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Notes -
What part of
makes it sound like I'm trying to strike at the heart of capitalism?
This sort of demonstrates my point about 'being allergic to the discussion', whenever you talk about this stuff people assume the old battle lines are in effect and that those must be the 'sides' we're arguing for.
Capitalism (well, free markets) is great in general, I'm just saying it doesn't deal with abundance well because it evolved to handle the distribution of scarce resources. You shouldn't expect it to handle the distribution of post-scarcity goods well, that's not a thing that even existed when it was being formed!
Like I said, capitalism's solution to post-need goods is to impose artificial scarcity; IP laws are one of the ways that this artificial scarcity gets imposed. The fact that without that imposition, capitalism can't incentivize the creation of those goods and they stop existing, is very much a part of my point: that capitalism doesn't have a good solution to this situation.
The real issue here is how to incentivize creation without artificial scarcity.
In theory, the makers of a great game don't care whether they make $50M and a million people play their game, or they make $50M and billion people play their game.
There must be some way for society to get them that $50M without telling those 999 million people they're not allowed to play it. We're not so stupid that this is physically impossible for us to accomplish.
We just have to talk about it and figure it out.
People assume this because you invoked capitalism for no gain whatsoever. As I've said elsewhere this discussion has happened before with no reference to fundamental economic systems.
It's not capitalism or markets that doesn't have a solution to this, it's a atomic property of this type of thing. There is no natural solution it's hacks and kludges all the way down.
Right, and somethings like price discrimination try to get at this but it's messy. The problem is the same mechanism we use to determine the value of the game is inherent to the scarcity. Something like a government buyout price could be interesting, a studio could opt to sell their languishing IPs straight to the state for some reasonable multiple of the cash earned to date but that's got it's own issues. Again, I'm really not opposed to tweaking the systems in play.
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