Paul Graham has lost the plot

The problem I have with this article is the association of investment with a 'right' to recoup that investment. There is no inherent right to recoup investment money of this type. NONE! It doesn't matter how hard something is to produce, there is no inherent right to make a profit based on that effort. People paint, write, sing and act all the time without compensation of any kind.

The argument that creators must be compensated to keep creating is a bit of a straw man. The idea that someone can spend some time writing or making music and then deserves compensation seems to be strongly held, but the ones who vastly profit from the copyright law are not the creators. Disney, for instance, has been dead a very long time, but his company defends copyright extension into perpetuity.

Right now, there are far more people unable to create because of copyright/patent law than there are people getting compensated for their creations.

Would there? Really? Like, are we absolutely sure there would be less of it? Are we also ruling out the possibility that someone would pay you to produce specific lines of code or just that once you produce code, you can't sell it?

It used to commonly be the case that you got paid to make music for someone. Now you make the music and then try to sell it to people.

It just seems like there is an implicit assumption that the marketplace model is the best way to encourage the creation of all things.

Just because it has already been produced, doesn't mean that it has already been paid for. The studio and the session musicians have probably been paid, but the artist should be compensated on a scale commensurate with the popularity of the work and that needs to be measured across whatever timescale people are still buying or downloading it.

Spotted the massive, gaping flaw in the argument yet?

It's 2012, if you make this argument then I am done with you. Linux is how old? How much of the internet runs on it?

Done.

Edit: Wow, really? Why is this still a necessary argument?

The linux kernel is utterly free. Yet it's still developed. It's still a state of the art product. And people still make money off of linux and linux-based products.

Do I honestly have to connect the dots here?

Spoilers: if you can't or don't want to charge for the code directly then maybe you find some alternate way to charge for something else or you use another form of supporting development.

The analogy to the creation of music and movies should be so frelling obvious I shouldn't even need to make it.

This sums up why I disagree with the author. People have been playing and composing music way before "selling records" was the way to make money. Just like people don't contribute to open source "for the joy of it".

Very serious business is being done around open source, and the same could happen around the music industry. I personally wouldn't mind settling for an industry where artists get paid for their performances (getting paid for the "actual" hours put in, not just a one-off recording session decades ago that's making them fat millionaires), using their records as promotional tools. Parallel business would develop, they would charge for packaging, interviews, talks, God-knows-what. Let the next generations be creative.

The industry may not seem as lucrative as it may sound today, but frankly I could do without the MBA consultant in a suit. Cut off his salary and most of the middle men and you're good to go. Despite what the article says, the cost of producing and publishing new material isn't that high. My closest friend took a couple months off to record a home made 6 song album. With an iMac and some amateur equipment. The result is simply bluffing. Even a small team on a low budget can definitely invest this money as part of their promotion campaign.