I've read some TechDirt articles on economics of abundance, and I like them. Since I have no formal economics training, I read things like this from a relatively dim perspective. That said, statements like the following make sense to me.
Some of the complaints about the last piece highlighted one aspect that perhaps I had not made clear: unauthorized downloads, "piracy" or "stealing content" (if you want to use those phrases) have almost nothing to do with this discussion. People criticizing the posts on this topic keep going back to the idea that this is all some big defense of such practices when nothing is further from the truth. This series is very much written from the perspective of the producer of content, not the consumer. That is, we're trying to make clear the basic economics so that the producer of the content can use that to his or her advantage. So, the lack of scarcity we're talking about is based on the fundamental nature of the content: that it has zero marginal cost to make a new copy once the original is made. That's a simple fact that has nothing to do with whether or not people are making unauthorized copies. That nature of the content is fundamental. So everything that we're saying here applies just as much to content if there were no "piracy" at all. If there were an industry where there was a lack of scarcity, but no piracy, the information here would apply just the same.
Perhaps part of where this gets confusing is that we have the current situation to fall back on: where content creators have had a good run selling their content. People have trouble then understanding why we would suggest that they should learn how to take the same content they've been selling for money and give it away free. The issue here is that the comparison is wrong. It's not about a choice between being able to sell the content for money or giving it away for free, but a recognition of where the market is going. Historically, the content has been made scarce by connecting it to a specific media (music on CDs, video on tape/DVD, etc.). What the internet is doing is breaking down the barrier of that scarcity, and that's changing the market, pushing out the supply to infinite levels and putting clear pricing pressure on the content. People used to make a living selling buggy whips too, but the market changed, and they couldn't any more.
In other words, it's wrong to look at this as a "choice" between the old way and the new way, but to look at the market trends and recognize that the old way (pretending the content is scarce) won't be viable any more -- and when that happens, those who try to sell their abundant good based on scarcity will find that there is no market and no matter what "right" they have to try to make money, the market won't care.
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