Comment by jaredklewis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jaredklewis | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

While I understand your metaphor, I don't understand your position. Are you against copyrights entirely? If you want to reform it, how so?

For example: if my friend who works on self-driving software for Google is at my house, should I just be able to download the source code from his work laptop onto a USB drive? The software distribution cost, like music, is near zero, so is this ok? If not, how is this example different than music?

I, for one, don't believe it is "absurd" that creators like musicians or Google be able to exert some control over how their creations are copied for a limited period of time. Currently the copyright system has run amuck and become far too creator-centric, but I think the basic idea is sound and makes a nice set of tradeoffs.

I also disagree that history somehow makes it obvious that incentives are not needed to make music. When the printing press came along and drastically reduced that cost of distributing music, copyright systems followed almost immediately thereafter. What historical precedent of an environment with low cost distribution but without copyright systems makes it obvious that the copyright part is unnecessary?

When one produces goods (e.g. pizza) there are two costs:

- pay-once costs (the cost of the oven)

- pay-per costs (the cost of the dough)

Competition and economic law tells us that the price of a pizza will drop to the pay-per (marginal) cost once the pay-once (fixed) cost is repaid.

Copyright law was introduced to let companies recover fixed costs by giving them a monopoly and preventing competition. The problem is that this law failed on many levels:

* the length of the monopoly far exceeds its needs: recording an album does not need millions as 50 years ago. It needs thousands.

* there is no real incentive to cut down fixed costs. The reason the prices of production dropped is simply the advent of digital recording. Pro audio analog tools are still incredibly expensive.

* it set up a specific, adapted business model which is not necessarily a good one, the one of rock stars, which privileges few "winners" giving them huge resources and exploits the majority of other artists by giving them essentially nothing.

If you want to know what would happen to software if getting a copy is free, well, essentially we are very close to it. Google is not really protected by copyright law when thinking about its search engine business. They are protected by the control of deep know how and the cost of building such a system. Google's search engine is its team, not its source code.

Software today is different, in that the value is not in the source code but in results of its execution. With Internet, this made it possible for companies to keep the sources and execution to themselves while giving you only outputs - also known as Software as a Service model.

> Currently the copyright system has run amuck and become far too creator-centric

That’s not even quite the case. The current system is strongly in favour of the middleman — publishers, music labels and the like. Whether this is a better or worse state of affairs than being biased towards the authors themselves is unclear, but it’s a sufficiently sourced different problem that the solution must also differ

Reply on news.ycombinator.com