Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve Jordan
Yes, the production and per-unit cost equations have changed forever, thanks to digital media. But this does not address the essential fact that people who produce those creative works, whatever the per-unit cost, deserve to be compensated for their work, just like any other worker. Discussion about production differences and unit costs merely obscures the real point of this discussion.
Do you believe that creative people have no right to make money from their work? Do you believe that you, as a consumer, have no responsibility to compensate an artist, not even a dime, for a work you obtain? Do you, as a consumer, believe that you and you alone should have the final say on what someone else deserves to make from their work?
And if you do believe these things... how do you expect artists to make a living, and thereby afford the time it takes to create the works you crave? And knowing they cannot profit from their efforts, why should an artist even bother to create works someone else will simply steal?
These are the issues concerning piracy... not per-unit costs, copyright details, or DRM. Being fair to the creators must be addressed, not obscured by cost debates and endless semantics.
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Steve, I'll discuss paragraph 3 (at you request). If I don't have any good answers, that's because there isn't any good answers.
Across the fields of human economic endevor, (with the exception of primary I.P. creation), people get paid for work delivered. There is no further money to be paid on that work, not matter how many times it get used. I'll use the bridge analogy. A group of engineers and architechs design a bridge. A large group of laborers build the designed bridge. Enverybody gets paid for their part up-front, any nobody who built it gets any more money, no matter how many people use the bridge (even if it's a toll bridge, raking in money, day after day.) Now certain high-powered workers cut deals that defer some (or all) of the money they have earned until a later time, (think CEO's) but they still
earned it as work received while they were working.
Primary I.P. creation pays in an entirely different model. The creators are paid a percentage on every sale of their work, up to certain legal time cutoffs. Nobody else in the working world has such a deal. This deal was based on physical limits of mass production. Now that those limits have been shattered, the deal is falling apart. DRM, ect. are simply stop gaps trying to restore the old limits. In the long term, they will fail.
That's the underlying reality. You may not like it, I may not like it, but it
is.
How to recompense the I.P. creator? First, the pay is going to go down. Unavoidable. Many, not all, I.P. producers have unique ways of making money on their I.P. that are still tied to the unit worked, unit paid, methodology. Some examples, movies still have the theatrical performance, musicians still have concert venues, plays still will be produced. Some I.P. creators don't have this venue, and some never had (such as painters and large scale sculptors. Note, this is where the term "starving artist" came from.) For those I.P. producers who don't have a way to get paid in the unit worked, unit paid, world, the outlook is grim. The world will evolve into a straight pay, no royalty, world where the rates are low, possibly augumented by extra money coming in via advertising. The money will come from those who want either a particular physical form (old school) or the latest and greatest, and are willing to pay for the priviledge.
Remember the world owes
nobody a living, whether you are a day laborer, a computer programmer, a CEO, a Capitalist, or an I.P. creator.