In a digital world where making copies of artistic productions costs nothing, how can artists make money? What are the alternatives to totalitarian control over copying technology? One excellent business model is the Digital Art Auction, which sets a fair market price for the good before it is released into the wild. This is a good fit for open source projects, which have to be freely distributable after release, but which may never reach completion without adequate funding. There is an awesome site in development right now called Openware Games, which will support the production of open source computer games using the Digital Art Auction business model! I can’t wait for this site to really get rolling…

There is also the wonderful Magnatune of course. (They are not evil.) The founder John Buckman just started a Magnatune weblog, which looks like it will be good reading. I’m adding it to my Bloglines subscriptions at least John’s latest post demonstrates the refreshing logic of free culture, in the face of the dinosaurian psychology of a major label executive. I’d like to think that John’s wife Jan made that executive rethink his position a little bit, but I fear that the old guard may be too set in their ways to truly change their minds. Then again, IBM is now a major force behind Linux, who would have thought? Once upon a time, they were the evil empire! Sane executives can’t argue with a winning business model. Unfortunately, the business world is not completely sane. Fortunately, those who cannot evolve and deal with reality will die off… unless they manage to prop themselves up with monopoly power and bad laws. Bad laws! Bad!

This entry was posted on Monday, March 15th, 2004 at 2:37 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.