Writing as a post-copyright career

A MUD discussion last night got fairly heated and hectic, so I'm going to try this in a forum that allows for more length and less crosstalk...

We all know about the content industries' struggles with piracy. Music and movies have been most visible, and I myself have been thinking about this issue mostly with regard to the music industry, but piracy affects the written word too (especially as e-books become more popular). Over the past decade, copying has gotten easier to do and harder to stop or even detect: I believe this trend will continue, and that it's time to seriously look for a new business model that doesn't rely on the author or publisher being the sole source of copies.

I have such a model in mind, and there's already evidence that it can work for music and software. But I'd like to know more about how well it can work with other media, and for that I need your help.

So...

Imagine a world where copyright does not exist. Anything you publish can be freely, legally copied by anyone who has the resources to do it, as long as they don't lie about authorship: i.e. no one can take credit for your work or attribute their work to you).

I believe the best way for authors and artists to earn a living in this environment is to sell their labor -- something that can't be copied. You can copy an old book for free, but you can't make someone write you a new book unless you agree to his terms. Therefore, as long as the public is still hungry for new books, there will be demand for authors to write them, and that demand will put money in authors' pockets.

You may have heard of the Street Performer Protocol or "ransom model", in which you write a book, then announce "Here's a description of the book I've written. I will release this book once I've received X dollars." Your audience pools their money and pays you, and then you release the book. Presto: you've been paid for the time you spent writing, and your audience can now make all the copies they want without affecting your pocketbook.

But this still involves a good deal of risk for the author. What if you write a book and try to ransom it off, only to discover that you don't have the audience you thought, and you aren't able to collect the full amount you want? This model guarantees that no one will be able to read your work until you've been paid, but it doesn't save you from writing something for which you won't get paid, or won't get paid as much as you thought.

So here's a modified version of the ransom model. Instead of writing the book first and then posting an announcement, post the announcement first: "Here's a description of the book I'm planning to write. I will write this book once I've received X dollars, and release it for free."

If your audience pools their money and pays you, you write the book and release it, presto: you've been paid and the audience can make all the copies they want. On the other hand, if they don't pay you, you learn something about the true demand for your writing, and you have a choice: lower your asking price, change your proposal, or find something else to do with your time. You know ahead of time whether or not you'll be paid for your work, and you can decide whether you want to go through with it.

This model doesn't mean editors, agents, or publishers would go away, exactly. There's still value in improving works before they're released, connecting authors with the people who want to pay them, and distributing copies. But the relationships and transactions would change: editing would be a service provided to authors in order to make their writing more valuable (or to the audience in order to secure their investment), agents would be middlemen between authors and their audiences (handling the thousands of credit card transactions, etc.), and publishers would be able to compete with each other to sell copies of the same works (just like printing Bibles or any other public domain works today).

So let me pose some questions to you:

• What do you like and dislike about this model?


• What makes this model more or less likely to work for writing than for other industries that currently rely on copyright (music, software, etc.)?


• What risks do you think this model would add, and how do those compare to the risks it would alleviate?


• If you don't think this would work, how do you think writing would happen in the absence of copyright?


• Do you believe the current model is a fair balance between the needs of writers and the rights of readers? How could it be improved?


• How do you feel about the current model's prospect of making lots of money from a successful release (but with no guarantee that you'll make anything at all if it isn't successful) compared to this model's guarantee that you'll get paid an amount you deem fair (but with no possibility of getting rich from a runaway success)?
  

Again, I'm seeking enlightenment here. Some have suggested that my proposed model fails to address writers' concerns; I would like to understand those concerns, so please, explain or ask away.

Finally, I'll anticipate some questions you might have:

• How will new authors gain a foothold?


• What happens if the author never releases the work, or it isn't what the audience expected?

These, and any others, will be answered in a future post.

Another copyright apologist loses it

Start here and read on. In this thread, we learn:

• Morality is the same as legality.


• Murder is morally equivalent to copyright infringement.


• People value "value", not property or the enjoyment they get from that property (utility), so causing the resale value of an item to fall is equivalent to stealing that item.


• Copying a file without permission is equivalent to keying someone's car and urinating on the seats.


• My work as a developer is a fantasy, and I have not yet reached puberty.

Piratbyrån's Rasmus Fleischer has a great essay at Cato Unbound about the future of copyright. Here's something I haven't really even thought of:

One early darknet has been termed the “sneakernet”: walking by foot to your friend carrying video cassettes or floppy discs. Nor is the sneakernet purely a technology of the past. The capacity of portable storage devices is increasing exponentially, much faster than Internet bandwidth, according to a principle known as “Kryder’s Law.” [7] The information in our pockets yesterday was measured in megabytes, today in gigabytes, tomorrow in terabytes and in a few years probably in petabytes (an incredible amount of data). Within 10-15 years a cheap pocket-size media player will probably be able to store all recorded music that has ever been released — ready for direct copying to another person’s device.

In other words: The sneakernet will come back if needed. “I believe this is a ‘wild card’ that most people in the music industry are not seeing at all,” writes Swedish filesharing researcher Daniel Johansson. “When music fans can say, ‘I have all the music from 1950-2010, do you want a copy?’ — what kind of business models will be viable in such a reality?”

The Fruits of One's Labor

In a discussion of the ethics of copyright, Slashdotter "Ohreally_factor" writes the following analogy:

Do you believe that people have a reasonable expectation of being rewarded for work? Do you believe that they should be rewarded for work? For instance, say a farmer plants a field of carrots. All other things being equal (i.e., he's not renting the land, etc.), don't you think he is entitled to all the carrots that he has grown? Doesn't he deserve the fruits of his labor?

But think about it. Does a farmer own his crops because of the work he puts into growing them? No, labor has nothing to do with it. He owns the crops because they grow from seeds, fertilizer, and soil that he already owned beforehand. He can hire a laborer to come tend his fields, but the laborer won't own the crops; they'll still belong to the owner of the land and resources from which the crops are formed.

Thus, talking about the fruits of one's labor misses the mark from the beginning -- but even more so here, because like so many pro-copyright arguments, this one mistakes authorship for manufacturing. Musicians are not manufacturers. A better analogy would be, "don't you think a house painter is entitled to all the houses that he paints?" Or maybe, "don't you think an accountant is entitled to all the numbers that he calculates?" That's how absurd the question is.

Oh noes, the sun wouldn't rise without copyright!

[copied from LJ]

One might say that the ridiculous lengths someone is forced to go in order to defend an idea are a measure of how bankrupt the idea itself is. If that's true, then copyright just filed chapter 11. Feast your eyes on that thread, in which "mr_matticus" provides these startling revelations:

• There can be no privacy without copyright. Everyone's private medical records, etc., would be public information, and there'd be no way to pass a law to protect them.
  
• There would be no universities without copyright, because the only way for a professor to make money is by selling books and papers.
  
• Stocks are a form of "intellectual property".
  
• If I have a signed contract with someone who agrees to pay me for writing something, and they refuse to pay after I've written it, that contract is unenforceable. Therefore, the only way to get paid for writing anything is to sell copies.
  
• Efficiency is a bad thing, because it can eliminate jobs.
  
• Forcing people to constantly reinvent the wheel is a good thing, because it provides jobs.
  
• Every single factory worker whose job was made obsolete by automation got a job in the "information economy", i.e. selling copies.
  
• There will never be another new job created, ever. If someone's job is made obsolete by information efficiency (i.e. if he no longer needs to write something because he can use one that's already been written), he will have nowhere to go.
  
• There is no originality in programming; most programmers "don't do anything worthwhile". Every line of code I've ever written has been written by someone else before. In fact, every function in every program I've written has either been pasted from another program, or will be pasted into another eventually.
  
• Without copyright, employers would hire cheap overseas programmers who can do the same work for less than an American. However, because copyright exists, that could never happen today.
  
• Without copyright, only the single most skilled programmer in the world has any hope of making money. The only reason there's a market for more than one programmer is because of copyright.
  
• Without copyright, employers might simply write a program to write new programs, and then no one would ever get paid for writing software again, because machines could write it themselves. The reason this hasn't already happened, of course, is the existence of copyright.
  

You might think I'm making this up. So would I, if I hadn't participated in the thread myself. Perhaps I've fallen for a very, very dedicated troll... but I think this is just the natural result of trying to defend a fundamentally indefensible philosophy.