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Comment by hxa7241 | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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