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Comment by cma | Hacker News Reader

A third option with both funding and no artficial scarcity:

https://cepr.net/report/the-artistic-freedom-voucher-interne...

Everyone gets money to spend as patrons for people contributing to the commons.

What is artificial scarcity? I don’t disagree with funding arts, in fact I think that STEAM would be a superior system to STEM, but we don’t even fund STEM research enough today, even though many of the best scientists had artistic abilities: not full inference.

> What is artificial scarcity?

The copyright system allows artificial scarcity to help fund things by restricting copies. But it doesn't have to be done that way.

In history it has been the most productive and innovative, because research and development takes time and money. The wright brothers are patent trolls who prevented the US from making plane designs, but without them we wouldn’t have modern flight. If we took away this incentive I doubt the world would be better. Currently you have this system where countries that don’t respect patents will just make it anyway, the US did against Europe and China does against the US.

Asia did not have patents and Europeans did. If my ideas aren’t my own and anyone can copy it, I wouldn’t want to put efforts into something others will clone.

I think patents are a necessary evil at least enough of it to make innovations, but foreign copycats and bootlegs serve this market well.

> If my ideas aren’t my own and anyone can copy it, I wouldn’t want to put efforts into something others will clone.

And yet, the FOSS movement persists.

Both systems can run alongside each other.

Don’t they? Free and open source stuff is often an implementation of closed source or commercial goods. Without Bell labs, there’d be no Unix, no BSD, no Linux. Commercial can run by itself, but free systems cannot. Linux isn’t GPL3, so the rights still belong to the programmers.

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