|
"it is difficult to deny you are not stealing or at least conning content owners out of money they are owed." I'll do my best... :) Distribution used to be very valuable. So much so that we see CDs as products. Before CDs, street performers were happy and paid if street patrons were happy and entertained. Simply put: creative businesses are charities; they always have been and they always will be because 1) their fruits are not material and can be "held"/understood by more than one person at a time, with impunity, and 2) they are non-essential, compared to food and water and shelter and clothes (and if they were essential, due to their non-exclusivity, it would be immoral to restrict them). Somewhere along the line distribution got all wrapped up in cellophane and people working in publishing formats (cds, books, video game cartridges, etc, etc) started feeling entitled to creative monopolies. And authors', reasonably, wanted more of the distributor's pie. We went from truly prohibitive distribution (manual transcription), to commercial/industrial distribution, to today: instant and autonomous distribution -- if it is worth seeing, hearing, or knowing, the copying is implied. So, if you are charging for distribution today (including "selling copies"), you are in the wrong business. But that hasn't destroyed/stolen anyone's value either, as you have proposed. We have simply come full circle. The value of design is in its applications. The most useful ideas are the most valuable, as it should be. It's (obviously) not enough to simply produce a movie and sell the pattern for $5... One pattern is enough for the whole world. You can't recoup the production costs by pretending distribution is hard. It has to actually be worth $5. The reality of this return to the original model is that you will be rewarded according to your contribution, but you're not the one to set the price either because creativity isn't a product. We were just confused for about 100 years. Patronage is different (and scary to Western concepts of "mine"), but it's time-tested and perfectly sustainable (and being seen more and more, for example via Kickstarter). R&D, for example, is sponsored and would be worthwhile even (especially) without patents... The requirement that creativity, design, and research, be worthwhile, is not a burden on society. Monopolies are. People can only reward you after they have benefited from an idea, namely from "the progress of Science and the useful arts." |