Posts by Mark Harris
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Creating some IP is most analogous to making a factory. You spend a certain amount of time or capital on it, then it can produce profit in perpetuity.
Except that a factory needs maintenance, capital investment etc. The law of diminishing returns will eventually obsolete it.
But it's a very special kind of factory - it's one where you get to stop anyone else making the same kind of goods, or at least demand a fixed cut of every good they sell.
No, you get to stop them making copies of your product, but they can still make the same "kind"of goods - you can't copyright an idea, only the expression of an idea.
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Really, IP is the means of production, rather than the product.
Aha! and the Internet allows the struggling artist to control the means of production!!
<cue the dancing cossacks...>
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The analogy falls because there is no physical product that is analogous to intellectual property. You've been resisting the comparison between breach of copyright and stealing for that very reason, no?
No, actually, I've been resisting it because stealing is about removal of property from the rightful owner such that they no longer have access, and copyright infringement is about making a copy of an item without permission. Two very different concepts. The physicality has little to do with it.
If I make a perfect copy of an artwork, stroke for stroke, but leave the original in place, I have stolen nothing, yet I have broken the law. I've infringed the copyright of the artist and, if I try to sell it, I commit fraud. But I have stolen nothing.
Digital content makes copying easier, but it doesn't make the activity of copying into "stealing".
But you can't really talk of fair market value with a technology that makes it possible to reduce the cost price to zero by opting to get the product for free from a p2p network - and with the exact same effort as accessing a paying service.
Wasn't talking about P2P, was only referring to the simple act of publishing and how the market might react to it in determining the price. Filesharing would have an impact on that price, as you'd want to pitch it low enough that it wasn't worth the effort of finding a free copy. Or you'd add a particular value to a genuine copy, that wouldn't be obtainable with the free copy. cf NIN and their Ghosts release.
The simple existence of that possibility obviously interferes with the concepts of fair value and market value (people used to say that CDs were too expensive - but too expensive in relation to what?)
Too expensive to buy each week because they represented a higher percentage of disposable income than the previous vinyl alternatives. Customers saw/see the high price as "gouging" by the industry.
and has the potential of turning the whole "paying for music and books" thing into one giant honesty box. There really is nothing that is analogous to that.
"fair value" ? There is only market value. If you want to put a nominal value on your work that the market doesn't agree with (i.e. beyond what people are prepared to pay), they won't pay it, and will seek out alternatives, which may be illicit copies of your work or it may be someone else's work entirely. If I hit a website that requires me to have umpteen different technologies enabled and will take forever to load, I flick it and go look for another site that fits my aesthetic. People do that with content too.
There will be people who will lose work the way of the saddlemakers, though: the printers, the paper and pulp millers, and so forth.
No doubt, but I think the majority of papermaking is not for books, but for printers and photocopiers. I doubt they'll disappear entirely.
These guys will be fine
They may call it publishing, but I call it "art" ;-)
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but they did servery impact on them in a negative way, not dead but a shadow of their former self.
That's called change. It happens. If you don't adapt, you die.
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e-books also in all likelihood dilute the share of royalties to the author, unless the author is also the person who performs the reading.
Jon, I think you're confusing ebooks with audio books. Not the same thing.
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I think Sacha's point was that the saddle makers had to find new ways to adapt to the new automobile purely because it was reducing their old revenue stream. Undoubtedly, a number continued to produce saddles - we still have lots of riders, after all - but the horse stopped being the everyday commercial item it had hitherto been. So they had to learn upholstery.
The analogy isn't strictly comparable, as Giovanni points out, but the economic driver is the same.
The author's income stream is dependent on what the market will pay for their work, not the nature of the publishing. Perceived value is what will drive that, not copyright. In that sense, copyright just means that no-one else can derive that income stream.
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Presentation from Cory Doctorow - Freedom and technology: who's the master? 86 mins available as audio & video.
Eplores technology as an agent of transparency.
Thanks for that, Jon. Really interesting stuff.
A key point to take out of it is that, while technology may change things, and make some older things less viable, the things don't disappear. Recordings didn't kill live music, neither did radio, television and movies didn't kill live theatre etc.
The issue, when it comes to copyright arguments, seems to be about the old models trying to block the new, but as Doctorow says, no one came down off a mountain saying "Thou shalt not disrupt our business model".
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Fer shure, I just wanted to make sure Islander got the right attribution - would hate to have Brett and Jemaine coming down on you for infringement. Sorry I wasn't clear.
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That must mean the economy's in great shape. Someone tell John McCain...
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US market stats
Non-free, Japanese cellphone ebooks
Indie ebook statsYou may not like them, Islander, but lots of people do AND will pay for them.