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Comment by FigBug | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure artificial scarcity is a bad thing, as it allows digital products to exist. As a consumer I'd much rather have the option to choose between a digital product and a digital service. Somethings like email and web hosting obviously have to be a digital service. Things like games and music can be either. And I usually choose the product since it'll exist long after the service is gone. (Assuming no DRM)

I think we may be entering a digital dark age, where in the not too distant future, a lot of the software of today will no longer be useable. There will be no DOSBOX equivalent to play web games of 2014.

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Digital products don't require artificial scarcity. They can be given away for free as advertising for the service. They can also be crowdfunded by a bounty, and then freely released upon completion.

Sure, artificial scarcity isn't required, there are lots of ways around it as many alternative business models have shown. My argument is they aren't always better. When you bring advertising into the equation, the end user is no longer the customer. And the incentives become more page views etc rather than designing a product the end user desires.

I don't see the problem with having a hybrid system. Just because some music os sold as MP3s, doesn't stop anybody from releasing crowd funded music.

If there's no copyright, what's to stop OTHER people from giving away someone's digital products for free?

I mean, I put all my books for free online. But I'd still rather be able to prevent others from using them commercially. I'd never have written them if a better funded competitor could just take them and provide them for free and outrank me.

http://lsathacks.com/explanations/ is my free stuff.

http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/againstfi...

You haven't addressed my point. The parent comment was arguing that I could give away my material for free as advertising for services.

I pointed out that I couldn't do that without intellectual property, as someone else with a larger platform could give away my material for free.

Does that book you linked to address this point?

When you figure out how to crowdfund the next Avatar/Game of Thrones/Last of Us let me know. You might not care about them, but enough people did value them enough to pay 100s of millions for them after they were created. I'm eagerly awaiting anyone to put forward a plan on how to convince the masses to risk pre-paying 100s of millions for the creation of a new-but-equivalently-awesome IP. It would not be a sensible risk proposition by any measure.

Market penetration of crowdfunding is still really low. Think of how many non-tech friends and relatives you have who have ever crowdfunded anything. Now think of how many people you know who have cable TV or go to movies.

Crowdfunding is still a business model with a lot of room for growth, whereas cable and movies have saturated the market, at least in the USA.

Obviously companies are not crowdfunding much stuff if they can use regulation to increase profit.

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