
License Zero: Comments on “The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free” - joelellis
https://blog.licensezero.com/2020/08/03/truth-paywall.html
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jandrese
This doesn't seem to address the problem outlined in the original article. It
seems to be arguing that people shouldn't be paid for lousy work, but that
isn't at all what the original article was talking about.

Being rich inherently gives one a voice, being right does not. If the truth is
inconvenient to the rich then it will face an uphill battle against the well
funded lies.

~~~
beepboopbeep
Well said.

------
blahbhthrow3748
I don't understand what this is even about? They didn't bother to get the
original author's name right ("Nathan Robinson"), and they seem to be arguing
with some strawman that every piece of creative output _must_ be compensated?
But there's no substance to that argument either, just a bald assertion that
sometimes you don't get paid for things?

~~~
rtlfe
> I don't understand what this is even about?

Agreed. I read the whole thing twice and couldn't identify any thesis.

~~~
DubiousPusher
I think the author's point is inferable from these two observations.

> Creators needn’t be compensated well just because they are creators.

> Neither must useful works of every kind cost nothing to everyone.

Obviously this author knows that if poor quality cheap information
proliferates and high quality information remains costly then people will
prefer the former to the later.

The author is effecting a denial of the implicit argument of the "post truth"
panic, which is that it is important that the public have a high quality and
cheap information source.

It's not utterly unreasonable to argue against an assumed premise such as this
but it would've been nice if they had been a bit clearer about it.

------
pwinnski
That's quite some hand-waving. If news organizations (like newspapers) give
away their content for free, they lay off staff. We know this because we've
seen it happen in newsrooms around the country as Craigslist dried up
newspapers' primary source of revenue.

So this seems either false or completely irrelevant to the topic at hand: "I
happen to believe that in most areas of creative work, and in most adjacent
industries, giving more away for $0 online would improve outcomes for most
players, overall."

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MattGaiser
My view of work is that you can be paid in 4 ways:

1\. Paid in cash.

2\. Paid in power.

3\. Paid in social status.

4\. Paid in deferred career benefit.

Because of the reach of content with the internet, the pay in categories 2 and
4 has gone up. It depends on what you do, but pay in category 3 may also have
increased. Unsurprisingly the cash pay is going to decline.

In my own case, I write a fair bit. I gain career benefits. I gain contacts
from Hacker News as I write under my own name. There are friends who find it
cool that I am published on Stack Overflow. I have a regular software
engineering job, so the money now is not a priority.

Eventually most content creation is just going to be supported by people doing
other things to earn a living. Only deep investigative journalism would
require someone to earn a full time living doing it.

~~~
jszymborski
I think you might have missed a fifth: paid with passion.

Whether it nets as much long-term happiness or food in your mouth is free to
debate, but I think a lot of people are just content with the idea of creating
something they wanted.

I think you see this a lot in OSS (linux, git, gnu) as well as e.g. the video
games industry.

I don't think it's a particularly sustainable way to get paid, but it can exit
into the other 4 you mentioned.

~~~
MattGaiser
Quite true.

------
rmah
It's annoying that the author takes the original article about paywalls by
Nathan Robinson so literally at some points.

For example, the Robinson wrote "Creators must be compensated well. But at the
same time we have to try to keep things that are important and profound from
getting locked away where few people will see them." To which the commenter
replied "None of the above is true." Then explains that only some creators and
some works should be compensated well. As if it wasn't clear that the Robinson
was referring to creators and works that he felt was of value.

In rebuttal, he only provides his opinion that "I happen to believe that in
most areas of creative work, and in most adjacent industries, giving more away
for $0 online would improve outcomes for most players, overall." without any
evidence that is the case for journalism (or even software for that matter).
Not even a weak "logical" argument.

Perhaps he's right, perhaps he's not. I don't know, it it's annoying that this
response has somehow hit #2 on HN. It's as weak as this post :-)

~~~
kemitchell
Picking quotes as I did does lend to an impression of nitpicking literalism.
But to quote myself now, my point was at a higher level than refuting factual
assertions:

> ... the problem here is evident: black-and-white, either-or thinking.

If you put the problem in terms of creators needing to be well paid, on the
one hand, and their creations needing to be free and universally accessible,
on the other, you've set yourself up a zero-sum cage match. The first quote I
pulled from Nathan was more nuanced than that, lamenting paywalls but
accepting them, because "it's complicated". The second quote I pulled, from
the end of Nathan's piece, puts things more absolutely, leaving less hope.

If the problem is being stuck between the rock of creator comp and the hard
place of free, universal access, the solution is recognizing that neither of
those is absolute, immovable, or perfect. Not all creation requires or
deserves compensation. Not all information needs be free and convenient to
everyone.

If you stop thinking of open/closed and free/paid as toggle switches, and
embrace that they're actually pretty fine-grained dials, it's no longer a war
between creators and consumers, and there are lots of practical things to try.
Find the optimum balance in the situation and over time. As I suggest:

> When the works we need or want come readily available at affordable costs
> that we can pay, and paying is easy, there’s no great harm to access or
> progress or truth. That cost many not be great. But if a great many pay it,
> the results can be.

To make that more concrete: I don't think I'd pay $10 a month for Current
Affairs. But I'd darn sure pay $3. Or up to $10, scaling up with how many
articles I read in a month. Perhaps on top of free access to an archive of
articles more than a year old.

I'm not sure how this ended up on HN, either.

------
kanobo
Is it just me or was this very confusing to read? In some spots I thought it
was written by a bot or generated by a gpt3 script.

~~~
fangorn
I think it may be a deliberate example of poor quality writing that should not
be compensated.

------
rtlfe
I really can't tell what they're trying to say here.

> giving more away for $0 online would improve outcomes

> there is nothing inherently worse about paying a fee

Aren't these contradictory? Is the author taking any position?

~~~
MattGaiser
The author is generally in favour of free content and argues that it is good
for both the consumer (as there is no hassle) and the content creator as there
are other avenues for earning money.

~~~
kemitchell
I'm just as in favor of paid content as free. But I also think creators tend
to see the free-paid and open-closed questions too black-or-white, and
therefore err on the side of closing things too tightly or giving too much
away. There are many, perhaps happier, middle ways.

------
rootsudo
Powerful sentence.

------
Kednicma
The author is so very close to realizing that intellectual property is
incoherent in the fact of information theory, _and_ also that universal basic
income is an essential component of a hyperwealthy neoliberal democracy. We
could be a culture of creators, with every person having a relatively small
but fluid audience who supplements their income and contributes to their work,
but no starving artist dependent on their employer for their living wage.

As the slogan goes, "All of our grievances are connected: Eat the rich."

~~~
kemitchell
Intellectual property law is _only_ coherent in the face of information. It's
the property law of intangibles.

Economics didn't run up to the industrial revolution and stop. The book I
cited, Slauter's _Who Owns the News?_ , gives a great history of English law
from before the Statute of Anne. For a view from the Internet era back, on an
economics angle, Shapiro and Varian's _Information Rules_ is a great read. For
a more nuanced view from those who lean open, James Boyle's books are all
worthwhile.

The author is, as it happens, an open-leaning intellectual property lawyer.

~~~
Kednicma
The author is dangerously close to realizing that _all_ property rights are
incoherent! Just take the contrapositive of your current position, and then
keep going.

Economics still works fine. The funny thing, though, is that information
doesn't behave like a typical good; it's only got marginal cost to duplicate,
and is usually too cheap to meter, and every purchase adds a new seller to the
market. Thus, it's kind of hard to even _justify_ applying the economic
question to information. Indeed, our societies are so drenched in information
that we put price tags on tooling which can _reduce_ , _filter_ , _aggregate_
, _summarize_ , and otherwise lower the total number of bits of information
within our control.

Any pragmatic and ethical intellectual property law regime must account for
the practical truth that artists and scientists can only receive a full
education by participating in an underground copyright-infringement movement
which consists of private libraries, ad-hoc study sessions, thumb drives full
of art and philosophy, and most recently Bittorrent and Sci-Hub. Our current
law regime is completely out of touch with this reality, and fixing it will
require drastically shortening the length of copyright, ending works-for-hire,
and taking other big actions to destroy the media cartels.

~~~
kemitchell
You've given me the tech-exceptionalist party line circa 1999. I could've
given you the same, way back then. Lessig. Drahos. Braithwaite. With more
nuance, Boyle. Have you done any reading from the _other_ side? I hadn't.

Valuable information that's easy to reproduce isn't a new phenomenon. See _Who
Owns the News?_. Nor is it peculiar to digitally reproducible works today. See
Rothman's _The Right of Publicity_. Both highly skeptical of many legal
developments, but not doctrinaire or absolutist.

Digital technology didn't take the economic theory of property by surprise.
See _Information Rules_ , or even Landes and Posner's _The Economic Structure
of Intellectual Property Law_. The latter goes light on software and the
Internet, but covers all the same dimensions of marginal cost, prior work, and
so on, in analysis of other domains. Cost savings with digital technology
didn't break the theories or policy justifications. They just made analysis of
certain combinations more valuable.

If I've guessed right, here comes the part where you lump me in with Disney,
the Copyright Office, the IP Watchdog people, and other "IP maximalists". They
lump me in with the pirates.

~~~
Kednicma
I wouldn't lump you with IP maximalists; I'd lump you with status-quo
supporters. There is a way forward for our society, and your entire response
is that I should read a book or two and think harder about my position. It's
no different from when modern Democrats tell Democratic Socialists to shut up
and eat doughnuts; I'm not going to mistake you for a Republican merely
because you dislike socialism, but I _am_ going to point out how little
distance there is between the Republican and Democratic positions!

We need to halt the abuse of artists in our society. It is common, it is
automated, and it is cruel. Ensnaring them in ever-more-complicated licensing
schemes is not a substitute for a living wage, nor does it recognize that art
fundamentally needs to be shared between people in order to be effective.

Legal technology, like all technology, is not culturally neutral. We choose
how the law develops by how we practice and observe it. We are obligated to
construct societies whose laws are not just moral, but ethical, and which dole
out a portion of justice to everybody under their ambit. Your attitude that
supporting UBI and tearing down copyright is so "circa 1999" and thus somehow
tired and outdated is ridiculous. What's so new that's replaced this position?
You offer only compromise with the existing system, rather than a hope for an
improvement.

~~~
kemitchell
You've retreated to generalities.

The working artists, designers, and other creators I know, and no few I've
worked with, don't want to abolish the legal regime set up to ensure them
compensation. They don't want to trade what leverage they have for the dole,
or for "universal basic income", which is much the same when you'd qualify for
either. I've heard and read much the same from their guilds and industry
groups.

That doesn't mean the status quo. Many would reform or replace fair use and
add orphan-work safe harbors. Others would make copyright protection entirely
opt-in, as before Berne. Some would expand "moral rights", or implement them
where they haven't been. Others want commonly negotiated terms, like portfolio
rights for works made for hire, made defaults, under law. Views on term of
protection vary.

There's nothing terribly tired about arguing for copyright abolition, other
than that we've heard it for decades now, and political prospects might be
worse now than they were then. What is tired is portraying intellectual
property as standing on no firm policy foundation, especially no economic
foundation. Activists have been making a straw man of economic theory,
pretending it got as far as 19th century industrial considerations and
stopped, since the nascent years of Internet exceptionalism. The idea that low
or no marginal cost of reproduction totally confounds public policy underlying
property protection is emblematic. Low marginal cost of reproduction didn't
begin with the Internet. It occurred to economists discussing intellectual
property, and was well integrated by them, generations before.

~~~
Kednicma
I don't think that I've really retreated; I had started on UBI and copyright
in my very top post. But let's get specific! (Also, just as a side note,
please grok that UBI does not have qualifications; that's rather the point of
it.)

I went to music school. I copied CDs and sheet music from the school library.
I also burned CDs and copied thumb drives from other musicians. My jazz class
mandated listening to dozens of albums, didn't give us copies, and expected us
to acquire them however. My professors taught us how to listen to the radio
and reproduce what we heard. I played out of "The Great American Songbook,"
which is the tradition where you play what folks in the USA like to listen to,
or you don't get paid for the gig. My compensation was per-gig and based on
live performance, not based on royalties or licensing. Despite what amounted
to a pretty good hourly wage, the actual number of hours per week was very
low, and I had a day job. This was not atypical, but the intended route for
the bulk of professional performers, and nothing has changed since I went to
school other than that copyright infringement is cheaper and easier than ever.

Nothing is new under the sun. Making original music is incredibly difficult.
We swim in such a massive sea of ambient art, and almost all of it is licensed
in ways which forbid us from integrating that experience into our original
artwork. The entire discipline of remixing exists as a proud affront to
copyright, just like libraries once did and still do. And today's musicians
are a product of a system which simultaneously requires them to continuously
infringe in order to be productive, while using the law to punish them for
infringing.

When I hear you talking about the folks that you know and work with, and
imagine what kind of musician actually is lucky enough to receive royalties, I
imagine a privileged few folks. They're not bad people, but they benefit from
a system designed to compensate them at the expense of everybody else. And
their actual benefit is relatively meager! Middlemen at the labels suck out
nickel and dime, and even successful musicians find themselves flipping
burgers. They're propping up a system which disenfranchises them.

And when I hear you talking about "their guilds and industry groups"! I
personally believe that ASCAP is a plague upon practicing musicians, music
venues, music lovers, and the entire tradition of making music. They have the
audacity to take royalties on behalf of those great legends who are long since
departed, and their entire justification is that it's a legal theft of the
public domain, and why shouldn't they do what they're legally entitled to do?
The RIAA's not any better, with multiple members committing acts upon their
customers and artists that, in literally any other context, would be criminal.
Imagine if I, an independent musician, published a CD with infectious malware
on it, and used it to attack my listeners; I'd be convicted and thrown in
prison!

The worst part of all of this is "political prospects". Yes, fascism is
popular right now. No, we shouldn't abide by it. No, fascism isn't an excuse
to avoid socialist reforms. No, we shouldn't just give up on what _we the
people_ want just because it's inconvenient for the ruling classes.

