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Re: This photograph is free

#131

Post by loup-vaillant »

Yet another example of the tension between scarcity and abundance.

Our economy is based on scarcity. Which means that anything abundant tend to see its price driven down to zero. Making a living by selling such goods as if they were scarce is increasingly difficult. Donations seems to work somewhat, though.

If everything (including food and housing) were abundant, we wouldn't even need money, and making a living out of music, photography, or software wouldn't even be discussed of. But we don't live in that world…

…Yet. The way things are evolving, more and more goods have the potential to be effectively abundant. Especially those who have bounded demand, like food (if I recall correctly, there is already more than enough food to feed the planet, if only it where correctly distributed). Work is being more and more automated, such that even human labour can eventually be made abundant (an especially vivid example is self-driving cars, which can bring down an entire profession). But scarcity isn't going anywhere, so we'd better prepare for a rather long transition.

I see several forms that transition could take. (i) More unemployment, more economic problems, more people starve and freeze despite the availability of food and housing. (ii) Reduction of the hours worked per week, while keeping the salaries up. (iii) Growth of actual wealth (Not of the GDP). (iv) artificial scarcity, driven by old corporation and institutions that just won't die.

I'd like to avoid (i) and (iv), but I'm afraid we already have evidence for them right now (especially (iv), see copyright and patents). I'd like to have (ii), but I'm not aware of any reliable metric about it. The last decades clearly demonstrate (iii), but I'm not sure we have as much as we could have.

Anyway, I'm not satisfied right now: abundance and scarcity clearly don't play well together. If someone has an idea about how we could make them, that could be terrific.

Re: This photograph is free

#132

Post by jsavimbi »

dextorious wrote: post #129
jsavimbi wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It was an attempt to influence OTHER photographers not to give away their photos for free. At some point, photographers will need to understand that their work is not that unique and that the wealth created by the community through sharing is much greater than that derived by a single artist through the licensing and sale of their work.

"""At some point, photographers will need to understand that their work is not that unique and that the wealth created by the community through sharing is much greater than that derived by a single artist through the licensing and sale of their work.""" Spoken like a true I-want-your-stuff-for-free person...

You're assuming that "your stuff" actually has monetary value. Usually it doesn't, but the creator rarely wants to hear that.

Re: This photograph is free

#133

Post by dchest »

hetman wrote: post #122
njharman wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The right to give and the right to charge are inherently personal decisions Actually, in the U.S.A. the right to restrict others from "using" "your" "intellectual property" is granted by the government and only for limited times (in theory). The default natural state is that everyone has the right to share, reuse, etc everyone's intangible creative works.

The right is not the same thing as the ability. Since rights are enforced by a civil authority, it would suggest to me the only "natural" rights are the ones granted by said authority.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_and_legal_rights

Re: This photograph is free

#134

Post by prof_hobart »

tptacek wrote: post #57

Or, "How not to make money selling software: a succinct illustration of cost-based and market-based (specifically, value-based) pricing in just two comment threads." Why can Github charge FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS PER YEAR for a local install of Github and succeed, impressively so, despite a small army of nerds pointing out how inexpensive it is to run one's own Git server and Gitorious? Why does 37signals have an office…

>Value-based pricing says, "how much it cost me to create the photo is irrelevant".

Almost, but not quite. In the case of a hobbyist, yes it's irrelevant. But for a business, the cost to create should set the minimum cost they'd be prepared to charge (or at least be expecting to charge - you may find yourself discounting it below cost if you've already made it and fail to sell).

I do mostly agree though, and it always amuses me when I see people complaining about eBooks that cost more than dead tree ones. If it's not worth more to you, then don't buy it.

>The moralism in these threads is an irrelevant sideshow.

Again, not quite. Morality doesn't, or shouldn't, come into play when determining the price. But it does when it comes to how a "buyer" reacts to a price they don't like in relation to goods that have no marginal cost to produce a new copy - e.g. digital photo, movie download. If you don't like the price that's been set, but it's not going to cost the creator anything for you to simply take a copy for free, do you have any moral issue with that?

Re: This photograph is free

#135

Post by tommorris »

Drbble wrote: post #119
aspir wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel the same as you. Giving (music, money, software), is extremely personal, and one that shouldn't be done lightly, or out of pressure from others. Personally, I'd love to be able to release a beneficial OSS software tool or commit a valuable patch to a project, but I'm not a good enough developer. Yet, I feel like a second class citizen in the development community because I haven't

Contribute documentation or bug reports. These are as valuable as code.

Or contribute how it is hard to contribute. If contributing to OSS is hard, then OSS communities may be able to make it easier.

For instance, I'm involved in Wikipedia heavily and have always thought that it would be worth contributing to MediaWiki: at the very least being willing to beta test new stuff and write tests and so on. It's a big legacy hairball type project, but the community have made it easier to contribute by documenting the process of getting a working environment setup, by better documenting the process of submitting bugs and patches to bugzilla, by marking a bunch of bugs as suitable for newbies, by the new maintenance/dev scripts and by having a newbie developers liaison person.

If you want to get involved in an open source project but feel inadequate, try and politely work with them to nudge them into making it easier for new developers to contribute. Document the process of getting a working environment setup, including getting things like Vagrant setup if needed. Most projects will welcome attempts to try and make it easier for new developers. And, well, if they don't, then find a better project. ;-)

(If you think your coding really does suck, we've got an encyclopedia with lots of loose ends that need tying up. Just sayin'.)

Re: This photograph is free

#136

Post by dextorious »

jsavimbi wrote: post #132
dextorious wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"""At some point, photographers will need to understand that their work is not that unique and that the wealth created by the community through sharing is much greater than that derived by a single artist through the licensing and sale of their work.""" Spoken like a true I-want-your-stuff-for-free person...

You're assuming that "your stuff" actually has monetary value. Usually it doesn't, but the creator rarely wants to hear that.

Well, if someone "wants it", it has monetary value.

What you're saying amounts to "I'd want it (over other things) if it was free".

Good, move along then, and don't use it because it is no.

Re: This photograph is free

#137

Post by tommorris »

miahi wrote: post #9

Just a couple of hours time difference and it would be copyrighted[1], and not by him. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eiffel_Tower#Image_copyright_cl...

Just remember: it's only in France and other countries that lack panoramafreiheit.

I thought the RIAA suing grandmas was bad, then I read about the panoramafreiheit situation in Europe. It's far, far more stupid than you can ever imagine.

Re: This photograph is free

#138

Post by tommorris »

projectileboy wrote: post #110

The underlying attitude that bothers me in these discussions on HN is that most of us are in the software business, so what it amounts to is "my intellectual property (software) is super valuable, and your intellectual property (photos, music, writing) is worthless". Do we really want to live in a world where people can't make a living from photography or writing or music?

That's the thing though: I do think the code that I write is fairly worthless. I do custom programming for a small company. The work I do is a competitive advantage for them, but it is so specific to them that even if I were to, say, get approval to open source the whole lot, they wouldn't lose a penny, nor would their competitors really gain anything. The value isn't in the IP, the value is in the fact that it enables them to get their work done quicker and better and be more responsive to their clients.

The code isn't the key part: the value is the fact that I can take complex and changing requirements and build them a one-off tool that does exactly what they want.

The code will be gone in five years, probably ten, as business needs will change.

Re: This photograph is free

#139

Post by maxerickson »

prof_hobart wrote: post #134
tptacek wrote: post #57

Or, "How not to make money selling software: a succinct illustration of cost-based and market-based (specifically, value-based) pricing in just two comment threads." Why can Github charge FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS PER YEAR for a local install of Github and succeed, impressively so, despite a small army of nerds pointing out how inexpensive it is to run one's own Git server and Gitorious? Why does 37signals have an office…

>Value-based pricing says, "how much it cost me to create the photo is irrelevant". Almost, but not quite. In the case of a hobbyist, yes it's irrelevant. But for a business, the cost to create should set the minimum cost they'd be prepared to charge (or at least be expecting to charge - you may find yourself discounting it below cost if you've already made it and fail to sell). I do mostly agree though, and it alway…

I wonder, do you think that the people complaining about ebook prices are buying them?

It seems likely to me that they are mostly complaining because the price has stopped them from making the purchase.

Re: This photograph is free

#140

Post by prof_hobart »

maxerickson wrote: post #139
prof_hobart wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Value-based pricing says, "how much it cost me to create the photo is irrelevant". Almost, but not quite. In the case of a hobbyist, yes it's irrelevant. But for a business, the cost to create should set the minimum cost they'd be prepared to charge (or at least be expecting to charge - you may find yourself discounting it below cost if you've already made it and fail to sell). I do mostly agree though, and it alway…

I wonder, do you think that the people complaining about ebook prices are buying them? It seems likely to me that they are mostly complaining because the price has stopped them from making the purchase.

Possibly, but it's usually not the price of the ebook itself that they are complaining about. It's the fact that the paper version is cheaper. If someone charged £10 for a particular ebook and £15 for the paper one, then there would rarely be much complaint. If they charged £10 for the ebook and £5 for the paper one, then people are up in arms.

And the argument is alway that it's cheaper to make the ebook than the paper one, and that it's therefore wrong to charge more for the ebook. The point is that this is the wrong way to think about it. As a buyer working out how much you're prepared to pay for something, the cost of manufacture should be pretty much irrelevant. If the ebook is worth £5 more to you than the paper one, then buy the ebook. If it isn't, then buy the paper one instead.

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