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Comment by Crinus | Hacker News Reader

The problem with these "many many ways" are that those that tend to work better also tend to be user hostile (subscriptions for things that have no reason to be provided as a service instead of as a product), make the users the products themselves (e.g. advertising), be privacy nightmares (like both the previous examples, at least for the majority of cases), etc.

At the end of the day the plain old "give me money to give you thing" works the best for all parties involved (assuming said parties want to be involved), despite any drawbacks.

Also as a programmer i'm not sure how i'd go about doing a live show :-P

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> At the end of the day the plain old "give me money to give you thing" works the best for all parties involved (assuming said parties want to be involved), despite any drawbacks.

This is the heart of it for me. All the new monetization models developed in the last 20 years suck. I don't want software as a service, I don't want freemium, I certainly don't want to be the product for ad-supported software. All I want is to pay you for the thing and get the thing and then for you to leave me alone until you release a new version of the thing.

What about software maintenance as a service?

Most of the decent software I’ve seen lately has used this model of monetization.

Patreon is a huge example of this model working very well in the online creator space. Music artists already make the majority of their income from live shows.

The solution to "subscriptions for things that have no reason to be provided as a service instead of as a product" is just trusting that people will pay if they like your product, or creating alternatives in the open-source space. Which will be much easier if you can rightfully use prior work. Your other concerns already exist, so at the worst we just have what we already have.

> Also as a programmer i'm not sure how i'd go about doing a live show :-P

You may be surprised. Many programmers do live-coding sessions as they work on open source products.

Yes, many programmers do live-coding sessions, but how many are making money doing it (and enough to live from that)?

I do livecoding a lot. It’s a great way to build and audience, do branding, etc.

You absolutely need to then do something to monetize said audience. Selling a course is the common model. But that’s selling access to information which is what we’re trying to argue against here.

I have also been pleasantly surprised that you can sell access to a livecoding series. That’s sort of like tickets to a live show.

Workshops are another form of a live programming show that people will pay money for. Have also done those and it’s a lot of fun.

Most paid forms of these are in exchange for teaching. Access to intellectual property in your brain.

>Workshops are another form of a live programming show that people will pay money for.

I know there are training companies that charge.

You also have workshops as part of paid conferences but I assume the vast bulk of those workshops are done for free by people being paid by their employer. And Meetups are usually free with the same people from companies along with those showing off or promoting some side project.

I agree with your general point around teaching/training. It's just that you're competing with a lot of free content, often subsidized by some company's product sales.

> Music artists already make the majority of their income from live shows

This is out of necessity, not necessarily because of the desire to do so. Not every musician wants to tour 300 days a year just to make a living. Writing music and performing music are not the same thing.

I'm sure there are some programmers capable of doing good work while keeping up a steady stream of banter, but many of us are quiet and don't want to have cameras peeking over our shoulders or staring in our faces.

Besides, turning my profession into a sharecropping existence on Twitch/YouTube/Patreon, choosing to either be a living ad banner or a mendicant, holds absolutely no appeal for me.

Would you say the current balance is correct?

I don't think I'd go as far as the op, but the current arrangement is causing me to lose respect for the whole setup.

IP should be there to enable people to make more stuff and no more. It seems that we should be testing how minimalistic we can make it, not how maximalistic, as is currently the case.

The blurred lines case isnt going to result in more music being made, it's going to result in less, Marvin Gaye isnt going to make another album, because he's dead.

I would guess for low overhead type things a 5 year copyright term wouldn't result in less music being produced, and it shouldn't be down to me to prove that, it should be down to whoever wants longer copyright terms to prove that that will result in more content being created.

the plain old model has historically been full of exceptions in order to make it work. Copyright used to expire, you had libraries as an solution to written words and people could do public performance without asking for permission.

Then in the last 30-40 years all those exceptions and escape vales for the plain old method of copyright was either made obsolete or amended away. Copyright does not expire in any meaningful way, public libraries holds only a marginal amount of all the copyrighted works, public performance got locked down, and so on.

The old "give me money to give you thing" worked fined in the old times with old time copyright and society. It work crappy in current time with current copyright and current society. Thus people are rushing to find a new better way.

As a programmer we could go back to 1790 old copyright law and still have a job. Even the game industry would survive fine on it.

subscriptions for things that have no reason to be provided as a service instead of as a product), make the users the products themselves

It seems to be working okay for YouTube and Twitch content creators. By monetizing via donations, Patreon patronage, and Twitch subscriptions, creators form a closer and more direct relationship with their audience. Twitch streamers especially are rewarded for engaging directly with people in chat.

For programmers it's different. Your best bet is to get paid by a company to work on proprietary business software, which can be highly specialized to the company and protected by trade secrets.

Entertainment seems to be swinging back to being primarily a service business, after a relatively short period as a hit-driven product business. It's not uncommon to hear a fan talking about buying a product specifically to support the creator.

> It's not uncommon to hear a fan talking about buying a product specifically to support the creator.

A consideration: Could a reason for this also be that people do want to avoid that their money goes to "evil media companies" who will use this money to fight against them (think DRM, think anti-consumer legislation etc.)?

It's not uncommon to hear a fan talking about buying a product specifically to support the creator.

And that sentiment is great, but while it's not unusual, it's certainly not the view that most people take. If even 10% of the people who like our stuff on social media and enjoy using the free versions actually paid even for the cheapest one-off purchase or shortest subscription to support the creators, I'd be writing to you from great hall of my palace right now.

Trade secrets are protected only by intellectual property regimes, and we're talking about a world without intellectual property.

> Trade secrets are protected only by intellectual property regimes, and we're talking about a world without intellectual property.

Not in Germany. In Germany, there exists a class of criminal acts that are subsumed unter the umbrella term "Geheimnisverrat" (secret betrayal), which also includes revealing trade secrets:

> https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Geheimnisverrat&o...

That's still just enforcement of intellectual property.

> That's still just enforcement of intellectual property.

No, in German law, this is a completely different criminal offence.

Ah, I see, so we could abolish IP law by renaming it to Conditionally Shared Secrets and keeping all provisions the same? No, that would be ridiculous. The concept of intellectual property is obviously unaffected by the implementation of the enforcement regime.

> Ah, I see, so we could abolish IP law by renaming it to Conditionally Shared Secrets and keeping all provisions the same?

I will try to explain it to you again: the purpose of all the criminal offences that are subsumed under "Geheimnisverrat" in German law is to punish leaking confidential information (e.g. trade secrets).

For example, a movie that is available on a BluRay disc, is not confidential because you can easily buy it. Thus, copying a BluRay disc etc. is does not belong under the umbrella term "Geheimnisverrat" because the content of the BluRay disc is not confidential data, but copyrighted.

Thus, in German law, Urheberrechtsverletzung (roughly and often translated with "copyright violation", though not identical) and Geheimnisverrat (secret betrayal) are very different criminal acts.

My point is that it's still intellectual property even if it isn't copyright, because it says that you can hold on to secrets and that secrets are protected like property.

Go back to the beginning of the thread:

> "Intellectual property" is fundamentally different from classical property because information is not an exclusive good. If I hold an apple, you cannot hold the same apple, but we can both hold a digital copy with the same information.

The same thing applies to these secrets. It's just a subtype of intellectual property. In the US, too, trade secrets and copyright violation are handled under different sections of the law. They are different acts, just like in Germany (hence the different name - copyright vs. trade secret).

But they're both intellectual property and the arguments against work against both.

Changing the legal framework around intellectual property doesn't stop it from being intellectual property.

> Changing the legal framework around intellectual property doesn't stop it from being intellectual property.

As I wrote under https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20811544 "Geheimnisverrat" applies to leaking confidential data (e.g. trade secrets, but not copyrighted works that are publicly available).

Intellectual property does not mean 'copyright', it broadly refers to any sort of creation that isn't physical in nature. Trade secrets are legally enforced differently than copyright in the United States as well, but they are both forms of intellectual property.

No, they're also protected by contract law. I don't think anyone who opposes intellectual property law is opposed to contract law. Non-disclosure agreements are widespread and straightforward. Why would we need extra protection specifically for trade secrets?

> The problem with these "many many ways" are that those that tend to work better also tend to be user hostile (subscriptions for things that have no reason to be provided as a service instead of as a product), make the users the products themselves (e.g. advertising), be privacy nightmares (like both the previous examples, at least for the majority of cases), etc.

Public money and grants avoid all of these problems. In my view, we should dramatically expand public funding for technology and the arts, especially in a world where distribution is nearly free.

In my view, we should dramatically expand public funding for technology and the arts, especially in a world where distribution is nearly free.

But then we need a way to decide what is or is not worthy of funding.

The effect of copyright is to create a market-based approach to this, where something similar to the familiar economics of trading goods allows us to direct money to those who provide value.

A move to publicly funded creative works would prompt the kind of debates we have today about public service broadcasters in particular and about pork barrel politics in general, but on a scale several orders of magnitude larger. I find it hard to imagine how that could possibly be as effective as what we have today. The power wielded by the gatekeepers of taxpayer-funded financial support would be immense and inevitably deeply corrosive.

> Also as a programmer i'm not sure how i'd go about doing a live show :-P

I see live coding happening all over Youtube and Twitch.

How many tickets have you bought for live coding shows?

Huh? Tickets are an outdated concept on internet platforms. Space is unlimited and advertising can sustain a channel just fine.

Edit: Medium sized channel.

According to Quora [0], ad revenue from YouTube is about $1 per thousand views. I doubt that programming live streaming is mainstream enough to be sustainable from ads alone.

[0] https://www.quora.com/How-much-does-YouTube-pay-per-1000-vie...

These metrics are totally inaccurate because different verticals pay different CPMs. Some can be much higher, but I've no idea how programming topics fares.

Even if it's 10x that, and one has 10k viewers, $100 is about one or two hours of work at a FAANG. And there's no health care coverage or free lunch for streamers.

Bear in mind that most viewers will see multiple ads during the stream, so 10k viewers could be more like 30k impressions.

Well I wasn't necessarily thinking this was being compared to a full time job, just that a channel could be self supporting, but there are ways to get close:

A strong supplement to ads is direct donations/subscriptions. If you've ever seen a YouTube/Twitch chat, people send a LOT of money that way and get their message highlighted/usually responded to for their money. It's not uncommon to see mid-tier YouTubers make hundreds in one stream but its probably the exception and not the rule.

It's not "tickets," but https://handmadehero.org/watch is live-streamed coding, funded through https://handmadehero.org/fund. I've found it educational and entertaining, and is an example of a programmer doing a "live show."

Quite a few if you include such content being bundled together with other content into a conference.

> Also as a programmer i'm not sure how i'd go about doing a live show :-P

I think the best-fit to the analogy here is when you make an app for one particular customer instead of for the general public.

But why would anyone then pay you to develop that app? They would need a business model of their own that doesn't rely on selling it, or maybe some other form of locked-down ecosystem where it is physically difficult to reproduce it even if it were legal to do so.

If the app is just a way into some other paid-for service, that could work OK. It would be similar to businesses contributing to OSS that is available at no charge today because they build related services that they do charge for. But this sort of model only works for a subset of the valuable apps produced today.

So, like websites? A surprising number of the apps I’ve worked on had websites with similar features.

Don’t get me wrong, some things may be well suited to the current model: a hiking GPS needs good maps, good maps are expensive to make, that expense is currently recovered with copyright licenses… but even then the best maps seem to be from the government, e.g. Ordinance Survey in the UK, and that app development could easily be nationalised and funded from taxation the way all NASA’s output is.

Well... I've seen a particularly aggressive company use their IP to kill competitors.

You can't make a specific file format without using this company.

It seems any free or low cost competitor gets bought by them.

It's made the CAD world horrible.

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