Fitting copyable things into the capitalist market economy is something of an unsolved problem.

No it's not, it's the same problem that market economies have been dealing with since the invention of the printing press... the solution was a legal and financial concept known as "copyright".

I remember the battle in the 90s. Slashdot vs. the MPAA/RIAA. The "good guys" who were for "freedom of information" and the "bad guys" who wanted to limit what we could do with our technology and make it illegal to circumvent copyright protections...

...and then the "good guys" won! DVD John, Napster... information must be free!

It's quite clear that anti-circumvention laws were not the best approach (they should have put those resources in to things like SoundExchange much earlier), these negative aspects of copyright have unfortunately dominated the conversation since.

Fast forward a decade, and what do we have... well, we're starting to see what happens when you get rid of treating intellectual property as something that can exist as something to be bought and sold in a market economy.

It's not like the whole concept of private property or ownership went away. For the people who own stocks in Google, Apple, Facebook and the other billion dollar companies who deal in distributing and organizing digital media, they've made plenty of money.

Open-source software is funded by corporate coffers. The people who make the software don't get to own anything while the corporations get to use these freely created tools to increase their share values. The vast majority of open-source developers are on corporate payrolls.

Not only are developers giving away their intellectual property, but so are the majority of individuals who the create digital media that drives the eyeballs to the advertisements. The "creative commons", where everyone freely distributes their creations in exchange for comments and clicks...

It is quite clear that digital media does have value. If Google had nothing to index, or if Facebook had nothing to share, there would be no one using these services, and therefor no one to sell any advertisements to.

Yet we have no way to price how much this media is worth. It never enters a marketplace. It is never bought and sold. I'm not sure what kind of creative accounting they have at places like Twitter but I'm sure they don't have a good idea of their actual business inputs and outputs. There's a giant air-gap between users creating content and advertisers buying space next to it.

Because of the fundamental economics of refusing to considering digital media as intellectual property in a market economy, the only profit model is to make the services free and then degrade the products through adding noise to the channel. Now product designers have to actively fight with their organizations profit structures. The result? Crappy and bloated products with crappy content, a plague that has been sweeping web publishing that seems to be increasing by the day if the tech blogosphere is used as a thermometer.

Advertisements do not pay for content. They pay for hosting, distribution and employee salaries. They pay to keep the lights on in Mountain View.

All sorts of hair-brained schemes are dreamt up to try and deal with it, but none actually treat digital media as property. Kickstarter is about the project. The people who support a project are not investors. They don't get equity or ownership, they get t-shirts. Patreon is about the artist. The people who support the artists don't get equity or ownership, just a "worthless" digital media file. Artists are told to sell merchandise and tickets and in-home performances and anything and everything under the sun other than what they are best at making, an absurdity that defines the early 21st century media landscape, as if somehow we can fix this problem if we just convince enough people that they need a closet filled with hundreds of "I supported an artist" t-shirts.

The only place where intellectual property is still honored is with the old giants of the 20th century, the book, music and moving pictures industries. These industries were built on top of the foundations of copyright. Artists create, own, and put their property on an actual marketplace. Companies who own IP and treat it as such on their books have a clearly defined view of their "content creation" accounts as being profit-makers. Speculative investment through publishers creates an incentive structure that aligns itself with the rest of our market economy.

The digital music industry has already ceded the battle to IT. When Sony negotiated with Spotify to put their back-catalog on this new service, they had the presence of mind to know that what really mattered was equity in Spotify. Their recordings and publishing rights were "worthless". A rival service named Tidal offered it's artists ownership in the corporation as opposed to contracts related to their IP for the same reason. Seemingly out of nowhere we're seeing a drastic increase in vinyl records, but I would argue this is less a hipster trend than a return to an economics model where the music itself is given value.

What I find interesting and ironic is that an industry built on information has not only conceded that information is worthless but celebrates this fact. Then we dream up things like "basic income" in order to create a world where the 99% who don't own anything can survive. We're all well aware of the relationship that labor has to capital. We're all well aware of the economic reality of scarce physical resources. In the real world, not everyone can own something. However, anyone has the ability to create intellectual property out of thin air and benefit from owning it like any other capital.

Somehow we blindly believe that things like basic income seem easier to implement on a societal level than accounting for ownership of digital media. We'd rather throw private property out the window then deal with it's complexities. Haven't we been here before?

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I'd love some feedback on this stuff and I know some of these ideas are half-baked, but everywhere I look I'm seeing the same root issue... we've decided to give up on hundreds of years of treating intellectual creations as property that can be bought and sold in a marketplace, and doing so we've made it very hard for people who make digital media, be it a software library or a song, to survive in a world built on top of private physical property.