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Comment by tomc1985 | Hacker News Reader

tomc1985

Honestly the whole idea of creators controlling their IP is fucked. Everywhere, everyone wants to get in on carving out a million monetizable use cases while the rest of us collapse under the weight of an entirely bullshit system of rights enforcement.

We should not have to walk on eggshells!

Here's an alternative: anything you put out there, isn't yours any more. It belongs to the public. Art, software, music, fonts... it is in the hands of the people. Your role as creator is limited to stewardship.

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Giving creators a monopoly over their creation for a limited time is a good thing.

However, life of the author plus 70 years, and whatever that means if a company owns it instead of a flesh-and-blood individual, is way too long. I can't even come up with a reason to defend that isn't "I'd like to create a multi-generational legacy and copyright minefield based on my IP so I can collect royalties without having to actually do anything productive."

In modern times it should maybe be 5-7 years, ability to collect significant damages shouldn't start until works are formally registered, and if you don't use your works in a commercial revenue-generating activity, the protection expires after 1 or 2 years. Longer or shorter durations for certain industries may make sense.

Only a piece of the solution, you still need the economic incentive, and that incentive shouldn't be just hoping you're popular enough for people to donate to your stewardship.

Let me know what you come up with, there are likely some crafty solutions.

Universal Basic Income could help a lot here. The rise of open-source and volunteer movements shows that a lot of people want to work on what they are passionate about, if only for their jobs and the need to earn money.

UBI may not solve this entirely but if it can free people of the need to worry about their economics whilst simultaneously allowing people to do whatever they want, for a lot of folks that is enough.

Additionally, I don't really see the issue with selling (NOT licensing) something up-front, if there is a culture of setting pricing to be reasonable and fair instead of the current leave-no-money-on-the-table approach.

Those that want to earn above and beyond can still find employment in critical services...banking, healthcare, government, whatever, while those that want to opt out of employment are free to do so on their terms.

I like the way CirclesUBI handles it. If you appreciate a craftsman's work you can "trust" them. Trust is a pact to value their UBI tokens as much as you value your own.

So you don't have be in the market for a font to support fontmakers (or anything else).

The need to earn money incentivizes people to work on things that are useful to others. If people only followed their passion, and the results of that are of no interest to others, why should others pay them to do that?

The need to earn money also incentivizes people to work on products that are monetiziable. More specifically, it encourages people to move their project in a monetiziable direction which puts the priority on revenue generation over quality.

> which puts the priority on revenue generation over quality.

On the other hand, the need to be able to sell things means the quality has to meet the customer's expectations.

For example, cars produced by free market companies far exceed in quality those produced by socialist operations.

In fact, I suspect you'd be hard pressed to find any examples of anything people made purely for their own amusement being better quality than items they made for sale.

For example, the software I write for my own personal use tends to be pretty slipshod, as it only has to work for my use case. I don't bother with coherent error messages, documentation, a decent user interface, or fixing any bugs that don't directly impede what I use it for. Doing that stuff is simply not worth my time unless I'm planning on distributing it.

> The need to earn money also incentivizes people to work on products that are monetiziable

So, a product for which people are willing to give you money in exchange. People are not likely going to buy a shitty product unless the situation involves monopoly (natural or otherwise) or regulatory capture

That's true physical products. I had software in mind when I made my comment. The need to earn money means testing paywalls and creating subscription features (and then adding nag screens to encourage customers to subscribe).

Does it though? It seems instead the incentive might be to create broad and accessible works that will appeal to the widest audience. Marvel movies are produced and performed with a high level of quality; yet the stories are simple, unchallenging, and easily accessible.

It's also possible to create content that's more experimental and creative, by focusing on more niche audiences. This is evidenced by the current golden age of TV and streaming, with a wide variety of dramas, comedies, documentaries, etc.

Are you willing to pay more money for a better quality product?

> The need to earn money incentivizes people to work on things that are useful to others.

No, it does not. The need to earn money incentivizes people to work on things that allow them to extract money from others. This sometimes happens to line up with "useful", and there's probably even a positive correlation overall, but they're not remotely the same thing.

> The need to earn money incentivizes people to work on things that allow them to extract money from others.

You're talking about things like acquiring money through force or fraud. This is not how free markets work. Free markets work by creating products that people want to buy and freely trade their money for.

If I create a widget and you want it more than the money it costs, I am not "extracting" the money from you.

What do we need an incentive for? The world isn't exactly short of art and lot of people will keep doing it for fame and glory or for its own sake.

Fewer commercial incentives may improve what bubbles up as the incentive process is sometimes interfering badly with the discovery, or production, of the best stuff.

I've been working full time on Open Source software for 20 years. I don't get paid for it, though I do derive income from lectures, training, and other paid gigs as a result. I've also turned down many high paying job offers as another consequence.

So, focusing on fonts and types in particular:

I drifted a way from worrying about typefaces but for awhile was really focused on them for publication reasons.

Things have changed a lot in the last 10 years or so because of Google Fonts and other similar things but my impression has always been:

1. For whatever reason, there seems to be this black-and-white schema that font licenses either need to be ridiculously expensive and locked down, or completely free. I've never really understood why you couldn't go buy a personal use of a font (with generous use allowances) for say, 10 USD. The idea that people might actually be willing to pay if it were affordable seems lost, probably because it's usually large firms commissioning the typefaces to begin with. But if you make it for an initial project, reap the benefits, and can relicense it, why not do so understanding that you might make some money from large numbers of small purchases? (For what it's worth, I think similar issues arise in other areas where there's overly restrictive IP -- you get this black-and-white seesaw between draconian IP and totally libre offerings as a blacklash, with nothing in between).

2. What seems to evolved in some cases is some initial commission by a large firm, followed by libre licensing afterward, which makes some sense to me. Then the designer gets paid a large fee, people get to ooh and aah at the beautiful font, and the company gets extra advertising for commissioning a nice libre font. It's basically a form of advertising -- people download the font and see that company A paid for it, and then they get some branding association. The desire for fresh branding and individuating, along with goodwill, is part of what drives the commissions. Or put some relatively brief term on the commercial font, after which it becomes open.

I agree with all of this, but there's also a flip side.

If you benefit from somebody's work, you should find ways to support it. Not because it belongs to anybody, but because whatever it is, you should have an incentive to keep it going.

I support the good will in voluntary support for the arts.

But I don't think this works as an economic system for rewarding creators, given corporations really do not have an incentive to help others benefit from new font creation or other artistic expression, just because they have themselves.

It would be interesting to have a list of all kinds of products where licensing can be the biggest headache in using them. Then seeing if a common theme emerges that might suggest a fairer, more mentally efficient, licensing mechanism.

Lol what? So musicians shouldn’t get value when people play their music? I guess you’d have them starve? Same with all the others?

Look at all these terrible attempts at controlling, and just how well they work. In every sector you have a cadre of elites and a much larger cohort of have-nots.

Musicians don't starve, they put on concerts and experiences and sell merchandise. In many ways music has already given up ownership of the music itself, because they let Spotify/Apple Music/et al eat their lunch. Fractions of a penny per-play is like nothing for 99% of musicians.

No. Musicians should get value when they play their music to a person or audience willing to pay. If they are starving they should find another job.

That would mean that there's no value in creating the music. Only in reproducing it. People would have even less incentive to create new stuff instead of redoing old stuff. That is definitely not what I, as a listener, want.

Except that people create music all the time despite their knowledge that they won't get paid for it.

There will also always be a paying market for composing, say, the soundtrack to a movie where it has to reflect the narrative and events in the film. For example, the Bugs Bunny cartoon music was performed while projecting the cartoon on a screen, so the musicians could match the timing. The music was very much customized to the cartoon.

There already exist multiple lifetimes of existing music. The world won't be worse off if that rate of growth slowed down significantly.

Most musicians don't make music for its monetary value, but because of personal fulfillment. All but the most successful 1% of musicians would find greater monetary value doing something else for the amount of work it takes to get to that level.

> People would have even less incentive to create new stuff instead of redoing old stuff.

In fact, I speculate the opposite might be true. How many big pop artists go into semi-retirement by their mid-30s once they've dropped off the charts? Why keep making music when you can comfortably collect off all your past hits? Certainly there's no economic incentive to keep working once you can collect sizeable rents.

I believe OP wants musicians to be compensated for the music they create because they believe that this will improve the quality of the music that is created.

I am sure that if there are no incentives to creating new music some people will still do it. Just like I am sure that if there are no incentives to creating new books some people will still write. Or movies will still be created even without funding.

That being said, I enjoy having access to blockbuster movies, AAA video games, books by professional authors, and songs by professional song writers.

I prefer to live in a world in which those things can exist. For those things to exist, they need business models that can support them. I would choose a world with high quality professional content over a world in which everything is free.

I didn't say musicians (and I did mean creatives in general) shouldn't get paid.

However, I'm not sure an entitlement should exist whereby the act of me acquiring or listening to a recording of a performance--for/on my own devices, in my own home, etc.--results in an obligation for me to pay the artists.

If your business model ultimately depends on controlling what people do in their homes or personal space, or personal devices, then it's bad.

Would you buy a book if you had to pay each time you read it?

> So musicians shouldn’t get value when people play their music?

People will pay $$$$$ to hear the original Beatles give a live performance. They will pay $ to hear a cover band play the same music, even if the cover band is better.

Reframe the issue as recorded music being advertising for the live concert performance, where the money will be made. Many bands have already figured that out that's where the real money is these days.

> People will pay $$$$$ to hear the original Beatles give a live performance. They will pay $ to hear a cover band play the same music, even if the cover band is better.

The novelty of having musicians rise from the dead for a concert does help there.

If Paul and Ringo hired a couple others to fill out the quartet, I bet the tickets would sell fast at a very high price.

P.S. That Greta Van Fleet singer didn't want to be compared to Robert Plant. What an idiot. There's a guy who sounds like Plant in his youth - what an incredible opportunity he is just throwing away. He could enlist the help of Plant & Page and create a new Zep songbook. Everybody wins - especially me, because there's only so many times you can play Dazed and Confused.

Note that Adam Lambert who joined Queen to fill in for sadly absent Freddie Mercury has done very well indeed.

Most musicians are not making their money from copyright but from performances. Only a tiny % of musicians ever get a record deal. Of those with record deals, the vast majority of the earnings goes to the record label and not the artist.

Earnings from copyrighted musical works probably follows a pareto distribution--something like 90% of earnings are accrued by <10% of copyright holders. So the copyright regime rewards, in order, 1. music distributors, 2. big name artists, and finally 3. most other artists who receive only token earnings.

Music was an idyllic vocation before records and long before copyright. There are many ways to support the arts other than copyright. Grants for public theatres, music education, and street venues would be more egalitarian and benefit more musicians than a copyright regime.

Sharing freely and embracing open source has been an unalloyed good for encouraging the development of software; so there is some insight to your comment. But participation in open source is voluntary. And right now any artist or musician can make the voluntary and free decision release their work under a Creative Commons license. It would be a degradation of individual liberty to require all workers in all creative fields to open source their work. That's not a choice you, or me, or the government should get to make on behalf of another person.

One might argue that some regime of publicly funded remuneration could be just compensation for the public seizure of all creative output. But that's orthogonal to the point. The seizure itself is the problem.

My issue is more that an individual work can't stand alone, in a legal sense. There is always the work, and then there is a an artificially-imposed, invisible framework around it that prohibits the free use of the work it supposedly protects.

I wouldn't describe it as public "seizure", more the omission of that previously-mentioned framework which in-turn allows the work itself to be free of encumbrance.

Does a U.S. government worker creating something public domain experience a "seizure" of his work? I don't think so. And in fact the government functions quite well with this rule in-place. Why can't we consider extending that to the private sector as well?

There is the old adage of, "information wants to be free". In a way, so does everything else.

But particularly in the digital domain -- which economically can be described as a land of plenty, where information can be freely copied, transformed, and executed with little-to-no-cost -- we should embrace this new economy rather than trying to force physical-world constraints where they don't belong.

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