Quote:
Originally Posted by mrkai
So what we have before is is either the ultimate free market scenario or the ultimate communist utopia.
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It's all about money  |
Ok, now we're not talking about morality, we're talking about economics. But I think we can talk about the intersection where morality and economics meet. In other words, what has value?
I'll share what I believe:
- Creative inspiration has value, e.g. the author who puts words together to tell a story in a way that seems new.
- Skilled labor has value, e.g. editing, proofing, typesetting, etc.
- Unskilled labor has value, e.g. moving boxes of books, or scanning pages.
- Limited resources have value, e.g. pulp or other materials used to make printing media. Or food.
- Energy has value (whether the energy is derived from a limited physical resource such as petroleum or from solar cells or windmills which require raw materials, labor, maintenance, etc.) Electrons are not really free-- at least, not electrons organized in a useful way.
Those who argue that ideas cannot be owned may be arguing that creative inspiration has no value; I disagree. Or perhaps they are simply arguing that it is impractical to worry about compensating anyone for something abstract such as creative inspiration. Or perhaps they are arguing that creative inspiration has value, but because it seems to be arbitrarily distributed, individuals shouldn't be compensated for it; it should belong to the community as a whole. I'll leave it to others to make those arguments, because I think it's irrelevant in practice:
Writing (as well as composing, or any other creative endeavor) is not merely being struck by inspiration. There is also a lot of craft, i.e. skilled labor involved. As the saying goes, "creation is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration." (Adjust numbers as you please -- I'm fairly confident that it will still be mostly perspiration.) As I noted above, I believe that skilled labor has value, so the actual words used to tell a story represent the author's skilled labor and should be compensated if someone else wants to enjoy those words (as opposed, for example, to having a friend relate the main plot of a book they've read).
So I don't really care who "owns" or "can't own" an idea. If we're discussing morality, my notion of morality includes that labor should be compensated, and this means I believe authors should be paid. So should a lot of other people in the process of getting the author's words in front of the readers. (Editors, I'm talking about you!) I'm sure it is possible to make that process more efficient, and lower the cost to the reader, compared to where we are now, but unless some of the people involved want to
donate their labor, e.g. by releasing a book under creative commons or by hosting a public domain book on a server they pay for (and server uptime involves energy and most emphatically is
not free), books will have costs, which ought to be paid, from a moral point of view.
Now, we can debate who should pay those costs, or how they should be paid. But I'm interested in knowing how many people even agree with the above, that labor should be compensated. Because I'm sure not everyone does. I'm not asking whether it's practical to ensure that labor is compensated, I'm not asking whether technological means such as DRM should (or can) be used to attempt to ensure that labor is compensated, I'm not asking whether people think copyright law works to ensure that labor is compensated or works against that end, or what people should do who can't afford the asking price for content in the current market: I'm just asking this one question, to the group at large:
In your mind, is it morally necessary to compensate someone for their labor, assuming they have not voluntarily donated that labor?
I believe this is the heart of the matter we are supposedly discussing.