automaticdoor75

I read a lot of Harlan Ellison (worked on The Outer Limits, 80's Twilight Zone, Babylon 5), and I was wondering what people thought of this quote from him:

[S]cience fiction is the only 100% hopeful fiction. That is to say, inherent in the form is, "There will be a tomorrow". If you read a science fiction story, it says, "This will happen tomorrow". Now that’s very positive, that’s very pragmatic, "We’ll be here tomorrow. We may be unhappy, we may be all living like maggots, but we’ll be here." So that means it’s 100% positive.

Ellison has even said that his short story I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream is optimistic, because in the climax, there is still room for self-sacrifice and defiance to authority.

I guess it comes down to whether you think a bleak future is better than no future at all.

Shameless plug for my work if you like Ellison or want to learn more: https://ndhfilms.com/ellison

The Chaos of Heat is a crime story as unrelenting as the heat wave described in its vivid prose. It follows a man who, wracked by heroin addiction, finds himself at the front of a dangerous robbery spree. Will Vince survive long enough to get his next fix, or is he little more than shark bait, out of his depth?

An interview with Sefton Eisenhart, author of the new crime story The Chaos of Heat I asked him about what he enjoys reading, his writing setup, fanzines, and the authors who inspire him.

I am trying to understand an idea that Richard Stallman proposed to promote music "in the age of computer networking." This is from an article titled Ending the War on Sharing: https://stallman.org/articles/end-war-on-sharing.html

We could support musical artists with public funds distributed directly to them in proportion to the cube root of their popularity. Using the cube root means that if superstar A is 1000 times as popular as skilled artist B, A will get 10 times as much of the tax funds as B. This way of dividing the money is an efficient way to promote a broad diversity of music.

The law should ensure that record companies cannot confiscate these funds from the artists, since experience shows they will try. To speak of "compensating" the "rights holder" is a veiled way of proposing to give most of the money to the record companies in the name of the artists.

These funds could come from the general budget, or from a special tax on something vaguely correlated with listening to music, such as blank disks or Internet connectivity. Either way would do the job.

What I'm having trouble understanding is whether the artist (musicians in this case) is getting paid per-listen, or if they are getting paid as a percentage of the total fund.

Is the idea that if an artist was responsible for 8% of the songs played on a platform, they would get 2% of the funding?

Has anyone else read about this idea? I wish it had been explained a bit better.

EDIT: I emailed RMS and he replied. Here is how the cube root system would work. I have labeled the quotes for clarity:

RMS: I am assuming a program managed by the state, which measures the popularity of each musician and distributes a certain pool of money among them.

auomaticdoor75: Let's use a very simple example: let's say there's a treasury that will pay out $10,000 to three different artists. Artist A was responsible for 67% of the songs played on the platform, Artist B was responsible for 20% of the songs played, and Artist C was responsible for 13% of the songs played. Using your cube-root idea, how much money would each artist receive?

RMS: The cube roots are 0.8750340239643772, 0.584803579016074, 0.5065797363612384 Add them and you get 1.9664173393416897.

The A gets (/ 0.8750340239643772 1.9664173393416897) = 0.444988968749288 of the total.

B gets (/ 0.584803579016074 1.9664173393416897) = 0.29739545482845087 of the total.

C gets (/ 0.5065797363612384 1.9664173393416897) = 0.2576155764222611 of the total.

I do not say that the cube root is the perfect function to use. It gives an example of how such a system can work. A different function might be better.

So, it seems like you find the cube root of each person's percentage of the web traffic, divided by the sum of all the cube roots. The resulting quotient is that person's share of the treasury.