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New summary of why you should not make your hobby projects proprietary in order to get money. Answering the question of why someone should not expect to get rich off of fiction writing, for example.
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First of all, if you want to make money, you should find career skills that are wanted by the economy, not work the other way around and try to make people want to pay for your interest.
- Your interest might be over-specialized and in general not wanted by the economy, so unless you can prove yourself an exception, namely in having the right political connections, you probably don’t have a chance in such a limited economy. Technical skill is a lesser contributing factor in helping you get your way into over-specialized professions.
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Second, the greatest factor in determining the success of media is its marketing and promotion. Often times this hinges around having connections to the right people, not the content’s quality itself.
- Can you provide me with some examples? I want to see this proven in practice! Yes, yes, that’s what the scanning project is all about. Examples of high-quality technical art content practice outside the context of marketing coverage.
* Also, remember that although old forms of marketing and
promotion have evolved to have an incumbent political status,
new forms greatly hinge around new technologies. Internet
search engines known to the mass market have changed the world
in terms of marketing, for example.
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Third, if you attempt to restrict the distribution of your work without any marketing promotion to help guarantee its distribution, changes are you will not make any money and nobody will see your work.
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Forth, when you restrict distribution and nobody ends up seeing it, there is lack of community. That alone is a strong driving force in making people want to stop doing something or leave.
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Fifth, lawyers.
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Lawyers are not economic either. They don’t make economic sense. You’ll likely loose more money over lawyers then you gain. Do you really want to invoke this?
- Legal involvement was designed for a more expensive and more limited economy of the past. Nowadays, for most professions, it is considerably cheaper to recreate a compatible clone using the technical skills people than it is to negotiate out a specific copy of proprietary media.
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Again, I reiterate, because this is important! What is the license or legal text all about? Basically, to summarize its purpose above anything else, it is “am I threatening to sue you if you violate these terms?”. If the answer is “no,” then it is not a “license” or contract and does not have a legal interpretation. Meaning, it will not invoke lawyers to litigate on the issue.
That being said, almost no practical use of information requires the invocation of a lawyer, so it is more often a practical idea to disclaim all legalese involvement and resort to permissive requests. Meaning, if people violate such asks, you may have a word with them for their violations, but you will not threaten to sue them or cause any other damages to them.
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Conclusion. Not only is it not economic, it also creates a lack of community, and that is a very convincing deterrent for most people to quit economic sectors that are abandoned.