the land duplicator

[dsrtao]

Suppose there was a machine which dupplicated land. For a small cost - let's say about as much as a washing machine for the duplicator, and a little electricity - you could make an exact copy of any land that you had temporary access to.

Trivially, you can copy the land you own. If you want more of it, no problem. It looks just the same and acts just the same.

You can go to the town library and copy the building and the grounds. Also town hall. Also the park. Also your neighbor's estate if she allows it, and the enirety of Yellowstone National Park.

Now suppose there is a lending library that has been buying the rights to access all sorts of real estate, and it turns out that that is sufficient for your machine to make copies.

Students routinely copy each others' parents' villas and estates, and of course every building on campus.

There are catalogs which will send you land to copy for a minimal fee, and underground landgrabs where everything is free.

What happens to the real estate market?

Every work of intellectual property is in this situation right now. There's no way to undo it. There is no effective preventative or lock. The laws say you can't copy everything, but the laws can't trump reality. Eventually they'll have to give way.

I don't know what happens next.

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Comments

[zonereyrie.livejournal.com]

It's even worse that the example - with physical goods there is a natural limitation of "You can't have everything, where would you put it?" And the costs of raw materials for the reproduction.

But with digital copies that cost is approaching zero, and is certainly already negligible for text and music, and getting there for video as storage unit costs plummet.

I don't know either.

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

How does location (, location, location) fit into this?

[dsrtao]

I think it roughly corresponds to availability, immediacy and utility, where entertainment is a form of utility.

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Location is a scarce resource that is intrinsic (cannot be modified or exchanged) to real property. (By which I mean real estate.) There are very few scarce resources with digital goods; I'm trying and failing to come up with one. Perhaps immediate access to novel goods, i.e., subscriptions.

If so, we're back to my Wandering Minstrel model (similar to SPP), which does seem to be the way the world is going: paying performers, because they create new material. Old material only serves financially as advertisement for the creator, with any income earned off of it being a bonus. This is essentially the model that record industries have used for years, resulting in act that tour continuously to earn money. No idea how this maps to real property.

[dsrtao]

There's also support. If the digital good is both useful and complex, then providing training, hand-holding, and bug fixing can be worth money. And putting in custom features can be worth money as well.

[dlevey.livejournal.com]

One question - while raw land isn't something someone produces (but rather is a resource that can be exchanged), intellectual property isn't a resource per se. Someone has to create it. Who will continue to create it if they don't receive recompense? Is all art now to be confined to something that people do in their spare time (when they're not earning a living) or only done by rich people? Is the professional artist/musician/author/etc a thing of the past?

[dsrtao]

I don't know what will happen.

I know that when reality and law conflict, reality wins.

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

See my comment above. Performers survive and earn based on unduplicatable qualities. Amateurs continue, as you point out, but essentually become beggars. We move back to historic (pre-mass-distribution) roles.

[dlevey.livejournal.com]

That may work for musicians, and actors. In the pre-distribution model, they were *employees* of a particular patron or group, producing work-for-hire. I have some discomfort with this model in the modern world, as it means that the creator gets paid once and the distributor "owns" the work, and can make money from it in perpetuity.

I don't see this working quite as well for people like authors, where there isn't really a performance aspect to it.

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Being an author who has observed use of this model, I respectfully disagree.

The "performance" is in the creation and release of new work. You don't perform in-person, but you can promise earliest access to a select few (who pay for the privilege), plus sell ancillary goods (mugs/t-shirts/public readings). The existing model demonstrating this is web cartoonists. Note also that there aren't a lot of rich web cartoonists, even the fantastically popular ones...this isn't as good a concentrator of wealth as other methods.

An alternate way (street-performer protocol, q.v.) is to ask for money up front to create promised works of art. More like writing on commission. To date this has worked only moderately well; see efforts by lwe and dduane (one done, one in progress, one stalled) and others.

...I also have a burgeoning essay on how this model favors extroverted writers, or ones who can pretend to be such. If you want to sit in a closet and write, you need to team up with a public face; this is one of the benefits of having an editor/publishing house overlooked by people who claim they add no value in the digital age.

[be-well-lowell.livejournal.com]

My speculation follows similar lines, but comes at it from a different direction. Professional musicians, by and large, don't make much of their livings from their recordings anyway, so it isn't much of a change of model. Professional writers, however, really do make their money from the creation of the fixed work.