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Comment by hxa7241 | Hacker News Reader

> it's more philosophical ... We are consuming everything without conscience

The crucial difference is that, unlike most physical things, informational copies are an infinite resource. The only essential moral action is to share them freely. Whether that causes problems is entirely conditional on particular economic systems.

It is indeed also true that supporting production is moral. But producing and sharing are not negatively dependent. If you don't do one, it doesn't do any good to then not do the other. They are mutually supportive: you should do both, and doing either you indirectly support the other.

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1) Informational copies aren't infinite, they take server space, electricity, and maintenance.

2) and more importantly, how do you overcome the hurdle that production itself requires resource consumption? Stuff at the lower level of Maslow's hierarchy: Food, Shelter?

Producing quality content requires investment. How is a producer of that content to get a return on that investment if people don't pay for the product after it is produced?

I agree that we should all produce and share, but not all sharers produce. Just because you have the bits on your hard drive does not mean the product those bits define are yours to share. Those bits are not simply bits, they are the definition of something that creates value. It takes risk to create the order of ones and zeros and if that risk is not rewarded, then the risk/reward ratio becomes too high and there is no incentive to take the risk to create the product.

I know that many people create for the love of the game, but those creators have to make money somehow. They have to have day jobs or something that distracts them from the many hours it takes to create quality content. If they could get paid for the content after it is produced, then they could spend more time creating more quality content for us to consume.

There was a quote from Ayn Rand about money where she describes money as a battery that stores labor so we can benefit from that labor over a longer time than it takes to perform the labor. Well, those bits are just like that. Bits are a battery that stores the labor required to create the order of bits. Content production is the opposite of entropy and to defeat entropy, we must take energy from outside the system. The artist in this metaphor is the closed system -- the artist's brain is the system that creates the content. The consumer is outside that system and must put energy into it in the form of food so that artist can use that energy to create order from a disordered set of random bits.

Money is that energy required to oppose entropy. Without a transfer of energy, there is no way to create order. Without order, there is no content. It's just white noise and consumers don't want that...

If consumers don't pay for the content, where will the energy to produce it come from?

> How is a producer of that content to get a return on that investment if people don't pay for the product after it is produced?

That is the question! Now copyright is looking very inappropriate we need some good answers. I expect it is a matter for evolution: try lots of things and see which work best. There are already some incipient examples out there.

> yours

(With information, it can only mean acknowledgement -- 'ownership' doesn't make sense.)

> those creators have to make money somehow.

Broadly, yes, just not by old copyright-oriented ways.

The point is seeing the two things separately. We need only pay for production, not for copies. That is economically optimal, and more practically fitted to current technological circumstances.

If you aren't paying for the music, you aren't paying for the production. If you were paying for the production, you'd pay what the artists' time was worth to create it, the studio time to record it, the post production editing...

But you'd never pay that much. That's why the artists/record labels/whoever spreads out that cost over all the copies of the of the recording. Then they account for risk, some cash to reinvest, and profit.

When you buy a book, you aren't paying for production either. Nor when you buy a piece of art. Or watch a movie.

All this arguing on behalf of the people who think stealing music is okay is really immature. Everyone knows it is wrong and no one would want someone taking their livelihood away from them -- yet plenty of consumers argue, "oh, it's fine to 'pirate' music... because of yada yada"

Everyone knows it's not okay. It's not okay.

Look at the arguments you make:

  A) It's not stealing -- it's a copy
  B) Record labels deserve it
  C) Piracy is actually *good*!
  D) Everyone else is doing it!
  E) It's so easy!

Seriously! These are piracy proponents arguments! It's a pity really. Pathetic that people of rational minds would stoop to such irrationality when it suits their wants.

You sound like a corporate astro-turfer: you don't appear to have understood anything I have said, and counter with non-arguments such as "is really immature" and "everyone knows it is wrong. It is wrong".

Neither what I have said, nor the rather odd and hardly even oblique caricature you offer of me, are irrational.

I suggest you actually learn something about copyright.

I think that's a valid point. For long years mostly the live performance of media was paid for. Then with the manifestation of media as data, the guys who had the machines to record and create copies claimed the stakes and the exclusive rights as a form to create economic value. Time has passed and now we have found out that every data are equal and data can hardly be bounded and the exclusivity of copying has gone away. Perhaps it's time to rethink the claims.

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