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Comment by nickm12 | Hacker News Reader

Could they make a living at it, though?

Some of them could --- Jonathan Coulton, for instance, has been making a pretty good living over the last several years on his music, all of which has been freely available on the web since he was a fairly generic techie with a guitar and a hobby. (In part from live performances, and in part because most people _will_ buy stuff that they _could_ get for free if it's the most convenient thing to do.) Likewise Randall Munroe at XKCD (with revenue from tie-ins), etc.

How many of them could is impossible to estimate. But it's also worth remembering that for everyone who made a living at the by-now traditional, exclusive rights-based approach, there were quite a few wannabes trying to "break in" or "get discovered" by the industry gatekeepers, who weren't making a living at their stuff either.

Before copyright, people still made a living from music, books, art, etc. It was just a different model, patronage was common, the modern equivalent is probably something like kickstarter. Even under the current system, most artists don't make a living straight away, they have to gain recognition whilst doing something else before it becomes their full time job.

And this business model really isn't as alien as you might think, many industries require deposits, milestone based payment, etc.

However, despite having been corrupted by greedy entities into a parody of it's original purpose, copyright has undeniably been beneficial to western culture over the past 100 years.

I believe there will be a grand bargain at some point, where citizens will be asked how long a copyright should last for, and an agreement will be reached. "pirating" will become something that is seen as morally wrong by society (at the moment most people see it as "a bit naughty" at worst).

How long it will take for the corporations to give up on copyrights that last more than a human lifetime is difficult to say. It is surprising to me that americans are willing to put up with a system which means that the only video of martin luther kings i have a dream speech will likely never enter the public domain.

>"pirating" will become something that is seen as morally wrong by society

Quite the opposite. Society will wake up and realize that sharing information, culture and art is the farthest thing from "morally wrong". Sharing is probably one of, if not the most universally ethical action a human being can undertake. You will be hard pressed to find a culture - modern or historical - where this is not the case.

It is sickening how far the - for a lack of a more appropriate word - propaganda of the copyright industry has twisted society's most basic perception of morality, though I must applaud them for their efficiency in spreading their misguided beliefs.

It is not that we, as humanity, will one day realize that sharing - quite probably the very act that brought us this far - is something evil that needs to be stopped. We will wake up, and realize in disgust how a single industry controlled our shared heritage for almost 5 centuries, and declare that this mistake must not be repeated - that art, culture and information cannot be owned by anyone, and must be free for everyone to access, process and hand on. That will be the day we finally get rid of copyright, of patents, and other forms of nonsensical "Intellectual Property", passing on to our children how this was one of the worst mistakes in our history.

I look forward to that day, and let me say with confidence that we will one day arrive at it. You cannot suppress human nature, just as much as you cannot bring order into chaos.

I don't think the creative industry overall has been an extremely profitable one for artists. Through out history artists have created because that's what they liked doing. Only the best and most popular ones usually got the recognition and some money. It's just hard to monetize art unless it also has a practical purpose.

That's going to be a problem as we approach a world where basic human needs are easily met.

Not really. As basic human needs become more easily met, the cost of them is going to fall, leaving more money left over for intellectual and aesthetic goods. The next step after 90% of the population working in agriculture to 90% of the population working in industry to 90% of the population working in the service sector is going to be 90% of the population creating essentially intellectual and aesthetic goods.

That assumes that the extra money is distributed. That doesn't seem to be happening.

Why will people buy these intellectual and aesthetic goods? And with what money will they buy them?

..are they entitled to? To trot out the old Heinlein quote:

There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute or common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back.

  -- Life-Line (1939)

I can't agree more! Although I support the idea of paying someone for their hard work, even if it was something of creative artistry. (Time is still money, even if it was spent dreaming of characters in a play, or colors on a canvas) I do NOT agree that we have now set some sort of "bar" for artists/actors/musicians HAVING to become filthy rich for choosing those careers and we can NEVER progress beyond that point.

The makers of horse shoes, sued Henry Ford for putting them out of business. We may laugh at this, but isn't this the same thing we see going on today?

You couldn't make a living as a writer prior to the invention of the printing press--at least the only way you could do it was to get some individual or institution to pay you to write a book. In that case books were so expensive that there wasn't a big enough market to do so. Now the cost of a book is asymptotically headed to 0. Maybe you can't make a living from selling books in that world either.

Be that as it may, the invention of the printing press wasn't a watershed moment for writers everywhere. Getting a book published in print even now is quite an undertaking when you consider all the individuals, money, and infrastructure involved. The elimination of that infrastructure and closer coupling of content creators to their channels of distribution (i.e. fewer middlemen between them and publishing) will probably provide a bit more leverage to content creators, but it's still not clear how much, how fast, or what the cost will be to everybody else. It looks like we're still trying sorting that out, especially given the current suits around publishers and Apple.

Because they weren't writers back then as books/reading weren't a market. A writer would have to be a story tellers and you could certainly make money as a story teller.

Also, if you could physically write, you could make comfortable living as a scribe.

During Charles Dickens' early career, his books had no copyright protection in America, and British copyright law could be evaded by just changing the protagonist's name to "Oliver Twiss". He was still able to become independently wealthy.

A major factor in that was the difficulty of copying in Dickens' day. His works were often published in serial form. His authorized agents were able to get a copy of each new chapter and have it on a boat to America while unauthorized copiers had to wait for the British publication, and then make copies from that.

By the time the copiers did that, and were able to get their copies to America, the authorized copy was already here, and most people who wanted to buy had already bought an authorized copy.

Even for works not in serial form, the authorized release had a big advantage, at least if the author was well known. Most sales occurred fairly soon after publication, and by the time copiers could buy a copy, and get it typeset (remember--this was all done by hand back then!) there weren't a lot of buyers left.

Stephen Breyer, who later went on to become a Justice of the Supreme Court, wrote a famous law review article called "The Uneasy Case for Copyright" where he argued that copyright might be unnecessary because of the market advantage from being first that the author's authorized edition gets. There's more information on this article here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Uneasy_Case_for_Copyright

Subsequent technological advances have pretty much obliterated the basis of that argument. Copying is so fast and easy now that being first gives very little advantage.

Does it matter?

In any case, my guess is that the good ones probably still could.

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