It's not much different from what's already happening on sites like Kickstarter and Sellaband.

It's true that there's no assurance of what the end product is going to be, but that's true of every service, and it generally doesn't stop people from paying for services. Before you get a haircut, or get your house painted, or get your heart operated on, you don't know how it's going to turn out. Various industries deal with that uncertainty in different ways that have been hashed out over the centuries, and I see no reason why artists and authors couldn't do the same.

Well, right: if someone else puts up the money. You're gambling that they will.

If you don't really care whether or not a book is written, then you have no reason to pay for it. Maybe others will fund it, because they care more than you do, and you'll get to read it for free. Or maybe they won't, and you won't get to read it, but you don't really care anyway so that's fine.

If you do care, then you have a reason to contribute, because you want to avoid the scenario where it doesn't get funded and you don't get to read it.

In other words, this model decreases the production of works that people don't really care about, and it guarantees a fair income for authors who produce works that people do care about. Those both seem like good things.

No, my solution is to abandon the idea of selling copies at monopoly prices. Not just for the author, but for everybody.

The "patron" doesn't have to deal with the "problem" of unauthorized reproduction, because he isn't treating the author's work as an investment that must be recouped.

Instead, he's treating it as a service that benefits him directly, by giving him a new story to read. In fact, the "patron" is likely to be a group of hundreds or thousands of people who all benefit directly from the author's work -- essentially the same group of people who buy copies today.

Unauthorized distribution isn't a problem for them, because they're not paying for exclusivity, they're paying for the benefit they receive themselves. Just like how it isn't a problem if your neighbor's property value goes up after you improve your own property -- you're paying for the benefit that you personally receive from those improvements.

"Work" isn't a thing that anyone can own. You can't own work any more than you can own friendship or color or numbers: owning such things is a meaningless concept.

What you can own is stuff. You can own a typewriter, or a pen, or a book. But you can't own the weight of the typewriter, or the color of the pen, or the arrangement of words in the book. Those are ideas, not stuff.

Putting labor into something doesn't necessarily mean you own everything that results from it. When you grow a tomato, you own it because you already owned the soil, seeds, and water that became that tomato. But if you cut a piece of string to a certain length, that doesn't mean you now "own" that length; and if you arrange words in a certain order and call it a story, that doesn't mean you now "own" that sequence of words. You own the string and the stack of papers, but you don't own every intangible attribute of those things.

When you claim ownership of an idea, what that really means is you're claiming partial ownership of everyone else's stuff: "I own this story, so I get to decide whether you can use your printer to print the same words". It's no more reasonable than saying "I own this string, so I get to decide whether you can use your scissors to cut the same length".

You seem to have grossly misunderstood what I'm saying. Of course people can own things. They just can't own ideas.

Agreed. I don't know why you're pointing that out, though, since it has absolutely no relation to my comment.

I'm talking about hiring someone to perform a service, and paying him a mutually agreeable price for it in a voluntary free-market transaction. It's a tried and true recipe for getting things done. Nothing revolutionary about it, comrade.

No, that's not true.

It precludes one specific revenue model: the one where you do a bunch of writing up front, for free, and then hope to make money later by selling copies for much more than it costs you to make each copy, which you may be able to do thanks to your government-enforced monopoly. That model doesn't work if someone else is out there undercutting your monopoly prices.

But that model is basically just gambling, anyway. Most participants won't make enough to justify their expenses, some will break even or turn a modest profit, and a lucky few will strike it rich -- but you won't know which group you fall into until long after the work is done. You just have to put in a lot of unpaid work and cross your fingers. Is that really the model we ought to encourage artists and authors to use?

There's a more sensible model that isn't threatened by free distribution, and it happens to be the same model that people in nearly every other industry have relied on for centuries: it's the one where you just get paid for working. You find a customer, or a group of customers, who benefits from the work you do (whether it's fixing cars, painting houses, or writing books), and then you exchange your labor for their money. They pay you to write a book, you write it and provide a single copy, and then the transaction is over; distribution of any further copies is their problem, not yours. If you want to continue to be a professional writer, you find some more customers and offer to write a second book.

You get a guaranteed source of revenue: you know exactly how much they're willing to pay, and if you don't think that amount is worth the time you'd have to spend writing, you can turn them down and move on to something more profitable. You don't have that tiny chance of striking it rich, but you don't have the much bigger chance of going broke, either. You just get reliable, fair compensation for your time. And if you really want to gamble, you can take that money to the casino.

If copyright were abolished, all code would effectively be BSD-licensed (albeit without the requirement to include copyright/licensing notices which would no longer be relevant). Don't fall for the idea that open source needs copyright to survive: the main effect of open source licenses is to give back the freedoms that copyright law took away in the first place.

No one has ever suggested that, in any of these copyright threads. That idea is nothing but a straw man created by copyright apologists who can't stand to participate in a real discussion.

If you write a book, you don't have to lift a finger to help anyone get a copy after that. We're just asking that you keep your nose out of their business: don't try to prevent them from exercising their own speech/property rights by, for example, reading the book to their friends.

Characters and settings are ideas, but just look at the legal trouble surrounding the unofficial Harry Potter encyclopedia.

It's not a great idea to use the standard rich text control for syntax highlighting anyway... you should probably be using a highlighting editor control like Scintilla. The rich text control has always sucked, IME.

No, it really isn't.

At best, Apple products are "innovative" in the way that Halo was "innovative": by combining second-best implementations of many features that have already been implemented separately (and usually better) in other devices. But that's not real innovation; that's a Greatest Hits album.

Do you have any more to add to that statement? For example, is there any reason to think an Android tablet wouldn't offer the same advantages over the iPad that Android phones already offer over the iPhone? Have you actually encountered problems using video editors on Windows? Or are you just blustering?

If you think the only way to get your technology to work NOW! is to buy from Apple, then yes, you are an Apple fanboy.

Seconded. Windows Forms is easy to learn, powerful enough to use for most GUI work, and if you stick to the classes that work in Mono, it's cross-platform with little if any changes required.

I think you mean "drop an iPad and it's shattered". All that glass is a liability.

That's unfortunate, but might I suggest taking another look at the laptop market? It's really not hard to find one that'll run twice as long. I bought mine off the shelf at Best Buy (an HP Pavilion), and it lasts for 6+ hours of actual use.

You can run watered-down mobile versions of productivity apps that support a subset of features of their relevant document types. That's a far cry from actually being able to run Office 2010 (or even OpenOffice) and fully view/edit every part of the documents you're collaborating on.

Neither can my coffee maker, but so what? Who's talking about netbooks?

Keep telling yourself that.

Let's stop this stupid meme of "the iPad is a business tool". It's bullshit. Just because it's only 90% useless in an office doesn't mean it belongs there.

My 15" laptop gets over 6 hours on a charge, doesn't burn my crotch, and cost about as much as a 64GB iPad.

Do I always have to carry the keyboard with me? Sure. But like I said, it's still no less portable than an iPad: they both need a bag. IMO, the important divisions of portability are "attaches to my body" vs. "fits in my pocket" vs. "fits in a bag" vs. "fits in a suitcase" vs. "too big to travel with".

Is 6 hours less than 10? Sure. But seriously, how often are you away from a power outlet for more than 6 but less than 10 hours?

Or run productivity/development apps, or view Flash sites, or carry files from one place to another, or play/burn CDs and DVDs...