Re: re virtual library

Posted by Roger Critchlow-2 on Apr 20, 2012; 8:09pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Re-re-virtual-library-tp7485313p7485695.html

I think the problem is speculation in intellectual property, ie looking at the potential windfall from owning a monopoly on a popular meme versus the horatio-alger story of the hard work of authors and publishers being fairly rewarded.  

The base issue is that all the ways you can use ownership of money to make more money are not equally acceptable.  I read a discussion about how speculation in insurance policies became illegal.  You can't buy insurance policies against hazards that you don't personally face, because when it was allowed speculators would distort and destroy the insurance market by buying portfolios of policies with a certainty that some would pay off.  They weren't participating honestly in an insurance market which shares risk among those who face the risk, they were simply siphoning off resources for their own profit.  It's not an acceptable way to play with your money.

The big media companies are similarly motivated.  They have no real interest in the promotion of cultural, technical, or intellectual progress, they simply bet on a portfolio of products in anticipation of some being enormously profitable.  They are not lobbying for fair rewards to the authors and producers, they are lobbying to maximize the payoff of their wagers.  So, why is it acceptable for gamblers in intellectual properties to siphon off resources for their own profit?  

Copyrights and patents were established to promote cultural, technical, and intellectual progress.  Profits siphoned off by speculators do none of that.

-- rec --

2012/4/20 Pamela McCorduck <[hidden email]>

It would be difficult for me, after having published ten books, to be completely impartial when I review the business model of book publishing, but perhaps I could summarize by saying these people figured out 1% - 99% long before Wall Street. Information technologies only exacerbated what was already unsustainable. 

On Apr 20, 2012, at 1:55 PM, glen e. p. ropella wrote:

I think the fundamental problem is that the economies of scale are
collapsing.  And I (tin foil hat in hand) tend to think it's a function
of population growth, resource depletion, and non-local homogenization
brought about by information technologies.

Music is a good example.  The recent surge we've seen in homogenized
musicians (pop stars and reality shows like American Idol) is the last
dying gasp of cultural economies of scale.  Sure, we _might_ fall into
some pattern where very rapid waves of fame ripple over the globe.  But
my prediction is the opposite.  Movements like slow food and buy local
will show up in more and more cultural domains.  Pirated IP and
micro-payments for copyrighted materials are symptoms of the collapse.
Not only does it no longer make sense for me to pay $15 for a CD (or
$100 for a book), but it also doesn't make sense for me to buy, say, a
band saw when I can walk over to the neighborhood shared tool shed and
use that one.  Similarly, why pay a bunch of money for a fossilized form
of knowledge from, say, an English cosmologist when I can chat with my
local cosmologist over a pint?

Because the US is still sparsely populated and places like Lubbock, TX
exhibit a long transient between information waves, an interested
consumer there must still buy published books.  But anyone who lives in
a densely populated area has no need for those hub-based services.
Rather, what they need is some[one|thing] _local_ they can turn to for
high quality information. (Think BitTorrent.) The process then becomes
one of triage, a graph walk from local to distant, in pursuit of the
type and quality of the information of interest.  There is a dearth of
heavy metal music in Portland, so I often have to walk the graph to find
it.  But you can't throw a rock without hitting a folk singer here. ;-)


peggy miller wrote at 04/20/2012 09:47 AM:

At the risk of taking the side of the greedy publishers, I still wonder

where enough profits will exist to cover costs of updates and writing new

books if everyone wants free books. I wrote a book that I think is good. I

am still trying to find an agent to go the publisher route because it would

be useful to get some payback. Sure I can put it on the web for free, and

maybe I will end up doing that, but where do costs get covered? Textbooks

require time, thought, =costs. Somebody has to pay. If it is the

universities, then it comes out of federal grants and/or tuition = taxes

and students covering costs anyway.

So I don't get the views being expressed here.

--
glen e. p. ropella, <a href="tel:[phone]" value="[phone]" target="_blank">971-222-9095, http://tempusdictum.com


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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org