Comrades, the time has come for communism. Well, not full scale communism, just digital communism, and I'm not talking about not giving profits to people who create intellectual capital, just the 'to each by their needs' part. Capitalism is based on the principle that the greed incentive will produce the most wealth for the most people, but digital property can be recreated so easily that the digital part of it costs about what air does. The trick then, is to create a structure that still encourages people to create content, by compensating them for how many people use their product (a rough gauge of it's contribution to society) while delivering it to anyone who wants to use it.

I know the recording industry is looking into adding a fee to broadband to allow unlimited access, but this fee will be regressive unless we benchmark it. Worse, it will likely push the price of broadband up unacceptably while preserving the profits for dinosaur organizations who don't realize that they are obsolete (except maybe for managing tours and promotions, but what business would say 'We'll work with you and help you make more money in market B (touring) in exchange for a cut of your profits in market A (recorded albums)' and expect anyone to sign up?

We need a tax. I know, the dreaded T word. Actually, a fee. It needs to collect roughly the amount of money that all sales of intellectual properties collect, minus what they can reasonably collect in ad revenue. It needs to be a progressive tax, and then we need to figure out a formula for giving it back to the people creating intellectual properties based on the value (not just economic but social) their product creates. Then we need to let everyone have access to whatever intellectual property they want for free. We already pay money to industries. This tax will replace those costs. Yes, there will be some inefficiency because the government will get involved, but that should be the only extra cost, and when you consider that almost instantly everyone will have access to every movie ever made, every song ever recorded and every piece of productivity software ever designed it's a small price to pay.

Then every-one will be poor and eventually we all will have to go back to DOS

The problem with that is that without a market to show what's popular and what's not you have the government paying Joe who's terrible open-mike night guitar makes your ears bleed. Not only that, but people with talent don't make more money for doing something more interesting in most government schemes. Good work is not rewarded.

The recording companies are famously terrible in their business dealings - look back at artists like David Bowie that were screwed by their managers, usually fed drugs and a trickle of what their music was actually earning (though Bowie regained command of his music and is now FILTHY rich). Their attitude to consumers when Napster came out was the big failure; all they had to do back then was make deals with Napster for percentages. Instead they screwed around, and it took till Apple came along for anything viable to appear.

People WILL pay, it's just that people will only pay if it seems fair. We all know that CDs cost less than a dolar to make. Everyone realizes that when they buy a CD for $15 they are getting screwed, and when they feel like they have a choice of dealing with an arrogant business that conspires to set unreasonable prices (the RIAA is a cartel) or to steal from the same, what do you expect they'll do? All they had to do was bring they cost down to a reasonable amount - I think under $10 CDs would have sold very well. People also like control of things they buy, which is another thing that the record companies screwed up - selling DRM free MP3s cheaply should have been the model from the beginning.

Beyond all this, the copyright laws of today protect works too vigourosly and too far into the future. I say, 10 years after the death of the artist, no exceptions. It might be too bad for Mickey, but that's what we need in modern society.

You'd still have a market. Think of it like this. You have a grocery store. Everything is free. You still have a checkout to keep track of what is going out of the store. The cereal company and the lettuce grower still get paid. The thing is, they split their money based on how much of their product is taken out of the store. It's a set amount that the store has to divvy up so if there is a run on tomatoes people selling something else get a little less. The food is then paid for by a tax.

Obviously, with food, this doesn't really work, because it encourages people to take more than they need and food will rot, but with something that is electronic, what does it matter? If a song sits on a hard drive unplayed no one loses. It cost virtually nothing to distribute or store so it makes no difference if it goes unused. The artists get paid for how much people think they are going to use it (how often it is downloaded).

There are some technical hurdles. You have to figure out how to make sure Joe the tomato grower doesn't keep downloading tomatoes to drive up the share of money he gets, and you have to argue over what the total pool of money that the artists get paid is. You have to fund the reimbursement fund, but that should be just about at the level the free market does anyway. The artists get paid at roughly what they would before, but now everyone gets to access. Taxes go up a bit, but only by the same amount that total expenditures on digital material go down. Incentive stays in the system.

It's not like this hasn't been tried before, and I'm not talking about Russia. It's basically the same principal as a library, except the books are so cheap you don't have to return them.

What we have now is basically a private arrangement where people buy based on their desires, subsidized in part by advertising. In the case of downloaded intellectual property, you buy and you get. Prices seem pretty reasonable to me. Never before have a greater diversity of offering and greater access into the market by the creators of intellectual property been available.

Oligopolists, of course, would like to further commoditize access to the WWW itself to generate more profits. It would be a shame if we allowed them to succeed as it will restrict access as it increases their profits, but that wouldn't be half as bad as moving government in wholesale to mandate open free access to all intellectual property with the whole contrivance funded by taxes.

I'm confused. What benefit do you think comes from displacing a market delivery of service--with price and demand tied to one another, for a government operated information utility with the all potential for control and abuse by government itself? What is the benefit you seek?

In your original post you distinguish between the altruistic motives of socialism and the self-interested motives of capitalism, but the difference between the two systems isn't mostly a matter of motivations: The actual experienced differences are operational realities that distinguish the two far more than underlying intentions. Free markets respond quickly and directly to consumer demand. Socialism requires some authoritative decision-maker to recognize the demand and to authorize expenditure of finite government resources to accommodate it.

Even if the resource is as bountiful as electronically stored data, human nature always results in the authoritative decision-maker seeing it as finite and his job essentially as one of prioritizing: picking and choosing--to gate keep.

The actual experienced difference between the two systems is that one system usually works a heck of alot better than the other--and you are advocating "the other."

The most direct way of bringing to a consumer what he or she wants at the lowest price is through a market. When you put in place gatekeepers untied to markets, you create elites who become bottlenecks on distribution of intellectual, economic and social capital.

We don't need a revolution. We just need to keep an eye on greedy bastards looking to become the OPEC of the internet and to smite them with the cruelty of government involvement whenever they impose too heavily on free markets.

I recommend Louis Brandis' economics to you as an alternative to Vlad Lenin's.

The incentive system is what makes Capitalism work. My system preserves the incentive system.

Capitalism also controls access to to limited resources. Digital copies aren't a limited resource. (The bandwidth they are sent over may be, and the decision then is a cost benefit analysis on how much more revenue the country can make with subsidized internet than without it. We subsidize schools publicly with the idea that better trained workers will make more than enough more money over their lifetimes to pay for it with taxes.)

Capitalism's weakness is that it limits access to resources. Usually, the benefits outweigh this cost, but in the case of digital material the benefits Capitalism can be kept with the distribution of tax revenue and the full use of a resource that is not really limited.

Capitalism is not morally superior to Socialism, but it is better at lifting people out of poverty and managing limited resources. If you can separate the cost of intellectual effort used to create digital media (which certainly has value) from the 1's and 0's that can be given out for free (which would improve the quality of life (which is the only defensible value of Capitalism) or improve productivity then you should.

"Capitalism also controls access to to limited resources. Digital copies aren't a limited resource....Capitalism's weakness is that it limits access to resources"

The problem is that someone has to originate the "unlimited" resource that is digitally copied. Under the present system that party is entitled to impose an intellectual property right on the distribution: in effect saying to the consumer, "You pay and you get."

Under any tax supported plan some bureaucrat ends up displacing the consumer as the determiner of what content gets unlimited digitally reproduced. It is not a moral problem (as you might put it) that the originator of content get paid for their product. It is a practical problem when consumer judgment is displaced by some authority's preferences.

There are several options for paying the creators of intellectual content. You could do it based on the number of downloads or some other metric for how much it's being used. That way you keep the consumer judgment in the equation. Google already has a model you could use for this with pay per click advertising. You would have some fraud in the system, but the system already loses a lot to piracy.