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Comment by yesimahuman | Hacker News Reader

Consuming locked down content is a choice, and we live in an age of an immense amount of choices. Should content producers have to do everything we say just because we choose to consume their content? Lady Gaga is not a public servant. You are not entitled to copy her work, or even put her songs on your own youtube videos.

Lady Gaga never had to exist in the first place. The fact that she does enriches some of our lives, but we must understand that content is a production of someone else's and it should be treated as such (just as we wish our users to respect the hard work we put into our web apps).

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> Mrs Gaga is not a public servant

We are all public servants. To cooperate with each other we are, to that extent, serving each other. And we want to cooperate because when we do we gain.

We can cooperate enormously by sharing information/data. There is nothing in that that means we cannot pay people to produce it. Just that what has been produced is then best shared.

And the marvelous thing about information is that sharing it is free. It costs nothing to share it because copyability of info is infinite and abundant. We can all cooperate, and gain from it, yet no-one needs to give up anything at all.

Some people say we need to restrict information copying in order to make a market to pay for production. But that is nothing more than a pragmatic suggestion. It only makes sense to do that if we cannot devise some better arrangement that would fully realise the benefits of sharing data.

(Or in short, please wake up from all that Randroid casuistry and start seeing reality.)

I disagree with your reality.

The reality I prescribe to is that we all have the freedom to create content and share it under the terms we dictate. We do not have the freedom to dictate terms to someone else.

Where it does not violate essential freedoms (such as me letting someone use my Kindle, or listen to my iPod), having an ability to trust the terms you've set helps business prosper.

Like I said before, the public "culture" feature of this content seems to give us additional rights and ownership over it. Just because we really, really like Tron or Inception does not mean we have the rights to copy it and distribute it through bittorrent.

Great, so the incentive to create content is not intrinsically coupled to the need to control sharing of that content. That's a great point that we often miss, I think.

However, how do you propose content creators become incented to create content?

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