Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

Dan Bricklin has posted a nuanced analysis of how artists do, can and should get paid for their work. Dan puts the transaction/commerce side of it within an entire "ecosystem." This leads him to criticize the current talk about Digital Rights Management:

The freeform of a variety and a mixture of funding models, and the benefits of unintended free release, are part of what makes things work with art and society. Responding to opportunities that present themselves requires flexibility. The DRM systems we hear about today are rigid procrustean beds that could kill this ecology. They are wedded to narrow, simplistic business models, dominated by large publishing businesses.

He concludes:

Listening to representatives from the recording and movie industries, you would think that selling fixed artifacts is the only way that artists can get paid. That has never been the case, and should not be in the future or else society and art itself will suffer. Those publishing businesses may be based on that one form of payment, but the artists' livelihood need not.