Suppose you build a beautiful statue in a secluded forest, with the intent of charging money for taking people through the trees to see it. Suppose further that as you have completed the statue, all the surrounding trees are felled by a freak storm, and anyone can now see
your statue without paying you, by standing on public land. A large crowd now surround your statue day and night, watching it.
If your response is to call the crowd “parasitic, adolescent, [and] greedy”, then I suggest you are starting off your relationship with your audience on the wrong foot. You should be doing something like selling them hot dogs. If that is not sufficient revenue, try something else, like taking up a collection for your next project. But suppose that none of the many possible methods for raising capital work; then, maybe the time of large statues is over, and you’ll have to do something else with your efforts; something for which there is an audience willing to pay.
What you cannot do is declare that anyone looking at your statue is a thief, and lobby to abolish the public right to look at things, merely because it upsets your old, now-obsolete, dependent-on-no-longer-existing-conditions, business model.
The very idea of intellectual “property” is extremely suspect in these days of zero-cost copying. “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.”
If your response is to call the crowd “parasitic, adolescent, [and] greedy”, then I suggest you are starting off your relationship with your audience on the wrong foot. You should be doing something like selling them hot dogs. If that is not sufficient revenue, try something else, like taking up a collection for your next project. But suppose that none of the many possible methods for raising capital work; then, maybe the time of large statues is over, and you’ll have to do something else with your efforts; something for which there is an audience willing to pay.
What you cannot do is declare that anyone looking at your statue is a thief, and lobby to abolish the public right to look at things, merely because it upsets your old, now-obsolete, dependent-on-no-longer-existing-conditions, business model.
The very idea of intellectual “property” is extremely suspect in these days of zero-cost copying. “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.”