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Comment by Strang | Hacker News Reader

I agree that the current creative industries would probably go bankrupt. Goodbye to the "summer blockbuster", pop megastars, etc. Is that really such a vital societal good that we need to take civil and criminal action against individuals that threaten these industries?

I disagree entirely that there would be "nothing". Art and entertainment would just look different. The budgets would probably be lower, and the payment and distribution channels would be entirely different. Kickstarter/Patreon vs. Netflix/retail.

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"The budgets would probably be lower,"

This is another way of saying the salaries would be lower and there would be no benefits or permanent career path in the arts. The arts would become a hobby that people do before they get a 'real job' that is able to support them as adults.

What I don't think you understand is that those big-budget shallow pop pieces support the rest of the industry both directly and indirectly. Look at software for an example -- your little open source effort is in fact bankrolled by the open source ecosystem that is subsidized by Facebook, Google, big VC money, etc. The high salaries in tech are held up by the demand that these large houses create. When you cut the top of the pyramid off an industry, the result is recession -- an overall deflation of the rest of the labor market. Look at what happened to even unrelated industrial concerns in Detroit when the big-three auto makers left town. The entire economy of the city collapsed, not just car factories.

I'll give you a concrete example: all the cool synth and instrument gear musicians use to innovate. It's a good example because I know people who work for Moog Music and other firms in those areas. The majority of those firms' revenue comes from larger and deeper pocketed artists and other creative concerns that buy the latest-and-greatest and the big-ticket items. Kill off all that and Moog would go out of business and all the little indie bands would no longer even be able to purchase gear.

Your ability to produce an album or a movie on a Kickstarter budget is in fact subsidized indirectly by way of demand generated by the larger and deeper pocketed side of the industry and the productive economy of scale that it helps create. Industries are ecosystems and the bigger concerns within them are primary producers -- what happens to a forest if you cut down all the trees?

I agree that copyright is in need of some reform, but the radical anti-copyright and 'pirate party' position is just insanely naive and would completely destroy art, music, and literature as viable career paths for anyone. It's the kind of position you encounter from people who have zero understanding of economics and/or are really naive about human nature (a.k.a. have never met a sociopath).

The arts would become a hobby that people do before they get a 'real job' that is able to support them as adults.

This is already the case for most people, and how society at large sees it. The barista with an art degree and the waiter aspiring to be an actor are both cliches at this point. The arts are intrinsically difficult business models because of their anti-rivalrous nature, their varying scarcity and in the digital age, increasing intangibility. Just as artists had patrons in the past, today they have complicated chains of publishers and distributors they must go past. As those become less relevant with digital distribution, then the problems of saturation set in.

Look at software for an example -- your little open source effort is in fact bankrolled by the open source ecosystem that is subsidized by Facebook, Google, big VC money, etc.

Well, not exactly.

The parts of open source that get subsidized tend to be limited in their scope, primarily user-facing and application development software -- what you would expect for media companies to care about, and what is easiest to sell as a service.

Infrastructure and systems software has always been treated as more of a commodity and receives relatively little attention. Some companies devote teams to enhancing it, but much of it remains dominated by private individuals and researchers, the latter sometimes working as part of research institutes that are both privately and publicly funded.

I think your conflating my position with another. I understand that eliminating copyright would be a massive upheaval. I do understand that many companies, industries, and career paths would be drastically affected negatively.

I just don't think that maintaining the status quo justifies the current policing of personal computer and internet usage.

Nowadays, film and music are just files, and can be freely copied at will. The creative industries have refused to acknowledge this reality. I don't think any individuals should be jailed or bankrupted to maintain this illusion any longer.

When the dust settles, society will still have art and entertainment. It will just be different from what we are used to.

I don't believe people should go to jail unless they are profiting massively from copyright violation -- e.g. someone selling a bootleg subscription streaming service and pocketing the money.

I also agree that the concept of copyright is a 'legal fiction' in the sense that it's a kind of hack. 'People who make intangible things should be able to get paid, so let's pretend they are physical artifacts.' But the purpose of that hack is at least in its purest sense noble. Child labor laws are also a legal fiction. There is no natural reason for them to exist. We made them up because we got tired watching the children of the poor be used up as a consumable good. Nature sucks. Civilization is a conspiracy to escape the brutal amoral Darwinism of nature.

If you want to get rid of copyright, create a better alternative. But your better alternative must do the good things that the original does, otherwise it won't work. So far I don't see such a thing.

The fundamental issue is present here in this sentence:

"Nowadays, film and music are just files, and can be freely copied at will."

Let's say I have two files. One is a music file, the other is the output of /dev/urandom. They could be of equal size, and they are equally easy to copy. But one contains the results of possibly thousands of hours of human labor not to mention the irreplaceable and ethereal quality we call 'creativity', while the other contains no actual information at all.

Conflating one with the other based on how easy they are to duplicate amounts to a profound devaluation of human labor and human life.

The same sort of argument sounds absurd when applied to physical goods e.g. "a t-shirt is just cotton, so why do we have to pay a premium to a bunch of factory workers?" But it is in fact the same argument, since in reality everything is just information and therefore all labor amounts to the transformation of information. Your t-shirt is just carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, etc. organized in a particular way.

(This argument carried further gets really interesting, but I have work to do. Quick version: in a post-3d-printing future where everything is automated, copyright might well be the only form of property and the only mechanism for compensation available to the non-capitalist class.)

My point about copying files is more literal than that. I'm not trying to theoretically devalue the creative or economic worth of the work. I'm saying that nowadays those works are delivered as files, which are literally free to copy. They can be encumbered with DRM, but DRM is also free to remove.

This is a drastic change from the days of printing presses, vinyl records, etc. The idea that these industries should be allowed to ignore this reality by punishing those who make use of it is ludicrous, in my opinion.

My alternative to copyright is nothing. Let society figure out how to remunerate artists without coercion.

"Let society figure out how to remunerate artists without coercion."

It already has. It's called Spotify, Apple Music, etc. If you remove copyright from the equation, this is what will happen:

These services will continue to exist, but free of copyright restrictions will make all content available to their customers. Then they'll become free, or freemium with an ad-supported free tier and an ad-free tier for a few bucks a month. Now that one of their major cost centers is gone they won't need to charge much.

Apple and the other Lords of the Brand and the Distribution Channel will still pay the artist... whatever they see fit to pay. It will be below minimum wage, with the artist expected to make up the difference by brewing coffee or waiting tables. They may occasionally take an artist and make them wealthy (by artist standards) in order to con the majority of punks into thinking art is a viable career path. As with all industries powered by burning out the young, you have to keep the queue full.

This looks not terribly unlike the old record company model, but with one key difference:

In the old model the artist had a contract. It might have been a shitty contract, but it was a contract and the artist had some negotiating capability. In the new model the artist has none, zero, nada. Yes master, pay me whatever you like master.

A few artists will try to rebel and form alternative channels, but there is no copyright, remember? Apple and the others will simply vacuum up the content from these channels and add it to their already-massive catalog without paying anything in return. A few loyal fans might boycott the big channels and go with the indies, but not enough to make a difference. Do you want six apps/sites/feeds to listen to music or just one?

A few rebels might also try to turn the tables by vacuuming up the catalogs of Apple et. al. and creating bootleg ad-free versions. Sure, fine, go ahead. It'll cut into the majors revenue a bit but it won't do anything for the artists. If anything it'll make things even worse by squeezing the majors, causing them to cut expenses in the one place they're now completely free to do so: paying artists less.

It's called a "deflationary race to the bottom," and in such scenarios the lower-downs lose more than the higher-ups because they have no intrinsic structural leverage.

If you're curious I can also tell you what will happen without child labor laws. It'll involve crying, secret mass graves, and cute little amputees.

Everyone is not an asshole, but enough people are assholes and enough businesses are more or less amoral that laws are required to address the worst of the resulting excesses. You'll never have a society without coercion. The question is whether you want one where the strong coerce the weak or one where coercion is applied according to some more objective standard and with the goal of common welfare and compassion. What we have now is somewhere in between, as real things tend to be, but I'm very much against anything that moves it more toward a might-makes-right world.

I say this as an ex-Libertarian. The big thing that destroyed my faith was getting deeply involved in the business world and learning how Shit Really Works, which reminds me of that old 'we should teach the Bible in school so we'd have more atheists' line. It ain't a joke.

This is a really interesting and well reasoned comment. I'm not gonna try to refute most of it because I actually agree with a bunch of it. But I just wanted to point out that different artistic mediums behave differently. For instance, with PC games (Steam dominates here) it doesn't seem that the "deflationary race to the bottom" that has been happening there (as more and more low quality games get in) has been affecting developers who produce ~good~ games. This can be either because Steam somehow managed to solve this magically or because the PC gaming audience is more engaged in what they buy, either way, not everything you said would play out that way in that market. I think these differences should also be taken in consideration separately for music, movies and books if you want a more accurate result in what you think would happen.

>Is that really such a vital societal good that we need to take civil and criminal action against individuals that threaten these industries?

Clearly since people risk civil and criminal action to watch the stuff for free.

There is tons of actually free stuff on the internet and people still want the hollywood stuff.

In the same way that people violate posted speed limits, at least. The chance of an average person getting nailed for streaming/torrenting something they shouldn't be is probably even less (and then even less than that if they stay away from new releases).

I don't understand your reasoning. There are people that risk these penalties, therefore the penalties are just?

I meant that it must be "a vital societal good" since people risk the penalties for it.

The civil and criminal fines are pretty damn ridiculous. If I were in charge, I'd treat it like a parking ticket. Your IP gets caught, you get a 75 dollar fine unless you can show it wasn't you. That's how we treat parking tickets.

I just think it's silly for pirates to argue that the media content is worthless junk. Since they spend so much time consuming it for free. That goes double now that netflix has enough content for a lifetime for 8 bucks a month.

You're making the tenuous argument that time spent watching has any correlation with monetary value.

Netflix has its own problems, besides. Chief among those, the predatory licensing agreements causing entire swathes of content to vanish overnight, or the fact that those agreements are often local to the USA, causing people in other countries to get a vastly reduced/different catalog of content.

If the movie industry wanted to serve their customers instead of screw them, they'd get their lawyers together and release their own Popcorn Time. Literally all the movies, $XX/month, no heavy infrastructure required beyond P2P, no worries about your favorites disappearing randomly some day.

..But they will never do that, because to do so would cause them to admit those evil pirates had the right idea, and cause the false valuation of their content to evaporate.

The movie industry isn't a single company. They can't just make an all inclusive plan without violating some antitrust laws.

Plus you essentially can do that on Amazon Instant or Itunes. It has nearly everything. Pirates just don't like paying 3 dollars a movie.

No, but it acts like one in all the ways that matter. If a couple of large studios got it into their mind to make this happen, the others would quickly fall in line.

And what's more, "pirates" don't like paying any amount of money for DRM-encumbered crap. Streaming is a different beast, but even then it's a bad situation what with the time limits and such.

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