Economics/Geekonomics

I said last column that among the groups participating in the media Geekonomy (Fans, Support, and Creators) that they're all in conflict because they want to get the most they can with comparatively little thought of the future – in short, of sustainability.  I referred to this as a kind of Extraction economy – the goal is to get the most of what you can out of a given source of resources.

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INTRODUCTION: Reviewing the stories of last week, issues of media, ownership, and more were big.  There were talks about scanilations and author income, of game companies and resold games.  Last week brought to light a simple fact – today there is a lot of unease, turning into outright hostility, between the consumers, creators, and distributors of media.  My goal is to analyze that situation and look at possible solutions because it affects the geekonomy, and because it's hard for me to shut up about my opinions.

In this and the upcoming posts I will be covering a lot of ground, clearly missing things or generalizing.  Forgive such issues – this is a complex issue.

There's an odd undercurrent of hostility in the media marketplace.  You can hear it in conversations, where discussions of casual downloads might include a snide remark about how much DVDs cost.  You see it in the news, where strange lawsuits are brought against people for what appear to be trivial reasons.  You feel it when an author discusses the craziness of the media market place and how they're concerned about being paid – or how angry they are at a publisher or a downloader.  There's something that seems broken out there in the world of the media marketplace – and thus, part of the Geekonomy.

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