Comment by toomuchtodo
4 days ago
Cost recovery isn’t profit. Copyright is just a shared delusion, like most laws. They’re just bits on a disk we’re told are special for ~100 years (or whatever the copyright lockup length is in your jurisdiction), after which they’re no longer special (having entered the public domain).
I think what is more ironic is we somehow were comfortable being collectively conditioned (manufactured consent?) with the idea that you could lock up culture for 100 years or more just to enable maximum economic extraction from the concept of “intellectual property” and that to evade such insanity is wrong in some way. “You can just do things” after all.
It's not the bits that are copyrighted, it's the performance and the creative work.
Your savings account is just bits on a disk, yet presumably it represents value that you worked for and which belongs to you to do with what you wish.
> Your savings account is just bits on a disk, yet presumably it represents value that you worked for and which belongs to you to do with what you wish.
That's another example of the shared delusion, since yes, we tell eachother it represents labor and resources, and the market engages in allocation somewhat efficiently, and so the money is a pretty accurate representation of the value of labor and the value of resources.
In reality, that's not true, because the most highly compensated jobs are some of the least valuable, such as investment bankers, landlords, or being born rich (which isn't even a job, but is compensated anyway). Rent seeking is one of the most highly compensated things you can do under this system, but also one of the most parasitic and least valuable things.
Your savings account's number is totally detached from accurately representing value. It's mostly a representation of where you were born.
Value is subjective. Ownership is not. You're attempting to perform a sleight of hand by conflating the two.
It doesn't matter whether you personally find some creative material to be worthless, or you personally think someone doesn't generate sufficient value to deserve their bank balance. The reason it doesn't matter is that societies cannot run on an individual's opinion about whether other people deserve ownership over what they legally own. Because if it did, that society would quickly disintegrate into anarchy.
Speaking personally, as someone who once was on course to make 9 figures and now makes a low 6, I think it's sort of a pathology to spend your time worrying about how much less you have than other people. What matters is whether you can be recognized for your work and earn from it. I don't care that some people just inherited what they have, while I had to struggle as a taxi driver and waiter and minimum wage intern. That's annoying, but it's not as bad as living in a society where I can't capture the value of what I produce creatively. Having ownership of my work is far more important to me than money. But I have a right to expect that e.g. code I develop in my toolkit will remain my own to provide me an income.
„Shared delusion“ - just another term for „social contract“?
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> Your savings account's number is totally detached from accurately representing value. It's mostly a representation of where you were born
This could also be true because the number of dollars in circulation is "just bits on a disk" that politicians can manipulate for various reasons.
Someone can work very hard and save their earnings, only to have the value diluted in the future. Isn't that also a delusion?
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> that to evade such insanity is wrong in some way.
There’s a commons problem at play here. Most habitual pirates couldn’t pay for what they are pirating even if they wanted to, so restricting their access just makes the world worse-off; but who is going to finance the creation of new content if everything is just reliant on completely optional donations?
The 100 year period is absurd and does nothing to incentivize art, but there are costs involved in production of these works. People are always going to make music and write books regardless of the economic outcome; far fewer are going to write technical manuals or act as qualified reporters without being compensated.
There are several labs and researchers with ideas on how to do this and published books on the subject (https://www.sharing-thebook.com/).
Long story short: workable solutions exist, it is entirely a question of political will and lack thereof.
This would work on niche segments and not for the masses. Look up YouTube subscribers to Pateon ratio.
> Most habitual pirates couldn’t pay for what they are pirating
Seems questionable. You can cover almost everything with a handful of monthly subscriptions these days. In fact I often pirate things that I otherwise have access to via e.g. Amazon Prime.
> but who is going to finance the creation of new content if everything is just reliant on completely optional donations?
Well this is an appeal to consequences, right? It's probably true that increased protectable output is a positive of IP law, but that doesn't mean it's an optimal overall state, given the (massive) negatives. It's a local maxima, or so I would argue.
Plus it's a bit of a strange argument. It seems to claim that we must protect Disney from e.g. 'knock offs', and somehow if we didn't, nobody would be motivated to create things. But then who would be making the knock-offs and what would be motivating them?
> You can cover almost everything with a handful of monthly subscriptions these days.
Maybe for you that's something you can afford. I can't. I just consume less music. Or sail the high seas if I really want something.
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> You can cover almost everything with a handful of monthly subscriptions these days.
The majority of people on earth cannot afford more than two or three of these subscriptions.
> But then who would be making the knock-offs and what would be motivating them?
Ten years ago there was a popular blog that got posted on /r/anarcho_capitalism with some frequency. IP was a contentious topic among the then-technologically literate userbase. At some point, a spammer began copying articles from the blog and posting them to /r/anarcho_capitalism himself. This caught the attention of some users and the spammer was eventually banned. A few days later, I followed a link back to his site and found all the articles he had stolen now linked back to a page featuring the cease and desist letter he had received from the original blog, the URL being something like: “f*-statists-and-such-and-such.”
Without any* copyright law, any content that is generated effectively gets arbitraged out to the most efficient hosts and promoters. This might be a win for readers in the short term, but long-term tends towards commodification that simply won’t sustain specialized subject matter in the absence of a patronage model. YouTube and the wave of Short Form Video Content are the two most obvious case studies, though it happens on every social platform that moves faster than infringement notices can be sent.
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I agree completely. Parasites with money like to keep open the legal loopholes for their clever wheeze.
Sure. But in addition to copyright you might add the concept of money, or the concept of any property rights and ownership of physical things, and...
Calling such things "shared delusions" is missing the point...it's not that it's wrong, but it is not a very useful way to look at it.
There is such a thing as intersubjective (as opposed to objective) reality. Physically it exists as a shared pattern in the brains of humans, but that is seldom useful to reflect on. Language wise much more convenient and useful to talk about copyright as something, you know, existing.
Everyone knows these are just human agreements... it is not exactly deep thinking to point it out.
You may not agree to some laws. You can then seek to have the laws overturned (I agree patents and copyright are... counterproductive, at this point). Luckily many parts of the world have democracy to decide what laws to force on people, as opposed to a dictator.
Are you an artist? Have you ever created a piece of work that has a copyright attached? You might be anti-establishment but ultimately you are anti-creation. Artists are finding it harder and harder to live and create, artists are vital proponents and voices in changing culture - for you to take away their ability to live in a financially viable way says more about you and how you have conflated big business and an artist who is trying to make art and live.
I am. Copyright is fucking cancer and is one of the worst things if not the worst things that exists to make creating new things harder.
Making bits available isn't "taking artists ability to live in a financially viable way" any more than radio, LPs and player pianos was. If you are an artist who is trying to make art and live do more of that and don't waste peoples time arguing for copyright restricting other people's activity on websites like this one.
I pay artists directly, and know they receive almost nothing from Spotify and other Big Tech platforms, ymmv. Artists good, big business bad.