Subject:
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Re: Copyright/Fair use question
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Sat, 9 Feb 2002 18:30:38 GMT
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Viewed:
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784 times
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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Frank Filz writes:
> > > Is it really that dumb?
> >
> > He lost $20. That seems dumb to me.
>
> Again, my question is, if he allowed the users to decide how much to pay
> (which is effectively what you are asking for), would he have got more
> or less money total?
I don't know. You seem (though maybe not) to be implying that it would be
less. I'm not so sure.
But what if he'd been asking $50 but had an unadvertised way to send less.
Would I have been the only one to use it? Today, I can just email money with
paypal to any email address. If they get the mail and either accept it or set
up an account and accept it, then they got the money. Back then, I couldn't
use their online forms to charge only $20 and I couldn't find an address to
which to send a check.
I guess that you're saying it's not dumb if it would have caused an overall
decrease in income. And I suppose you're right. But who's to say that joe-bob
the programmer knows where to price his work for maximal income. Do you? How?
I think it would be cool if:
A) idea producers made their ideas available with a public renumerative goal as
well as the time and effort that went into fabrication
B) the market prices of these ideas did fluctuate, in that they decreased over
time
C) the total amount that an idea (single song, album, book, application,
whatever) earned was public knowledge
and
D) the current price was a function of how close to the initial goal the total
take had become and how old the idea was.
I don't know that I'd support legal mandate of such a system, but I think it
takes into account your (and my) desire to justly compensate people for their
generation of valued ideas and the notion that those ideas are a product of the
maker's role as a member of society rather than an intellectual island. It
would be a neat model to see tried, in any case.
> I agree that online banking will help the situation. There does still
> need to be some minimum fee. How would you like it if 10 million people
> decided to use PayPal to pay 25 cents for your software, as PayPal sends
> you a bill for 1 million dollars (don't they have a 35 cent base fee on
> business accounts?). Remember, ANY exchange of money or goods costs
> something.
$.30 plus either 2.2% or 2.9% depending on your incoming volume. And you can
refuse the payments to avoid such an attack. But as an artist, I'd be happy to
get 10,000 payments of $2 through paypal from maybe 40,000 people were using my
art instead of 500 payments of $20 from the same 40,000 users. Obviously I was
free to constuct numbers out of thin air, but the idea is there.
> > > From what I can see, for the most part
> > > the shareware didn't really work, at least not as a business model.
> >
> > But how far was it refined? Without graduated payment systems (and lots of
> > other innovations), I'd say it wasn't given a fair shot.
>
> But there were some graduated payments. I know plenty of shareware
> software offered one agreement for personal use and another for
> corporate use.
That hardly seems innovative.
> Contracts probably are the right way to handle it. Of course a contract
> could be pretty informal, and the degree of formality will be based on
> the perceived need. I agree that the intangibleness of ideas is what
> makes it so hard to pin down the right way to handle them.
Is it reasonable that if I produce a CD, I can contract with the consumers for
certain behavior? And that once the consumer violates the contract, I can hold
them liable for any losses that result? That all seems fine to me even if it
will generally be hard to prosecute.
> I do think that different kinds of labor does deserve different
> compensation.
This is a tangent from the thread, but it's something I've been thinking about
lately. Why do they?
> One factor of course is the investment required to be
> trained to do that labor. Another factor is the need for market
> motivating factors.
It seems naive to think that no one would program (for example) if they were
paid the same as ditch diggers. I've done both and I'm quite sure that almost
everyone who could do either, would choose to program most of the time. What
incentive has to take place?
> Our current system of course is not ideal. Certain jobs get paid too
> much, and others don't get paid enough.
Which ones?
> I'm not arguing that there should never be an option. I'm just trying to
> find a way to understanding how goods should be priced. Our society does
> understand that different circumstances require different prices. Many
> services have lower prices for children or elderly people.
This is the only of your examples that I think is valid. In this case, the
price is reduced based solely on expectatin of the customer's ability to pay.
> Other
> services have cheaper prices if you are part of a group purchase. Other
> services have cheaper prices if you take on more responsibility for the
> delivery of the service. Others have prices which fluctuate over time
> depending on how badly the service provider wants to fill the capacity.
All of these, aren't rooted in our society understanding different
circumstances. They're just a different product for a different price. If I
want my books from Amazon gift wrapped, then I pay more.
Chris
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: Copyright/Fair use question
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| (...) Again, my question is, if he allowed the users to decide how much to pay (which is effectively what you are asking for), would he have got more or less money total? (...) I agree that online banking will help the situation. There does still (...) (23 years ago, 9-Feb-02, to lugnet.off-topic.debate)
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