Creative Careers in the Post Copyright Era - Jason Rohrer, Game Designer

Since the recent copyright debate has focused on the medium of recorded music, only one solution has been widely discussed. Musicians will make money the way they currently make most of their money anyway: they will play live shows. Since it is impossible to make a copy of a live experience, let alone distribute copies of that experience in a free fashion, musicians will be able to make adequate livings without copyright. And, if you place this means of making a living on the reliability and productivity spectrums discussed earlier, it measures quite well: musicians are paid ahead of time (at the ticket booth) for doing immediate, productive work (rendering a live performance on stage). Also, the amount of money made from a live performance is tightly correlated with how many people benefit from that performance (in other words, how many people are in the audience).

However, this particular post-copyright "solution" leaves most other creators out in the cold. Programmers and book writers cannot give live performances, at least not performances that will sell many tickets. The same goes, in general, for painters, sculptors, photographers, and graphic artists. During the recent copyright debate, a catch-all solution has been proposed for non-musicians: donations. These creators will supposedly eke out livings post-copyright with the online equivalent of the tip jars commonly used by bar and street performers. Of course, the online equivalents will work better, since an online audience can be so much bigger than a bar or street audience (if just 1% of 1,000,000 visitors give a $1 donation, we have already started approaching a livable income for a year).

On the productivity spectrum, donations are not an ideal way to make a living, since new creators still do their primary productive work unpaid in hope of attracting donations after their works are released, while established creators attempt to live on the current streams of donations while they create their next works. And, I hardly need to mention how poorly donations measure in terms of reliability: just ask any street performer." Read More...