From: Rüdiger Koch (rkoch@rkoch.org)
Date: Sat Mar 30 2002 - 04:07:22 MST
On Friday 29 March 2002 08:45, Hal Finney wrote:
> In my opinion, the situation we face is very clear. If unlimited
> free reproduction of information goods continues to be possible on
> the Internet, then the profitability of those goods is going to fall
> drastically, and people are going to stop creating them. In a nutshell,
> we are not going to have much new music and movies, if no one has to
> pay for them.
It appears to be almost common sense that nothing gets created without money
involved. Actually I think it it rather a form of fairness if artists get
paid. But what do they get paid for? The current system is like a lottery:
You create a single #1 hit you get a pension for the rest of your life. If
you're out of luck and you create a piece of music that's truly innovative
and ahead of it's time you get nothing. Except that people in 100 years might
look at you in awe.
Again, I am not advocating killing copyright - but in my opinion every single
piece of really valuable artwork or progress in art or sciences had no or
very little money involved. The mail client I am using to write this down to
the ISDN driver to transmit this is all free software, and it's every bit as
usable as their proprietary counterparts. Yet they were created without the
implied hope for the big buck. Maybe this is un-American [Microsoft's
Alchin]? I don't think so!
Soon it will be possible for artists to create not only music, and software,
but also movies in LOTR quality. And maybe distribute them (or the PovRay or
RenderMan sources) under GPL like licenses. I think this should be encouraged.
Humans are creative by nature and money has nothing, really nothing to do
with it.
-- Rüdiger Koch http://rkoch.org Mobile: +49-179-1101561
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