Debunk The Myth That Copyright Is Needed To Make Money

I don't accept your premise. The situation is too similar to a tragedy of the commons, with a large dose of ignorance mixed in: most people outside the creative industries have no idea how much hard work by how many different kinds of people ultimately contributes to that smash hit music recording or novel or computer game. They just think of it as the latest track from $singer or the latest book from $author/$publisher or the latest game from $studio.

Take a look at how long the credits are the next time you watch a blockbuster movie that you enjoy, and see how many of the job titles you even understand. Unless you work in the movies, it will probably be a small minority, yet without all the others you probably wouldn't have enjoyed the movie nearly so much, assuming it even existed.

The trouble is, a lot of people have got used to two conflicting views in recent years: we expect ever higher creative values in works (which come with a higher sunk cost to produce the work initially) and yet we see that we can redistribute them cheaply and quickly (which implies a marginal cost near zero). If you don't have copyright, or some other economic tool, to amortise the huge sunk cost over a similarly huge audience, then you can't afford to make the work in the first place and the fact that the marginal cost of physical reproduction/redistribution is now near zero doesn't help you.

Free-riding is a narrower concept than simply reduced incentives. There are lots of different incentives and lots of different ways to increase or reduce incentives, but free-riding addresses the specific case of where the ability to copy a design cheaply and easily and thus undercut the inventor reduces or eliminates the incentive to invest in new designs.

> I don't think anyone is suggesting that Microsoft would be able to survive with the same business model in the absence of copyright. But the real question is, would there still be operating systems? And obviously there would be -- at the very least BSD and GNU/Linux and the like.

That's not really the full extent of the question. It's not just whether there would be operating systems, but would the market be served as well by those operating systems?

BSD was a university research project that arose in the context of a major DARPA project. That's a viable and popular model, but do we want to rely on the Department of Defense for an even larger fraction of our technology? I used to work for a DARPA contractor. They're not the world's most efficient way to develop technology. We use DARPA for blue-sky things the market doesn't invest in naturally, not because it's a great way to develop new technology.

Linux started as a personal hobby, and the incentive structure has always relied heavily on people scratching their own itches. Would either have served the home computer user market like Windows did? An incentive scheme that relies on government funding or personal hobbies results in very different software than one where a customer can pay a vendor for a piece of software. And I think there is much to be said about how the latter incentive model incentivizes the creation of software that the public wants rather than say what is most useful to the military.

It's interesting to see how recent developments built on Linux have been monetized. Nobody can make money selling Linux directly to cell phone vendors, like Microsoft did selling Windows to PC vendors, so what you have instead is a platform, Android, based entirely on the perpetuation of Google's search/advertising empire. Instead of paying cash for an OS, people pay in the form of their privacy, because that's something that can be monetized in a world where software cannot be monetized. Is that better?

I'd also add that if anything copyright has left us poorer because it promotes software and other content that doesn't permit free-riding. GNU/Linux and BSD probably would have occurred much sooner and become the dominant platform in the world if copyright had not afforded Microsoft the money to spend on every which way to compete besides simply building a better product.

I'll grant you that the phrasing of the 'myths' on the site is more absolute than is generally used by copyright proponents, but the arguments are extremely common with minor qualifiers, e.g. that free sharing causes an extraordinarily large (albeit not 100%) reduction in the amount that people spend on entertainment (see generally http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/how-copyright-industries-con-...), and (most importantly) the counterarguments still apply to the less absolute versions of the argument more commonly encountered in the wild.

>If there are alternative business models that really are as effective as copyright or more so in incentivising the creation and distribution of useful works, why aren't we seeing vast amounts of such work, funded by such alternative models, in the age of the Internet?

There is an extent to which we are. See: YouTube, github, etc.

But a big piece of the trouble is that if you take any given business model, chances are the artist can make at least trivially more money by exercising some of the control the copyright monopoly provides over the work. And if copyright exists, why not do that? The consequence is that most business models are seen to involve copyright, even if they would work very nearly as well without it.

More than that, a large part of the benefit of not having copyright accrues to content consumers rather than producers. The argument is that the benefit consumers gain exceeds the benefit producers lose, i.e. that no copyright is only slightly worse for producers and vastly better for consumers, and the benefit producers lose is insufficient to significantly impact the number and quality of works produced.

That content producers can't actually be better off without copyright is of course necessarily the case for the reason you point out. If a situation arises where not having the rights granted under the copyright act is better for the content producer, the content producer can just license the rights to whoever he likes and be in the identical position as there would be with no copyright. So eliminating copyright wouldn't create any benefit for the content producer that they can't already obtain (ignoring for a moment that content producers are often simultaneously content consumers, e.g. when they produce derivative works). But that explains the lack of examples of content producers adopting non-copyright business models: They're the ones under copyright who decide whether to authorize alternative business models, but they aren't the ones who derive the bulk of the benefit from them. The argument is instead that the non-derivative content producers fail to experience a harm sufficient to outweigh the harm that copyright causes to the producers of derivative works and to consumers.