| > rights for content creators I scratch my head when I hear talk of this, because the past century and a half has been a steady march in western economy and politics against rights for the original creators of wealth and content. Negligible rights for the original creators of wealth and content are the economic (and political and social) basis of the USA, and western Europe, and now the world. The only people who've talked like this have been communists, and I suppose anarchists. I mean this is obvious on the face of it. Who has all the rights in writing at a small startup, the angels and VCs, or the first hire? Before the first hire even comes on board, their first act will be to sign a paper giving away what little rights they had to the content they will be creating. Mainstream economic thought, from left Keynesianism to right wing schools say commodities are given value by their marginal utility ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjective_theory_of_value ). Your idea that creation or labor from creation has some moral value is an idea only espoused in the last century by communists ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value ). It's not just you, I've seen the RIAA and MPAA make similar arguments, and I shake my head, because they're making the same arguments Lenin and Stalin made. By that I mean with regards to the words like "creator" and mention of the work done to create the content. Not that I make a judgement either way, but it seems to pass without notice how extremely radical your claim is, as it is economically way to the left of say, Paul Krugman's New York Times columns. The strange thing is that these old Marxist arguments are trotted out about something that is no longer not exactly a commodity. Because commodities are produced, and basically used once, whereas this content is created, and with the push of a button, at costs approaching free, it can be duplicated and distributed one billion times. So in some senses it is no longer a commodity. So just as it loses the properties of a commodity, these old arguments from 150 years ago about commodities come back. |