Re: Design principles and ethics

[Marcus Brinkmann]

At Thu, 4 May 2006 19:11:30 +0200,
Pierre THIERRY <address@hidden> wrote:
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> Scribit Marcus Brinkmann dies 04/05/2006 hora 15:13:
> > > Which leads to self-censorship, because an author cannot affort to
> > > write something his patron would not agree with.
> > This is not different at all from how self-censorship works today in
> > the media.  The patron is the editor, with the advertisers behind him.
> > Or, in the case of music, the label.
> 
> That cannot be really compared. There is a far larger number of editors
> available for this claim to stand.

This really depends on how you count, and what numbers you are
comparing.  Media concentration has sky-rocketed, however.

> And with the advent of purely digital communication, this will be even
> less and less true. An author will not need a distributor as such, but
> merely some service providers for the act of making the cultural product
> from his own work. That is, mixing and working the sound, typesetting
> text, and so on.

Of course the internet is a tool of liberation.  This is why it is
considered dangerous, and there is an enormous effort to kill the
possibilities you (and I) are seeing.

> > However, a patron (or equivalent) is not the only possible way to
> > sustain creative people that contribute to society.
> 
> What do you suggest?

This is really not my domain of expertise.  If you are looking for
references, there was a workshop and a number of talks about
alternative compensation systems at the Wizards of OS 3 conference
(http://wizards-of-os.org/index.php?id=722), where for example
statutory or voluntary levies have been discussed.  Others have
suggested micropayment.  At the larger scale, participatory economics
(Michael Albert) suggests how to address these concerns not only for
authors, but everybody in society.

This is getting increasingly off-topic, though.

Thanks,
Marcus