Matt Fangman

As I discussed here, property rights are something we made up so that people would invest effort in making things: teapaw.org/Devon_Eriksen_/s… Now, by "we", I mean living organisms, not just human beings. If you doubt that other animals have a notion of property rights, go hit a beehive with a stick. But WE, meaning humans, made up intellectual property rights. Because as far as we know, only humans have sophisticated enough languages to be able to put real sustained effort into developing complex ideas. The difference between the two is that physical property requires significant effort to duplicate, while intellectual property does not. What this means is that "theft", which is what we are trying to prevent, means two different things for intellectual and real property. Theft of real property means taking someone's stuff, depriving them of it. And it's simple to understand and simple (not easy, but simple) to enforce. Whose home is that, whose vehicle is that, whose land is that? Theft of intellectual property doesn't mean taking someone's idea. Ideas are for taking, that's their whole purpose. The creators of ideas WANT you to take them. But they also need to be paid back for the effort they went to in creating the idea. Because otherwise they won't bother, and have no incentive to obey other rules about not shooting you in the head. So how intellectual property rights actually look depends a lot on how creators get paid. We don't need to design intellectual property rights in such a way that creators must be paid X for every single copy of our work that is made... but we do need to design them in such a way that creators are paid enough to inspire us to meet demand. This isn't, then, a question of absolute morality that must be debated. Instead, it is a question of system design. The best designed intellectual property system will therefore be one that offers the best combination of incentives to creators, and content to consumers. Let's take novels as our example, because that's what I know about. During the mid to late twentieth century, there was a golden age of science fiction, a ready supply of high-quality stuff, such that fans were never in short supply of things to read. The incentive structure was, in practice, that if you sucked at writing, you didn't get paid much and you washed out, if you were good and a hard worker, you earned a middle class lifestyle, and if you were brilliant, you got rich. This is ideal. We want quality, and we don't want to market glutted with shovelware. However, at the time, the question of intellectual property management was fairly simple. Books were physical objects. So long as you prevented people from selling bootleg copies of books on a broad scale, and thus competing with the copies the authors where getting paid for, everything was fine. There was some degree of copy sharing via libraries and used bookstores, but it didn't make enough of a dent to really hurt creators that much. However, as duplicating things like books becomes cheaper and cheaper, the investment of effort to create the intellectual part becomes a larger and larger fraction of the total. When I sell an ebook over Amazon, Amazon has to put in some effort to provide the delivery infrastructure, but it's much less compared to a 20th century print run. Even print-on-demand is cheaper now. This is great, because I get much more per sale than tradpub authors do. But it also makes our society's intellectual property strategy much more complicated. Right now, I am dependent for my sales upon people's sense of consequential morality. There is nothing to prevent someone from scanning each page of Theft of Fire, OCRing it, making an ebook, and putting it on a torrent site. And nothing to prevent people from going there to download it for free instead of paying me. Nothing but their belief that this would be wrong, and their knowledge that if enough of them do so, there will be no sequel. This gets even more muddy when it becomes possible to use that work in ways for which payment isn't convenient or clear, such as training AI. How much is that worth? The entire amount I expect to make from the work? The price of one copy? And how do I even set the price of one copy, if I don't know how many I will sell? Personally, I think the time is ripe for a transformation in monetization schemes to mirror our transformation in book technology. Our old laws and customs simply aren't adapted to the world we are living in. Personally, I would like to see some artists return to the Renaissance model of artwork... super wealthy patrons commission works of art. They get prestige, artists get paid, and the public gets art without being charged admittance. But this is not the custom right now, and for unknown artists to reach the ears of the super-wealthy.... meh, good luck. Patreon-like models crowdsource this, but the problem with distributed funding is the same as it always was with tradpub... publicity requires money and/or time. Ebook sales, as they are, give me a good share of sale prices, but with tradpub in ruins, I have to do the work of generating publicity myself, mostly here on Twitter, and that cuts into my writing time. Stephen King doesn't have to do anything but snort cocaine and write novels in a drug fueled haze. I, on the other hand, have to choose each day between working on Box of Trouble, or trying to hit that one banger post that will make more people aware that I exist. This choice may seem easy from the perspective of someone who already read Theft of Fire... clearly, they want the sequel, and that's all I they want me working on, or they will grumble and compare me to George Martin, which some people did two weeks after my debut. The technology for reaching through the screen and hitting them with a meat tenderizer does not yet exist. But for me, the choice is more complicated, knowing that working on publicity in a given day can make the difference between X sales and 10X sales. And that 10X sales has a ripple effect, raising overall awareness of the book. In other words... what we need right now is not so much a new set of laws, or a new moral understanding of intellectual property, but new monetization models for content creators. If someone cracks this code, coming up with a solution that allows artists to get rich for producing bangers, without having to divide their focus to marketing, while freeing consumers from DRM device jail.... Then there will be a new Renaissance, an explosion of worthwhile fiction, art, and music. Anyone got any ideas?