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Making money by giving away
Posted by Graeme in Economics at 11:22 am on Tuesday, 13 February 2007
The advocates of ever stronger copyright and patent laws claim that these are the only way to give people an incentive to create new works and inventions. Here are a few examples that show otherwise, mostly of how people make money by giving away.
- The best example is open source software. Companies, non-profit organisations and individual programmers give away the software they write. They make money in a number of ways that range form providing support for the software to selling associated products (such as computers). Open source software runs everything from supercomputers to mobile phones to most web sites to increasing Numbers of ordinary PCs.
- Chinese musicians make a perfectly good living despite the fact that almost all copies of their music sold are pirated. They regard CD sales as a promotional tool.
- Writer Cory Dotorow allows downloads of his novels under creative commons licences, which has boosted sales of printed copies. This is not a complete rejection of copyright as a number of restrictions remain (most importantly, on printed copies), but it does undermine the arguments for strong copyright and DRM.
- The Baen Free Library also provides free downloads (although not so liberally licensed) in order to boost sales of printed copies.
- One of the most important successful pharmaceutical products ever developed, the polio vaccine, was deliberately left unpatented.
Obviously much of this requires some form of funding. The question of whether the best form of funding is copyrights and patents has never been seriously discussed by policymakers. It has largely been lobbied for an accepted by “business friendly” (rather than pro-free market or “consumer friendly”) politicians.
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