Quote:
Originally Posted by Giggleton
I agree with most of what Stallman has to say, but I do not think we should reject ebooks. We should obtain our ebooks through indirect methods until the direct methods provide a more just method for supporting authors.
I do like this aspect of his internet sharing license,
"The most obvious method is to compute each artist's share in direct proportion to her work's popularity. (Popularity can be measured by inviting 100,000 randomly chosen people to provide the lists of the works they have played.) That's what "compensate the rights holders" proposals typically do. But that method of distribution is not very effective for promoting the arts, because a large fraction of the funds would go to the few superstars, who are already rich or at least comfortable, leaving little money to support all the artists who really need it."
I've advocated for randomized lists of content users to gauge what should be promoted on a content distribution system, it feels like it could work. He's talking about music here, and it seems that levy's could probably be more easily computed directly in the user's music player. Although the potential for abuse is still there as always(music player bots playing songs over and over) For that we would need an end to anonymity(one player per person), which goes against Stallman's first point I suppose. If everyone knows what everyone else is doing, I think we would be allright.
But for books it is a bit different. Sometimes we read a book and say that book was not good... Should the author still be compensated for such a book?
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Well I personally see several issues in the theory. The popularity of the author and measurement in particular. Ok take random sample of who bought and read what and distribute collected levies from there. What about obscure authors? Lets take a look at say a medical text book (ebook version for the argument). Now that type of works in terms of sales compared to all ebooks sold will be very very small, I mean lets face it, it has a very small but specific market share. Take a Stephen King novel, and for arguments sake it sells 100,000 copies per 1 copy of the medical book. Does that mean Stephen King gets 100,000 times more moneys from collected levies than the author of the medical ebook? The medical ebook may be very very popular in the narrow specific market but as part of the entire ebook market it may not even register.
Secondly, internet levy. Will this not reduce the money going to the authors and potentially ruin online sales? I am all but certain there will be a mindset of people saying "Hang on, I am required to pay an intenet levy to compensate authors due to file sharing, I want X-ebook....well I've paid the levy I'm not going to pay the author twice I shall just download it via file sharing". Thus online ebook stores lose a sale, and the author will not receive a royalty for that particular copy, merely a portion of collected levies based upon a flawed statistic. Think again to the medical author, they may collect say $30 a copy sold (given a good number of text books sell for around $100 it probably isn't unreasonable). Take a share of the levy and they may collect a few cents, or a dollar if they are lucky.