A ridiculous portion of GDP is wasted on this type of hostility. Just look at how much marketing is completely unnecessary, but billions are spent on it. Look at how many companies are spending money to reinvent the wheel constantly instead of sharing code, designs, etc. Patent lawsuits. We're just scratching the surface here. It's a depressingly wasteful and hostile world.

Aye, it's tough to see it as anything but a waste too - it gets bypassed and that's it, all time, effort and money that went into it was effectively for nought.

I actually believe the exact opposite.

That so many useful innovations are lost & forgotten, because there was no incentive to market & distribute the innovation.

It is lost on many, that the usefulness of an idea does not guarantee it's popularity. It is very, very hard to get visibility & traction for even the most useful of inventions.

Protections on ownership & wealth create the incentives to invest in creating new innovations, but also to productise, distribute and market those innovations.

It is only a small fraction of products that can exist without the proper incentives to build out the whole chain from idea to r&d, productisation, to distribution & marketing.

I believe somewhere in between. The usefulness of an idea doesn't guarantee its popularity, but it also doesn't guarantee its profitability, or the timeline where it will become popular or profitable.

The fashion industry seems to do fine with relatively little draconian protections - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zL2FOrx41N0

But they're not doing anything useful, just taking advantage of human nature.

Run the Jewels just released their latest album entirely for free, and hit #1 in sales anyway, so

That a counterexample exists doesn't really impact the claim that "many" (though they imply "most" imo) do not work this way.

Indeed: Not everybody is the kind of person who pays for Jonathan Coulton's music instead of downloading it for free.

RTJ also have an established brand - I can tell you 100% I only know of them because of their previous marketing, I've maybe heard one song. It's like how Radiohead did a pay-what-you-like for their album and it came out being viable, it only works because of their previous commercial success through more traditional routes. If they'd self-produced and made Pablo Honey PWYL they'd probably be unheard of.

Perfect summary of what's wrong. I often wonder what would happen if the best minds were trying to solve the world's problems instead of getting people to buy things they don't want.