A Massive Essay On The Concept Of Free

Just kidding! It's still summer. I'm not going to bore anyone with a long essay on the pay-model vs. free-model debate and all its various business and cultural permutations, even though the massive set of cascading issues flared up over the weekend via comments by Mark Waid at the Harveys and a privately-directed rebuttal by Sergio Aragones. Not while there are matinee movies to see and rivers to tumble down in one's inner tube. If you want to read around on the matter, though, let me suggest a few things.

* first of all, to my reading Sergio's criticism wasn't as much an indictment of the various give-it-away-for-free models in and of themselves but a warning as to the ramifications of such models for the wider industry in which they continue to take hold. You can't just point at a list of people making money that way and saying, "See? It works! Sit down, you appealing yet clearly fearful-of-the-future giant of our industry!" It's a different argument. To pretend there are no ramifications to the introduction of a new set of reward models seems to me as dubious as pretending that there aren't people seeing varying levels of success with said models.

* second, we're working from a lot of incomplete information. The things we don't know about these new models -- how many people can sustain themselves that way, how much they're dependent on pushing against pay-for models, what the expectations are for top earners over time -- may outweigh what we do know. This uncertainty provides rhetorical benefits to both sides, incidentally. There's also a lack of information about where the money goes in a lot of the long-existing models.

* third, I think it's perfectly reasonable to decide that the extremists on both ends of protection/free arguments are douchebags, that Superman and Mickey Mouse should have fallen back into the public domain around noon yesterday but that those people that scan entire comics and put them up on-line should be discouraged and dissuaded. Beware anyone who brings 2002 Internet argumentation confidence to these issues on one side or the other.

* fourth, beware overvaluing the inevitability argument. Some things are inevitable, other aren't, and most things develop from a combination of the actual inevitable things about them and the choices made by people one way or the other. If what seemed inevitable were always so, comic books would have ceased to exist three times between 1958 and now.

* fifth, please keep in mind creators rights elements to this discussion. If you believe that creators have the ultimate right to decide how to conduct business on their own behalf, and this right to self-direction should be honored, you get rid of a lot of the dorm-room presumption that comes from what I consider a warped view of the primacy of consumerism.
 
posted 11:30 am PST | Permalink
 

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