As for money-making, try this as an angle: The stuff I’ve done that allows lots of reuse made me money with fewer intermediaries, and in particular let me avoid some of the pitfalls familiar to anyone who’s done technical writing as work for hire. (Documents that could have been part of printed manuals were instead sold online, through a storefront that automagically sends me the percentage I’m contracted for each month rather than the publisher having to issue a separate check after he gets his cut. Very, very nice in a field where print distribution stinks so bad.) Once it’s out there people can pass the text around as they wish but in practice they end up often willing to pay for the layout, illustration, and the rest of the bundle.

Part of contributing to the commons is making money in different ways, and having the option of sticking with existing practice, jumping on a potentially productive bandwagon, or experimenting. Reuse isn’t at all incompatible with making money, and sometimes making really good money.

I haven’t thought this through, but wouldn’t your scheme create an opportunity for someone to, for a buck or two, to make a farting noise recording for others in their name?

Bruce Baugh:

Didn’t mean to put words in your mouth. (Some of my remarks are a thinly-disguised cri de coeur that clearly belongs in some other forum.) These phenomena seem to my mind as analogous, at least at some level. Maybe they’re not. I’m just a little baffled why some people put so much time and effort into things that they won’t necessarily get paid for and, in many cases, won’t even get credit/recognition for. I don’t see this as a viable way of life for large numbers of people over the long haul.

You missed c) IBM. Even in the telecoms industry, which is usually the absolute antithesis of (b), a hell of a lot of stuff runs on Linux these days.

“People have to eat. How are they to obtain the means of existence save via the cash nexus provided by the market-place? ”

I think this gets to the point. So much of the tival labor of our time is abstract, yet the market has to restrict distribution to commodify it (with physical goods, natural scarcity constricts distribution, and property rights control this). The product is not scarce, but the labor to produce it still has opportunity and sometimes capital costs. Perhaps it’s time to recognize that Capitalism cannot address this and socialize intellectual production, as we already do to a degree in the academy. Here’s what I propose as applied to music (haven’t thought through newspapers yet):

1. The tax authorities take a trivial amount, say $10 a taxpayer, in to support music. In the US, this would generate about 2.5 billion a year, enough to supply an average of $25,000 to 100,000 artists, for example.

2. Musicians who want to qualify have to register and release all recordings they want considered in freely-copiable form.

3. Taxpayers get to go to a website and allocate their ten dollars. This preserves the market’s ability to conform to taste and reward popularity.

4. Taxpayers who don’t care and don’t allocate get their money put into a fund for “elitist” art: the sort of experimental or classical work that may not attract a huge audience but which society finds worth supporting. No one is compelled to support this stuff, as they could always direct their funds elsewhere.

5. Taxpayers who object could release a recording and allocate the money to themselves. They must actually make a farting noise record or whatever, and direct money to it. Hence, the system is voluntary, not compulsory, but those who opt out have to be public cheapskates.

So, no one is forced to support it, but most will. Artists can get rewarded directly according to their public support. The “cultural elite” can also fund projects that lack popular support, but no one is compelled to pay for this. And the whole program is, strictly speaking, voluntary.

Would the US do this? Not first, I imagine. Socializing anything is too taboo here (although we’re going to have to nationalize the banks if we don’t want decades of impoverishment, and that will challenge this taboo). But no one said the US had to be first. The first nation that does this, and restricts eligibility to its residents and legal citizens, will attracts musicians from all over the world. Why would anyone want to do that? We all know about those unruly musicians, right? Well, yes, but this can be the basis of a cultural ferment, and all the classic Richard Florida arguments come into play here. But if not the US who?

It would be the best choice for a large nation, an up-and-coming power that has musical traditions with global appeal. I see two major candidates: Brazil and India.

BKN @21: This strikes me as just very obviously incorrect. The productivity of the whole tech sector has been dramatically improved by open source; the big reason being not because of any capital-savings or quality-improvement (which may or may not exist) but rather because something gotten for “free” can be chosen by the developer without engaging management in a time-consuming approval process. Microsoft is probably the only Fortune-500 tech player that isn’t absolutely up to its ears in open source software, in terms of consumption and creation.

virgil @25: I think this is an important insight, but I’m not sure the consequences are as dire as you suggest. I’m increasingly finding that local news is being researched better by blogs and wickedlocal than paid papers, which always seem a day late and a dollar short. Conversely, how much do 99.5% of newspapers add on world news, and really how much independence do we get from having the NYT and the WP, which rarely seem to have much in the way of substantive disagreements? Perhaps there is some gap around state/regional news, which has higher collection costs than local, but less visibility and market leverage than national/global.

One of the things this thread hasn’t touched on but should is the growing opportunities for hobbyist creators to get some audience and some reward for their effort. This is the case for quite a few of my friends, who have day jobs doing whatever that enable them to maintain a middle-class lifestyle, and who write or compose or illustrate on the side, giving it a few hours a week, a weekend a month, or something of the sort. The opportunities for quality production of amateur work are amazing, and getting better all the time. Some creative effort needs full-time attention. But not all does. If anything, there are some kinds of creating that may really benefit from not being someone’s job.

In some ways Craig’s List seems analogous to new plant/animal species introduced into new environments that have no known predators and thus come to crowd out/exterminate the native flora/fauna—often with devastating environmental consequences—especially in the case of unrestricted animal predators
who often end up extinct themselves via starvation once they have killed off all the native species that were their food supply (or, in the case of the triumph of one species of plant-life making the resultant mono-culture highly susceptible to disease.) One may see the vivid actual processes worked out when this happens in isolated closed systems in the natural world such as billi-bongs and oasis-type environs.

In the case of Graig’s List, when combined with web-sites/blogs which give information away for free—yet depend on salary-based news organizations rooted in the financial, market-based world to produce it—this trend may see the demise of a large segment of the internet once the animal (the newspapers) upon which the essentially parasitic blogosphere feeds dies. Already one sees some blogs such as TPM, etc., hiring their own reporters—but this entails real costs that a viewing public may not wish to pay for and neither will advertisers as Pajamas Media has found out.

A very wise businessman when asked by me why his major competitor went out of business replied: “Because he didn’t charge enough for his services.” He went on to explain that while everyone is always trying to eliminate the middle-man, they are often far less successful in eliminating the middle-man’s costs—which are very real or middle-men would not exist. Most businesses today in the market economy are busily trying to externalize their internal costs (which is why one tangles with interminable automated phone trees on one’s own time rather than having a salaried phone operator of the firm one is calling do the work.) But their is a limit to this and in any event they can never get “lean and mean” enough to ward off predators whose costs are essentially zero (for statistical purposes) by comparison. But once the host body is dead, the parasitic competitors have no means of generating the lifeblood (in this case information) on their own that they previously obtained cost free—which means
that the functional equivalent of the newspaper—with all it’s attendant costs—will have to be replicated somehow if the same level of “services” is still desired by the general public, i.e., if the example here (the newspaper) did not already exist, it would have to be invented—and for all the same reasons it was invented in the first place.

I, for one, think the concept of “the end of the cash nexus” is of limited utility. People have to eat. How are they to obtain the means of existence save via the cash nexus provided by the market-place? Unless, of course, the genteel poverty so represented by the university existence from whence most academics come is seen as the nirvana toward which all should not only aspire but be forced to adopt—as opposed to mere crass commercialism cravings for material betterment. It all reminds me of the futuristic societies I read about in the Science Fiction novels of my youth where robots had eliminated all work for humans. Always glossed over in the plot lines was
how, in fact, humans were supposed to then sustain themselves and maintain the option of preferential individual lifestyles—save for the feudalistic existence (however cushy) inferred (by graphic plot depictions if not exactly formally/explicitly described) by the authors.

So if this is true the governments tax base should fall as a fraction of the economy. Perhaps even in an absolute sense, as people moved over into the non-taxed part of the economy.

What I find, and what friends who’ve gone much more wholeheartedly into writing things with an eye on immediate release into the commons find, is that one ends up doing a different mix of work, but less radically transformed than either foolish hypesters or foolish critics assert. Good – which is to say, worth the while of some sufficient number of customers – work made in traditional ways will continue to flourish, simply because consumer time has value too, and nobody can play their own editor all the time. It’ll just exist alongside alternatives, with expectations shifting around in various directions.

The most important thing someone trying to create work they’d like to sell can do about the commons is to stop worrying about freeloaders. You can’t stop them anyway. Just focus on whether there’s enough of a paying audience, and how to identify and reach it and who cares about the rest?

My own concern is just the awareness of how much this all does depend on people still hauling away the garbage, stocking the store shelves, delivering the mail, and so on.