The problem is even deeper: information is non-scarce. The marginal cost of production for any unit of information is zero, and thus the natural market price for a piece of information is zero.
The problem being that while the creation and copying of new information is obviously massively valuable, we've not yet invented any effective and sensible way to trade information for physical goods like food and land and medicine.
The more information-based our economy gets, the more blatantly neo-feudal it gets, because our property laws for information are blatantly feudal and have been for decades. Popular examples of the problem include patent trolling and Mickey Mouse's regular copyright-extension bills.
Free Culture was a marginal movement in the past couple decades. It's going to quickly become the next big question of the world economy. When data is what makes the world go 'round, how do you compromise between compensating the original creator of the data, making use and extension of the data as widespread as possible, and not allowing "intellectual property" to expand into feudal-style veto or rent on everyone else?
> The marginal cost of production for any unit of information is zero, and thus the natural market price for a piece of information is zero.
The cost to reproduce an existing piece of information is very low (not zero; you still need computing technology).
But the cost to produce an original piece of information is often still quite high. Look at how much it cost to make Star Trek Into Darkness, or for George RR Martin to write his next "Game of Thrones" novel, or Apple to produce iOS 7. These take huge investments in time and technology.
Even the premier product of free culture, the Linux kernel, receives millions of dollars of investment every year in salaries and supporting technologies.
Yeah, but the point is that the resulting product (like the movie, code, whatever) is a tradeable product. The act of creation itself is not something we can sensibly trade. People are trying with stuff like Kickstarter, but the core problem is still there: how much should you pay to maybe get something later that might match the description you thought you liked?
Market economics doesn't work without excludability.
The solution to that core problem is to move your transaction to after the act of creation, so that you can see the final product before you decide whether you want to invest in its creation.
And that is where the concept of copyright came from in the first place.
Well, this article is retarded, where shall I begin? Kodak killed by Internet companies, what a joke, Kodak died of its incompetence to transition from film to digital tech -- Nikon, Canon & co. are still doing pretty well selling expensive camera gear. If anything, lots of people are buying these cameras to shoot their Instagram photos -- or at least, buying expensive smartphones that contain optics from traditional camera companies (Carl Zeiss is around since 1846... I guess old dogs can learn new tricks when they are smart).
Translation software from Google/Bing "stealing" work from human translators?? That work was paid at some point, and if it was reused and repurposed, that's because it was made freely available by their copyright owners. For one thing, many of the training materials used by machine learning-based translation are official documents, e.g. from the United Nations and EU, because these are often long, complex, and their translation is both high-quality and focused on precision (which often doesn't happen with literature -- "traduttore, traditore").
Very interesting discussion and timely in the sense that I spoke with a co-worker yesterday about how Google is obtaining free market research on businesses through the Google Online Marketing Challenge. Essentially, it's a competition where students consult with businesses, produce a report on the company, industry, etc and implement an Adwords campaign for them. No doubt I gained a lot of experience from doing this but submitting all the reports to Google and with them being able to aggregate everything, I'm sure they would find some value in it.
The problem being that while the creation and copying of new information is obviously massively valuable, we've not yet invented any effective and sensible way to trade information for physical goods like food and land and medicine.
The more information-based our economy gets, the more blatantly neo-feudal it gets, because our property laws for information are blatantly feudal and have been for decades. Popular examples of the problem include patent trolling and Mickey Mouse's regular copyright-extension bills.
Free Culture was a marginal movement in the past couple decades. It's going to quickly become the next big question of the world economy. When data is what makes the world go 'round, how do you compromise between compensating the original creator of the data, making use and extension of the data as widespread as possible, and not allowing "intellectual property" to expand into feudal-style veto or rent on everyone else?