Replying to Avatar Gigi

No prisons, no limits.

It doesn't make sense to put a jpg or a blog post behind a paywall. If it's good, it will be available for free in no time. Someone will right-click save the thing, or take a screenshot, and send it around or republish it. Trying to fight that is stupid. Putting chunks of data behind prisons is stupid.

All data can be reproduced at zero marginal cost, leading to infinite supply. That's why market prices are ridiculous for blog posts, and why it's equally ridiculous to try to sell a single blog post. What you CAN sell is access to an exclusive club or community, as well as access to the author. That's what all Twitch/YouTube/OnlyFans have figured out. But make no mistake: they're not selling JPGs. They might sell early-access (in the case of OnlyFans) which is fair, but it's not selling a JPG as you would sell an apple. Early access because if the stuff is any good, it will be available for free to anyone everywhere.

Here's the thing: people love to support other people, so let them. No limits. The success of Patreon and Substack does not come from paywalls, but from the inherent willingness of people to support others. Lean into that. Let people give without limits.

Social signaling is important. Community is incredibly important too. Do that right, and we can 100x the whole space just like a switch from $50 per game to free-to-play 100x'd the gaming industry, selling cosmetics and social status only.

Computers are copying machines. Information yearns to be free. People want to support the stuff they love, and they're willing to pay for it. Not all people, but ~4% of them. And that is enough.

You say DRM strategies are stupid, ridiculous, and don't make sense. You demand no prisons, and no limits on the consumption of digital media.

However I haven't seen any explicit statement about whether DRM would still be bad if the strategies COULD work. You don't seem to say anything about whether the pervasiveness of piracy or the ease of creating unauthorized reproductions are good things.

You talk so much about the status quo for what is possible, but I don't see any explicit statement about rights. Why is that? Won't you say whether the original producers of a piece of digital media have any right to dictate who consumes it? Won't you say whether the consumers of a piece of digital media have every possible right to reproduce it and redistribute the reproductions? Are you even capable of giving a normative justification for a value-for-value paradigm?

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