You know what would rock even more? If we could have both music and movies and and all the other art that we can spread across the world to everyone with a computer virtually for free as well as having the poor artists not starving.

An it would totally rock if everyone had access to all digitalized culture legally, so one wouldn't have to feel bad or fear a one in a million chance of personal economic disaster.

And we can. All it takes is a little socialism. Let the people decide what they like by downloading stuff and give those artists a living wage paid for with taxes.

(Another solution, even easier to administer, would be basic income http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_guarantee [wikipedia.org] )

Anyway... Socialism FTW and fuck you and the horse you rode in on. Peace.

Since it's Sunday, and I have nothing better to do. Let me humor you with a long reply.

Yes, it would be great if we can have everything free. That's called the Star Trek economy [wikipedia.org]. Once we have production-grade replicators or nth-generation Repraps [reprap.org], that will become a reality, indistinguishable from magic. Now, if all that we need to manufacture something is the work to haul some amorphous lump of matter and dump it into the replicator, then the value of money degrades to that of a household chores bribe: Hey, Junior, can you fetch me some dirt from the back yard. I promise, I'll drive you to the ballgame this Sunday.

That's it, as far as goods that we can hold in our hands are concerned. We're not yet at the Star Trek level as far as physical objects are concerned. Every single iPhone or Prius has to go through some form of manual intervention, a worker who has to assemble the bits and bolts. You can't just download the blueprint for a laptop and feed the binary data to any of today's state-of-the-art 3D printers. And even if you can, you still need special materials that you can't ask Junior to fetch from your back yard.

On the other hand, duplicating an eBook or an Mp3 is as easy as typing "cp *mp3 /media/My_Copy" or simply plugging in your iPod Touch and clicking the appropriate prompt button. As far as digital goods and objects are concerned, we are already at the Star Trek level. So the work needed to product a piece of music is limited to the very act of making the actual recording, not the reproduction. Once the master has been made, endless copies can be made.

So, I'm sure you'll ask, who'll pay for the initial step? Those hungry for novelty and innovation. If nobody wants to pay to hear a new version of the Goldberg Variations, then we're stuck to listening to the old recordings by, say, Glenn Gould, or until some bored amateur decides to record and foist on us her atonal version of Bach.

Don't underestimate boredom as a motive for innovation and progress. It's what made Wikipedia the dominant source of information in the Internet, millions of bored users deciding to contribute their little tidbits of information.

Yes, Wikipedia still needs money to operate its servers. But that is minuscule compared to the quantity of "free" editing and writing work contributed by bored users, trolls, and government agents. We don't pay for the pizza but for the pizza delivery.

As far as copyrighted works are concerned, history shows people are quite content with working for free on their own already.

Well, not *everyone*, but losing Lady GaGa and Justin Bieber ain't no big loss anyways, all the good music is indie in any case.