However, before you do that, there’s a lot of backstory that you should probably wade through. I’m not trying to give you homework or anything – all I’m suggesting is that you’ll understand this post a little better if you read this, this, and this first. If you don’t want to, that’s okay. But don’t say I didn’t warm you.

And now, without further ado, I need to reply to Levi Montgomery:

Okay, let’s narrow this back down to novels and digital fiction again, since that’s where this whole debate started before we escalated it away from the point.
I don’t know that I’ve done the best job I can to describe how digital text pricing should be levied, so I’m going to take another crack at it.

To start, let’s assemble a ballpark cost involved with being a writer. We can take as a given that to survive as a professional writer, one must have an income from that writing. This number varies depending on where you live and what other help you have, but let’s take 40,000 dollars a year as a target number. That seems like a pretty fair income for one person who gets to do what they love for a living. I don’t mean to suggest that this is what all writers should make, and I don’t want to get too caught up debating that number, but it gives us a ballpark figure to start working with the math.

Now, let’s talk workload and resources. Take a writer that writes 2,000 words a day, which is what Stephen King does (according to his writing memoir).Levi, I’ve seen your twitter reports about your daily writing – sometimes you write more, sometimes less, but I feel like 2,000 words a day is a reachable goal if writing is a full-time job. At 2,000 words a day, I’ll finish the first draft of a 100,000 word novel in 50 days. Now, that’s pretty fast, and it doesn’t allow for any rewrites, cover design, digital posting, breaks, or anything like that, so let’s double that figure and say that an industrious writer working every day can finish a novel and get it out there every 100 days. Since there are 365 days in the year, that puts a good writer’s output at about three novels a year, with some time in there for vacations and extra editing, if needed.

If I know that I can publish to the internet, in digital form, three novels a year if I’m working full time at being a writer, that gives me some data to start thinking about pricing. I know that in order to write full time I need to make 40,000 dollars a year. I have 3 novels with which to make that money. Since we’re talking about digital releases, the only costs involved for me are time. Writing, layout, design, editing, and distribution are all time costs, not resource costs.

In order to make my living, I have to sell:

at least 4 units for 10,000 USD or
at least 40 units for 1,000 USD or
at least 400 units for 100 USD or
at least 4,000 units for 10 USD or
at least 40,000 units for 1 USD

Keep in mind, this is total copies, so if I have repeat readers who might buy all 3 releases in a year, or any back releases, hitting those figures gets easier.

Now, just to give us some data, let’s pretend that the combined downloads of my current work through all online sources (that I can track) in the last year were actually sales. 2000 on scribed, 2000 via bit torrent, 100 from my site, 1200 on feedbooks. Let’s pretend that it was 5300 sales that I made in the last year.

Dividing that out, I would have needed to price my books at about 7.5 USD per unit to have made my target income for last year and support myself as a writer. Of course, my downloads weren’t actually sales. I’m using those numbers as what I have to start doing some math, not to say that I could really push that many units a year. My stuff isn’t good enough for that, and the resources I need (storefront and so on) aren’t available yet. Not to mention all the hassle of getting a bigger audience, piracy losses, and all that stuff. Those issues relate, and I know people will be upset if I just dismiss them without addressing them, but I’m going to do that, at least for now. We’re just talking here, after all. I’m trying not to get sidetracked.

So, anyway, my numbers are 7.5 USD for 5300 units so I can make my 40,000 USD and continue to write. I can afford to price them at whatever I can afford to make my living, since there is no physical production cost floor. As long as I can hit my 40,000 dollars a year, I can price them at whatever I want.

Now, say that next year is even better than this one – say that I’ve got some great content coming out and I’ve been building my name – I expect 10,000 downloads in the next year. If that’s the case, in order to maintain my target income, I only need to price my books at 4 USD per copy. Now I can offer the same thing for cheaper while still maintaining my lifestyle. Everyone wins. (It seems like there is a “devaluing” fiction conversation a lot of people are having lately that would fit in here, if I was going to try to fit it in.)

If for some reason I had a banner month, a crazy month where I got all 10,000 sales in one month at the beginning of the year, then I can now afford to price my stuff for free for the rest of the year.

I understand some planning is needed for something like this – projections, that sort of thing, but it’s worthwhile for me to do it if I feel like I can get more work to more people. As long as I can feel somewhat comfortable with the numbers, it would be great to be able to plan a little, too.

I’m sure that if I was a Google-level engineer I could figure out some pricing system and website module that dynamically priced content on my website based on how many sales I’d made and how many I needed to make to hit my goals of remaining a professional writer. Some awesome and wonky math that priced different novels at different prices to maintain their sales rank, all while lowering or raising prices as I needed to maintain my income, yet still offering my work as close to free as possible. Even not being a Google-level engineer, I’ve taken a crack at it to see if I could figure it out.

But the real point of the thing is that I’m not trying to steal work from people. I don’t advocate that. I just advocate only taking what you need. I have a copy of your novella on my hard drive right now, Levi, a copy you gave me for free so I could review it. I wouldn’t dream of releasing that work without your consent, no matter what I think you should do with it. It’s not my place to decide what you should do with your work. I can judge you or not judge you, but my judgment is not allowed to turn into action you don’t condone.

I don’t see pirates as Robin Hoods on some moral high-ground quest. The group is too diverse to lump all together. You’ve got your competitors who do it for the name, the people who just want stuff for free, your revolution folks, and people who just can’t afford content otherwise. They don’t all go together, even through their actions are all the same. And they aren’t Robin Hood.

But I also don’t see corporations pricing their content to only take what they need, either. So, I’ll happily condemn them both. I believe in working things out from the bottom and trying to come up with numbers to support it. If corporations need to price their books at 10 bucks a pop to stay in business and pay their employees and writers an acceptable wage, then fine. But right now I don’t believe it and until I see some numbers, I’ll continue to not believe it.

But I don’t think that I have the right to take from people what they aren’t willing to give away, either. However, I see that it is a moral obligation for people to price things fairly, based on maintaining the ability to release more. That’s a personal choice, I get that, so I will happily call out the guy who has the cure for cancer and is selling it for 10,000 bucks a pop, even though his costs are only 5 bucks a pop. That guy is a jackass, and deserves to be lampooned and made a public spectacle. But beyond that, I wouldn’t steal it from him. I’d try to shame him into doing the right thing. Failing that, I’d try to get some laws changed, since laws are supposed to be there to aid the common good, even if they routinely fail short of that lofty goal.

For me, right now, that means I can release what I can for free, even though I have to spend the majority of my time at a day job. That day job severely limits the amount of time I have to produce content and release it. However, that job also provides me with an income, so I can afford to release my content for free. It’s a trade off that I’m willing to make right now. Maybe later, when I’m ready to try writing full time, I’ll have to charge. But I know that I’ll do my best to keep my prices as low as I can afford and still be professional.

I hope that makes sense.

Both of Mark’s scenarios that don’t involve the taking of something from someone else, but still involve physical piracy (free newspaper and concert), stem from the same given: content creators have a right to decide how, why, when, and where their content is experienced, if for no other reason than they created that content.
I’m not sure I agree with that given as it stands, and I’d like to use a silly example to illustrate why. There is an anti-corporation argument that has a place in the piracy debate and I think this is also the place to bring it into our discussion. I want to use some examples to talk about where I think that argument comes from, but also what I think it means that the argument even exists in the first place. I hope that this will also help address Mark’s ideas about stealing.

We’re going to need two people for this discussion, so let’s pick polar opposites to try to tease out the implications of the thing.

First, we need someone who’s rich and can pretty much buy and sell whatever they want. Let’s use Bill Gates, since I seem to have been thinking about him lately. I don’t know why – it might have something to do with him recently joining twitter and also donating billions of dollars to charity (although those two events might be unrelated).

Second, we need someone who’s not rich. Anti-rich, even. For this, let’s use Marian, referenced in the same blog post I’m responding to. Since we were put up as mutual mouthpieces there, that seems fitting. Marian, unlike Bill Gates, cannot buy and sell whatever she wants. She’s limited by her limited income.

So here’s the scenario:

Say that I’ve just finished writing the next great American novel. It’s the best thing since sliced bread, full of the bees-knees, wisdom, humor, and great ideas. Not only is it gonna be a best seller, a strong member of the Oprah book club, and adored by the mainstream and counter-culture alike, it’s also full of life-changing ideas that everyone on the face of the planet, young and old, should read. Say that’s what the book is, just for example.

Now say that, before it’s released, word gets around that all the hype about the book is true, that it really is better than Shakespeare, the Bible, and Twilight (for the mass market appeal) rolled into one and my publishing company and I decide to set the price of the novel at 10 billion dollars a copy, because we think, for some reason, that we can get Bill Gates to pay that price.

Lo, the novel is realized. My publishing company and I sell three copies to the three richest people in the world. We retire in luxury and never work again. Bill Gates gets to read the book, being one of the three who bought it, but poor Marian never does, because she cannot afford the price of entry.

This is an extraordinarily silly example, but a necessary one, because it demonstrates some talking points:

People should only have a right to distribute content if their profits from said content are reasonable. What right, beyond the creation itself do I have to price my novel at such an exorbitant price? I created the content, but if the book is so good that it might improve lives, what right do I have to price it so only a few lives can be improved?

That’s the point about sticking it to corporations and where it originates. Just because I create something, do I have the right to completely control access to that thing? Maybe, but only to a point. After that point, the social contract says that the work should be freely available, or at the very least, as widely available as possible.
That’s what this is really about. Did Bill Gates really have the right to make 40 billion dollars because he started a software company that provided the right thing at the right time? Does he have the right to become the wealthiest person on the planet because he won big on a social roulette game?

I don’t think so. That’s too much. Letting someone profit that much from the creation of a single thing is absurd, whether it’s a company or a novel. Now, novels aren’t as absurdly profitable as the amount of money Bill Gates has, but you get the slippery-slope gist of the thing.

Now, Marian’s point was this: if the content isn’t priced affordably, she knows how to get it for free.

I think she’s right. It’s easy to get it for free. And digitalization of work brings that into a whole new perspective. Because although piracy might be described as the theft of a sale, the hard fact is that after the content is created, an additional digital copy costs the company nothing. NOTHING.

So how in the hell can they justify pricing a book at ten dollars? It’s an unreasonable profit margin for their investment.

If a publishing company spends 150,000 dollars to pay the author, the editor, the layout person, and the web guy who throws it up on the digital store – they only have to sell 15,000 copies at 10 bucks a pop to recoup that investment. Now, for a novel that they are willing to spend 150 grand on, they are easily going to sell 15,000 copies. It’s more likely that they are going to sell 100,000 copies or more, since they are banking on it being a best seller (otherwise, they would have paid 15,000 or less for the advance, layout, and editing fees). 100,000 copies at 10 bucks a pop gets them 1 million gross and 850,000 net. That’s an absurd margin.

This is simplistic, but basically how it works nonetheless. Now, if they price the book at one dollar, not only are they going to sell way more than 100,000 books, they also put it in reach of a bunch more people. They probably aren’t going to make the same margins, since they’d have to sell a million books at one dollar to make the same as selling 100,000 books at 10 bucks, but it’s possible.

And if they do sell a million books, it’s time to lower the price. Thus spake the social contract and the social contract mote it so.

(Beyond that, there is also the issue of the payment of the writer versus the payment of the publisher, but that’s another whole big thing that probably needs its own post.)

So, my belief is this: content creators have a right to distribute their content as they wish, as long as they price that content so the most people can have access to it (which means as cheap as possible) and still maintain a comfortable lifestyle that lets them continue to create that content. If you want to charge me ten bucks for a copy of a digital book, you don’t get to have a private jet. I’m sorry. No. That’s not feasible or socially responsible. Instead, people in my generation will steal your book. So it goes.

In the above scenario, I would be an asshole for writing something that could help people and then pricing it so only a select few could afford it. That’s capitalism, you say. Fine, I say, well capitalism is an asshole, too.

Information, content, entertainment, whatever you want to call it, should be priced so that the highest number of people can access it and the people who made it can live and continue to create it. When that happens, then content creators have a right to control their content. Until that level of social responsibility is inherent in the system – content creators shouldn’t have a right to do what they want with their content.

That’s the “right” of creation – bringing good to people, and as many people, as possible. If you don’t do that, you have no right to create.

Anyway, to get on with the post:

We want professional content, so we need new business models for artists that allow them to become professional without selling copies of their work, since new technology is proving that difficult, or, at least unsatisfactory while lacking uniformity. So we need new business models for artists. That’s one issue to solve. I’ve mentioned a few ideas for new business models before, here and here (bottom of post). Those barely tap the surface – I’m sure there are others. I’m not a businessman, so I’ve spent less time brainstorming ideas than I could have.

In fact, the few possible models I’ve presented I’ve listed for two real reasons: 1: I abhor the presentation of problems without the presentation of possible solutions. They already have a word for that and it’s called complaining. And 2: I didn’t want to just gloss over the business issue by simply saying it was someone else’s problem to figure out. I didn’t want to just say there were other possible models without suggesting some, if only to spark ideas or begin to move toward a solution.

However, in truth, the business aspect of copyright doesn’t particularly interest me. What interests me more are the social aspects of copyright – the idea of copyright itself. The definition of copyright, if you will – why copyright exists, what purpose it serves, what gives us the idea that speech, text, sounds, and visuals can be copyrighted, and why we might feel this way. I am absurdly interested in motivations and reasoning – I like to know what people believe, but more importantly, why people believe what they believe.

So that’s the goal of this post – to try to tease out some meaning, to try to put myself in the place of someone who not only believes that copyright is a necessity, but also that it is a right. After all, “right” is in the word itself, is it not?

(Side note – I’m sorry if the prose in this post tends a little toward a schoolmarmy lecture-voice. I’ve been reading Bertrand Russell lately and he always does that to me. Stuff you’re reading always bleeds into your writing style sideways, at least for awhile.)

So it seems to me that copyright, and the idea that copyright IS a right can be explained as a compilation of these ideas:

1. Humans have a right to benefit the fruits of their individual labor, both physical and mental.
2. People are motivated to protect the fruits of their labor from others, so as to not lose the fruits of their labor.
3. The idea of a thing is separate from the thing itself (which strikes me as channeling a little Plato, but he’s in there, so what do you want?). This notion makes patents and copyright possible. The design of a chair is separate from the physical representation of that design.
4. Individualism matters – people work to benefit themselves and if the many also benefit, then it’s win/win, but win (individual)/lose(many) is acceptable if win/win cannot be obtained. It is generally acceptable that lose/win is noble, but most are too selfish for this to be adopted across the board, not to mention it creates problems with sustainability.
5. Ideas are unique to individuals. Though they have influences, the key ingredient to any recipe is the chef, not the green beans, though better green beans help. It’s generally accepted (except by those wacky “the writer is dead” literary theorists) that the artist is the most important contributor to a work of art, without whom, the art would not exist.
6. Attribution is important. No one wants their great ideas to be attributed to someone else.
7. The first person to create something is the person who should benefit from it.

I feel like those are the seven major ideas that lead to the idea of copyright, but if I’ve missed anything else that you think is important, please let me know in the comments. I invite you to post. Let’s have a CONVERSATION.

With those seven ideas in mind, let’s take them and build copyright from them. If the idea is separate from the thing, then the idea is a thing someone can create, even if the thing is not created. Who creates the idea matters, and the person wants others to know s/he created the idea. Because people have a right to benefit from their labor, even mental labor, the creation of an idea is something that can be benefited from, as long as that person created it first. Finally, the creator has a right to protect others from profiting from the idea so s/he can maintain profit alone, or at the very least, reap the lion’s share.

Bam! Copyright.

I want to talk more about which of those seven concepts seems like a given that shouldn’t be a given, but first I want to wait a bit to see if anyone has anything to say. Specifically, I want to know if I’ve missed anything before moving forward. So please, pick apart my reasoning – let’s suss this thing out together.

We begin personally, as all my musings begin. I believe that the individual viewpoint is how we all see the world first, so it’s a comfortable and easy place to begin. So let’s start by talking about how I came to this in the first place.

It’s hard for me, as a content producer (sure, maybe the content is bad, but I’m still producing it) and also a content consumer, to understand how I feel about copyright and piracy (also called file sharing). I’ve thought about it a lot, because I am the guy who releases content I spend hours (months) on to people on the internet for free. I’m also the guy who will read/watch things that are legally available for free (Doctorow’s fiction, Hulu content) and sometimes pay if I like it and sometimes not. I’m also the guy who would someday like to be compensated for my work, at least to a level that I could scrape by an income and do it full time.

So…mix all those things together and you’ll soon realize that the ideas don’t jive with any logical consistency, not without some creative and double-sided accounting. I’m on the verge of releasing a new novel for free on the internet, a work that took me the better part of 18 months, and before I do that I feel like I should get my head on straight about copyright and file sharing. I wanna know how I feel about it so I can stick to my guns and also not feel like I wasted my time or limited my options in a way I’m uncomfortable with.

The real issue goes beyond digital piracy to copyright itself. Now, I don’t believe that digital file sharing, even of copyrighted materials, is theft. That’s probably a generational thing, but we’re gonna do our best to suss out as much meaning as possible. Keep in mind, this entry is a fluid conversation, so comment if you wanna participate.

So, theft seems to me like it is inherently defined by defined by the taking of something from someone else, depriving them of it. Theft is a physical concept, based on a starvation economy, that there is a finite amount of resources to go around, and possessing resources means someone else will not possess them.

Information used to be like that, too, since information was passed on via physical items. The price of a book was determined by two things: the cost of production and the cost of the information. The starvation economy also played into this, because there were only so many copies of the book. Stealing a book from a shop meant that the shop owner no longer had a copy to sell.

But the thing is, a starvation economy does not apply in a digital age. Or, at the very least, the costs are so absurdly low that the profit margins are absurdly high in monetized digital distribution. We exist in a world where time is monetized, and that’s the only cost for me to release a book. The fifty bucks a year hosting costs I pay to the website company are nothing. So all it costs me to put a book out on the internet is time, the time to write the book, edit it, and format it for distribution. Putting a copy of my book on someone else’s hard drive costs nothing and does not take the book from my possession. I’ve made a copy at no cost.

But it’s still theft, people say, because although file sharing piracy does not steal a physical object from someone else, there is something that is stolen – the sale, and more importantly, the money from that sale. The sale of a copyrighted item has never been about the physical object, not really, so we’re not really sailing in different waters here, or so people say.

Now, the fact is, our society is based on two concepts, and those things, boiled down to simplicity, are idealism and pragmatism. All humans possess the capacity for both concepts, and we operate on both, too. Our laws are based on idealism – we put artificial ideals on behavior and attempt to base our society on them. We say in America that all men are created equal, even though we know that’s not true. Some people are better at math, some have better social skills, some people are born with genetic defects, and no logical person can say that everyone is created equal. Life isn’t fair. However, our idealism says that we all are, because our society hinges on the idea that we shouldn’t be penalized because of inborn defects or treated better because of inborn talents. We say that under no circumstances should murder or theft be correct actions, even though we understand that pragmatically there are exceptions to those things, such as war and self-defense.

So, ideally, theft is wrong, but pragmatically, people steal. It’s no surprise this has translated to the digital realm, because the same operator, good ole human nature, is still there. Only the medium changed. Now, ideally, in our justice system, all injustice is punished, and all innocent go free. Ideally, a proper defense is available to any and all. Pragmatically, more money gets you a better defense. There is a ideal of the thing, and then there is the thing itself. Sometimes they jive and sometimes they don’t. Our duty as good citizens and good humans is to do the best we can, ferret out injustice where we find it, hold up the ideal as best we can, but also constantly examine the ideal in light of the pragmatic, in order to understand how to improve the ideal. This is the nature of the entire enterprise here, folks – it keeps us alive and moving forward as a species.

Now, the fact of the matter is, the paradigm has shifted. If we’re looking at it pragmatically, there can be no other conclusion given the data we have. Although the old guard sees physical theft and digital theft as the same thing – my generation does not and never will. Generations younger than mine also do not, and despite copyright theft merit badges and kindergarten “understanding copyright” training, this is not going to change. The paradigm has shifted. the pragmatic data doesn’t lie. People are sharing files at record rates, countermeasures are only small speed bumps, and unplugging the whole internet is the only thing that’s gonna slow it down. Obviously, that’s not gonna happen.

So, the real choice now is whether to allow the ideal, the law, to change. We must examine the cause of this paradigm shift, but also examine the economics and social impact of the thing to determine if the shift is for the better or the worse. Humanity doesn’t always make the best choices, sometimes it moves in the wrong direction, but sometimes it moves in a positive direction. Our goal is to determine if the current direction is a good thing. That means looking at the reasons some people think file sharing is theft and the reasons some people don’t think it’s theft.

Our task is difficult, because the media landscape is full of nothing but shouters. Newscasters are shouting their ideals on television, bloggers are shouting on the internet, people are shouting on the street, even congressmen are shouting at each other on the senate floor – we’re all shouting so loud and so powerfully that we can’t sit down calmly to discuss things logically anymore. It’s impossible, if for no other reason than calm talk quickly drowns in the overwhelming noise. No doubt our calm discussion will be drowned out also, but we must try.

So let’s move on. Let’s first collect all the things that we need to add to our conversation: the possible reasons for this paradigm shift, a logical discussion of how the ideal could change, and further, what that change could look like. After all that, we’ll see where we are once the dust clears.

Now, copyright has existed for a long time, say about four hundred years, give or take a score of decades. That’s the real conversation we should be having, not about costs of distribution, but the time/money costs of the production staff – the writers, artist, and technical people needed to produce a work of art. Since I am concerned mostly with writing let’s narrow it down to that.

At some point, if we want professional works of art, the artist must be compensated. I read somewhere that it takes 10,000 hours to master an art. That’s about a year and a half of solid time, with no time spent on sleeping, work, eating, or anything else. Obviously, that’s physically impossible, so let’s take it at a more reasonable level: two hours a day. That 10,000 hours is a little less than fourteen years at two hours a day. That’s a lot, but possible, if one is dedicated, but it would still take an absurdly dedicated person to do that pro bono. The love would have to be the whole thing, at that point. If forty hours a week are spent, the artist is able to reach mastery in a much shorter timeline, a little less than 5 years. That teaches us another point to apply to our discussion – if we want professional work, the artist must be able to monetize at some point during those 10,000 hours.

So let’s run down the points we need to cover right now:

• The theft paradigm has changed or has become such an open floodgate as to become a wash.
• Distribution costs nothing.
• The artist must be able to monetize in order to reach a professional level in a reasonable amount of time.

So at this point our discussion is about finding a business model that will allow artists to monetize in order to produce professional content. But that’s not all of our discussion – there’s more that enters into it, so let’s get started on that: Business. Because, make no mistake, it is a business, after all. Professional writers are like professional athletes – it may have started as a love of the game, but eventually it also became about the numbers. Cash money. It seems like half of the appeal of the artist lifestyle is the lottery effect, the startup ethic, or whatever else you want to call it – the hope that you can live through lean times in order to later reap big, fat times, possibly over and above the hardships you experienced. Basically, the hope to live off what you already created with little maintenance work.

So, there has to be a place in our discussion for an acceptable artist lifestyle. How much is enough? I’m sure there are artists who will protest what I’m saying, who say that it is all about the love, but really, if it was, they would work a 9-5, put in their two hours a day at becoming a master, and reach their goal in a little under 14 years. Even if it is all about the love, at best those protesters are impatient, and at worst, they are secretly greedy.

So let’s add in the third thing: Artists want to make more money than the amount of time they spend would make them at a reasonable, middle-income 9-5. At some point, it has to be about business, and it has to be about money. But how much money? That’s what we need to answer. That needs to be in our conversation, too.

Now the conversation gets really really big, really, really fast. It starts to include things like reasonable income, and, even bigger, what monetary amount you can put on pleasure. Now, all these things can be quantified – you can do a income study for a location, and ask people how much they are willing to pay for two hours of entertainment, for three hours, for ten hours – you can average all those things out, subtract costs, and see where you are at. That’s business, right? That’s what business does.

So how do we even begin to approach this conversation now? Let’s break it down and start with small questions and answers.

Why did the theft paradigm change?

First, I’m not sure it did. I think we just think it did. Humans are physical beings and we understand, evolutionarily, physical things. We’ve always struggled with ideas and “content” because they are not physical things. A child can understand from a pretty early age that she can’t have the new toy she wants at Toys R Us without paying for it. However, try to explain to a child that she’s not allowed to hear the story her mommy reads her at night before bed without paying for it. That’s a harder notion to understand because there is no physical item exchanged.

We are not children, but as ideas get more complex, there are thresholds of understanding. We’ve already removed the concept of theft back one step, from the theft of a physical item to the theft of a sale. Some people cannot make that leap – it’s too far, even if it seems short to most of us. There are a number of pro piracy arguments levied against this concept – pirates wouldn’t have bought the content anyway, piracy actually encourages sales, content creators have created ill-will in consumers and are now getting their comeuppance – all have varying degrees of truth, but none feel like they fully address the issue, and worse, something about them smell like compensation, not real answers.

So the ideal of the situation is this: civil copyright law says file sharing is wrong, that it is theft. The pragmatic situation says that millions of people are doing it because they do not feel it is wrong. There is a disconnect here, so much so, that’s it time to examine the ideal. That’s the pragmatic situation we’re in. Trying to turn back the clock to a time before the internet is impossible. It’s not going to happen. Instead, we need to address the realities of the thing – the root of the reason content costs money is because we, as consumers, want professional content. If you cut away all the profit margins, corporate BS, and all that other junk to boil it down to what the consumer wants – we want professional content. This means we need to pay creators so they can become professional.

It remains to be seen what the business model looks like that pays content creators to a level that allows them to be professionals. With writing this is less of an issue than other mediums, since with digital distribution all that needs to be paid is the author’s living expenses. With video games and movies, the issue is stickier, since those things cost much more. However, I do believe there is a business model out there that allows for professional writing to be created without trying to fight the idea that file sharing is theft, or trying to stem the tide.

I don’t have a direct answer, but I have a few ideas:

A donation/performance based revenue structure – musicians do this already, so why can’t writers do it? Some people say that the performance is the thing with music and that doesn’t apply to books, since with books, the book is the thing. However, donation buttons, live readings, and other forms of compensation are possible. I don’t think they’ve been fully exploited yet as a possible revenue stream, if for no other reason than there is no easy business model and aggregate structure that allows consumers an easy donation interface. If there was a site like Scribd.com that allowed artists to both sell their work and be donated to, that would be a first step. As for my part, I emailed a woman I know at Scribd.com this morning with the suggestion that they add a “Donate to Author” button to their site for all authors who want it as a supplement tobuying digital works on their site. If you think this is a good idea, email them, too.

Secondly, I think that the old model of sponsored art is a possibility. Why can’t charities buy works of art and release them for free? Why can’t the local library hold a fundraiser to buy the latest book from a local author, stock that book on their shelves, and put it out on the internet for free? Why can’t entertainment be a cause for the public good? Well, we don’t know, but damn, let’s try it already.

Also, I’ve been talking about sponsored e-books for awhile. Why can’t the artists be compensated through advertising, just as other content creators (like television and news websites) have been doing for a long time? Why can’t websites pay for content that drives people to their site? Why can’t Pepsi pay an author to release a “branded” e-book for free on the internet? People put up with advertising if it’s unobtrusive and tasteful. Pepsi sponsor’s musicians, why can’t they sponsor an author? Is it any different than the Pope paying Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel?

I’m willing to try this, too. I’m about to release a novel on the internet. If you wanna sponsor it, spend me an email and we’ll talk. If you’re not ready, that’s fine. I’m halfway through writing a second one, too. I plan to keep writing them and trying to figure out a new way to monetize my work without forsaking my ideals, which say that ideas should be offered free, as long as I can afford to do that. Right now I can. We’ll see about the future.