Comment by matheusmoreira
8 days ago
> someone’s work
We don't recognize ownership of ideas as a legitimate concept.
Intellectual property is logically reducible to ownership of numbers. All information is a sequence of bits, and all sequences of bits are numbers. All numbers already exist. Humans performing intellectual work are merely discovering those numbers.
The entire set of laws supporting intellectual property boils down to making knowledge and transmission of certain numbers illegal.
It's illegal for me to write certain numbers on a piece of paper and give the paper to you.
That's just absurd and unacceptable.
> It is logistically impossible to support any industry with your logic here.
Not at all. Plenty of creators enjoy sizeable patreon followings. They get paid for their labor, not for the finished product.
Also, physical goods are naturally scarce. Therefore industries producing physical goods are easily supported. Your claim that "any" industry cannot be supported is trivially falsifiable if taken literally.
> On the other hand the owner of a certain IP can make his product as inaccessible as possible
Complete illusion. Only a single copy need ever be produced and sold. Once that copy is available, it can be trivially and infinitely duplicated.
If I have a file on my computer, say a book, duplicating it is as easy as holding down Ctrl-V. By doing that I can literally exhaust my computer's memory by filling it up with copies of the book.
There are no limits to copying other than the physical limits of the computers performing the copying.
Contrast that to the age of the printing presses. Sure, you could copy books by hand but that imposes hard limits to the scale of your operation. Printing presses gave you the power to infringe copyright at scale but you had to be a major industry player to even have one.
It is now the 21st century. Everyone on Earth has globally networked computers in their pockets. The costs of planetary scale copying and distribution of information are measured in cents. There's actually so much information being copied and distributed that determining what's true or false is actually becoming a problem unto itself.
Intellectual property is nothing but an unacceptable restraining bolt on our amazing computer systems, stopping them from realizing their full potential.
> Why the fuck are you so afraid of being accused of pirating?
No one's "afraid" of anything. We've simply taken it much further than you did.
You "pirate" because it's convenient.
We "pirate" because we believe computers are world changing technology that should not be limited in any way whatsoever just because of utter legacy nonsense such as copyright.
Computers are obscenely subversive. They democratized copying, thereby nearly wiping out entire sections of the economy off the face of this earth. They democratized encryption and privacy, thereby allowing normal people to defeat militaries, spies, governments, police, judges.
Computers are far too important to be allowed to be controlled, least of all for completely idiotic reasons such as preserving the failing business models of last century's entertainment industries. Let Hollywood and the games industry get fully wiped out if they can't adapt.
For the enforcement of copyright requires that they own your computer, and that is unacceptable tyranny which must be resisted at all costs.
> Why do you have to justify to yourself by buying games and then pirating occasionally?
No one "needs" to justify anything. Copyright infringement is natural. People do it without even realizing it. There is no need to justify natural processes.
We consciously choose to justify it, because we believe there are higher reasons for doing it.
> I pirate every fucking IP I own. I don’t give a shit.
Unlike you, we actually do give a shit. That's why we spend time thinking about it and debating the issue.
> People like You pay for all my games and movies. Thank you.
> If you feel piracy is moral then what I do is moral to you. Thanks for paying for my shit.
You're welcome.
Make no mistake, though. Our reasons for paying for games are probably not what you think. I usually don't pay for the games themselves. I pay for Steam's excellent service.
I guess I'm old enough to remember the time where people had to manually download and apply half a dozen incremental patches to their games in order to get the latest version and play online. Many times I licensed games I already had on Steam just to avoid that. Battlefield 2 is my goto example. I still have the boxes.
Steam was the first ever Windows package manager. Licensing games through it has always been worth it for that fact alone. Anything else just sucks. Gabe Newell is right: it's always been a service problem.
My Steam account contains many games which simply cannot be licensed anymore for any amount of money. Usually because other game companies are trying to push their shitty copies of Steam, just like Hollywood studios keep creating their own shitty streaming services.
There's nothing wrong with competition. The problem is they're competing for the wrong reasons. They don't actually want to create a superior Steam, they want to leverage their copyright monopolies in order to more efficiently rent seek. They create their own stores, then they pull their games from Steam and offer them exclusively on their shitty platforms that nobody actually wants to use. They force people to use their shitty services in order to get access to the games instead of just offering them on Steam.
Well if it's not on Steam, I won't pay even one cent for it. It's quite literally that simple.
> Does that make your blood boil? That geniuses like you pay for me to enjoy all my entertainment for free because it’s moral?
Not at all. Your enjoyment in no way deprives me of mine, nor does it offend me on any level whatsoever. Had you asked for it, I would have simply given you a copy myself.
> Then maybe pirates like me should be arrested.
Absolutely not. "Piracy" should not even exist as a crime. If it does, it should not cause anyone to be deprived of their freedom.
The truth is in the name chosen by the monopolists: "piracy". Copying is a crime so victimless, they have to compare it to high seas piracy in order to get people to give a shit. It's just asinine.
> Well it’s convenient for me to live a life where you pay for my shit.
Relax. Copying is literally victimless. There is no "your shit", it's all just files in a computer. The ownership notions of the physical world do not really exist in this realm. The scarcity is completely artificial. It's not real.
>We don't recognize ownership of ideas as a legitimate concept.
Who is this "we" you're referring to? As far as I know it's you and your 2 or 3 online pen pals because the rest of the world recognizes it as a legitimate concept such that it's been encoded into law and billions and billions have been invested into said said ideas on the assumption that those laws will provide the idea creators with "ownership" of said ideas.
You have it backwards. It's a relative minority that recognizes it as a legitimate concept. It's just that this minority lobbied for the laws.
(As a curiosity, these same minorities lobby for the opposite, or turn a blind eye, when it's contrary to their interests. See the current LLM craze, and also... did you know Hollywood was founded on copyright infringement, and that its location was chosen to enable this? Put that in your pipe and smoke it).
(Or also: many AAA game developers played pirated games in their youth. It was part of their formative years. )
Most people don't believe in the concept. You don't either, regardless of your protests here: you admitted you pirate everything. If you believed this was deeply immortal and harmful you wouldn't.
Your actions speak louder than your words.
> As a curiosity, these same minorities lobby for the opposite, or turn a blind eye, when it's contrary to their interests.
> See the current LLM craze
Excellent point. Watching the corporations engage in AI washing of massive scale copyright infringement was extremely disgusting.
I don't even fault them for doing it, technology should not be held back due to intellectual property nonsense. It's the "rules for thee but not for me" nonsense that's offensive.
> did you know Hollywood was founded on copyright infringement, and that its location was chosen to enable this?
Plenty of industries were. Samuel Slater, the so called father of the american industrial revolution, memorized british designs before immigrating to the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Slater
I used to have a small collection of examples just like this. If I remember correctly, some drug companies chose specific European countries due to their stance on intellectual property.
Infringement is only inconvenient when others do it to them, never when they do it to others. Every monopolist was once an infringer. They always climb the ladder and try to kick it out so the next guy can't touch them.
Copyright abolitionists.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_abolition
I have no "pen pals" from this site. Anyone replying to you is doing so independently.
Recognition of intellectual property is just an illusion. They have vested interests, of course they're going to recognize it. Doesn't change the underlying absurdity of the system. Doesn't change the fact they constantly run smack into reality on a daily basis. "Their" works are mercilessly copied, "their" inventions are reverse engineered, AIs are trained on "their" creations, generic versions of "their" drugs are made... It's a constant unceasing fight against reality, completely senseless, and they still can't stop any of it. Because it's not actually real.
The idea of exchanging paper for material goods is also absurd. There are also vested interests that rely on maintaining this illusion. They want people to believe that something like a tesla can actually be exchanged for worthless paper. None of this is real so there's endless fights against people who try to make illegal copies of the paper. It's an endless fight, because it's not actually real.
The entire economy is an illusion. But it works because most people buy into the hallucination. IP is much of the same thing. If there's only a few people creating IP laws it doesn't mean anything. It only works because the majority of people respect said IP laws. IP exists because the majority hallucinates it into reality.
Even the concept of "laws" are illusions. They are total fabrications created by mankind. Your entire life is built upon thousands of fabricated concepts and illusions that are in many ways incompatible with your ancient genetic biology. So saying that IP isn't "natural" is meaningless.
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> The entire set of laws supporting intellectual property boils down to making knowledge and transmission of certain numbers illegal.
It's illegal for me to write certain numbers on a piece of paper and give the paper to you.
That's just absurd and unacceptable.
Your bank account credentials are a bunch of numbers, would you be willing to share those? Surely you wouldn't bother changing them after the fact, I mean, literally victimless if someone copies them for their own use right? ;-)
That argument is completely unpersuasive. These are not the same things at all. In multiple ways.
First, there is no way do duplicate bank account contents. Bank transfers are transactions: adding to your account subtracts from mine. The bitcoin ledger is infinitely copyable but doing that gives no one extra bitcoins.
Contrast that with intellectual property which is the complete opposite: information can be losslessly duplicated infinitely at no cost whatsoever to either party.
Second, bank credentials are secrets. The information is not actually meant to be widely distributed, it's meant to be known by as few people as possible, ideally one person.
The secrecy exists precisely because once information is out there there is no way to control what will be done with it. Contrast that with copyright: the monopolists want to distribute the information world wide and simultaneously fully control what people do with it. The tyranny necessary to enforce such corporate control is utterly unacceptable.
So your bank account argument in fact supports my world view by exposing how utterly schizophrenic the copyright monopolists are. They actually think they can control public information that has been disseminated far and wide. It's so out of touch with the reality of things they might as well be put out of their misery. Just abolish copyright straight up.
>The secrecy exists precisely because once information is out there there is no way to control what will be done with it. Contrast that with copyright: the monopolists want to distribute the information world wide and simultaneously fully control what people do with it. The tyranny necessary to enforce such corporate control is utterly unacceptable.
The idea wouldn't exist if such tyranny didn't exist in the first place. What causes a drug company to invest billions into creating life saving drugs? If all ideas are open source then there's NO incentive for ANYONE to invest billions into ideas.
That's why copyrights and patent laws exist. To function as incentive in the creation of new ideas.
Pick and choose: Either you can only interact with the idea under monopolist rules. Or the idea doesn't exist period. Overall, humanity (aka the actual "we") has picked the former over the later.
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So now we have established that not all numbers are "just numbers" that can be copied victimlessly.
Consider that maybe it is because some numbers represent something more than just numeric values. Maybe they represent economic value.
Said economic value having been generated by your hard work.
Now maybe you can see how that line of thought leads to the concept of intellectual property.
Information covered by IP is "public" simply because there is no effective way to keep it secret, precisely because it is so easy to copy. However, as the bank account example shows, ease of copying "just numbers" has nothing to do with the effort invested into creating the value represented by those numbers. And IP laws exist precisely to account for that.
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