[cc-community] Rcrd Lbl to offer CC and Free as in Beer Music

Terry Hancock hancock at anansispaceworks.com
Mon Nov 19 04:24:26 EST 2007


Greg London wrote:
> And I believe there is a fungibility to software that simply
> isn't present in works that are more "subjective art" in nature.
> I can't prove it.

I don't know if I can "prove" such a statement, but I can certainly
support it. This goes back to the division between works of "aesthetic
value" versus "utilitarian value" that I've proposed (rather than
"creative"/"utilitarian").

Aesthetically valued works are intrinsically non-fungible: if you have
two science fiction novels, that doesn't mean that one of them is
redundant. If you're an SF fan, you'll want to read both. That's because
you don't simply use the books to attain and end goal -- reading the
books IS the end goal.

OTOH, with software, you're looking for a tool to achieve a goal. If I
want to write a report, I need a word processing tool that has certain
features that make it easy for me to do that. I don't need or want two
of them -- thus if there is a proprietary one and a free one, I'm
completely free to chuck the proprietary one and use the free one,
because that's all I need. I don't feel deprived if I can't use the
proprietary one -- not so long as there is a free software program that
DOES the same thing.

Think how different that is from a book or a music recording -- if you
decide to abstain from proprietary music you're really cutting yourself
off from a huge body of cultural works. It doesn't matter that there are
also good free works -- you're still missing something.

In other words, if you only value a work for what it DOES, then you need
one such work, and any others are redundant (for you).

But if you value a work for what it IS, then that value persists -- you
can't just replace it with another similar work.

Consider a simple physical analog: if you want to loosen a bolt, you
need a wrench -- exactly one wrench, so long as it is of the right size.
Additional wrenches of that size are redundant.

But what if you *collect wrenches* as museum artifacts? THEN you value
each wrench for details of its provenance, design, forging
characteristics, etc.

Of course, the example shows that this is not truly a property of the
work, but of how you perceive the work, but as a generalization it works
quite well -- most digital works fall into one or the other category for
most people, with the alternate use case a bizarre niche (who really
collects wrenches!?)

This difference in valuation is the root of the economic problems with
broader adoption of free culture, IMHO.

Cheers,
Terry

-- 
Terry Hancock (hancock at AnansiSpaceworks.com)
Anansi Spaceworks http://www.AnansiSpaceworks.com



More information about the cc-community mailing list