While it's tempting for me to caricature my idealogical opponents using examples of pithy, meaningless platitudes such as this one, I shall strive not to follow your example. If you really do value honest discussion, I think you'll find such preaching to be self-defeating.
> "...everything from Open Source software to self-published books paints a very clear and consistent picture"
Please do break this down with some stats and examples. You can't possibly be so naive to think this statement will be taken as axiomatic.
> "...while there are the occasional gems, most of the work simply isn't very good by professional standards."
Ah, an ad-hominem of your own, most self-righteously disguised. I am writing this comment entirely using tools that are covered under OSS licenses. I earn my living using the same tools, and my work is also covered under an OSS license. You'll note that I said "earn", and from that you might deduce that commerce and OSS are not mutually exclusive. You might also observe a counter-point to your rather haughty categorizations of "professional" and "hobbyist" creation. I even have hope that you may perceive the irony of accusing your opponents of being "black-and-white". Speaking of which...
> But as long as we confine the debate to a black-and-white "Big Media Bad, Cheap Freeloading Good" or "Cheap Freeloading Bad, Big Media Good"
You seem to have created your own personal straw-man using the most radical contingent of anti-IP viewpoints. I'm surprised you didn't call them freetards. Your post consists almost entirely of shallow, difficult-to-argue-with assertions seemingly aimed at thick-headed techno-communists. Do you honestly expect many folks here to recognize only the marginal cost of content production? Any answer other than "no" will tell me that you haven't been paying much attention. So long as you only hear what you want to hear, you won't be able to intelligently converse with the many folks here who are somewhere in between the extremes. Folks like me, who might say things like...
- I highly value content and the minds that produce it. Perhaps more than anything else, art is what makes life worth living for me. I require it, and I thus require content producers to produce it. I am willing to pay for it, but like everything else that I buy, the cost must be sustainable.
- Technology has long been at point where content is presented and used in its purest form: a totally non-rivalrous and totally non-excludable commodity. The carriers required in earlier times, e.g. books, CDs, etc., are no longer required. Any piece of content is now exactly equivalent to any other piece of information -- the words of a book, a song, a picture, an idea, a rumor, a number. There is nothing novel to me about the idea of copyright, or in its value as a temporary monopoly on the distribution of information intended to incentivize the creation of said information. Again, if you pay attention, I think you'll find this to be a commonly accepted notion around here.
- When non-rivalrous and non-excludable goods are treated like rivalrous and/or excludable goods for the purposes of regulation, bad things generally happen. The methods by which this must be done are obtuse, ineffective, and in my opinion, often unethical. Think censorship, DRM, security-through-obscurity, etc.
- It seems to me that if someone wants to make money from a completely non-rivalrous and non-excludable product, the onus is very much on them to distribute their product in a commercially viable way. Some artists are embracing the inevitable challenges of making money from information in today's market. The large distribution cartels (e.d. RIAA) have completely rejected them, and expect governments to maintain the old business models for them using force.
There is indeed much room for compromise, but be not mislead about the depth of the convictions of those who disagree with you, nor of the scope of their knowledge and experience.
You seem to have spectacularly misunderstood my position, and even reading back over the earlier posts in this thread, I honestly can't see why. I am in favour of balance, recognising that there is a genuine problem with piracy and real economic damage being done to creative industries, but also recognising that ill-conceived legislation like SOPA is not the way to fix it. I want to see a balanced legislative approach that restores copyright to something respectable and faithful to the basic idea without the excessive protections and penalties that have been developing in various jurisdictions today. But I also have no sympathy with the "information wants to be free crowd", because I think they are at best economically naive and at worst selfish freeloaders. I genuinely can't understand how my comments in the grandparent post seem to have convinced you that I am some sort of evil copyright zealot.
To address your specific points:
> Please do break this down with some stats and examples.
OK, Open Source first:
Linux vs. Windows/MacOS (on the desktop)
OpenOffice vs. MS Office or Apple iWork
GIMP/Inkscape/Scribus vs. Adobe Creative Suite
Blender and related tools vs. Autodesk suite and related tools
??? vs. Exchange Server
??? vs. Skyrim/Battlefield 3/any other AAA game you like
??? vs. any serious CAD package
??? vs. any serious business admin suite
And those are all big name products, the kind of thing where there is critical mass for developers to build and sustain a serious OSS project, and where there are plausible alternative revenue streams available via selling support, commercial sponsorship by a company that wants to software to exist for other reasons than selling it directly, etc. Generally, OSS does best in those sorts of areas: system/server software, programming software, geek toys, mass-market content production/consumption tools, basically anything a lot of geeks are going to be interested in. There are very few OSS success stories in more specialist niches or in building the kinds of professional software that keep businesses running.
As for self-published books, I'll give you the challenge on that one: please name one textbook that you would want your kids' school to use that was self-published by the author(s) without any sort of copyright-based incentive scheme but is as good or better in quality than textbooks produced following the traditional publishing route.
> Ah, an ad-hominem of your own, most self-righteously disguised.
You need to look up what ad hominem means. I am not attacking the creators of the work. I am attacking the quality of the work. There is no logical fallacy there.
> You seem to have created your own personal straw-man using the most radical contingent of anti-IP viewpoints.
The trouble is, they aren't particularly radical viewpoints among the anti-IP crowd. Read any debate on tech-heavy forums like this one or Slashdot, and you'll find plenty of people who really believe we should abolish penalties for any non-commercial copying of works under copyright. Plenty of people really do quote the "information wants to be free" line and use the near-zero marginal cost to justify rampant piracy while totally disregarding the fixed up-front costs of development. Plenty of people really do claim that piracy isn't costing copyright holders anything because there's no guarantee that anyone ripping a copy without paying would have paid for a legal copy anyway, a position about as plausible as the movie industry claiming that their actual losses due to infringement are greater than the global GDP. This is not some extreme caricature I've conjured up to make an argument. These are views publicly expressed by large numbers of anti-copyright advocates all the time. When faced with this sort of advocacy, often by people who are essentially defending breaking the law by claiming it's bad law, it's hardly surprising that politicians who aren't particularly technically literate are sceptical.
> Do you honestly expect many folks here to recognize only the marginal cost of content production?
Based on the overwhelming consensus of the comments that had been made when I wrote my first post to this thread -- not to mention the common groupthink on various other forums with an ongoing interest in this subject -- I not only expect it, I think it is pretty much proven beyond any doubt. A few more reasonable people have posted to this particular discussion since, fortunately.
> It seems to me that if someone wants to make money from a completely non-rivalrous and non-excludable product, the onus is very much on them to distribute their product in a commercially viable way.
And what way is that, exactly, if we don't enforce copyrights?
> Some artists are embracing the inevitable challenges of making money from information in today's market.
And they represent a tiny fraction of the content consumed today.
Indeed, one of the strongest arguments for the effectiveness of copyright as an economic tool and against the effectiveness of various oft-proposed alternative incentive schemes is that typically today's copyright laws don't prevent anyone from adopting one of the alternatives if it really does provide a better incentive. However, almost no-one has done so successfully.
> The large distribution cartels (e.d. RIAA) have completely rejected them, and expect governments to maintain the old business models for them using force.
That is how laws work. But bizarrely, a lot of people seem to think it's entirely reasonable for the law to prohibit copyright infringement, yet for the entire burden of finding infringers and bringing them to justice to fall on the copyright holder. I wonder how those people would feel if their houses were burgled and the police told them to do their own forensic work, arrest the burglers when they found them, and take them to court personally? Or, to give a more directly comparable scenario to avoid any concerns about comparing physical and intellectual property, how would those people feel if they were tricked out of a normal return on their retirement savings by professional fraudsters, and the police gave a similar response?
> There is indeed much room for compromise, but be not mislead about the depth of the convictions of those who disagree with you, nor of the scope of their knowledge and experience.
The scale of global piracy makes the convictions of those who disagree with me (or just don't care) quite clear.
While it's tempting for me to caricature my idealogical opponents using examples of pithy, meaningless platitudes such as this one, I shall strive not to follow your example. If you really do value honest discussion, I think you'll find such preaching to be self-defeating.
> "...everything from Open Source software to self-published books paints a very clear and consistent picture"
Please do break this down with some stats and examples. You can't possibly be so naive to think this statement will be taken as axiomatic.
> "...while there are the occasional gems, most of the work simply isn't very good by professional standards."
Ah, an ad-hominem of your own, most self-righteously disguised. I am writing this comment entirely using tools that are covered under OSS licenses. I earn my living using the same tools, and my work is also covered under an OSS license. You'll note that I said "earn", and from that you might deduce that commerce and OSS are not mutually exclusive. You might also observe a counter-point to your rather haughty categorizations of "professional" and "hobbyist" creation. I even have hope that you may perceive the irony of accusing your opponents of being "black-and-white". Speaking of which...
> But as long as we confine the debate to a black-and-white "Big Media Bad, Cheap Freeloading Good" or "Cheap Freeloading Bad, Big Media Good"
You seem to have created your own personal straw-man using the most radical contingent of anti-IP viewpoints. I'm surprised you didn't call them freetards. Your post consists almost entirely of shallow, difficult-to-argue-with assertions seemingly aimed at thick-headed techno-communists. Do you honestly expect many folks here to recognize only the marginal cost of content production? Any answer other than "no" will tell me that you haven't been paying much attention. So long as you only hear what you want to hear, you won't be able to intelligently converse with the many folks here who are somewhere in between the extremes. Folks like me, who might say things like...
- I highly value content and the minds that produce it. Perhaps more than anything else, art is what makes life worth living for me. I require it, and I thus require content producers to produce it. I am willing to pay for it, but like everything else that I buy, the cost must be sustainable.
- Technology has long been at point where content is presented and used in its purest form: a totally non-rivalrous and totally non-excludable commodity. The carriers required in earlier times, e.g. books, CDs, etc., are no longer required. Any piece of content is now exactly equivalent to any other piece of information -- the words of a book, a song, a picture, an idea, a rumor, a number. There is nothing novel to me about the idea of copyright, or in its value as a temporary monopoly on the distribution of information intended to incentivize the creation of said information. Again, if you pay attention, I think you'll find this to be a commonly accepted notion around here.
- When non-rivalrous and non-excludable goods are treated like rivalrous and/or excludable goods for the purposes of regulation, bad things generally happen. The methods by which this must be done are obtuse, ineffective, and in my opinion, often unethical. Think censorship, DRM, security-through-obscurity, etc.
- It seems to me that if someone wants to make money from a completely non-rivalrous and non-excludable product, the onus is very much on them to distribute their product in a commercially viable way. Some artists are embracing the inevitable challenges of making money from information in today's market. The large distribution cartels (e.d. RIAA) have completely rejected them, and expect governments to maintain the old business models for them using force.
There is indeed much room for compromise, but be not mislead about the depth of the convictions of those who disagree with you, nor of the scope of their knowledge and experience.