Benjamin Spatz on 3 Aug 2000 14:32:16 -0000 |
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[Nettime-bold] Re: <nettime> copyright wanking |
What if all the songs were available for free through an agent like Napster, and that agent provided its dowload statistics to some government agency, which paid the artists according to how popular their music was? Obviously this is completely inconceivable at the moment, but I'm wondering if there are any theoretical reasons why it wouldn't work. Of course, it doesn't leave any room for artists who are doing important work that nobody likes, but capitalism isn't supposed to leave any room for that kind of work anyway. I realized that this essentially replaces the music companies with nonprofit organizations. I think this might be a good idea. In fact, the more abstract version of the question, I guess, is simply: Why aren't all corporations nonprofit? The leaders of nonprofit organizations still get paid lots of money, but never anything close to what Bill Gates type people make, I think. Why do we need for-profit corporations? -ben_ Benjamin Spatz bspatz@wesleyan.edu Box 5178 bspatz@bronze.lcs.mit.edu 222 Church st. Middletown, CT 06459 Cambridge, MA (860) 685-???? (617) 354-4330 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- "You don't have to have faith, as long as you never give up." _______________________________________________ Nettime-bold mailing list Nettime-bold@nettime.org http://www.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold