Messages

Mr. President, you'd better not let us down.

Yes he can!

I shall now go hang myself by the neck until dead out of guilt for making such a tasteless comment. But you know, deep down, that I'm right.

Short: life is self-reinforcing disentropy.

[your own distributor]

(I'm not understanding the difference between being your own distributor as opposed to distributing your stuff to as many distributors as possible?  Is it just that as your own distributor you would be both wholesale and retail but wholesale only if you simply sold to other distributors?)

There's no difference, you're right. Every customer is a potential distributor in this model. The marketting is a bit different though

Also, this model of distribution appears spontaneously in the right conditions: as lots of authors of intellectual works abandoned SL over time, they just started selling their stuff with full permissions just like I did, as a way to grab the last shreds of value they could before leaving for good. It sparked an entire, fast-growing movement of "BIAB" (stands for Business In A Box) commerce, where you pay a lot for full permission stuff you can start to sell for profit as restricted, DRMed content on your own. The whole thing immediately followed the same trends: as people started reselling the BIABs as such instead of as DRMed content, the prices went down fast, the content became more and more accessible and cheaper, and in no time people started buying the BIABs not for the purpose of reselling, but for enjoying the content itself. That movement is strong and keeps going, new original content gets released this way continuously, in turn fueling more original work creation. Hopefully, at one point the whole DRM thing can be abandoned once and for all (that's one of the last things stopping SL's editor from licensing their server software or interoperating with compatible, reverse-engineered servers).

How do you determine when to lower your initial price?

At one point, after being away for a few weeks, one customer came to me and said: "Hey, you should check that, this guy X is selling your stuff at 1000 while you're selling it 12000. I think he has pirated your stuff !" So I explained to him that this was actually the model working as expected, and thus I dropped my prices to 500. I kept an eye on the prices that other people were selling at, adjusting from time to time, which is easy to do since there are "online-shopping" websites where you can lookup the stuff and check its price in realtime.

See, the strength of this is that if I set my price too high initially, then I only get one or two purchases and the reward I end up getting for creating is lowered to a more reasonable amount. The continuous lowering in price and eventual "open sourcing" happens at the rate the whole audience decides, as they make actual purchases, instead of at some fixed legal rate. If they don't buy, or buy little, then the lowering takes more time, but it happens eventually. If I price it lower than I could, then more people rush to it and try to make a profit from distributing it, and that augments my reward. It balances out.

It's more complicated in my example because I do both creation and distribution, but I could restrict myself to making new stuff and selling it at high price to all the distributors I could, and not bother on distribution at all (leaving this entirely to them to cope with the downward trend and accessibility explosion).

[It works.]

Replacing copyright: basically there needs to be some way to make money from creating new intellectual works. But if a legally-enforced monopoly on the copying and distributing of those works won't fit, then what ?

Well, I experimented with one alternative. I have an active account in Second Life that I use to sell my own creations. Just so you know, SL enforces copyright by allowing creators to set "permissions" on their stuff, so that the next owner cannot duplicate or modify or transfer the object to someone else (and any combination of those, with one exception: you can always transfer a non-copiable object, or copy a non-transferable object, can't forbid both at the same time, so SL follows the "first sale doctrine" of legal theory applicable in much of the Western world). That's DRM, and I loathe it, so I went and found some way to do without.

What I did was selling my stuff with full permissions and an explicit authorisation of selling for profit and competing with my own distribution of it. I initially set the price very high, the principle is that with more sales, more people can distribute my stuff and compete with me (and recoup their initial purchase), so my price (and theirs) come down, until we all reach the marginal rate for distribution (that is, at this point we hardly make any money from distributing the stuff). At that point, my original work for the initial creation is paid for multiple times over and I, as an author, was rewarded for creating new things - and yet with this system no one can monopolize the distribution and leverage outrageous margins out of legal enforcement of bogus rights, like the RIAA members do nowadays.

End result: It works. It lets an incredible number of people access the works at lower prices although with a little longer delay (corresponding to the period during which the prices go from very high to "practically zero"). My stuff is now pretty much in the public domain, which is exactly what I wanted because it stops bastards from taking it, slapping restrictions on it through the inbuilt DRM system, and selling it as their own. Of course some people tried to do just that, but the fast-widening distribution model ensured no one would buy it from them when they could get it almost for free elsewhere.

That's the First-disclosure model I was talking about on page 1, put into practice. I could profit from my natural monopoly of disclosure on the original work (being the author, I was the only one to have access to it), as I sold access to it at a price that suited me and corresponded to how valuable I estimated my work to be. The first buyers were confident their own distributing leverage was sufficient to make a profit for themselves too (rewarding their own distribution work in the process), and in turns smaller distributors or end-purchasers bought access to it from those first disclosees, then they too turned around and sell it at a lower price, extending distribution of it some more and making it more accessible, etc... Basically, it works like some MLM scheme except the product sold has actual value instead of being an empty promise, and everyone is informed of the way it works and where it's gonna end, from the start.

(I did get some nasty flak from people who arrived after the whole thing was over, did not understand the model, and thought my prices were "way too low", missing the whole point of such a dynamic method of distribution.)

[actual people]

Since corporations were created to protect individuals from most responsibility involving the corporation... I see no reason why the corporation should have ANY rights of the individual. IF the individual wants full rights, they should also take full responsibility. If they don't want the risk associated with being personally liable, then they should understand that such a position limits their personal freedom/expression/rights regarding the corporation.

:mittens:Thank you.

I'm especially vindicated these days by people who go around calling big corporations "capitalist". What the eff does private ownership of production means (the ownership of the tools, ideas, recipes and land by actual people like you and me) have to do with those big hulking bureaucracies of elected representatives of shareholders (and elected representatives of employees, as is legally mandatory in my own country) sitting around in councils, comittees and other forms of Soviets, coopting their relatives and club friends into layers of collectively irresponsible slices of limited dictatorship to lord over employees who don't own and don't even lease themselves the tools they're supposed to run to do their work, down to the point where they will tell them how to dress and what they can or cannot have in their pockets ?

(coopting the enemy's symbology can work in more than one way)

"Intellectual property" ain't. In fact, copyright is an abuse of other people's property, because you get to use the State's might to force people into using their own property (their own computer, their own CDs, their own brains) in a restricted way.

Information ain't a private good because it's not rival. We can't both use the same car to go different directions at the same time, but we sure as hell can use the same recipe in different ways at the same time. Thus there's nothing taken from you when information is transmitted.

The Proper Capitalistic Way is that of the natural disclosure monopoly, which says you better get your efforts paid for the first time you disclose your original information, because you ain't going to make such an easy profit after other people have access to it. It's the model where only possession of information matters, and you get to spread it to anyone under the conditions you think best. A model where creation of original work is where the profit resides, and distribution of it just scrapes the margin.

The magicians' world works a bit like this already: they don't give shit about "I invented this so you don't get to use it in your spectacle", instead they reward contributing new stuff with unrestricted access to the others' stuff. Whole industries work like this too, there are companies out there (like Michelin in the tire-making business) not giving a shit about patents and intellectual property because, to them, it's a worthless system and they make more money treating ideas like valuable secrets that one has the right to do whatever they want with and thus should pay the good price outright to get them in the first place. The world of fast-subbing works like this too, where dozens of competing distribution networks race to feed their audience the newest episode of whatever-anime-is-hot-these-days as quickly and with the highest quality as is possible.

There's a whole other world of intellectual work creation waiting. And the pirates are making it come to us.

Damn you, you saw right through the way I cleverly disguised that comment as sarcasm.

Not that particular comment, actually, but the whole posting of that thread in the first place. But you're improving, really, you've already got the retroactive infallability part of being a Pope.

[I aspire to be like you]

Weird shit happening at work:

Increase in the number of sketch-comedy like bad mornings

Electronics going more haywire than usual

I'm being given special attention.

NO you're NOT, you're getting the usual treatment every recent illuminee gets as per the Procedure©. Get a number and get in line to collect.

I aspire to be like you

That's precisely what you're doing wrong, and that's also why all that nasty shit is happening to you.

It's not Thursday again yet, though ?

And thus there was some Enlightenment

I just think it's more interesting to show that the Hope is justified and yet they are doomed anyway.

The game is rigged, and they will always be exploited.

But the rigging and the exploitation are not interdependent, which was the point all along. I want to avoid implying that there is any such interdependancy, so I judge I cannot afford to introduce any reason for the Hope to be bogus in the first place as it would undermine the whole piece. So your criticism is welcomed, but rejected.

Edit: Ratatosk was faster.

And thus, there was no Enlightenment

This is brilliant, and snarfed for later usage with proper attribution. Thanks !

Ah, but no rigging is necessary at all, it's all neatly fucked up all by itself. Or are you suggesting it's really the rigging that makes it fucked up ?