Forum

[Lizard]

Originally Posted by Novem5er

People would be welcome to tape my lessons and post them online, as long as I still got paid to teach them. My point is that knowledge requires SOME people to pay for its creation and distribution, but everyone who accesses that knowledge does not need to pay to do so.

How do you propose we decide which poor sucker gets stuck with the bill?

History shows that when everyone gets the benefit but only some do the work, eventually, the hard workers catch on that they're being scammed, and stop working so hard. This is why communism, whether on the large scale of the USSR or the small scale of hippie communes, collapses. This is why kibbutzes have gone toward market systems.

So a system based on some people paying while the majority doesn't will sputter along for a while, based on inertia, but one by one, the payers decide that they're tired of supporting the non-payers and drop out, or, more often, decide "I've paid enough -- someone else's turn!" and become non-payers. Then the pressure on the remaining payers increase, so they're more likely to drop out, and the cycle collapses.

We are in the VERY early part of the cycle -- there's still dupes out there who feel like they're being noble and heroic when they support an artist, even though others just take the work for free. They feel, "Hey, I'll pay for this book now, and someone else will pay for the next book, the writer makes enough to live off, and everyone's happy!" But with each iteration, more leech and fewer pay. The writer has less time to write because he needs to earn money from other projects. The people who supported him feel disgruntled because they were buying, in part, his future productivity. So with less promise of more material to come, they are less likely to pay for what IS produced, and, also, when there's a lot of existing material, people newly aware of the artists are more likely to consume what's already out there for "free" instead of paying for the new material when it's released.

Look at early factory productivity in the USSR, or the way kibbutzes worked in the first generation of Israel's existence, or the way most communes and utopian communities in America started (and this goes back to the 19th century, the hippies were followers and copycats). Then look at how they worked a decade, two decades, a generation later. Same pattern, over and over. We're in a real "up" part of the "free" content cycle. The crash is coming.