I know I've been flaky lately, but I've just got too much going on. I couldn't brain last night, so I left it for this morning in the hopes that a good night's sleep would fix the problem and I could hammer out a post before work. It didn't and I couldn't. Sorry.
Continuing my tradition of posting off topic. I read your piracy article. What do you think of this piracy article http://geekvision.tv/2013/03/a-message-to-video-game-pirates/
ReplyDeleteI agree with every word of it, but I would add the following:
DeleteSo long as art and entertainment are subject to the same capitalist markets as everything else, piracy is a serious problem that ultimately snatches food from the tables of creative people who are, in all likelihood, already severely underpaid.
However, we are approaching the point where it is increasingly obvious that capitalist markets just plain don't work for digitally distributed products. The problem is that anything which can be duplicated and distributed over the Internet pretty much instantly becomes nonrival and nonexcludible, which is to say a public, rather than private, good. The market has responded with the creation of "air meters," most notably DRM, but like all attempts to force a public good to behave like a private good the results are messy, inefficient, ineffective, and foster resentment.
There are only four long-term viable solutions that I can see. One is a return to a sort of patronage system. This is unlikely to work, given that the idea of a wealthy individual or organization spending money for any purpose other than making more money is laughable in our "leave nothing on the table" business culture. However, crowdfunding services like Kickstarter and Patreon give some hope that this may be workable.
A second option is to have the government take on the role of patron, massively expanding arts endowments and including mass entertainment in them. This is a fairly disturbing idea, however, since it subjugates the arts to political interests even more directly than the current corporate-funded model does.
We can throw our hands up, bow to the inexorable pressure of the invisible hand, and accept the coming day when nearly all art and entertainment is created in the spare time of people lucky enough to have day jobs that leave them spare time and energy.
Or, my favored approach, we can establish a guaranteed minimum income high enough that, in combination with crowdfunding, artists and entertainers can create and distribute their work without need of corporate backers, high sales, or day jobs.