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Old 10-10-2007, 02:37 PM   #176
bingle
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Join Date: Nov 2005
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Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT View Post
Apologies if I've misunderstood you, but what you seem to be saying is that you think everything should be free. That's all well and good, but who's going to provide this "free stuff" for you? How does the content creator, such as myself, make a living?
Hmm. I think I'm confusing the issue.

I'm saying a few things:

1) Everything is going to be free. This isn't a value judgment about whether they *should* be free. If you're not giving your stuff away, someone will be giving it away for you. (Or someone who gives stuff away will enter your market segment, like Netscape with the browser or Google with the spreadsheet).

2) You can't stop this effectively with laws or technology. Laws are too difficult to enforce, technology is too easy to break.

3) Trying to stop this with laws or technology causes more harm than good. Laws make us less free, technology makes us more annoyed.

4) The current business model of most content producers is "make the original for free, sell the copies" - that is, an author doesn't make any money while writing a book, they only make money when each copy is sold.

5) A world where copies are free is very, very bad for this business model.

6) It is good for society if content is being produced.

7) There are other business models that will allow content producers to produce content.

8) An army of content producers trying to find business models has a good chance of success, although some will fail.

9) (This is the most controversial one, I think) The benefits to society of a world where copies are free is greater than the harm.

So... I'm not trying to convince you, or anyone else, to give things away for free. I'm not saying that content producers are doing it for the good of society. I'm saying, society has a problem. People want content, but people don't want to pay for copies. We need to solve this.

I'm also saying that it _will_ be solved, and that content _will_ be created. (This may be naively optimistic).

I'm also saying that we'll be better off, in the long run.
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