Comment by xtracto | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xtracto | Hacker News Reader

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A lot of the typical and expected takes for these sort of discussions:

- on one side, people who are in favour of the arrests , because they see their a activities as crimes. They have point

- on the other side people that one way or another, believe that the distribution of the information should be free in some sense. Justifications always abound. A d it's Ok

I offer a third take: Theres no reason why authors should be perpetually paid for the work of 500/1000 hours, or whatever time it took them to write the books; research time included. Publishing a book should give authors, editors and related parties the compensation for their worked time at a fair hourly wage. The same way you a I are compensated hourly.

After that, the only cost of books should be distribution costs, which nowadays are near to 0 with p2p and similar.

The fact that the work output of some people is intended to be overpaid indefinitely, while the output of the rest of us is only paid hourly, is what's unfair.

Authors and creators are not wage workers. They are taking on the risk that their creations may yield them nothing. In that sense they are entrepreneurs/investors, and along with the risk of failure they have the prospect of great "upside". So I think the question is whether you think there should be limits to how much you can earn, etc, in general.

Does this apply to everyone? If I build and sell an indie software product, should I only be able to sell it for the distribution costs ($0.02/user/month, say) once I have recouped someone's definition of a fair hourly wage for building it?

Creative works can't be valued just by the number of hours it takes to make them. Good books must be paid for more than bad books.

The way I think this would work is like this:

- A "good writer" sholud release the first chapter of their book (or first N pages or whatever) for free. As a sort of "Resume"/"Portfolio"

- Then, he lists the rest of the TOC for the next chapters of the book, and the price of each of them.

- He raises that money in a place like Kickstarter or similar platform, for each of the chapters. And as he gets the money, he publishes/uploads the new chapters of the book.

- Once he gets the 100% of the price of the book, he has delievered/published all the chapters. He may offer the whole book in one file, printed copy, audio or whatever other medium for an additional prodcution and distribution fee.

With this approach writers who write good books would be able to demand more money per chapter (hence, $ per hour of their work) than writers who write bad books. While at the same time, they would be able to ask for some fixed amount of $ per hour of their work. Sure, a writer like Stephen King may ask for $1000 USD per hour of his work, so one chapter of one of his book will take $40,000 USD. But I am sure given his fame, he won't have any trouble in raising that.

This appraoch would also work for music and software. It is kind of based on the Shareware model used in the 90s.

Compensated by whom?

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