Comment by wwweston
7 days ago
If anything the culture of the last 30 years has made people dismissive and stupid about copyright — and no one has been more obtuse than an average tech libertarian.
You can spot the worst by really thoughtless ideas like “it’s so easy to make cheap copies now so that means copyright is obsolete!” which is laughably common in tech and tech influenced spaces, but shows a total lack of reflection on the topic - copyright was created as a thoughtful attempt to rebalance incentives in a time when industrialization made copies cheap. Cheap copies made copyright important! Cheaper copies - or fractal remixes - might make it more important.
And it’s copyright proponents who know more than most that it’s not a law of nature but a prosocial bargain that has to be maintained by a prosocial people.
If you’re more “the strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must,” if you’re more “eh, thinking through the incentives balance is hard” or “incentives don’t matter now that AI can do all the progress in the arts and sciences we need”, then yeah, copyright may not make sense, but don’t pretend that the problem is that its proponents just can’t conceive of anything else.
Problem is that A LOT of companies abuse copyright. Examples with known services: - Several years ago I can only buy a lot of ebooks via Kindle Store (they weren't in other places).Actually reading them in Bookfusion (which is my preferred tool) required breaking DRM. - Spotify/Netflix - several years ago they required using their apps/sites only. Now I have to ALSO work around their geoblocks and they don't like this (so...they think I should try very hard to give them more money because they don't want them). There are a lot other services with those problems.
But:Torrent trackers still work same as before. Paid pirate equivalents of Netflix (!) also still work same as before.
Counter example:iTunes Music store/Apple Music and Steam - still works, it looks like Apple and Valme still want my money so they get it.
I used to care about copyright, before AI came and I realised that it somehow does not apply to big corporations mass stealing. If Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft do not care about copyright, why should I?