Somehow you don’t discuss at all the argument I made—that without having the practical option to sell it, people that make commercial-level goods might end up offering them to the public freely—and yet you list an irrelevant criterion (that these goods must not be superior) which must be satisfied for it to “make sense”.
People that make something sellable very often want to sell it.
If they don’t have that option, some people may not create this sellable thing in the first place—other people however may however make it and offer it to the world for free (as is done with fanvid/fanfics and all these other non-sellable things).
Especially if this currently-sellable thing is superior, the former case is a loss for humanity, and the latter is a gain. But do you have data to indicate that cases of the former will outweigh/outnumber the latter?
I didn’t mean to avoid your argument. You’re of course correct, people who don’t have the option of making something sellable might create free things to give away. Or they might not create the thing at all.
To my mind, if the result of eliminating that option is that equally good stuff gets created and distributed for free, that’s a win (all else being equal). Conversely, if the result is that there’s less good stuff created, that’s a lose (all else being equal).
I can’t tell if you’re actually claiming that the result will be the former. I’m skeptical, myself. But no, I don’t have any data I expect you to find convincing. Mostly, I find convincing the number of hours of work I see around me explicitly devoted to doing things in order to earn money, from which I infer that without a profit motive a lot of that work (and the associated things) would not get done. But I don’t expect that to be a new datum for you, any more than the existence of wikipedia is a new datum for me, so I don’t expect it to convince you.
Somehow you don’t discuss at all the argument I made—that without having the practical option to sell it, people that make commercial-level goods might end up offering them to the public freely—and yet you list an irrelevant criterion (that these goods must not be superior) which must be satisfied for it to “make sense”.
People that make something sellable very often want to sell it.
If they don’t have that option, some people may not create this sellable thing in the first place—other people however may however make it and offer it to the world for free (as is done with fanvid/fanfics and all these other non-sellable things).
Especially if this currently-sellable thing is superior, the former case is a loss for humanity, and the latter is a gain. But do you have data to indicate that cases of the former will outweigh/outnumber the latter?
I didn’t mean to avoid your argument. You’re of course correct, people who don’t have the option of making something sellable might create free things to give away. Or they might not create the thing at all.
To my mind, if the result of eliminating that option is that equally good stuff gets created and distributed for free, that’s a win (all else being equal). Conversely, if the result is that there’s less good stuff created, that’s a lose (all else being equal).
I can’t tell if you’re actually claiming that the result will be the former. I’m skeptical, myself. But no, I don’t have any data I expect you to find convincing. Mostly, I find convincing the number of hours of work I see around me explicitly devoted to doing things in order to earn money, from which I infer that without a profit motive a lot of that work (and the associated things) would not get done. But I don’t expect that to be a new datum for you, any more than the existence of wikipedia is a new datum for me, so I don’t expect it to convince you.