Related, I've noticed that NYT has tightened their pay wall recently. No more modifying the URL and if you stop loading you have to hit it at just the right time. It's like a game that's moved on to a more difficult level!
There's a tumblr naming (and shaming) publications that pay or don't pay freelance photographers.
http://whopaysphotogs.tumblr.com/
Some of the entries are quite interesting.
e.g.
http://whopaysphotogs.tumblr.com/post/45045913161/guardian-uk
I guess someone could do something similar for writing.
I think while a lot of writing for free is in fact the norm, it shouldn't be - editors' poormouthing covers asymmetric power and possibly a degree of oligopsony or at least coordination. As long as the medium is some sort of business concern that employs other people, rather than a labor of love, writers are producing revenue and should be paid (so perhaps excluding academic journals, but not nonprofit magazines like the Prospect).
The same thing exists with artists, that Huffington Post logo thing being a pretty egregious example.
A lot of the activism focuses on raising awareness, value-your-work screeds like this nice flowchart, but a union would probably help.
Also, why isn't this covered by minimum wage laws?
Oh, I guess the independent-contractor thing. (Which category really deserves better regulation.)
1: Incognito still seems to work.
There is a writers' union. How effective, I have no idea.
http://www.nwu.org/
And finally, per Tedra, what a wonderful way to guarantee an upper-class boys' club.
I think the point of capitalism is that eventually only real estate people will be paid and everything else will be on a volunteer basis.
3. Surprise, surprise!
http://whopaysphotogs.tumblr.com/post/45035276602/slate-magazine
Ta-Nehisi is much more positive about wrting for free than you give him credit for. His line is, "I've written for free alot, because I had something to say that no one would pay for, and you should too. Also writing for free got me a well-paying writing job, which probably won't work for you, but you never know."
As someone who enjoys reading without paying for it, I'm pleased that people are willing to write without getting paid, bloghosts and fellow blog commenters not excepted.
Also, why isn't this covered by minimum wage laws?
Oh go on, you guess.
Writing for free is inevitable, since all writers are going to be churning out content for their blogs or whatever until anyone knows what they are. I took Coates to be drawing a line at profitable ventures that don't pay their writers.
And not that he's wagging his finger at the writers for complying, but at the companies for not paying.
Writing for free is inevitable, since all writers are going to be churning out content for their blogs or whatever until anyone knows what they are.
This is also hard on the writers who are getting paid -- competition with all the free out there drives down compensation. The rights and wrongs and who deserves what are complicated, but I've been watching this happen to Buck for the last couple of decades: prices per word have been falling, and he's been maintaining his income by turning out more copy. And he's in a fairly insulated niche, as an expert in a dullish, businessy topic where the few people who are interested spend a lot of money. For someone writing in an area where there's enough general interest to produce more free, it's got to be worse.
Because I am virtuous, I try to keep my own writing at a low enough quality so as not to threaten anyone's paycheck.
I think the point of capitalism is that eventually only real estate people will be paid and everything else will be on a volunteer basis.
I think this is right, but it does make capitalism sound an awful lot like feudalism, which I don't think was the point originally.
Here's another recent dust-up about the topic.
Freelance journalist publishes an email exchange with an Atlantic editor in which he declines to write a piece for free.
Senior editor at the magazine responds, fails to self-edit, doesn't make himself or his point very sound very sympathetic, IMO.
Oh, I see now that the Gawker piece is about the Atlantic thing. Well, now you've got the links directly from here.
This is also hard on the writers who are getting paid -- competition with all the free out there drives down compensation.
Unfogged is single-handedly killing literature.
While miming cock jokes with the other hand.
I think this is right, but it does make capitalism sound an awful lot like feudalism, which I don't think was the point originally.
If you mean it wasn't the point of capitalism originally, sure. But I think the rent seeking conglomerates that dominate the economy these days would very much like a return to feudalism in its late, monetised form, as frex 18th century France. They would do very well with a lot fewer impediments.
Craigslist Ad: Musician to play in restaurant
We are a small & casual restaurant in downtown Vancouver and we are looking for solo musicians to play in our restaurant to promote their work and sell their CD. This is not a daily job, but only for special events which will eventually turn into a nightly event if we get positive response. More Jazz, Rock, & smooth type music, around the world and mixed cultural music. Are you interested to promote your work? Please reply back ASAP.
Musician's Response: Restaurateur to Cook in Musician's Home
Happy new year! I am a musician with a big house looking for a restaurateur to promote their restaurant and come to my house to make dinner for my friends and I. This is not a daily job, but only for special events which will eventually turn into a nightly event if we get positive response. More fine dining & exotic meals and mixed Ethnic Fusion cuisine. Are you interested to promote your restaurant? Please reply back ASAP.
17: I love the response "our normal rate is $100, but I'm out of freelance money right now". Some people might think that meant not engaging freelance journalists right now, but nope!
to make dinner for my friends and I
Sorry, but he lost my sympathy right there.
22: aren't there chefs who really do that sort of thing? Like, throwing money-losing pop-up dinners in people's houses in order to build exposure/a name?
Figures that Yglesias would come out in favor of working for free.
Harlan Ellison has other ideas!
Least believable part of that interview:
ELLISON: Everybody else may be an asshole, but I'm not.
I think writing / journalism as a separate business is almost doomed. There are too many people who want to write for free. The ease of self-publication on the net has turned writing into a hobby for hundreds of thousands of people, and there are also all the salaried people who work in some form of communication for an institution, whether it's commercial marketing, advocacy like think tanks and the like, or professors who want to increase the visibility of their otherwise obscure work. (The key is that none of those people, with the possible exception of academics, are journalists who are paid simply to go out and find a story and try to tell it -- they are being paid to advocate in some way). They can 'write for free' off their salaries. Then add to this the way that the net vastly lowers the cost of accessing any single piece of good writing, creating huge economies of scale (sort of a milder version of the impact of recordings on the market for live musicians). Journalism was never a lucrative career, now it's going to be close to non-paying. The people who survive will be those who in another era would have been known as 'successful non-fiction authors', like Malcolm Gladwell, or people who have a substantial TV presence.
Hundreds of years ago Adam Smith had a great comment in The Wealth of Nations about what happens to wages when what was once a profession becomes a pastime:
Hunting and fishing, the most important employments of mankind in the rude state of society, become in its advanced state their most agreeable amusements, and they pursue for pleasure what they once followed from necessity. In the advanced state of society, therefore, they are all very poor people who follow as a trade what other people pursue as a pastime. Fishermen have been so since the time of Theocritus. A poacher is everywhere a very poor man in Great Britain.
most awful writers are well remunerated at some venture or another. meanwhile magical market forces often keep the valuables hidden for an appropriate amount of time.
re: 21
Shame the late 18th century French solution to that problem isn't on the cards.
28: Yeah, that's Buck's take on it -- he's spent the last couple of years trying to figure out if there's enough money left that he can finish out a career as a journalist or if the industry is going to shut down (or shrink to the point where he can't find work) before he retires. He's got a pretty good shot of being one of the last couple of people standing with a paying job, but who knows how long that will last?
Topical article about uncleared samples in the Harlem Shake.
Topical because essentially everybody involved in dance music production is working for free (or pennies) so who cares if you don't clear the samples in your dance track that is going to sell maybe a hundred copies on beatport. Doesn't matter if Benny Benassi (getting $10k for the night) drops it in front of three thousand drunk yahoos (often paying up to $1k a night apiece) at a superclub in Vegas. You aren't going to see any money, so who cares.
But then Billboard rejiggers their rankings and suddenly Baauer might get rich and everybody's suing everybody!
It's fascinating because nobody actually wants dance music production to be remunerative like that -- it never has been, doesn't work that way except in very special cases -- and nobody wants to have to clear every sample before releasing everything, because that would just absolutely kill the ecosystem. But then it comes into contact with the larger world of YouTube pay-for-play and automatic licensing and Billboard rankings and everything gets weird.
re: 28
As per lots of comments above, it sometimes seems like bloody everything is doomed as a separate business. Certainly everything remotely creative except to the extent that it can attract rich patronage.
The Ta-Nehisi Coates post is (as you might expect) very good, and complicated. I'd be inclined to summarize his position as, "writing for free can be a good idea, but it isn't for amateurs." That is to say, if somebody wants to receive value from the "exposure" they get from writing for free they need to have enough experience to know, in advance, how much work it will take, and what they do have to gain.
A couple other interesting links relating to Nate Thayer:
Tim Burke -- "About two years after I'd started blogging, a journalist friend of mine gently needled me about what I was doing. 'You're going to put us all out of business if you keep giving away all that stuff for free,' he commented. This was right when the bottom was beginning to fall out of print journalism as Craigslist eviscerated revenue from classifieds, other advertising was chasing readers online, and subscription revenue continued its downward trends in many urban markets. I begged to differ. I still do, but with less blithe assurance than I had back in 2005. . . ."
Ezra Klein -- "Now, the people who were once sources can write their own blogs, or they send op-ed submissions or even feature articles to editors looking for vastly more content. Think about Brad DeLong's blog, Marginal Revolution, or the Monkey Cage. This work often doesn't pay -- at least not at first -- but it offers a much more reliable, predictable and controllable form of exposure. It's a direct relationship with an audience rather than one mediated by a professional journalist."
therefore, they are all very poor people who follow as a trade what other people pursue as a pastime
If we look at England today, richly supplied as it is with amateur dramatics groups, we can easily see why there are no rich actors. And, similarly, when millions of men play football for fun every weekend, how straitened must be the pitiful existence of the professional footballer?
But there are so few rich actors/athletes that it almost seems reasonable to ignore them statistically.
The same argument explains why it's silly to think you could get rich by singing.
re: 35
I'd guess, statistically speaking, there are effectively no rich actors or rich football players. Anyway, 'tournament' professions are a bit structurally odd, anyway. I'd bet champion sport fishermen do OK as well.
37: Isn't it? I mean, the very occasional person does, but planning on it would certainly be silly.
Re: 22, there was a fun piece in the New Yorker on Craig Thompson (not the Blankets guy; Nicolas Cage's former chef), who turned himself into a name chef in L.A. with a longstanding "donation based" illegal supper club called Wolvesmouth, although it was at his house. Thompson apparently is opening a legit restaurant at this point, in part so he can get health insurance for his servers/kitchen staff.
Indeed, I believe that several people on this very board play the guitar; which must explain why Paul McCartney hasn't bought Essex yet.
Yet during most of history artists including writers have either depended on patronage or been rich amateurs or been dirt poor.
35, 37: you think you're smarter than Adam Smith? Anyway, I don't see any contradiction. The new thing you're pointing to which did not exist in Adam Smith's time is an economics of superstars in media production, caused by the growth of pop culture and technologies for distributing it. A huge number of hobbyists means that it is almost impossible to earn a living doing the thing that hobbyists do, but the few people who can sell to those hobbyists can get fantastically rich. Performers in music, sports, etc. sell to the vast audience of people who are interested in these things in their daily lives, but there are very few superstars.
re: 42.last
Yeah, it's difficult to argue that the music in, say, the mid 18th century was _massively_ worse than it is now.
36: but the rest of them aren't in poverty either. In the US, the median actor earns $17.44 an hour (BLS) though of course most of them aren't in steady work. But the median professional athlete is on $43k a year - well above the average wage.
The same argument explains why it's silly to think you could get rich by singing.
It is pretty silly to think that a given particular you will get rich by singing.
I don't know about the UK, but in the US I'd think that the number of athletes who are paid at all is still awfully small.
There's a line I've used for years with family and close friends when small talk turns toward my career and why I don't mind too much the fact that my job is boring and dead-end: "Everyone wants to be a writer, but very few people want to write."
To be a writer: to be able to schedule your personal errands for the middle of the day, not during rush hour. To work in your own living room in a ragged bathrobe and floppy slippers. To be moderately, respectably well-known. To bring living breathing characters to life with your own imaginative genius alone, if we're talking about fiction, or to illuminate pressing relevant tough issues if we're talking about nonfiction. Sounds like the best job in the world, when I put it like that. But to write? Staring at blank pages, checking and revising repeatedly and still not getting it quite right, getting it torn apart by editors and complete strangers if not just ignored, for freelance rates?
I couldn't handle that, especially not without a day job to fall back on. Some people apparently can, though, or feel so driven to it they don't have a choice. There probably always will be people like that, since there has been since media as we know it has existed. So it would be nice if at least the financial side of it wasn't so terrible. Not sure how to get there from here, but reducing the expectation of unpaid work is probably somewhere on the road.
However, this potentially interesting topic was merely given a tangential jumping-off point by Thayer, who has apparently lost his mind and may never have been that stable to begin with. The article he balked at editing down was apparently plagiarized, as argued by a link in that Gawker article in 7. He has compared "work for exposure" with slavery. Regardless of exactly how crappy the system is, that's nuts. And here's a quote from him while responding to a critic that jumped out at me:
I am, I agree, "using my position as a journalist (to) disseminate information". That is my job. And I will not shy away from it despite the protestations of either you or the Westboro Baptist Church. Or anyone else. That I will promise you. And if anyone tries to deny me that first amendment right, I will immediately be forced to exercise my second amendment right to ensure they fail. And, together, that is why I am proud to hold American citizenship.
re: 42.last
Although, purely personally, I have a huge amount of personal affection/appreciation for the sorts of thing that got produced by photographers and graphic artists during the mid-20th century period when they could earn a serious professional living at it. In fact, I tend to much prefer that sort of thing (Irving Penn, or Eugene W. Smith, or whoever) to stuff produced as 'art' for the art market.
Who is the median US professional athlete on $43K a year? The minimum salary in major league baseball, football, hockey and basketball are all way way way way way higher than that. Then the minor leaguers get substantially LESS than that (albeit they also get lodging and food during the season), unless they are established veteran journeymen. Maybe there are enough marginal players who spend 1 month or so making the major-league minimum, but spend the rest of the season in the minors, to outweigh everyone else.
$43K sounds about right for the average MLS soccer player.
I'm sure there would be rich hunters and fishers if it were a spectator sport, the way acting and singing are spectator … events. And indeed there are, but only insofar as they are spectated.
46 also to 38 and 43; tournament-based they may be, but it just isn't the case that pro sports consists of a handful of stars earning millions at the top, and a vast majority of people in poverty.
I don't think I'm smarter than Adam Smith, just much better informed than him. Also, what he said, "they are all very poor people who follow as a trade what other people pursue as a pastime" wasn't even true when he said it. 18th century Britain was littered with amateur painters; didn't mean that every professional painter was very poor. Ditto amateur composers and musicians. Musicians didn't get rich in 18th century Britain but they weren't all living in the state of abject poverty that he associates (presumably correctly) with fishermen and poachers. You could make quite a decent living as a musician, especially if you taught on the side.
with all of you writing for free, it is no wonder that y'all are pwning left and right.
Who is the median US professional athlete on $43K a year?
No idea. Ask the BLS.
I'm sure there would be rich hunters and fishers if it were a spectator sport
Oh, there are - there are entire cable channels devoted to competitive bass fishing, and they do rather nicely.
And finally, per Tedra, what a wonderful way to guarantee an upper-class boys' club.
[I]t sometimes seems like bloody everything is doomed as a separate business. Certainly everything remotely creative except to the extent that it can attract rich patronage.
I thought the gawker piece made an important point about the division in opportunities available to people who can get subsidies (from their families) and those who can't. I also thought it undermined that point somewhat by bringing in the Amanda Palmer example.
I haven't watched the Amada Palmer TED talk, but I have no difficulty imagining why people would find it and her annoying, but I do think what she's talking about is in a different category than writing for free.
I'll again recommend The Gift: Imagination And The Erotic Life Of Property (Lewis Hyde) as one of the best books I've ever read. To summarize briefly and unfairly -- he makes the point that the market economy is not the only economy that people participate in, and talks about various examples of gift economies -- in which the flow of money or goods (or credit) isn't directly a payment for services rendered but a reflection of communal or emotional connections.
Art, of various sorts, often has one foot in the market economy and one foot in the gift economy (particularly if you think of patronage as belonging to the gift economy realm). He includes in the latter category people who work a nine-to-five job to support their own art in their off hours (becoming their own patron, if you will). If you include those people that vast majority of people making music (or doing photography or writing fiction or poetry . . . ), aren't making money and don't expect to make money from their art. People do still manage to make money from music or photography of course, but they are a small group, relatively speaking.
My impression was that journalism, by contrast, has a longer tradition of being a profession. That, over the last century, the majority of people conducting journalism were getting paid for it (or, at least, expecting to make it a paid career) -- that it has mostly existed within the market economy. So people in the profession have less experience working in a field which straddles the market and non-market economies. Perhaps I'm wrong in that impression, and that working for free has always been a big part of journalism, but I think that's part of why the Nate Thayer story attracts such strong emotions on both sides.
pwned somewhat by the discussion of professional musicians/athletes.
Oh, there are - there are entire cable channels devoted to competitive bass fishing, and they do rather nicely.
Hence "and indeed there are".
Anyway, the key thing isn't that people in the distant past weren't paid to do X, it's that people now are increasingly no longer being paid to do things. And that that's reflective of a social and economic shift that we probably shouldn't welcome.
32: One solution to that topical issue might be to limit remedies for things like sampling to proper accreditation and a percentage of profits. That way artists are properly credited and rewarded while innovative use continues.
And it might even fuck a few over-aggressive IP lawyers in their pockets.
Growing up, I always wanted to be a writer, but in college it seemed too terrifying. It still would, I think. Also I love my blogging set-up tremendously.
Isn't the actual answer that government should subsidize the arts and public goods, and journalism is a public good?
Those subsidies need to be indirect. A journalism that is dependent on the favor of a given regime is not ideal. And the public should decide what arts it likes at a grass-roots level.
My take on these issues is always the same. You have three, and really only three, ways of financing creative expression. Copyright, which turns it into a profitable commodity product, Socialism, ie government financing, or Patronage, including wealthy amateurs doing it for free and otherwise independently wealthy organizations doing it to push an agenda. All three have existed at basically all modern times, though in different proportions. Right now option copyright is in bad shape and option socialism is completely off the table, so we're ever-increasingly moving closer to a world in which cultural production will be entirely dominated by patronage. That this creates what look like feudal relationships in the arts shouldn't be at all surprising.
The university model survived alongside feudalism last time around, so I'd suggest following that, except it seems to be in the process of being eaten by MBAs.
What 64 misses is that copyright is a form of government financing. So the socialism/copyright distinction is not so clear. There are many other forms of government financing besides copyright, which may or may not be socialist, depending on how you define that.
I am sad about what's happened to journalism as one of my thoughts was always that I could become some kind of long-form journalist/non-fiction writer, under the old regime my current career track would make that possible but now it just seems ridiculous. However, the underlying thing that's going on here is that the contradictions of capitalism are becoming more visible, as Marx predicted -- the property rules are conflicting more and more with productive possibilities. Now we have to figure out how to unleash the possibilities for abundance that capitalism holds back.
option socialism is completely off the table
This is hilarious. Do you live in New Zealand? Option federal subsidy has been on the table for every American industry for quite awhile now.
How is option copyright in bad shape? It reaches back much further than it ever has.
I will now make my now-traditional recommendation of Dean Baker's good idea.
66 -- sure, but only in the more limited sense that every modern property right is a product of the state, including real property, and that such property rights are necessary for commodification. There's a pretty clear difference between that and direct state ownership/subsidy a la the NEA or the various European state orchestras.
A while ago I saw an interesting explanation of the development of rock and roll as an exercise in union busting. The 15 instrumentalists behind Bing Crosby or Frank Sinatra were not famous, could be replaced at any minute, but they were able to support themselves and their families, and they were members of a union. They worked five or six nights a week, not always for the same frontman. They wouldn't work for less than the negotiated wage, and they charged overtime for encores. The union wouldn't let them do it any other way.
The rock band didn't have any interest in joining the union. They lived with their parents or in very cheat group apartments, they didn't get married, they played for nothing every night they could get a gig, and they hoped to be the next Paul McCartney. Obviously, the concert hall owners loved them, and droped the big bands with their annoying salaries and work rules.
To get to the point: journalism is moving in that direction. The reporter unions are dying out. Young people blog or report for free in hopes of being the next Ezra Klein. A very few will make it.
Frankly, I like the sound the rockers invented, and I liked the young fee bloggers when they were starting out. As a consumer of journalism, I don't mind at all the new model.
69: I think patent and copyrights are artificial in a way that real property rights are not. There is an entirely different level of government bureaucracy behind them for that reason.
The state could change the way it supported creative work without taking direct state ownership of the creative product (e.g. give the producer the property right to an income flow generated by the product through a state-controlled distribution system, so the distribution mechanism would be a public utility but the content on the mechanism would be privately owned). Subsidy systems could easily involve less bureaucracy (and less work for lawyers) than the current copyright system. Etc.
$43K sounds about right for the average MLS soccer player
In 2012 the average was $143k, the median was $70k, and the low was $34k. Excluding the designated players, that became $94k average, $68k median, and $34k low.
Soccer pays better than you think, even in America!
A while ago I saw an interesting explanation of the development of rock and roll as an exercise in union busting.
I remember Bob Dylan saying that part of what attracted him to folk music, as opposed to being in a rock band, was that he didn't have to split the money with anybody else.
I'm not that sad about the death of journalism -- to which I am contributing by buying virtually none of it, and patronizing very few advertisers -- for most of my life it's been about 95% crap. And hit higher levels in, say, 2003. (Not to say that 1998 was anything special.)
I guess I buy fewer books now, but I'm watching way more movies.
71.1 is ignorant, in a way that is fairly typical for economists. Do you have any idea about the extent of the government bureaucracy/rule enforcement needed to maintain property rights in real property? Have you considered the level of legal involvement necessary for even the simplest real property transaction? Probably not, but of course there is probably 100x, if not 1000x, more "government bureaucracy" devoted to policing and maintaining property rights in land, tenancies, mortgages, and other real property rights as there is to either patent or copyright, as well as thousands of times more work for lawyers in those areas.
71.2 is I guess theoretically possible, but as we've discussed before a "state controlled distribution system" isn't actually the primary problem with renumerating creative work so that particular idea is pretty pointless in my opinion. The Dean Baker creative freedom voucher is much more worthy of serious consideration; the problem is that there is essentially zero chance in the real world that such a project wouldn't be structured in such a way to uniquely screw over artists, so there's no way the costs/benefits would net out. It's just another part of the chorus asking to uniquely disarm capitalism in creative industries while maintaining it everywhere else. Which is fine, if you want creative endeavor to need to rely exclusively on patronage, but isn't fine if you don't.
There are a whole bunch of amateur sports that travel around like carnies. I saw some posters at the rink for a minor league women's hockey schedule, there's professional women's soccer, there are random things you can pay to go watch like lacrosse or semi-pro tennis or roller derby or MMA. Also, does professional athlete include the staff pros for tennis and golf at country clubs?
(73 -- My cousin who played, uncredited, on Blood on the Tracks has some opinions on this subject. He was paid, union scale I suppose. But the credit would have been worth a damn lot, I think.)
(( Not just passively playing along, either: http://www.today.com/id/4339751/site/todayshow/ns/today-entertainment/t/dylan-took-advice-guitarist-song/#.UT4bmjCsiSo ))
- My cousin who played, uncredited, on Blood on the Tracks has some opinions on this subject.
Right. The habits that help on the way up aren't necessarily the best behaviors once you've become successful. The story I was thinking of was from when he was playing folk clubs, before he had a record contract. But, befitting the larger topic, once you know that you can perform and get paid without having a band . . .
Interesting comment in the AMG review of Blood on the Tracks, "And, in a way, it's best that he was backed with studio musicians here, since the professional, understated backing lets the songs and emotion stand at the forefront."
I'm not sure what to make of that.
Do you have any idea about the extent of the government bureaucracy/rule enforcement needed to maintain property rights in real property? Have you considered the level of legal involvement necessary for even the simplest real property transaction? Probably not, but of course there is probably 100x, if not 1000x, more "government bureaucracy" devoted to policing and maintaining property rights in land, tenancies, mortgages, and other real property rights as there is to either patent or copyright, as well as thousands of times more work for lawyers in those areas.
That's not the point. Real property is very important stuff, and I'm have faith in the ability of lawyers can generate lots of work around important stuff. Here's the issue: if you went to the most primitive tribe on earth at any time in the last couple of thousand years you would find a well developed system for handling some form of real property rights. Even tribes with no government and no lawyers. What you would not find is a system for defining property rights in words out of somebody's mouth or ideas they had. Why? Because rights in real property are natural, they are exclusionary goods. Words and ideas aren't. The bureaucracy around IP is more an interference in ordinary human social life than a facilitation of it.
All the bureaucracy and rights arguments around real property are reflections of the complexity of our real economic arrangements, not an arbitrary bureaucratic choice on how to channel income toward stuff that isn't naturally a form of exclusive property.
(Yeah, I realize the above, like all natural/artificial distinctions, has its flaws, but it feels mostly right to me and since this is just a blog I'm running with it).
81 -- That sounds like the kind of journalism that is inspiring people to consume that which can be had for free, rather than that for which they must pay.
BTW, there were two different sets of sessions, in New York and Minneapolis. The NYers got credited and the Minnesotans didn't.
(That s, it's an insight/opinion for which no one is going to pay.)
I guess someone could do something similar for writing.
82 is also stunningly ignorant. Do you have any understanding of (a) what real property is or (b) how much of the current law of real property -- i.e., land -- is basically a modern invention? I'm going with "no." If you're going to proceed on a "mortgage liens and the rule against perpetuities" (both of which are fundamental to our current property system) are "natural" but an assigned property right in creation is not, you are basically just talking out of your ass, or more precisely just making up boundaries about what is "natural" property and what is not that are just stupid.
The NYers got credited and the Minnesotans didn't.
And hence our gigantic municipal inferiority complex about NYC.
Another reason that this is bad for journalism: if journalism requires significant parental support while one writes for free for years, then even as its easier and easier to produce and promote content, it's still a game only the very well off can play. That's already true, but I think it's getting worse when it could be better.
Qu'est-ce que la propriété?
My stereotypical 80s elementary school education tells me that Native Americans got screwed because their concept of land ownership didn't include permanent exclusive possession so the deals they made to "sell" land to Europeans were bogus.
What I feel we're losing in long-form journalism isn't writing. I worry that we're losing research; curiosity and muckraking and general finding-out. This is often speculative and requires travel and being able to go to boring meetings* during the workday, which rules out having most other jobs at the same time. It's also expensive and risks annoying advertisers, and city-paper journos I know were grumping that the papers were cutting real work in favor of lifestyle features *before* Craigslist cut them off at the knees. (Now a lot of the news research in that city is being done by neighborhood websites (boring meetings, reading prospectuses) and the alt-weeklies, each supported by ads for bars and escorts, AFAICT.)
Trivial to 81: [Current famous actor] told by producer that when Cary Grant! played a delivery boy in his first role, everyone could see he was a star! CFA: "Then he wasn't acting very well."
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Tomorrow's horror movie plot today!
Russian Scientists: Mysterious Bacterium Found In Antarctic Lake
MOSCOW (AP) -- Russian scientists say a new form of microbial life has been found in water samples taken from a giant freshwater lake hidden under kilometers of Antarctic ice. The scientists said in Monday's statement that the "unidentified and unclassified" bacterium has no relation to any of the existing bacterial types. Sergei Bulat and Valery Lukin said that extensive research of the microbe that was sealed under the ice for millions of years will be necessary to determine its characteristics. New samples of water retrieved from Lake Vostok are expected to be delivered to St. Petersburg in May aboard a Russian ship. The Russian team reached the surface of the subglacial lake in February 2012 after more than two decades of drilling, a major achievement hailed by scientists around the world.
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(That s, it's an insight/opinion for which no one is going to pay.)
Agreed but the standard for "reviews people will pay for" is pretty low. Have you looked at Entertainment Weekly? As you know, AMG reviews are generally pretty good.
CFA: "Then he wasn't acting very well."
Verisimilitude is not the only standard by which acting is judged (but the story is amusing).
I mean, the usual bullshit-economist claim about rights in real property that eventually commodify land is that they naturally evolve when there's a rise in value of land. That claim is wrong, but it's less completely wrong than the idea that the commodification of land is "natural."
if you went to the most primitive tribe on earth at any time in the last couple of thousand years you would find a well developed system for handling some form of real property rights. Even tribes with no government and no lawyers. What you would not find is a system for defining property rights in words out of somebody's mouth or ideas they had.
Not true. Many coastal tribes of the PNW have works with restrictions on who can perform and/or experience them.
82: I'm sure I have just as good an idea as you do. I'm not sure how you're getting from my saying that it's reasonable to make a distinction between real property and IP on the grounds that the physical nature of real property generates unavoidable conflicts to the idea that I think e.g. the MERS system is natural. Mortgage liens are a pretty reasonable adaptation to the idea that you are going to use real property as loan collateral, two groups cannot simultaneously use the property but one entity can use it to secure some money they gave the other to purchase it while the purchaser uses it. But that doesn't mean I have to approve of every crazy way Wall Street or some lawyer tries to further abstract a lien.
In contrast, property rights in IP are a very roundabout way to solve the straightforward question of how to reward a creator for doing some work. There are very straightforward ways to do that, like e.g. send the creator a check if people like his stuff. The property rights route is incredibly roundabout -- in order to enforce IP you have to go out there and forbid people from doing a whole bunch of stuff that they would naturally want to do and it would be economically rational to do, like reproducing the IP at the lowest possible costs or singing 'Happy Birthday' on a youtube video. That's a little different from working out a legal solution to the issue of having two people trying to use the same car at once, or whatever. All solutions to social problems have an artificial element, sure, so there's an arbitrariness in my formulation, but some are more artifical than others.
95: that's interesting. Are they religious limitations on traditional works (e.g. some works are part of initiation rites, etc.) or are they designed to somehow reward a particular creator?
68,88: The $100 creative credit doo-dah sounds like a mess in implementation, and also why shouldn't anyone not currently getting copyright simply declare themselves eligible and trade the credit with their neighbor?
Response pugnacious, why shouldn't everyone do some creative work? since the OP is implying we all do (without even mentioning fanfic).
Which is fine, but then the tax credit bureaucracy is extra useless. A higher minimum wage, a real 40-hour week, safer neighborhoods, public basic healthcare, and it would be much more reasonable that many of us would be artists or public gardeners or journalists in our spare time. Personally, I think serious amateurs are *more* willing to pay for the best work in their fields, since knowledge increases
appreciation, so we'd still support some professsionals.
95: Sure. And there are restrictions on re-creation of artistic goods that come from very early China (not to mention similar restrictions that come with very early printing in China). And restrictions in Islam granting only certain poets the right to recite their own work. The idea that there is some value in providing "ownership" of some sort in a work to its creator seems to be reasonably common throughout history. None of these are precisely similar to copyright, but neither are most land "ownership" regimes in the world very similar to our current one.
98: I don't think that question is well-formed for the PNW system. First, I don't know if they're more religious than works not so protected, and the line between culture and religion seems culturally determined to me. Second, I'm pretty sure they're usually inheritances, and again there's a cultural difference in whether we design for wealth held in a kinship group (who presumably know which individual member was a creator) or for rewards to individuals (who might leave it to their family, or not).
100. What? Early printing in China was imperial. The imperial household had lots of rights that no-one else did, including the right to ban and destroy creative or scientific work.
102 -- that's not exactly right in detail, but the broader point was that there was a conception of "ownership" of intangible creative works, as well as strict limitations on their dissemination.
What I feel we're losing in long-form journalism isn't writing. I worry that we're losing research; curiosity and muckraking and general finding-out.
This is right. People are willing to share opinions for free, doing research is different. The dystopian future will be 100 million op-ed columnists screaming at each other.
On the other hand, it is counterbalanced somewhat by a huge drop in the costs of certain kinds of data-based research -- the availability of statistical data must have improved by a couple of orders of magnitude. But shoe leather research is different.
There is a real live Freelancers Union, through which several people I know get health insurance. The founder, Sara Horowitz, was recently appointed to the board of the NY Fed. It's a nifty organization, whose beehivey subway ads should be familiar to the NYers.
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NMM to the NYC ban on large sugary drinks.
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106: So it died before it was truly born???
97 -- yawn. You're just assuming your conclusion, again, and it's nice to see the insane-making phrase "economically rational" in there. I mean, there are plenty of ways you can criticize the copyright system, but starting from the premise that certain kinds of property rights are more natural than others is not the way you want to get there.
Copyright provides a mechanism for enforceably commoditizing culture, just as our (incredibly extensive and intensive) system of property law provides a mechanism for enforceably commoditizing land. There are plenty of alternatives to commoditization in both realms, but, in the case of culture, if you're not going to treat it as a commodity you're going to need some form of either more-or-less direct state subsidy to the artist (which is what, e.g., the Baker system is), state ownership of the arts, or some form of patronage.
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Fuck insurance companies. I called to find out about seeing someone out of network (a therapist, because I am feeling juuuust across the line from "charmingly eccentric" these days) and they were like "hmmmm, gosh, couldn't tell you how much we cover!" And I was all "????????????????????????????" and they were all "depends what they bill for. It is all a great mystery." The rest basically consisted of
me: Thank you. You realize that this makes my insurance unusable, right?
person: I'm just the phone operator!
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64: option socialism is completely off the table
Really? I could have sworn the Republicans keep getting worked up about federal funding for the arts.
108 -- The poor guy didn't spend a semester trying to follow the differences between shifting and springing interests, or between remainders and reverters. Cut some slack.
(I've mentioned before, no doubt, that I represented a bank who's predecessor had loaned money to a fellow who had the remainder after his uncle's life estate. Nephew moved away and filed a Chapter 7 across the country. Then the uncle stopped paying property taxes [but refused to die]. Then a new bank took over the old bank, and purged loan records for loans that weren't doing anything. And got rid of everyone who knew anything [about, seemingly, anything].)
Fuck insurance companies.
Three words that inspire comity pretty much any time they are uttered. Best of luck.
I have enormous sympathy for the smart, talented journalists I know who are getting crunched between the gears of a machine that nobody can really define or predict. Similarly, I agree wholeheartedly that there is a systemic bias in favor of writers who have a family safety net and the problem is getting significantly worse.
That said, I'd be lying if I said I weren't pleased that the same grinding of gears has *also* allowed me to bypass some of the most incompetent and mendacious journalistic gatekeepers and get accurate information out to readers who can check my data themselves.
109- We had this with our dental insurance, the doctor basically has to send them a mock bill or quote or whatever then they'll tell the doctor how much they'll reimburse then the doctor will tell you and if you decide to do it the doctor does it all over again but for realz. Because efficiency of the free market!
Above all, though, every argument on this topic inspires teeth-grinding because of the literally hundreds of e-mails and letters I have sent in the last ten years giving specific, inexpensive, responsive advice* to handwriting articles by editors and journalists alike. Ahem: maybe you'd be getting your butts kicked less if you weren't resolutely ignoring customer** feedback.
*Make your website searchable by newspaper headline. Make it possible for me to subscribe to (or at least search for) all articles by a specific reporter. Link to prior coverage of the same topic. Stop creating temporary links to big, ongoing projects. Stop using dynamic links and frames that make it impossible for me to link to your content. and on and on and on and on and on.
**I know their customers are their advertisers, but if the reader eyeballs aren't there, the advertisers WILL go away.
109: I'm with you. I just paid $975.00 for an MRI that to all appearances was fully covered by my insurance but which they somehow managed to sneak out of paying (mostly - they covered some little bit of it).
I think I bitched here about how my insurance covers 100% of the cost for a colonoscopy *unless* they find something, in which case it's only 80%.
Also I hope you return to the right side of the charming eccentricity line soon.
116.last Thankfully, therapists aren't allowed* to say "actually, you passed that line miles back and are just nuts."
*by market forces
Also I think I maybe feel like an asshole for kvetching about this vis-a-vis a tune-up with the head shrinker when other folks are getting shafted for an MRI &c.
Nah, don't sweat it. There's plenty of room in the evil bucket for everybody's terrible stories from the Greatest Healthcare System in the World.
Speaking of long-form journalism, I finally read this Washington Monthly article about the rule-making process and the difficulty of implementing Dodd-Frank. Long, but very interesting and worth reading.
For example (emphasis mine):
Questionable judicial behavior aside, the Business Roundtable decision marked "the culmination of a trend empowering regulated entities to strike down regulations almost at will," wrote Bruce Kraus, a former counsel at the SEC, in a subsequent report. For one, it established an inherent bias--reformers cannot, after all, challenge a rule in court to make it stronger. For another, it opened up the floodgates for future suits. If two of the industry's most powerful organizations could sue the SEC and overturn a rule on such grounds, it was suddenly feasible for industry groups to sue any agency and overturn any new Dodd-Frank rule using the same arguments.
120 - That's a really great article, and one that everyone should read.
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I never thought anything of your criticisms of Measure B, Halford, but now that I see its backers are capable of something this petty I'm tempted to take a fresh look.
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I think maybe you're thinking of someone else? IIRC, I didn't know much about the measure, but put it up to the blog to decide how to vote on that one, eventually deciding to vote "no" (although it passed).
Anyhow, moving public health services into the City is insane.
Oh, it must have been someone else on the side of the Establishment.
The porn establishment? Like how Ron Jeremy and Jenna Jameson shuttle seamlessly back and forth between their endowed chairs at Harvard, positions at Goldman Sachs, and stints as political appointees in charge of important federal agencies?
120: A regular Unfogged commenter is quoted twice in that article!
105: Freelancers is perfectly good insurance if for some reason you want (i) a lot of puzzled looks from medical office people who have never heard of it and (ii) a little notice/bill after each office visit reminding you that Freelancers covers squat, even if you opt for the most expensive plan available.
64
My take on these issues is always the same. You have three, and really only three, ways of financing creative expression. Copyright, which turns it into a profitable commodity product, Socialism, ie government financing, or Patronage, including wealthy amateurs doing it for free and otherwise independently wealthy organizations doing it to push an agenda. ...
So how do wikipedia or linux fit into this? Seems like there are more possibilities.
It's a good article. I don't find Judge Wilkins' decision on the position rule as shockingly deficient as the author presents it: this is a complicated statutory scheme, and Congress can have written the thing more clearly. And having the deciding vote at the commission more or less say 'I think this is dumb, but we don't have any choice but to do it' is pretty unhelpful once a court decides that maybe there was a choice after all.
Otherwise, yes, the DC Circuit situation is very very bad. A direct consequence (I say yet again, because it's still true) of certain failures of understanding in advance of the 2000 election.
133 -- I view work by hobbyists who have enough independent income to do work on the side as basically a form of patronage -- the equivalent of wealthy amateur artists.
Batman, something, something, Wayne.
Beg to differ with 84. I think there's something to the argument -- the band on Blood on the Tracks is much less raucous than The Band (not quite yet, but almost) on Blonde on Blonde. To me, the tracks on Tracks showcase Dylan in a singer-songwriter way that gets a little pushed back by Blonde on Blonde's long awesome party. I couldn't pick a favorite between them -- it's probably Blood in my heart but Blonde in my pants.
Sorry, that went off the tracks at the end there.
17.last: The Alexis Madrigal response at the Atlantic is really pretty fascinating.
I hadn't been fully aware of the trend toward expecting writers to work for free (at for-profit magazines), so this whole dust-up has been enlightening. For the first time I begin to see why a subscription requirement for online publications is not a wholly annoying idea. Of course, if I were to pay a subscription fee to, say, the Atlantic or New Republic, I'd expect them to stop coughing up dreck as often as they do.
I've just remembered: didn't Andrew Sullivan recently go independent, and subscription based? Wonder how that's going.
Hm, I think I would probably pay some subscription fee for the Washington Monthly.
Wikipedia's another story but people make money off of Linux and other open-source stuff. (But lots isn't profit making, of course.) As far as I know - and many people here would know more - the money comes from service, support, hosting, customized installations, etc.
140 cont'd: Huh, I just got to Madrigal's mention of Sullivan:
And if you think it is the ad-supported model, look at how Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish is doing. They are going to support a staff of five with the money they collect.
What does that mean? That they're dinky? Madrigal is losing me here and there.
re: 141
Yeah. Some of my/our current projects pay fairly hefty sums to open source providers for training, customisation, and support. It's a service like any other.
I assume TPM like everyone else still has unpaid internships, but they actually seem to have converted some former internesque job duties into actual paying work. Not necessarily long-term, but with some money. They've been ad-supported a long time, but I think they got investor money a few years back. And now they have that Prime thingy, though I'm not sure if you get any articles for Prime at this point - seems like it's mostly "exclusive" chats with people.
135
133 -- I view work by hobbyists who have enough independent income to do work on the side as basically a form of patronage -- the equivalent of wealthy amateur artists.
Well except they aren't wealthy.
TPM's ads seem pretty hefty, that is, they're remarkably targeted. I use ad-block here at home, but not at work, and I'm often surprised that the TPM ads are so on-the-mark. I see ads for book-related sites, and eBay, and a couple of other places we've frequented on the work computer. They're not fooling around. The result, much as I'm surprised to hear myself say it, is that the ads don't register as invasive or off-putting. Though they do also show me ads for high-end furniture and clothing. Which are still tasteful, so they've got my number!
I get the impression that the Prime thing isn't doing so well; at least, they sure do flog it a lot, which I'd figure they're doing in order to make you feel like you're missing something.
The biggest problem with TPM, if you ask me*, is that they basically shut down over the weekend.
* I know you didn't.
Is the person who comments here under the pseudonym "Awl" related to The Awl website?
Apparently, there is no analogy ban at the Atlantic, where Alexis Madrigal wrote this, which I liked:
Furthermore, looking at the numbers teaches you about the social reality of the Internet. In a very real sense, unless you look at the numbers, you do not know what (the dynamic sociotechnical space that is) the Internet looks like. Your view lets you see its boulevards and parks, but it is like a photograph from the 1850s when the exposure times were too long to capture moving people. Your Paris is empty.
re: 149
[Not really, but ...]
http://www.alexeytitarenko.com/city17.html
http://www.alexeytitarenko.com/city2.html
http://www.alexeytitarenko.com/city1.html
[He doesn't make the exposures quite long enough to make disappear, so the effect is pretty striking]
I'm glad clew pointed out the Northwest Coast tribes and their highly elaborated system of intellectual property rights (which also includes names, btw). In addition they also had an equally developed system of property rights in physical wealth, and I think something similar with land rights but at the level of social groups higher than the individual. They were complex hunter-gatherers too. Really fascinating societies, and extremely different from the stereotypical image of Native Americans that most Americans hold.
If Sifu had a quarter for every time he made me smile, he could ironically preach the virtues of the simple, de-materialized life.
150, those are great. Some sort of horror fog, which is fair enough.
So this might get awkward. The woman with whom I just went out on a date to the Frightened Rabbit concert turns out to live literally two buildings away from me.
Goddamnit, I meant to put a || , |> there. Oops. Sorry.
*Catching up on thread.*
Well, maybe; it means that I'll have to actually figure out how to express my desires, and their limits, which is not something I'm very good at. We had a lovely time at the concert, and were very enjoyably kissing and making out, but I really don't see this becoming a committed exclusive relationship, to put it bluntly.
it means that I'll have to actually figure out how to express my desires, and their limits, which is not something I'm very good at.
Oh man, I know that feeling, and I sympathize.
We had a lovely time at the concert, and were very enjoyably kissing and making out, but I really don't see this becoming a committed exclusive relationship, to put it bluntly.
Because you're not that into her specifically, or because you're not interested in such a relationship in general right now?
Both, but especially the former. My ideal would be a non-exclusive relationship, but--as with my last serious one--I'd probably be willing to compromise on that for the right person.
In any case, I'll see her again for movie-watching in a few days. And the other person I recently had a date with, next weekend. It's been a strange week.
Well, at least it's been strange in a good way (I assume).
Very much so. And now I should go to bed and let this thread get back to ... whatever it was about.
Unfogged After Dark is too tired to deal with petty matters of the heart after a long night spent advising essear, apparently.
When I expressed an earnest wish for his remarks on Italy, Johnson said, 'I do not see that I could make a book upon Italy; yet I should be glad to get two hundred pounds, or five hundred pounds, by such a work.' This shewed both that a journal of his Tour upon the Continent was not wholly out of his contemplation, and that he uniformly adhered to that strange opinion, which his indolent disposition made him utter: 'No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.' Numerous instances to refute this will occur to all who are versed in the history of literature.
10
Ta-Nehisi is much more positive about wrting for free than you give him credit for. ...
I agree with this. He does say at the end that writers should be paid for their work but most of the piece is about how grateful he was for the opportunity to write for exposure and how it helped his career.
As for journalism in general while it is too bad that some journalists can no longer make a good living (in the same way that it is too bad that some people no longer have jobs developing film) I don't see any great loss to society. It seems to me that on balance the internet has made information about just about anything vastly more accessible.
140: Sullivan has gone to a partial subscription model where you get the short bits for free and if you want to read all of the long form pieces you have to pay. I'm tempted to pay up because he's got some interesting things to say, but I'm also kind of lazy about actually picking up the credit card.
168: I'm still waffling. I read it, so I should contribute... but I'm reading it less, due to both other time-killers and practical problems with the new format, for example I don't like the infinite scrolling... but I want to make this business model viable, for all the reasons we're talking about here... but if I'm going to support this kind of thing plenty of people need help more than him, and besides, collective action problems...
By now I've already put more thought into it than a $20/year expense deserves.
For my part, I have had multiple of your editors tell me upon our first communications, "We unfortunately do not have money to pay you." Not that you prefer not to pay writers if you are not forced to, but that you actually have no budget. This is a common and amusingly transparent negotiation tactic, usually delivered by a doe-eyed newbie editor who may in fact believe it. It is galling - The Atlantic maintains Class A office space in one of the most prestigious buildings in the world, a gorgeous setting overlooking the Potomac from the Watergate Building, but it claims that it hasn't got any money at all to pay its contributing writers.
I like that guy.
More from Ta-Nehisi Coates.