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Comment by sascha_sl | Hacker News Reader

> You're "renting" something that can be effortlessly replicated ad infinitum.

This is only slightly less true for books and optical media. You are never paying for the paper or plastic - even on the lowest margins that's at most 10% of it - , you're paying for the privilege of consuming what's on it.

> How much of what you pay for "digital rentals" goes to creators and towards running the actual infrastructure to download/consume media?

If you look beyond the big players you'll find some people earn more (semi-)self-publishing on the internet than they'd have ever earned with a publishing deal. On-demand/low volume print and having digital as your default channel also made "real" publishing deals available to more people.

Being on store shelves was not actually that much better than Spotify for musicians accounting for volume, they just had less competition because now shelf space is unlimited.

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>> You're "renting" something that can be effortlessly replicated ad infinitum.

>This is only slightly less true for books and optical media. You are never paying for the paper or plastic - even on the lowest margins that's at most 10% of it - , you're paying for the privilege of consuming what's on it.

When I pay for a book in a bookstore, part of the money goes towards maintaining the system that produces and distributes books. The system includes various parties, like printers, publishers, distributors, books stores and so on. It's far more than 10% and there is nothing wrong with paying for a reasonably working distributed system like that.

Replacing all of those companies with a single megacorp like Amazon or Apple is not going to result in the same system running cheaper. It will create an entirely different system. Over time that new system will shift to publish entirely different type of content, it will have an entirely different relationship with consumers and authors and it will have completely different effect on the society at large. Given what I see already, I seriously doubt those changes will skew towards the positive.

> It will create an entirely different system.

Simple as that sounds I didn't think of it before. It seems that if all the old systems can/might/will be replaced by the mega corp we could simply set a modest fixed megacorp-tax of say 1-2% and have the rest go to the creator of the text or video.

It was the author who provided the excuse in the old system why we should pay for easily replicated data. The argument that we should pay to be able to find the data was never a thing. It might as well be but it isn't. We can generously give this party 1% for the great effort they made finding the product I wanted to purchase. (The author should probably pay the megacorp for hosting and bandwidth)

After all, the mega corp is our hostage first and we are theirs second.

> we could simply set a modest fixed megacorp-tax of say 1-2%

Yeah this will surely be more like 30%

Only possible if the power dynamic somehow shifts in a significant way. Maybe it will, but I'm not very optimistic.

The MagaCorp will spend less than that 1% "lobbying" (hear legally bribing) politicians so that will never happen.

I’m still waiting for public domain Mickey Mouse. Disney only has a couple more years to get those checks sent out.

> You are never paying for the paper or plastic - even on the lowest margins that's at most 10% of it - , you're paying for the privilege of consuming what's on it.

It's true the physical book manufacturing is only ~10% of the price.

But you're forgetting costs of shipping, warehousing, stocking, retail, etc. Separate from manufacturing, roughly 40% of what you pay for a book goes to the physical retailer, and that's actually the largest chunk.

When you add up all the costs of producing and transporting and selling the physical book to a customer (and the publisher taking back unsold copies), they make up the majority of a book's cost.

The actual "license of content" cost of a physical book is a minority of the price you pay.

But with a book, you have that privilege in perpetuity, and you can loan, transfer, and resell it.

Coincidentally, NFT’s got the “transfer” side of the equation, but forgot about the “privilege” part! The tokens are yours in perpetuity, and can be transferred to others, but it’s not at all clear what privilege they provide.

Well, I was hinting at smaller digital storefronts! Many of them do offer DRM free digital books.

I can't comment on NFTs beyond "wow, what a wasteful scam".

> Coincidentally, NFT’s got the “transfer” side of the equation, but forgot about the “privilege” part! The tokens are yours in perpetuity, and can be transferred to others, but it’s not at all clear what privilege they provide.

Exactly! This is the part that I cannot get past whenever people talk about NFTs. They are a neat toy, self-contained, and having unambiguous ownership of the NFT. But there is absolutely nothing in the real world connected to it. It's like those pie-in-the-sky physics models that have hundreds of free parameters unconstrained by any experimental measurement. Sure those models might make some interesting predictions, but they have nothing tying them to the real world.

I could imagine a system where NFTs are used to establish ownership, but that requires there to be some trusted source that signs the initial NFT. This could be a land surveyor to make a NFT that represents property borders, or a patent office to make a NFT that represents a granted patent, or a MMO video game company to make a NFT that represents a particular asset within the game. But as it is, J.K. Rowling could make a NFT representing "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone", and I could make one as well. There's no indication of which one is a valid link from mathematical space to real space.

NFTs need a legal system in order to tie them to anything outside of the NFT ecosystem. They need trusted authorities who are the only ones that can generate NFTs with specific legal authority. And once you have that trusted authority, there's no point in having any of the other trustless blockchain architecture whose sole, flimsy excuse for existing is in avoiding having a trusted authority in the first place.

(Sorry, that turned into a longer rant than I had expected, but your phrasing crystallized some ideas that had been floating around my head, and I wanted to write them out to see where they went.)

This is the same issue all decentralized systems of ownership/value have, including all cryptocurrencies. Technology itself can't be a trust anchor without enforcement.

The dollar has value due to a mixture of trust in its continued value and in the entity enforcing it.

Bitcoin has value mostly because people speculate it has value. The extra decentralization loses its value as soon as you add enforcement, because now it is just a really complicated dollar.

Similarly, smart contracts do not solve an actual problem we can't solve with real contracts much cheaper, and the contract itself is unenforceable if any participant stops cooperating.

If you have to rely on police and courts to enforce your smart contract, why do you need the decentralized smart contract to begin with? Can you even model a smart contract that satisfies the legal constraints of all countries where participating in it is possible? Why aren't you just leaving this to lawyers and signatures on paper?

I would say this is more a fundamental problem/feature of human relations than technology. Every transaction, every contract, every treaty and every law has, on its own, little more value than a receipt. Centralization doesn't really solve that issue so much as it pretends to add the weight of government/society/God/{abstract entity of choice} where there is none. What's remained the same since time immemorial is that every act of trade is done voluntarily or under force. What blockchains and bitcoin change is by making the receipts self-provable and consistent without needing more information than a public key and a time of transaction. It doesn't change the need to assert one's property rights. That is still the purview of law and law enforcement short of a breakthrough in jurisprudence.

Your point about the dollar is flawed. The value of the dollar may be a floating currency at its most ideal but its "true" value, outside of forex, is determined by fiat. The Fed just financially engineers it in a very complicated manner with veritable pulleys and levers and, somewhere along the way, a gun to everyone's private bank account in the form of artificial inflation/negative interest rates, punitive taxes, and from time to time, suing institutions that make US financial theater look bad by threat of dubious litigation.

>>If you have to rely on police and courts to enforce your smart contract, why do you need the decentralized smart contract to begin with?

If police departments have to rely on private citizens to be bounty hunters or informants, is there a point to having a police force at all? What's the point of a legal system that depends on executive enforcement when the citizenry is capable of doing so on its own? Why do we have to have a mayor/governor/president? Why not a government of individual people addressing their own affairs as need be and judges/arbitrators as referees? The answer to both sets of questions is that they are both options to a larger question: "How should one handle interpersonal expectations and violations thereof?"

I'm not sure if you went anywhere with the question of "what use does a smart contract actually have" beyond "justifying vigilante justice" or "anarcho-capitalism" (which, let's be clear, boils down to feudalism in which they'd be little less than a formality).

I addressed it in my first paragraph but, to repeat, a smart contract is a self-provable receipt.

In addition, I don't see how you read my statement and came away with the idea that I support vigilante justice or anarcho-capitalism. My questions were pointed towards addressing the unstated assumptions inherent to your question and the other questions in your post that I didn't quote. Namely, that a centralized authority or agreement of centralized authorities is a requirement to render any transaction/contract/agreement valid. That's an assumption I find to be unproven and easily contested.

NFTs need a legal / authority system ensuring they are tied to something. I agree and this is why NFTs and block chain are simply not needed at all. A simple certificate signed by an authority would make more sense .. no purpose in a anonymous block chain for this I can see.

> But with a book, you have that privilege in perpetuity, and you can loan, transfer, and resell it.

But you don't. Not really. DVDs and books only last, what, 30-40 years. Are you entitled to a free replacement after that time is up?

> books only last, what, 30-40 years.

I have little pulp paperbacks that are older than 40 years, and those are about the least durable books around. I expect finer books to last 100 years and as many readings... and to go on to do it again. Barring environmental damage or my deliberately binning them, I expect most books I’ve already had 20 years to outlive me by going another 50+... and I got most of them used to begin with, often already 10-80 years old when I got them (a few older, but they’re outliers). If the next owner re-binds them many could survive another lifetime or two.

Books will last much longer than that. Their most common mode of destruction is storage-in-landfill. Moisture (may that be flooding or mold) and fire are the main environmental factors diminishing the lifespan of a book. Things such as the acidity of paper are only an issue for book collectors and libraries. That leaves wear and tear, which can usually be repaired. In other words, books are more than capable of lasting for the lifetime of the original purchaser.

Now contrast that to digital downloads with DRM, where you are at the whim of the vendor. The worse example I've seen is a perpetual license expiring after 2 years, though I have lost access to several hundred dollars worth over purchases over the past decade (and I'm not a big spender).

> You are never paying for the paper or plastic - even on the lowest margins that's at most 10% of it - , you're paying for the privilege of consuming what's on it.

To be honest this is a really great point I've seen brought up very rarely. I think the digital aspect makes it so extremely obvious that it forced the conversation.

That said, there are more costs than the physical medium itself. There's the physical shelf space copies consumes (vs. digital media which can be copied on demand), the costs associated with the creation and shipping of the item, in-store human handling, not to mention all the consumer-level effort and costs of purchasing the physical media (going to the store and carrying it around, having it occupy space at home, taking care of not damaging it…)

These things all still exist in some capacity, though obviously it has become more efficient. Bandwidth isn't free, for instance.

The cost of publishing hasn't changed much. It just shifted from "making it to the limited selection" to "being visible in the essentially limitless selection". In the end you still need to make deals with retailers and invest into advertising (especially when storefronts don't do deals - or at least say they don't, hi spotify).

Except you're not renting books or optical media. You're buying them, and you can resell them or loan them to other people no problem.

For collectors or even casual consumers, this secondary market has as much or more value than the primary market. My wife and son borrow an absurd amount of library books. I maintain a library of movies and games, most of which are second hand. And if I don’t like something, it goes back into the market for someone else to enjoy.

There’s depreciation and an ultimate limit to how many times something can be lent, which only exists artificially in the digital world (libraries get so many “lends” of a digital license before they have to buy another). On the other hand, for end users, digital licenses are completely missing lending and selling and in some cases even backup and format shifting.

Has the first sale doctrine ever been applied to these licenses in court?

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