Hacker News Reader

Comment by half-kh-hacker | Hacker News Reader

As a jumping-off point for thought: Piracy-by-default would work very well in a world where access to a work is not charged, but the social custom is that revenue is collected via pre- or during-production crowdfunding

You may see lower revenues, but how much cost is currently poured into resolving licensing / investing in DRM / etc, all for works to be pirated anyway?

View on HN

While that is not fundamentally impossible, Star Citizen is so far the only crowdfunded thing I know that managed to collect AAA-game levels of money. Pretty much everything else isn't making nearly enough to actually finance the project and requires more funding outside of the crowdfunding. Furthermore, a lot of successful crowdfunding is build up on prior copyrighted work. People spend money on Star Citizen because they liked Wing Commander and Freelancer. Without copyright, those earlier works might not have existed to begin with or never gained the popularity they got.

Yes, AAA games and live-action movies are so costly to make that they generally wouldn't get traction on crowdfunding platforms if they insisted on full funding. So we get this middle-of-the-road solution where crowdfunding pays for a fraction of the costs, with the rest to be recovered via post-release sales. But other kinds of content don't have that issue to anywhere near the same extent.

You can't look at current crowdfunding levels in a world where the crowdfunded product is the exclusive "IP" of those receiving the money and then assume that tells you anything about a different world where there is no copyright and pre-funding creators is the only way to get new content of a certain scale. Or in other words: you're arguing that not having copyright would not work in a world built around copyright.

There's quite a bit of crowdfunded open content. It just tends to not work as well for the most costly to produce kinds of content.

Many ebook vendors I use (InformIT, Packt, No Starch Press, Pragmatic Bookshelf, Manning, O'Reilly Back in the day), work at piracy-by-default mode. Only InformIT watermarks PDF copies, and there's no DRM to talk about.

So, when you have good content with reasonable prices, people also come and buy.

Also, there are some eBooks in Kobo store devoid of any DRM. So, publishers are not forced to use DRM on Kobo, as well.

Another idea is serialization. You release your work little chunks at a time, and if it's not sufficiently supported financially, you stop. A lot of Patreon is effectively funded like this. Obviously the medium has to be amenable to this (e.g. novels, graphic novels, visual novels, some video games).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com