write software.

That you don't sell the software is irrelevant: you're still creating the software because there is money in doing so. What would the effect be on your creative output if nobody would pay you for it? How much software would you be writing if you had to crank widgets for a living instead? More? Less?

I stand by my original statement, and I think the tone of your response doesn't particularly invite debate on that point, but I do want to address this:

How much software would you be writing if you had to crank widgets for a living instead?

I've done pizza delivery, tech support, coffee barista, construction, and a bunch of jobs I barely even remember.

I was writing software while I was doing all of it.

My side project is Appleseed, which I've written in my spare time, which is tens of thousands of lines of code, and six years in the making, without any particular economic incentive. I've always worked whatever job I could to pay the bills, but no amount of poverty has ever stopped me from coding, at one point I had to sell my only computer to make rent, and managed to find someone who could lend me an older laptop so I could continue coding. And everything I've written is open source.

Writers, like programmers, and artists, and other creative people, create because they love to do it, because they'd rather do it for nothing, than not do it at all.

Dont' be ridiculous. For 3 of the last 4 years my sole income was from doing free software.

This is 100% spot on:

"In other words, your previous answer was a cutesy lie. You do not, in fact, earn a living giving away software. You earn a living getting people to pay you to to write software."

How can an author do that? There is absolutely no equivalence between the economic model around free software and the economic model around music and books. Free software makes money by giving it away to a lot of people, and getting money from the few people that need extra. Some people will pay for you to add a feature or provide support or make a change or put it under a different license or gaurentee uptime. Maybe the project matters so much to a person or group that they will pay someone to work full time on it. This is what makes FOSS go economically.

A book is a book for everyone. Once you have the book, what else could you need?

And to say that a side project and full time are the same thing is also ridiculous. I did a lot more coding on FOSS when I didn't have a 40-50 hour a week comittment to my FT job going on.

Ask for money, get money (or pledges), write book, distribute book.

Regardless of whether human creativity is intrinsically bound to economic reward (I would strongly argue that it isn't), the fact of the matter is that you can't make the case that what we're dealing with isn't a matter of artificial scarcity.

The true scarcity is the clever/creative author, which was previously monetized by selling less scarce physical artifacts of the author's work. This doesn't decrease the value of the author, however they are stuck finding another way to capitalize on their ability.

Software did it by putting software behind services, not allowing copies to be distributed to the end users. Perhaps authors can figure out something analogous.

If an author can't afford to put all their time towards writing a book though, because they no longer make any significant amount of money out them, wouldn't it be a net loss for society.

I agree that creativity isn't bound, but it will certainly happen less when a person who is exceptional doesn't have the opportunity to full devote themselves to their craft.

Almost everything sold today is by means of artificial scarcity ... do you think oil companies are happy with alternative fuels and hybrid diesels?

Related to book authors: they need a way to make a living writing books, at least part-time.

Also in a fair society, brilliant people should be rewarded accordingly.

>Regardless of whether human creativity is intrinsically bound to economic reward

"Reward" is the means to pursue your creativity. The ability for an author or a photographer or a painter or a musician to actually work on their trade instead of working menial jobs to try to support a hobby.

There was once a time in human history where creativity wasn't a meritocracy. It was an idle pursuit that the rich engaged in. Is that a better model?

>the fact of the matter is that you can't make the case that what we're dealing with isn't a matter of artificial scarcity

From a naive perspective, of course you can copy that floppy.

From a rational perspective, however, of course it deals with a real scarcity of creation that copyright seeks to prevent (just as patents attempt to prevent a scarcity of innovation, though the results are much more mixed).

And what is the marginal cost of printing a book? The difference between burning a CD or printing a book and sending a digital file is often overblown. If it costs $1 to burn a CD that sells for $10 or $2 to print a book that sells for $25, 90%+ of the money is still paying for other things.

Publishers are not as dumb as the pirates think. The publishers just actually have seen the numbers and know that if you take out the cost of printing, you really haven't lowered the cost of the book very much. If you take out the cost of burning the CD, you really haven't lowered the cost to the record label very much. So why should they be expected to now evaporate 100% of their revenue becuase their cost drop 10 or 20 or 30 percent? That is nuts.

1. Speaking tours make money. Conferences make money, etc.

2. Fame, recognition, i.e. non-monetary benefits to being a good writer.

3. At least some people write because they believe what they have to say is important and/or helpful.

4. People will always want to own physical books. This is different than music or a dvd as a book can be passed-on/gifted much easier than a DVD or a CD, which will be obsolete.

I can see both arguments, but I'm definitely not worried about the possibility that people will stop writing books.

Speaking tours and the like make money if you're an established author, and it's about as likely as it is for your garage band to make millions on tour. Sure, it happens, but it's hardly a good career for the other 99.999% of folks who yearn to do that.

Agreed, but is it now possible get established relatively easier by simply writing a better book than the other guy? I mean the ease of distribution brings the harm of piracy but aren't there also some gains?

As examples, I'd offer both Why's poignant guide to Ruby and 2 pretty good books I've recently checked out, Learn Python the Hard Way & A Byte of Python.

> [Is] it now possible get established relatively easier by simply writing a better book than the other guy?

Sure, just like Britney Spears gets all her sales by having good music.

Writing a good book means little if you can't find a way to get lots of people to read it.

Well Britney is a good example but at the other end I'd offer something like Die Antwoord, who were able to get themselves a big record deal by simply putting their videos on youtube.

Or Justin Bieber, who also only exists because of the internet and youtube. I'm not saying Bieber makes good music, but he exists and thrives because of the internet, not despite it.

So if you have someone who is a great writer, they need to take time away from writing to do things that aren't writing, in order to make money?

If writing is something we value as a society, then there should be a good way for good writers to make money by writing, instead of having to find ancillary things they may not be particularly good at.

Demand payment and release the book one paragraph at a time.

Why do you say that people will always want to own physical books?

He can sell support contracts, documentation for it.

Because the book is an advertisement for whatever products he describes therein ("so they sat at the Au Bon Pain™, sipping Mochafrappalattes™ silently, watching each other"), and the advertisers pay per thousand books sold (CPM!), so the author wants to write well.

"A. Why can't the library just buy as many digital copies as are needed for the customers, and keep them forever, if they don't naturally degrade?"

My local library offers assorted e-books. Every so often, when I've tried to request one, I was told I had to wait until someone else "returned" their copy.

It's not anything new. The whole point of copyright (and other intellectual property law) is to artificial limit unlimited goods. Copying has become cheaper with the digital age, but copying's been cheaper than buying monopoly copies for a long time. Why do you think libraries impose limits on how much you can photocopy out of a single book ?

"Planned scarcity" is the term. But I still think "lending" is a step forward to enable booking sharing, while preserving the incentive for writers to keep writing.

Needless to say Amazon will take a cut in this feature, perhaps some to the book publisher and author too. Kind of works out for everyone.

I think you're getting it confused with "planned obsolescence". The economic term actually is artificial scarcity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_scarcity

Although the acronym Cracked uses is most definitely not the scientific one.

You're looking in the wrong place to discover scarcity.

Copyright law is there to prevent real scarcity. Without copyright law there would be no big budget or little budget movies, little recorded music, few books, and on and on and on.

Sure, there will be a couple of beatniks who'll work night jobs as janitors to ply their trade, but the vast majority would abandon the effort.

The scarcity, minus the "artificial" scarcity, would be very real.

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