Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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