[Nettime-bold] Re: <nettime> Sounds like it could be handy

["Mr. Bad" <mr.bad@pigdog.org>]

>>>>> "KS" == Keith Sanborn <mrzero@panix.com> writes:

    KS> Dear Mr. Greed: Why would anyone WANT to re-sell the work? Why
    KS> not just point people to the url so they can get it for free?

Dear Mr. Zero,

All kinds of reasons. Say I run a small university theater in CA and
it costs me $3500 in electricity to stay open one night. I just want
to show a couple of those movies -- why is it so bad to charge $2/head
to defray costs?

Or if I put together a CD with some movie on it. I'm providing a
service to people who don't have the bandwidth to download movies. Why
can't I offset the few dollars' cost of that by charging people for
the CD?

Here's the deal: if the key is to get the movies to people, and not to
worry about who gets credit and who gets money, then it's stupid to
put a no-sale clause into the license. It's basically a selfish move
by the archivers -- "It would be NO FAIR TO US for you to make money
off of OUR WORK! So you CAN'T!" Gift culture is about GIVING, not
about FAIR.

This is the way Free Software works. You can't really charge for the
information itself, because nobody would pay -- they can just download
it off the Web. But if you're providing ancillary services like
getting the info to someone in another medium, then it makes sense
that you could sell the medium.

The cool thing is that it's usually so easy to do, that nobody can
really exploit the system -- if they try to, someone else will come
along and undercut them on price. Prices for Free Software CDs tend to
hover around the $2-5 price range.

~Mr. Bad

-- 
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