On Feb 26, 11:57 am, Dana Paxson <[email protected]> wrote: > What a wild thread this is! But it hits at a huge problem any artist or > creator has to face: How do I get an appropriate reward for my creative > efforts?
Yep. But I'm going to throw in another huge topic. The future. Ever since the 19th century spawned a whole literature of future utopias people have argued, sometimes convincingly, sometimes not, for running the world in a fundamentally different way than the present. (They got this, just as writers always have, from the morning headlines, specifically discussions of Communism and Socialism replacing Capitalism, but I'm going to ignore that.) The one thing that Utopians and their successors always left out was the messy transition. How did a society, with society's massive inertia and legacy problems, change over from the present day to the future that presumed universal change down to its very roots? You see this in current arguments from those who want to get rid of our suburban sprawl and replace it with tight-knit cities dependent on mass transit. How do you get there from here? How do you compensate the 60% of America whose current choices would be devalued by removing cars from the equation? The world in which the argument technology exists and everybody has to let it roll over them is like those. In a future world content will be produced in a different payment model than today. It can't be expected that those who developed their business plans for the current business model will abruptly drop the any more than Microsoft has dropped all its DOS from the OS I'm using, no matter how much theoretical sense such a change might make. Nor are other industries' transitions proof that technology triumphs over all. Imusic is a better business model than Napster. Hulu makes more money than YouTube. People will pay for content, if the price is right and the delivery mechanism is right. Taking and putting it out for free has changed industries but hasn't broken them, because content has value. Content owners will fight for that value and find acceptable ways to extract payments. It's not that fight that is self-defeating, it's the taking for free fight that is. People will strike back when their possessions are stolen. In the long run, even on the Internet, the thieves have been the ones to lose. The future of books will be different. The transition will be messy. The result will be a compromise in ways that probably no one is predicting. What I guarantee it won't be is what would happen if you wiped the slate clean (what a hoary obsolete cliché that is - and yet we still understand it!) and created the new system from scratch. Steve --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "R-SPEC: The Rochester Speculative Literature Association" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/r-spec?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
