Comment by teddyh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by teddyh | Hacker News Reader

Since we don’t have a “Basic Income”, to survive in society you have to provide value to others¹, i.e. make money. If you want to spend your time being an artist, you still have to make money.

The cost of any widely available item will trend towards its marginal cost. A non-rivalrous good with zero marginal cost will therefore trend towards a price of zero. Digital copies of things fall under this category. Therefore, you cannot expect to be able to make money by having a profit margin on each item sold on these types of products. You cannot make money this way.

You may lament this fact, but it is the reality. You will have to make money some other way. There will probably never arise a perfect substitute. The worst case scenario is that the modern but pre-digital age was a golden age for production of these kinds of now-digitizeable things, just as ancient Egypt was a golden age for the production of pyramids.

But you can’t put the genie back in the bottle, and you can’t complain that there isn’t any substitute business model to cover your situation. Reality is what it is.

① http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-harsh-truths-that-will-make-yo...

> The cost of any widely available item will trend towards its marginal cost.

This is really the problem that copyright was meant to address in the first place -- once industrialized publishing hit, marginal cost of production was always cheap compared to investment required to produce the first work. Digital changes the degree but not the character of the problem.

Of course, that's really only half the equation.

> You may lament this fact, but it is the reality.

"Reality" is a pretty fluid concept when you're talking about money, markets, or value, all of which are largely cultural concepts.

It's arguably accurate to say that right now we're tending towards a culture where people don't pay for digital copies of media. That doesn't make it the only possible reality.

> […] marginal cost of production was always cheap […]

Yes, but it wasn’t zero, like digital copying is today.

> Reality" is a pretty fluid concept […]

Sure, there are laws like Copyright which change the normal market forces, just like any other country can have laws changing society. But the principle, the trend for the cost towards zero, is the same, Copyright notwithstanding. Copyright sort-of worked when the marginal cost was small but non-zero, but when it actually hits too-cheap-to-meter zero, then it starts being ridiculous.

> […] culture where people don't pay for digital copies of media.

This isn’t a “cultural” thing. It’s a “normal market forces” thing, which was my point. If it were a cultural thing, we could influence culture to turn the tide and actually affect things. But it isn’t, so we can’t.

Bluntly, this argument (which is tiresomely familiar to me at this point) strikes me as nothing so much as self-fulfilling justification.

Thing X doesn't pay, therefore I don't have to pay you for Thing X, you should've gone into something else if you wanted money.

Baloney. I can think of no other field where the kinds of man-hours involved are as devalued. Yes, supply is generous, but so is demand, at unprecedented levels in human history. We are a culture grown fat and rich off its own cultural products, yet which routinely refuses to actually pay for any of them.

Labor isn't free in almost any other market, so why should you get to demand someone work 80+ hours a week for nothing? Explain to me how that fits any sane market theory.

If you want to get paid, then you’d better do something which makes money. It’s as simple as that. In the current technological world, digital goods cannot make money by using the method which was, in the past, used to make money for the things which are now digital. (This is not to say that they cannot make money some other way.)

You comment looks like a sweat-of-the-brow argument. Like, if I spend a lot of effort and time doing something, and then as a result have a product which the world doesn’t value, why should I still get paid?

> We are a culture grown fat and rich off its own cultural products, yet which routinely refuses to actually pay for any of them.

If this could be shown and quantified, then we would have the data necessary to create some system to use this effect to national advantage. But we don’t, so we can’t.

Also, I think you are arguing disingenuously when you say that I “demand someone work 80+ hours a week for nothing”. I do not. People are free to do whatever they want, and will get compensated according to what they can get paid from other people.

People have been refusing to pay artists for longer than there has been digital copying.

And yet we still have artists making art. Why?

No more than people have been refusing to pay for work in general. With digital copying, the situation changes fundamentally.

We are a culture grown fat and rich off its own cultural products

Not really, you can't actually make new works of art based on old works of art, since copyright forbids that. Technically you can, but they have to have been released before 1920 and that date will never change. You will never, ever be able to use Mickey Mouse in your own cartoon and you will never ever be able to take a sample from an earlier song and put it in yours without paying to whoever happens to own the license for it.

I would pose another similar question. Let's say that artists don't work to satisfy the entitlement of others. For what reason, then, do they continue to work? It must be because given the cards they were dealt, they decided to make what play they could.

The entitlement explanation to behavior probably isn't the right one here.

I would also argue that artists can't make money off of art because it isn't simply art that sells. There's a whole marketing and visibility and polish machine that could be exploited, if you had enough money and power. I would argue that for many profitable art works, it's companies and investors who win -- those who have power and money. Artists are just employees unless they make it huge, and that only really happens in the music world. And on this tangent of the music world, I would note, as a curiosity, that most people wouldn't be able to identify the artist of some popular visual art as readily as the artist of some song.

Artists are just living in a world where most means of discovery have been capitalized upon by other businesses into a pipeline that you must pay to use. People like Macklemore are just rare exceptions.

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