Because expert information comes from experts who are paid a lot to do stuff not involving the authoring of their ideas. And we need to incentivize them to get said valuable information. How many people here have some novel expertise in their fields? How many would help produce technical articles pro Bono? Or for pay but end up mass pirated?
I 1000% agree the publishers themselves take way too much off the top of these authors, but the concept of "just provide knowledge out of thr good of your heart" doesn't work at scale.
>If we are sticking with a mostly capitalist system so that money is so important to get things created, then a government can provide some for this purpos
Which runs into all the problems we all know too well. Something something politics, something something taxes, something something lobbying.
On top of all that, the government just simply doesn't compensate as well as the private sector. I'm not sure if this will ever change.
Are we sure about this? It seems to me that a lot of those experts become experts despite the incentive structures that they are in. And, there are those to-be experts who had to quit, because they didn't have enough resources to fight the established “incentive” structures. Maybe if we could let people do what they could become an expert in, we would all be better off.
1. How many people can and do become experts?
2. How many of those experts interact at all outside of their career? Even just posting about work rants on social media?
3. Of 2), how many take the time to author any sort of content on the side? From an unknown blog to a conference talk to podcasts, contributing to open source,, etc. we can break this down further to those who do it outside of the company sponsoring them to do so.
4. Of 3), how many go on to extensively share knowledge? In things like journals or technical deep dives or books? Things that take months of the writing process to formalize
5. And lastly how many of 4) would happen without any sort of incentive structure? No grants, no compensation, no time off work to do this, etc.
I'm mostly talking about group 5 here, and then dividing it into 6) how many of those would then be okay with people (mostly other companies) immediately implementing those ideas, potentially making millions while they may not even get shallow platitudes of thanks? It feels like exploitation of their knowledge, and depending on the product it may indeed be) have some ethical quandary the creator fundamentally disagrees with. But it's for "the advancement of humanity" so the just need to accept that and let people extract their knowledge.
>? It seems to me that a lot of those experts become experts despite the incentive structures that they are in
It'll vary by industry, yes. I'm sure authors don't write expecting to make the next Dune. But in the context of this audience: I have definitely seen enough discussion here and on other social media that I wouldn't be uncomfortable asserting that a good 70% of tech workers would not be here without high compensation to education ratio (and I apologize for not providing any hard evidence, this is simply a gut feeling from my own statistical samples from years of discourse). Many people are indeed here for the money first and foremost.
>Maybe if we could let people do what they could become an expert in, we would all be better off.
I don't disagree, I'd love a post scarcity society that doesn't need to perform labor to survive. But that's an even loftier goal than abolishing copyright.
I can see other crowds completely disagreeing with the notion of "not all knowledge is equal", however. Definitely a savory group out there that believe that everyone needs to contribute to society somehow and not "leech off our taxes".
Why should that incentive take form of making information a product?
"just provide knowledge out of thr good of your heart" is a gross misrepresentation of what the person before said, and you even quote the passage indicating as much.
It seems like you're trying to portray the problem as a dichotomy: "product" vs "goodness of heart". That other ways pose problems doesn't mean much. The current side of the false dichotomy causes problems as in the OP.
Their suggestions last people who "just want to deny it happens" and their solution is to just let the government pay for it (spoilers: it's allready subsidized), so I don't exactly understand why you think I'm establishing a dictonimy.
Yes. People are unironically arguing to simply abolish copyright. It's an extreme solution and I disagree. I haven't heard many good moderate solutions out there because people are so pro-piracy that I'm inclined to think they don't care about the people behind novel ideas, just benefiting off their work. You get tit for tat with that sort of thinking.
I have moderate ideas, but as I've learned moderate tales fade to the extremities if you aren't even slightly aligned. We're very disaligned here, so the starting step to to show why that extreme take is bad and work from there.
Now that I never said the current system is fine. Because that's not my argument, nor the one the other extreme take needs to hear. But if that's all you got from my chain I suppose I need to do the same thing with you.
Why did you react to "but people need to survive" with "well it NEEDS to be a product"? Compensation comes in many ways, and I was simply saying that the government has historically been horrible at compensating most parts of any industry. What makes this time with books different?
>>Why should we turn information into a "product"[...]
> Because [...]
That clearly indicates that you're in fact advocating it to be a product. Perhaps I misunderstood your post, but then I'm afraid you're not making yourself very clear. I'm also not seeing any references to survival in your post, just of incentivizing where work goes, so I am fairly certain what you think you write is not what you actually write.
Regardless, I am a huge fan of the devil's advocate. You can talk about points without them being your complete world view. That's the assumption that we seem misaligned with. Just because I don't want all information to be free the moment it is published (or stolen) doesn't mean I want to abolish copyright.
Now I'm not saying that capitalism is the best way to distribute this value, but at least some effort is required in curating all knowledge.
That's like saying f(x)=x is a random function, if x is random.
If we are sticking with a mostly capitalist system so that money is so important to get things created, then a government can provide some for this purpose (and they often do already). It's not like they don't borrow or print money in whatever quantity is needed.
I suspect that it's the same issue that has led certain neoliberals and libertarians to denying that various forms of pollution are a problem. There's just no way that it can be fixed within capitalism, so better just deny that there's any problem at all.