Who is Luc Devroye

[oldnick]

I don't think that artists or anyone else deserves to be paid for their work

Using that same logic, I suppose that nobody really deserves to live, either.

digital works and physical property are fundamentally different in nature

How true. I saw an interview of a guy who had been waiting in line for over twenty-four hours to buy the iPhone 5. “I could have bought it online,” he opined, “but it's not the same thing.”

Duh. Doh.

[quadibloc]

@hrant:
But no amount of pedantic discussion by peons on a typographic forum is going to change that.

Before taking up arms to achieve change, though, it makes sense to think very carefully about what sort of change, if any, is desirable.

[hrant]

I'm all for thinking, planning. But when you know that a building is unlivable, you also know that it must come down, and postponing its destruction only prolongs misery. Trying to make this more on-topic and less fatalistic: I don't need to have a watertight plan for a post-chirographic world to be justified in bashing it.

hhp

[oldnick]

Hrant, you wacky iconoclast, you! Post-industrial, post-postmodern, post-chirogaphic: when will it end?

December 21st? Next Tuesday? The mind boggles…

Or, at least, MY mind does. WAAAAY too much coffee, I reckon…

[5star]

...when will it end?

post-end.

n.

[quadibloc]

@oldnick:
Using that same logic, I suppose that nobody really deserves to live, either.

Well, the wording of the poster you quoted began the process of confusing things.

The statement "Artists deserve to be paid for their work" (which I will refer to as X) has more than one meaning.

To say:

P: Artists should not have their work appropriated without compensation.

is not to say

Q: Artists are entitled to compensation for their creative work irrespective of whether or not there is any market demand for that work.

So when someone makes the ambiguous statement X in a context where it is clear that person is asserting P, for someone to say that, no, X is false, because Q is false... begins the process of creating confusion.

I think, though, that your post continued the process of getting things thoroughly confused.

An example of an opinion that avoids confusion might be:

Artists do deserve to live, and, like everyone else, they deserve to be free from interference in their efforts to live.

Thus, on the one hand, they do deserve protection from having their work appropriated without compensation.

On the other hand, if their work is not of interest to the market, the best they should expect from their right to live is to get welfare like anyone else, not to have the government support their art with tax dollars.

I'm not saying one has to agree with that opinion.

On the one hand, some Libertarians strongly support copyright laws, while followers of related political beliefs question where the authority to enact a copyright or patent law could come from (on the assumption that without a natural law right as its basis, such a law would be a government tax decree, not a protection against force or fraud).

On the other hand, non-Libertarians might see government patronage of the arts (but hopefully with some judgment of the quality of what is supported) as essential to a civilized society.

I'm not even claiming the opinion given as an example as my opinion; I'm just noting that here is how one can debate these issues while keeping them sorted from each other.

[dezcom]

Type designers should have a fair "opportunity" to
be paid fairly for their work.

They also should be able to give it away ONLY IF THEY CHOOSE TO.

They also should be protected from pirates, thieves, and profiteers who steal their work.

[abattis]

"I think that only used to be true in the past, and is now an outdated view; I think monopoly rights restrictions today tend to retard progress"

As Utah Philips said, the past didn't go anywhere. The fact that intellectual property laws have been hijacked by corporations doesn't mean that the original reasons why those laws came to be seen as a good idea have gone away. Indeed, today they are often the only thing standing between a creative individual and the uncompensated economic exploitation of his work by those same corporations.

The original reasons why those laws came to be seen as a good idea were from an age when authoring, publishing, and modifying published works required large capital expense. Global computer networks have removed that requirement. So if not abolished outright, then curtailing their duration seems to be a good idea to me - and not extended, and especially not retroactively.

If you want to do away with corporate monopoly rights restrictions, you need to come up with an alternative mechanism to prevent exploitation of individual creators.

The business value would shift from copies to production.

[oldnick]

Dave—

You are absolutely right. Forget about what I said about not being a Marxist. Death to Monopolistic Capitalist Pigs!

Well, maybe not Death: that seems a bit harsh, don't you think?

[oldnick]

Well, I CHOSE to give my fonts away for awhile, but profiteeers hot-linked to my metered site, and it cost be over $800 freaking dollars to GIVE stuff away IN ONE YEAR year, so—unsurprisingly—I suspended the practice.

And, John—

I did not mean to suggest that artists should be compensated merely for creating art: I am not a freaking Marxist, nor am I an Art Nazi. OTOH, if someone—through his or her creative efforts—adds a little joy or beauty to my otherwise lackluster existence, I have no problem ponying up so that he or she can eat or something. Sheesh.

And, by the way, I am currently negotiating a deal for Luc and the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia to divvy up the sixteen cartons of books that none of your chickensh*t bastards expressed an interest in. However, it's going to be a chore figuring out what Luc DOESN'T have in his "small collection"…

http://luc.devroye.org/lucbtype.html

[John Hudson]

Dave: The business value would shift from copies to production.

How? Will authors be paid some sum up front to produce novels? Paid by whom? On what basis would the sum be calculated? The commercial value of such creative works cannot be determined until they exist and are products in the market, then it is determined precisely by how many copies sell. If you make all copies free by making copying free, how is the value monetised? Copyright enables monetisation of copies, and hence of income to the author. The reduction in capital expense that you describe affects who may publish and how, which is a good thing, and reasonably should affect pricing -- as it very obviously has in the case of fonts --, but it doesn't change the situation of the author with regard to uncompensated exploitation of his work, including the exploitation of readers who want to enjoy what he has produced without paying him anything.

[quadibloc]

@John Hudson:
How? Will authors be paid some sum up front to produce novels? Paid by whom? On what basis would the sum be calculated?

While this business model would result in grossly inadequate compensation for creators, it is not quite as totally unworkable as your questions suggest.

After all, people do get paid for, say, preparing the masters for printing ruled ledger paper, despite the fact that anyone can do it, so one could imagine novelists being paid on the same basis.

Thus, a society that saw novels as merely a way to promote the sale of newsprint, and which was content to have only as many works of real artistic merit as people might, as an amateur pursuit, make and give away for free, might feel entirely content to have no copyright laws.

In Canada, once upon a time, while music could be copyrighted, musical works weren't eligible for royalties until something like ten or twenty years after they were first published. Thus, while composers of works of enduring merit would be rewarded, those who composed ditties that were mere passing fads would not be.

One could easily imagine the United States, at some time in the 1950s, deciding to adopt such a rule so as to destroy the music industry (this, of course, is before the RIAA had its lobbyists firmly in place) in order to save the nation's youth from the pernicious influences of that musical genre known as "rock and roll".

Sadly, artists and creators are not universally loved. But while musicians and composers are sometimes hated, the fate of type designers is more likely to be ignored and forgotten.

[Nick Shinn]

The original reasons why those laws came to be seen as a good idea were from an age when authoring, publishing, and modifying published works required large capital expense.

That’s true, up to a point, and not quite in the way that you intended.

Originally, copyright was maintained by royalty to prevent the spread of seditious ideas.
That monopoly, lack of competition, and small runs of dull books, kept prices high.
When copyright was redistributed to publishers in the 18th century, it created a boom in books by the early 19th century, with lower prices and mass readership.

See St Clair:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Reading-Nation-Romantic-Period/dp/052181006X

However, that was within countries. Internationally, there was no copyright!
The work of Charles Dickens, for instance, while protected in the UK, was pirated in the US, prior to the international agreements mid 19th century.

So the argument that the pre-digital international copyright paradigm established in the mid 19th century was favored because of the large investment required in authorship and publishing doesn’t make sense; it was political, driven by a sense of fair play. And Dickens’ celebrity advocacy.

In some ways, Dickens’ tour of the US was like a rock star today; he was making no money from book sales, although they had created his fame. He was selling tickets to speaking performances of his works, which he delivered with great drama.

[hrant]

BTW: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17017791

hhp

[oldnick]

So—Dickens happened to notice that Americans were a bunch of braying, pretentious, self-deluded idiots.

Duh: the man had an IQ of 185. We kindred spirits can relate…

[Richard Fink]

The bottom line is that the laws for physically distributed media aren't enforceable for digital media. (Or, at the very least, they are weakened to a point where they aren't much more than symbolic in strength.)

And that's that. Let's move on. We can wax about whether making a copy of something should or should not be a crime or not till we're blue in the face, but it won't make a difference.

Something like the level of protection for physical media in days of yore COULD be enforced for digital media but the costs - every kind of cost you can name - would be madly insane. And you would certainly have to kiss the First Amendment goodbye.
The bottom line here is that the polity doesn't want it. Strong copyright protection isn't wanted. It's not welcome. And you can preach about "good" content inevitably disappearing without protections till you're blue in the face from that, too, but it still won't make a difference.

To the topic: Luc's site is awesome. Always was. Font ugly or no.

[Nick Shinn]

Let's move on.

Feel free.

[quadibloc]

@Richard Fink:
Something like the level of protection for physical media in days of yore COULD be enforced for digital media but the costs - every kind of cost you can name - would be madly insane. And you would certainly have to kiss the First Amendment goodbye.

I realize that there is a lot of pirated stuff on the Internet, and that some of the measures used for combating this have been intrusive in nature.

Still, I don't think one can conclude that copyright is dead. A balance is still possible, even if Big Content isn't currently interested.

[oldnick]

The bottom line is that the laws for physically distributed media aren't enforceable for digital media

What part of UNIQUE SERIAL NUMBER, GLOBALLY TRACKABLE BY SPIDERS IN THE CLOUD do you not get?

And the “insane” costs? A Digital Rights Management fee paid automatically at point of sale to the copyright holder. What are we talking about here? A couple of insane cents to the payment processor?

BTW: which First Amendment are you referring to? The one that says everyone ought to be able to steal whatever they want? Jeez, man: get a clue, wouldya?

[quadibloc]

@oldnick:
What part of UNIQUE SERIAL NUMBER, GLOBALLY TRACKABLE BY SPIDERS IN THE CLOUD do you not get?

The trouble is, I feel tempted to say - what part of "And he caused all, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to have a mark on their right hand or on their foreheads: that no one might buy or sell except one who has the mark of the name of the Beast or the number of its name" don't you get?

Paranoia is something you have to consider here, even if watermarking is already a standard practice...