[p2p-research] Fwd: [fcforum] Fw: iPad DRM is a dangerous step backward. Sign the petition!

[Kevin Carson]

On 2/3/10, M. Fioretti <mfioretti at nexaima.net> wrote:

>   I find it much simpler and robust, so to speak,
>  to substitute "ideas" with "time" in your last sentence above.
>
>  It cuts all the "marginal cost of copies is zero", "information wants
>  to be free" "scarcity is artificial" etc... slogans down to something
>  much more concrete. My own TIME is only mine and is sure as hell a
>  really limited resource.
>
>  If it takes me, say, five full days to research and test stuff in
>  order to write something that gives one million people emotions
>  (e.g. poetry) or, much more prosaically, teaches them in twenty
>  minutes how to do something they need to do, I may only be able to
>  afford to do it if there is some guarantee that I can make enough of
>  it to at least pay my expenses for those same days. If there are no
>  such guarantee (because there is no protection at all of that time
>  investment, ignoring for a moment how it is legally called) I won't
>  cry from the rooftops. I'll simply spend that same time teaching
>  privately in some school or course for people who can afford a good
>  live teacher. But in that case, since time is damn scarce, I will NOT
>  have any TIME left to do the other thing, even if that could have been
>  useful to many more people by publishing it online

Nobody is entitled to a guarantee of the ability to recoup sunk costs
of any kind.  You are free to spend your time any way you see fit, and
to devise any business model you can think of to get money from so
doing--so long as it doesn't involve coercing other people to make the
business model viable.  You're no more automatically entitled to a
guaranteed return on how you choose to spend your time, than investors
in buggy whip factories were entitled to restrict competition from
Ford to guarantee a profit on the capital they'd invested.

-- 
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html
Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html