Damn.  (See Boing Boing: Dutch court rules that discussing piracy [sic] is the same as committing piracy [sic]; link is believed to be free of infringing content, but if you really want to get your hands on some infringing content simply visit Google)

a

For each seller of a good or service there exists a set of suppliers.  This is basically “upstream.”  Each also has consumers (“downstream”).  So the LPW algorithm is simply:

1. Receive LPW data from upstream.
2. Compare upstream LPW to local LPW.
3. Forward downstream the lower of the two.

A few caveats include the exclusion of volunteer labor (for example, open source software) and the marking of whether the given LPW value is direct or indirect.

The tricky part of the algorithm is what the actual LPW data should be. The most obvious, the actual hourly or yearly wage, is faulty because of differences in the living wage. That varies from region to region. An alternative that accounts for this is needed.

So the second choice would be something like the percentile of the worker. This may be more effective in most cases, but it could still fail in cases where there is a large majority of impoverished workers. It also requires significant research on the region.

There may be others, requiring more or less effort to discover, and more and less accurate. The hard part is figuring out the most readily understandable and available value to use.

Now, you may or may not be wondering why this data should be published at all. The idea is simple: given the choice between two otherwise-indistinguishable goods or services (same in price, quality, etc.), one could decide to choose based on which either directly or indirectly pays their workers better.

Again, if possible it will show the difference from a living wage, so that wages aren’t necessarily inflated when workers are fairly compensated.

As a closing note, I’ll simply point out that the MPW (Most-paid Worker) could also be included just as easily.

What do you think? Could simple information, when propagated, solve wage inequality?

a

The problem is that corporations tend to overcharge for their content.  Then they complain about an alleged sense of entitlement when their customers supposedly want it for free.  They are reading things wrong: there’s very much a sense of entitlement, but it’s one not to pay too much.  This goes for all forms of content and “intellectual property”: books, news, images, videos, movies, television, music, video games, software, web applications, academic articles, and so on.

Free is less than too much, so free wins over too much every time.

People deserve payment for their creations, but the economics dictate that how much they charge and what they are prepared to deliver (ie, their pricing/business model) will change the composition of their customer pool, determining their revenue.  Before the digital revolution, all sorts of sharing occurred that wasn’t priced in to their model, and yet no one screamed bloody murder over one newspaper getting passed around the coffee shop or office.

The sooner the content creators start moving to alternative models, the sooner they will find the sweet spots, and the sooner they will get paid for their creations.  But if they merely try to copy their old models in the new landscape, they are liable to find themselves with lingering pain for quite some time.

As I did not see specifics on the pricing/business model that Hulu will be using, I will withhold judgment about this move.  But I will say that if they plan on overcharging, they might as well buy some Going Out of Business signs while they’re cheap.

Update: An article on mediamemo.allthingsd.com, How Much Will You Have to Pay for Hulu? Nothing. How Much Will You Pay for “Hulu Plus”? Good Question. states the pay content will be in addition to the existing site, rather than moving some content to for-pay so it doesn’t sound like they are doing anything very dangerous with regard to their business model.  I just hope they get creative and take their time to create a better model that can be mimicked by others.  It can work, if they don’t get too greedy.

a