@wilw has posted to Slashdot 4 times since late 2007. http://slashdot.org/~CleverNickName/comments Didn't post in any of the new Star Trek movie threads. Probably no longer a regular. Certainly posts more regularly to places like Fark.com than here.

Endlessly extending copyright causes a net decrease in the amount of books/music/etc. available, here's why: Except that in 2009 there are more new book titles published in a single day than there were in a whole month in 1969. 800 new titles EVERY DAY in the USA (citation: http://amarketingexpert.com/ameblog/publishing-news/800-books-published-each-day-in-the-us/) There are more new songs released every week in 2009 than there were in six months in 1969. I dunno how you get your decrease figure when the number of titles published each day is already insanely high. Whatever one wants to say about it, the current copyright rules don't seem to actually stop people creating new works and it could be successfully argued, if you look at the figure, that the current system seems to have provided us with more works of culture on a daily basis than most people could consume in a decade. Even if 99% of it is crap, that's still 8 books published each day that aren't crap. How long does it take you to read 8 books? Longer than a day I suspect.

Go and read Thomas Kuhn's "Structure of Scientific Revolutions". It is 40 years old, but is a good basic introduction to how revolutions in scientific thought occur. Examining real scientific revolutions through historical documents indicate that they don't work according to the simple model that you propose.

Neal Stephenson writes with a pen. Why would anyone want to buy his computer? http://www.inkygirl.com/neal-stephenson-writing-and-editing-with-a-fountain-pen/

Textbooks don't sell anything like what a best selling hard cover book sells like. Most textbooks will be lucky to sell a couple of thousand copies. Few college level textbook authors will see anything beyond a couple of thousand dollars in an advance. That's a couple of thousand dollars for upwards of two years work putting together the textbook. Unlike hardback fiction, textbooks need to be fact checked. Do you really think that the editorial costs of a JK Rowling book are anything approaching the costs for running the appropriate eyes over a college level textbook? Do you think these people work for free?

I was limiting my generalization to Art rather than "information". I think that information, because of its time dependent utility, can be professionalized. Much information is "use it or lose it" - so a provider can extract value from it for a short duration. The longer that information is published, the more likely it is to be replicated in a way that precludes it being monetized. Dating sites are a bit different from Art. Although free sites exist, the main benefit of the dating sites is that the paywall acts as a bozo filter. Again this sort of information can be professionalized - but I don't think it counts as Art. Art is a bit different in that a digital copy of it "retains" its "value" for substantially longer. By value I'm talking about something that comes out of the answer to the question "why would you regularly watch movies made 5 years ago or read books written 5 years ago but not read newspapers written 5 years ago" rather than monetary value. Salon can monetize what it has because by the time people replicate it digitally the content's value has degraded. People have to go to Salon to get the value. Art that can be digitally replicated retains some sort of value, which means you can wait for it to become ripped or whatever and still get something out of it.

I haven't argued that the old business models are dead. They are. The Internet is FANTASTIC at destroying old business models. But that doesn't mean that there is a replacement business model that works to produce anything approximating a similar result. It just isn't my limited imagination - alternative business models have been hypothesized for years - but the problem is that *none of them work all that well either*. People far smarter than you and I have been trying to nut this out and still haven't got it. The old business models *don't work*. The hypothesized alternatives *don't work either*. Nothing can be done about this - that the old models are as dead as communism is not in doubt. The problem is that we keep grasping at straws believing that somehow some new genius model will come along where we still get to watch great new movies, read great books and hear great music for free. It may come along. It may be out there - but no one has found it yet. Sometimes the solutions to hard mathematical problems are found after a long time looking and sometimes there isn't a solution at all. In the next 20 years we will see the production of anything that is digitally reproducible and which can't be done on a voluntary basis dry up. Professional art will still exist, but only for those forms of art which are impossible to digitally replicate. That's great for painters and sculptors, not so great for writers, movie/tv creators and music producers. As for fame and capitalization - I think you should go and meet some real famous people and talk to them. Not about the fame itself, but about what you can do with it. With few exceptions the answer is *not a whole lot* (and again, don't think these people haven't tried).

Live with your head in the sand. You can't live off public speaking. If you'd ever done it you'd know that even with the big conferences the conference pays your transport, pays for your accommodation and may offer a small per-diem. You can't live off that, unless you are public speaking *every day*. I've been flown to the other side of the world to speak - but other than having my expenses covered, very very few people *make* any money off it. The economics of conferences are such that in general the speakers *do* *not* *get* *paid*. A very few speakers do get paid - but the market for paid speaking gigs is minuscule and already saturated. That's why most of us already do it for free - because at least that way we get a free trip to another city and get to stay in a nice hotel. But you can't work for 10 months so that you can spend two months living in a nice hotel at the expense of a conference. Free advertising for the artist? Advertising for what? They can't sell their art!!!! Advertising is only good if you've got a product to sell. What product do you have to sell if it can be digitally replicated for free? Live concerts? You know that concerts are loss leaders to sell albums right? Artists tour when when have a new album to sell - that's why when you go to a concert they play stuff from their new album - because they need to sell that. If concerts were the money spinner, they'd just play the "classics" that "everyone loves". The albums don't sell the concerts - the concerts sell the albums. The concerts still make a loss when you're charged an arm and a leg to attend. Any art in future will be voluntary. There ISN'T a business model for it. All the stuff you faff on about doesn't feed the kids or pay the rent. People who are currently producing art professionally are already moving towards something where there is a real business model rather than some hypothetical one.

Customers are people that pay for things. People that do not pay for things are not customers. There is no business model for art that can be digitally reproduced. In the future, all art that can be digitally reproduced will be done by volunteers as there is no way to professionalize art that can be digitally reproduced.

In 10 years any art that can be digitally reproduced will be created on a voluntary basis because there is no model to make money off art in a digital economy.

How about this for a fundamental law: If you aren't paying for the product you are not a customer.

Except that in the book Arsenals of Folly, Richard Rhodes falsifies this myth by showing that Soviet expenditure on arms peaked well before Reagan came to power and was in decline throughout the Reagan presidency. Reagan gets credit for bringing down a system during his presidency that had already failed and was in significant decline during his governership of California. The USA wouldn't have had to have spent a cent more on its military during the 80's and it still would have achieved the same result.

As long as Starbuck isn't suddenly invisible, it could work.

The Internet is great at killing previous business models, including previous Internet business models. The moment it became possible to block ads without consequence, the days of getting revenue by getting people to watch ads were numbered. Will the next shift come quickly, as ad blockers reach some sort of tipping point like browser tabbing did, or will it happen more slowly - with the sites that go straight to a pay model either failing spectactularly or scraping by while the free online alternatives scrabble around looking for another way to pay their bills. Because the pay sites can't work while the free sites survive, and the free sites can't survive if everyone is blocking the advertisements that they serve up. We've been sort of lucky so far in that geeks have been able to do away with the inconvenience of advertisements by using tools like adblock while getting other people to "pay" for what we read by having them view the ads that we don't want to. I can't really see everyone choosing not to deploy ad blockers and people will just avoid sites that block them if they block ads.