Maybe you should tell us what you disagree with him about instead. It's just as much work and would be far more interesting than watching Luis fail to back up his arguments yet again.
I am sorely tempted but I am pretty uncertain the debate will go anywhere sane. Not just because of our man Luis Dias, but because it's a very charged topic on the internet right now. Even on normally decent sites like RockPaperShotgun, you get people claiming that creators (game developers, authors, whatever) lose any right to be compensated for their products the moment they release them, which is just
In addition to being a mediocre writer and a bad blogger, Doctorow's position about distributing work for free is constructed from the vantage point of someone who's
already become rich and successful - he advocates giving stuff away for free because he can afford it. That's most of what I take issue with. He doesn't have uniformly bad ideas, but like many zealots (Kurzweil, for instance) he evangelizes them without moderation, practicality, or restraint.
I guarantee you that someone in this thread is going to take this as an argument in favor of DRM, stringent copyright, whatever the **** - people with a low tolerance for ambiguity are the bane of debates like this. I'm not saying there's no merit to the 'open information' movement, and I certainly support the open web, but some of the far-open positions are as ridiculous as the far-closed positions. There clearly needs to be a compromise that allows the market to incentivize creators to create. (If you want to take a crack at your own thinking on the topic - I was much too strongly in favor of the open movement for a long time - there are good books I've read recently, written by software pioneers, describing what's gone wrong with the whole ideology. I can try to hunt the titles down.)
As an example, the best writing on television in recent years has been enabled by closed, subscription-based distribution rather than the open, ad-supported network model. Similarly, there is no way to create value in a written work without some form of artificial scarcity (or a patronage model - I don't know myself if this is something that can work).
Information doesn't want to be free. Information doesn't want anything. Creators, on the other hand, need to get paid; otherwise they can't make a living and they have to work ****ty jobs instead of creating.
And besides Battuta, those who have the wealth of wisdom, do they not benefit the most by disseminating it to any and all who would hear? Your statement seems rather vacuous and vague, I'm not sure much can be gained from it.
I understand you don't spend much time in GenDisc so I can see why the context might be difficult to grasp, especially for someone who hasn't followed recent threads. But this isn't the Thunderdome; we only get in knife fights when it's fun. Please don't waste time trying to stir up ****, tia; the pros will handle it.
