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Comment by mahranch | Hacker News Reader

> If we could get rid of copyright

If that happens, the web as we know it would cease to exist. Without a legal recourse to stop plagiarism and stolen content, people who are actually creating new content stop completely and move into other areas of work. Websites that produce original and unique content close up shop. Instead you're left with a bunch of low-quality rip off sites that have nothing original of their own. Then it the entire web stagnates over the years as very few new things get added to the net as a whole. And that's just the effect on the internet, that doesn't take into account real world publishing.

I wish people would consider all of the consequences of these things before making statements like that. I haven't even begun to consider the consequences of eliminating copyright completely and just from what I can come up with off the top of my head makes it a non-starter.

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That's bullshit. Probably the first thing that would die would be the crappier part of the web - the one made to earn lots of money. Bye bye ad-sponsored clickbait image bullshit sites. Hello again honest communities. Sure, there would be lot of plagiarism, but it wouldn't stop people from creating content. Best content is often created by people who want to create something so that it exists, not just to make a buck out of it. Open source code is not an exception, it's the rule.

> That's bullshit. Probably the first thing that would die would be the crappier part of the web - the one made to earn lots of money. Bye bye ad-sponsored clickbait image bullshit sites.

No, it wouldn't. Because if copyright vanished, I'd be one of the people trying to take advantage of it. It would be open season. A lot of my buddies would do the same.

I think you underestimate just how greedy people are.

> Best content is often created by people who want to create something so that it exists, not just to make a buck out of it.

While true to some extent, if we want these people to keep making more of this "best content", we should also enable them to "make a buck out of it". Else they will (and do) go do something else to make a buck and we'll be worse off for it.

> Open source code is not an exception, it's the rule.

How often do people get paid for open source projects? How often do people get paid for writing custom, proprietary code? If your answers to these questions don't make obvious the fallacy of your statement above, all I can say is you're living in a bubble.

> While true to some extent, if we want these people to keep making more of this "best content", we should also enable them to "make a buck out of it". Else they will (and do) go do something else to make a buck and we'll be worse off for it.

I agree, but there is a subtle difference in mindset here I think a lot of people miss - creating something to make money is a different thing from creating something and making money on it. Instrumental vs. terminal values. We want to have more people building things so that those things exist (i.e. making fun movies so that they're fun, or building tools to solve a problem), support them by e.g. making sure they aren't bothered by stuff like food and shelter - paying them. What we want to have less is people making things in order to make money off it, because their incentives are to create worst possible thing that still sells.

> How often do people get paid for open source projects? How often do people get paid for writing custom, proprietary code? If your answers to these questions don't make obvious the fallacy of your statement above, all I can say is you're living in a bubble.

Of course people are paid more for writing propertiary code, and I'm also aware of the trend to pay people for making open-source code which will be then monetized by e.g. charging for support. But this is irrelevant to the topic. Even most of the tools you use for your daily work as a programmer would still exist if suddenly no one got paid for code anymore.

My point is - code and art is something better if done by someone who cares primarily about them than by someone who cares primarily about the paycheck for them.

> Instead you're left with a bunch of low-quality rip off sites that have nothing original of their own.

Isn't that what we mostly have now? Before the net was commercialized, it was mostly people sharing things they had created or discovered and talking about things that interested them - original content. People would also post interesting scientific papers, books, etc. and discuss them.

Once people decided to monetize the net it filled with spam and duplicated content alongside payperclick ads. People started cranking out 'original content' that isn't very original and doesn't have much content either just to make a few bucks on the ads. Those papers and books that used to be shared became imprisoned behind paywalls. The volume increased a lot, but signal-to-noise ratio dropped significantly.

That's not really an argument to eliminate copyright, but vigilant legions of lawyers were never been needed to produce content, suing people doesn't increase its quality, and the net wouldn't necessarily be a worse place if a lot of that was gone. At least some places are opening up and starting to share educational content.

> Once people decided to monetize

You have it backwards friend. Once people decided you could make money off the internet, innovations came at a breakneck pace. It was the money that fueled web growth. See: the previous internet bubble. As long as you can make money from the internet, there will always be innovation & content. Once that money disappears, so does the innovation since there's no need to innovate since there's nothing in it for people.

> Without a legal recourse to stop plagiarism and stolen content, people who are actually creating new content stop completely and move into other areas of work.

Copyright prevents creative impersonation. If I take your creative work and try to pass it off as my own--whether for profit, reputation, etc.--copyright gives you a legal tool to stop me.

Without it, anyone could get away with pretending to have done anyone else's creative work.

To illustrate with a recent example, Andy Weir wrote "The Martian," and distributed it online for free, originally. Without copyright, Crown books could have copied the text, put a different author name on it, sold thousands of copies and kept every dime. Same with the movie--they could have just copied the story and made a movie without paying Andy anything.

That's the aspect of copyright I'm willing to support, but it doesn't require DRMs, just a working justice system.

Also, sadly, publishers have many different tricks to rob authors out of the money from book sales. Bigger ones probably don't care, but there are a lot of smaller "entrepreneurs" willing to lie and cheat, so one has to be careful (as my physics professor learned in a painful way).

It would be possible to create laws respecting a right of correct attribution without actually having copyright as it is known today.

Sounds like applying a license similar to the GPL instead of copyright would solve this problem?

GPL only works because of copyright. Without copyright there is nothing to license (since there is no right).

> Copyright doesn't prevent plagiarism; plagiarism can exist without copyright violation and vice versa.

Well yeah. Murder laws don't stop people from murdering but that doesn't mean we should do away with the laws since people still get murdered. It's a punishment & massive deterrent. Especially when used in conjunction with the DMCA.

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