Comment Re:How about this one (Score 1) 225
There is only one Lady Gaga, and she can't be everywhere at once, and she is therefore by definition scarce.
Which is why people pay a lot of money to see her in concert.
Recording and mass marketing has made her un-scarce. She chose this route. She did so in order to maximize her profit, with the expectation that she might make some money. Not an unreasonable expectation.
No, it made her music un-scarce. There is still only one Lady Gaga. Even if her income from published music were 0, she'd still make more money than if she hadn't recorded anything. The records are brand recognition.
When there were records (vinyl), artists and labels could press a short run, label them a collector's edition if they wanted, and controlled the number in production. Same for books. That too was a artificial scarcity of sorts. So was the 1937 Bugatti Type 57S Atalante Coupe, 17 made. They could have made any number.
How does the availability of MP3s or eBooks or kit cars prevent any of this? These things are not data, they are things and with such have a physical, and thus limited i.e. scarce availability.
Others could have copied the car, or the books or the records. But we, as a society, gave that right to the car company, the author, or the artist. Never mind WHY we did that. Those arguments are not germane, we did it, enshrined it in law, and it is what it is.
I'll agree to this as we're debating about scarcity. However, you are severely confusing PHYSICAL goods with data.
Digital music / ebooks / videos removed all capability for the artist to control the number of copies, and allows anyone, at will, to create any number of copies.
You can't, with any intellectual honesty, simply hand wave that away and claim a business model is morally wrong simply because it is suddenly possible to circumvent it in your parents' basement with an $800 computer.
Why not? What gives you the right to wave your hand and say it's morally right for society to treat data as it were a physical object? Morality is an ambiguous thing. You can't claim intellectual dishonesty over morality. Was prohibition moral? The people who passed it thought so, but pretty much everyone else thought no. Is the drug war moral? The people who support it do, I think it's the most disgustingly immoral act on going in the US.
Ford could have copied Bugatti. But the barriers to entry were high enough (an automotive assembly plant) to prevent that. Someone could have pressed a copy of the Beach Boys albums, or any best selling book. Again you had to have the expensive tools and you would risk getting caught with a warehouse full of counterfeit goods.
But the goods are only counterfeit because we as a society have said we allow for an artificial scarcity.
The computer removes all of that, and gives any 12 year old the ability to make perfect copies at zero cost.
Of a 1937 Bugatti Type 57S Atalante Coupe?! What program do they have that I don't?!
Does that fact somehow trump the law, wash away the artist's rights, and make copying anything legal?
Well no one ever said laws were moral.
Will 3D printing do the same for physical objects?
I hope so.
The concept of artificial scarcity is, itself, artificial: man made.
Artificial scarcity is artificial? I thought that's what the phrase meant. Scarce: Lady Gaga. Not Scarce: A grain of sand. Artificially scarce: A grain of sand when walls with armed guards surround every beach.
