No, and that kind of comment is not welcome here, either.

Information goods most certainly are scarce if you look at the effort it takes to make a song, a movie, a complex piece of software. That time and effort is not free. 'Dreamed up' is a lot different from 'sat down and worked hard on it for months'.

Your argument about scarcity is akin to saying "Never mind that we have trees that drop fruit on the ground for everyone into perpetuity--when you consider that we collect some fruit, cart it off to town, polish it, and cart it back, and sell it, of course fruit is a scarce resource!"

If the time/effort would've been expended anyways, yeah, it's effectively free. If the time/effort would've been better spent elsewhere, it shold've been.

Come on now, you've been here long enough to know that's not how HN works. It's about basic respect towards others--not just to the poster, but to all of us here on HN. As a developer (and someone who runs a development shop?) you know that developer time is important. A comment is 10 seconds to write but will be broadcast on a site like HN to be read by many over many cumulative hours. Say those things which are worth saying to 100k hackers, not those things which are not worth saying to one.

You run a C-based dev shop out of Houston. I run a C-based dev shop out of Austin. The probability of us doing business together IRL is unusually high. Now when we meet, I'm always going to be thinking of you as that guy who gets into flamewars and insults others, instead of the guy who writes beautifully-commented crypto POSIX code.

I can go to great lengths to explain that the copyright/IP battle is uphill, and that every talking point parroted blindly and every baseless assertion made without logic is just more deadweight we have to work against, and that the (relative few) people trying to work for a better future can't afford to treat unsubstantiated remarks with anything less than full-on ridicule and insult. That's all well and good.

But, really, this is about respect, and regardless of how I feel on the topic, I crossed a line in what is otherwise a place of civil discourse (and the occasional lighthearted troll).

Thanks for calling me out on that.

Please try to avoid this.

In a comment starting with such question and attitude you'll very rarely find anything worthwhile...

>How many songs/stories/etc. are dreamed up by kids and never published? How many love poems are written and not saved? Content is far, far from scarce.

So, songs/stories "dreamed but never published" and poems "not saved" mean that content is ...far from scarce?

For one, "not published stories" are as good as NO stories at all, with regards to scarcity.

Second, we are not talking about every BS story everyone thought up at some point as content.

We talk about actual worthwhile content. Most of it is done professionally. Or, if you want to avoid the quality judgement, most of the content people WANT and DO consume, is done professionally.

If the creators weren't compensated there would be less of that content. And , surely, not of equal budget and scale. You can't record "The Wall" or film "The Matrix" without getting paid. Except maybe for some talented multi-millionaire, doing it out of passion. Not many of those around.

I don't think many would take an interest in "songs/stories/etc. are dreamed up by kids and never published".

The person I was replying to was trying to contend that content is scarce. I showed that, no, it indeed is not. Had they put in your caveat that undistributed content might as well not exist, I would've cheerfully argued and perhaps ceded the point. But, their statement, as given? Wrong.

Also, you claim (as does everyone else in this debate, it would seem) that creators must be compensated or less content will result. You cannot prove this, or if you can, you have not shown a reasoning chain that results in it. Use logic.

EDIT: Downvote away, but for chrissakes at least provide your reasoning. What is this, reddit?

It would be better if you spend some time to understand what they MEANT with by "content" in their statement, instead of attacking their statement "as given", i.e with only considering the more basic meaning of the word content.

Also: it's not just that "undistributed content might as well not exist", it's also that content not done to a level the public wants "might as well not exist". Even if you distribute (say, online, on YouTube) your "movie" made with a camcorder, it doesn't mean it will replace an actual, budgeted movie, for the majority of people.

>Also, you claim (as does everyone else in this debate, it would seem) that creators must be compensated or less content will result. You cannot prove this, or if you can, you have not shown a reasoning chain that results in it. Use logic.

Why don't YOU use logic? I don't have to "prove" anything, it's obvious.

1) People produce content for two reasons: for free and because they are paid to do so.

If they are not paid, the second reason ceases to exist. (If you don't believe that some of the professional content creators would not produce stuff if there were no money involved, talk to some of them). A lot of content is not produced "out of passion" at all, but solely for money. Justin Bieber songs, hollywood blockbuster, etc.

2) Content creation costs money. If content is not paid, expensive content will not be produced by anyone, even those that do it out of passion. A money, which can get to $100 million budget easily, is expensive content.

3) Content creation takes time. If professional creators cannot do it as a full time job, they will work some other full time job, and if they still feel the urge to do it out of passion, they would do it on their spare time. Again, volume will drop.

Re: your 3 assertions towards the end.

1) Agreed. However, the absolute amount of content being produced is increasing regardless as population grows and tool proliferate. We all know you can't count a decrease in growth the same way you count an actual cost.

2) Content creation becoming expensive can be a function just as much about expectations of what something should cost as it is actual production cost--so, no, I don't agree that creation costs what it actually needs to. Expensive things won't be made, sure, but what about ten cheap things instead? Or a hundred hobby things?

3) Agreed that time is used. However, how many people program in their free time if they do it as a job? How many people shoot movies in their free time as Best Boy Grip or whatever? Just because they do it as a day job doesn't mean that they'll do it as a hobby, too. Or that they wouldn't increase their hobby time now that they don't have to do it for a living.