Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

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If you read what I wrote, I made no criticism of him for doing his job. I said it would be a poorer world were the only people who could afford to write those with independent sources of income.

> artists earn money by performing

What you're saying, in economic terms, is that musicians have rivalrous, excludable goods they can produce: the concert experience.

That's not bad, although it would have the IMO negative effect of leaving the Brian Wilson (much more oriented towards studio work than touring) types between a rock and a hard place.

Authors don't really have that: they could sign books, but that would reduce their income drastically, as most copies would be freely had.

> Open source developers earn money by utilizing their knowledge and skill in paid-for projects.

As for the open source developers, but WHERE DOES THE MONEY COME FROM in those paid-for projects? Scarcity is where it comes from, and often, they're getting paid to work on open source by someone who deals in the artificial scarcity of intellectual property.

> Authors don't really have that: they could sign books, but that would reduce their income drastically, as most copies would be freely had.

Cory Doctorow seems to manage just fine. OK, that's not easy. But I'm not sure it's harder than earning money from a standard publisher, and it looks at least possible.

Paulo Coelho, Trent Reznor, Bruce Eckel, at least to some extent.

Cory Doctorow's work appears to be released under the "Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike" license, which means that only his publisher has the right to sell paper copies. Granted, he's being very generous and liberal, but he is still utilizing IP laws to create some scarcity.

http://craphound.com/ftw/Cory_Doctorow_-_For_the_Win.htm

Also, you have to look at these things at the margin: were all authors to do this, how many would no longer be able to support themselves with their writing, and thus be forced to stop or curtail their activities? He's a relatively well known writer: maybe it's ok for him to make, say, 100K rather than 200K a year. Some guy making 50K a year may have to give it up if his income is cut in half.

Furthermore, consider that just now the Kindle and similar systems are really starting to take off. In 2005 or so, you either bought the paper book and had yourself a nice read, or stared at an LCD for hours, which is not my idea of pleasant.

I hear you. Well, I even agree, you're probably right. And that sucks.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2334265

> (...) WHERE DOES THE MONEY COME FROM in those paid-for projects? Scarcity is where it comes from (...)

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Google, IBM and the likes earn by selling services and goods rather than artificially limiting intellectual property.

((cue Android download link and AdWords control panel link))

> > Scarcity is where it comes from (...)

> Sometimes yes, sometimes no.

No. It always comes from scarcity of some kind.

In the case of consulting, the scarcity might be expertise in putting together some kind of enterprisey system, but there is always going to be scarcity, otherwise no money will be exchanged.

And you can rest assured that IBM has made plenty of money from IP itself over the years - they're no strangers to software or any other kind of patents, nor selling software like DB2. Also: do you think that IBM's services division would make as much money if they posted all their code to the internet? I bet many of their clients believe (right or wrong) that the custom solutions they're getting are a competitive advantage and do not want to freely share them with the competition who is not shelling out big bucks to IBM.

With regards to Google's IP, you can be very sure that they would invoke all kinds of IP laws were someone to walk out of their HQ and post important bits and pieces of their search engine tech to the internet. These days, they're in a pretty good position to survive in any case, but think about trying to start a company and have no way of doing anything if people walked out and posted your "crown jewels" to the internet.

Agreed.

> It always* comes from scarcity of some kind.*

Meaning, if you want to gain any wealth, then work on something scarce, and make sure it stays scarce. Let everyone do that, and we get a world of scarcity.

Hmm…

I thought that a world of abundance was better?

Competition has a way of ensuring that scarce things become abundant. Look at, say, automobiles or computers or food or most normal goods. Sure, monopolies exist, but we also have laws to limit their harm as well.

You don't just get to wave your hands and make things "abundant", someone has to do the work, and in order to do the work they have to make a living at it, at the very least.

> Sure, monopolies exist, but we also have laws to limit their harm as well.

A monopoly large enough is able to self-sustain, by adjusting the environment to its needs. And let's say that openly: including adjusting the law.

Of course, at some point their growth is stopped by growing pains of internal communication & management. What does the development of management theory and practice spell for the future, we shall see.

As I've said numerous times here, I don't think that IP laws in their current form are ideal, just that the idea of tossing them out entirely is likely to have some very serious consequences in terms of the production of information goods.

Counter example - affordable new AIDS medicines Or better internet connectivity/speeds in America.

While competition does have its place for helping humanity, it should also be recognized as not being useful in the production of other types of goods.

How is throwing out IP laws completely going to get you those things? I don't see it. Who's going to bring drugs to market? Sure, government sponsors basic research, but to get there to the market is not exactly a walk in the park.

I've read the thread again, could you tell me where I came across as "throwing out IP Laws completely"?.

I think - A) Competition is good for some types of goods, not all. (I don't remember/know the correct economic criteria to define this.)

B) IP laws are good/great for some research, and bad/terrible for others.

C) I do not see the current system incentivizing humanity's good over personal/shareholder profit.

D) The current system has 'Human Good' occur as a side effect of rewarding people to do their best. It is vastly better than any system which has existed before. it will be better if we can fix C).

The original article was about Chomsky saying IP was a bad thing, and a lot of commenters here seem to like the idea of ditching it, lock stock and barrel.

I agree with your points, and think that D and C are incremental improvements to the existing system to try and make with time, rather than a reason to junk the entire thing.

I agree that ditching the whole thing would be ineffective. Even if we did, I would bet that the new system would be the old system with minor differences.

There is good in the system, it needs more people to help managed and identify fraudulent/cheating behavior which is aimed at gaming the system.

I also think we need a smaller net so that fewer things can be patented. Again, this is for the freedom to exchange information and ideas, which leads to the betterment of humanity as a whole.

Everything we do has been built on the ideas and labor of others before us. It makes little sense to me to imagine we will be better off by not letting future generations do the same.

There are proposed alternatives to IP protections. For example, a society could decide to fund these as public goods. (Say, in a participatory bottom-up manner.)

Then you don't have the stick-filesharers-in-jail problem.

I would champion this point - at least in terms of research and science.

On the other hand when it comes to artists and sharing of other similar IP, the current system can do with shorter copyright terms. At least thats my non-nuanced starting point on these discussions.

(!!Science!!)

There exists concept of Gift economy [1] where scarcity is not a driving factor. The (historical) implementations we had so far aren't exactly shining examples of quick development. But it may have been just partly related, or even unrelated, to the economic model.

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[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_economy

the online gift economy does not have to remain limited to digital culture

www.giftflow.org (still in alpha)

The services Google sells are dependent on a lot of trade-secret intellectual property.

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