Protection of Ideas

[Bill Stewart]

At 12:01 PM 07/04/2002 -0700, Tim May wrote:
>On Monday, July 1, 2002, at 01:10  PM, Anonymous wrote:
>>If we don't get DRM, that's probably what we will end up with: government
>>subsidies of the arts.
>
>About 20 years ago the American program "60 Minutes" did a nice piece on 
>how the Dutch government, using reasoning identical to yours,  was paying 
>artists a stipend for their artistic output. Warehouses and warehouses 
>were being filled with the crud generated by these subsidized artists.

We also have that in the US, these daya particularly with artists whose 
preferred
medium is television, and in the past lots of WPA stuff, often on gov't 
buildings.
The National Endowment for the Arts subsidizes a range of works from
deep, emotionally complex performance art by Karen Finlay to Jesse Helms's 
favorite
black-velvet paintings of Elvis :-)

>>Most musicians and other artists won't be able to
>>make enough money to live on even if their works are relatively popular.

That's the case today - see Courtney Love's rants.
90% of the artists in the record business don't make money today,
or at least not for more than a couple years of obscurity with
an occasional 15 minutes of fame.  This is somewhat related to the
problem that 90% of everything is crap, but unfortunately there's
not always a close correlation between the two 90%s. :-)


>So? Not my problem.
>After all, most would-be writers and actors can't make enough money
>on their ideas and artistic expression to live on without also
>working as waiters and waitresses and driving trucks.

A century ago, music was largely an individual, family, or
social activity, with most paid performers receiving payments for
live performances in front of audiences, though sound recordings and
player pianos were starting to emerge and commercial sheet music
had been around since about the 1840s.  The transformation of their work
from performing live into preparing packaged goods for mass distribution
is a relatively recent thing, and much of it dates from about the 50s
and the adoption of the transistor radio.  Some of it's also the
emergence of CDs as a durable product (since playing vinyl
records is a fundamentally destructive process.)

>>The government will have to tax consumers and distribute the proceeds
>>to artists (and the RIAA, etc) in order to protect the content industry.

Feh.  They've already taxed us heavily for decades, not in money but in kind,
by nationalizing the airwaves and parceling them out to the politically 
connected.


>And to fill warehouses with CDs no one wants, with paintings no one wants,
>with stages where actors perform plays for each other because the public
>won't voluntarily pay, and with software programs which the market didn't 
>want.

There used to be a lot of this - we called it community theater,
and it's still thriving in the socialist community I grew up near.
In the rest of the country, too many people stopped doing that
when they got television.


>...[dongles]....
>However, it is NOT a function of a legitimate minimal government
>to *require* that I buy a computer with certain features.

I agree, and I'd also say that using anti-trust arm-twisting to
forbid Microsoft from bullying manufacturers into implement it
is *also* not a legitimate function of a minimal government.