Geek Speak — HabitableZone

Geek Speak » in reply to Which brings up another point Robert

Not quite the last point after all
Robert — (archived)

I see the need for an economic connection between work and reward, no matter how abstract that work might be, and that certainly includes authors...and programmers and artists and musicians and Web designers and most all the interesting job categories these days. This is definitely a problem that needs to be solved in the hoped-for economic regime that accounts for digital technology.

I contend that the ancient concept of property may be overextended to fill that role. It's a stopgap to extend intellectual property laws ever more elastically as we're doing now, but I don't think they can be stretched infinitely. At some point we need a more direct way for abstract workers to get paid in real money.

An illustration of the problem is the disconnect in the music world. The so-called "studios" get an enormous piece of the action for manufacturing recording media to distribute the work of the artists, who get a "royalty" back. The studios assert that they're the owners of the intellectual property and that they're the offended party when digital technology makes their property rights evaporate. Why should I care about maintaining the profits of the disc manufacturers? I want the true authors of the intellectual property to receive all the money. Digital eliminates the manufacturing overhead, and what remains ought to be pure profit to the author/artist. Hollywood-the-business has become just grit in the wheels of intellectual commerce. The 19th Century industrial mentality has to get outta the way to let us into the 21st.

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