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Comment by CuriousSkeptic | Hacker News Reader

Why should there be “balancing”? The entire premise of copiright is just wrong to begin with.

Here we have this perfectly anti-rival public good produced. But of course anti-rival just doesn’t work that well with free market economics, you know with the externalities and all. And since we just can’t imagine any other form of work allocation schemes than the free market, what to do?!

Naturally the most obvious thing, destroy the pesky anti-rival externalities. Let’s waste as much effort, and misery, as it takes to force it into the shape of the rival goods we all know and love.

It’s quite sad really.

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I'm sorry but I don't think I follow.

You disagree with the notion, that people that produce content should be paid for it?

I do believe that correct attribution and fair compensation is vital to get quality content. These proposals are not the answer though.

"You disagree with the notion, that people that produce content should be paid for it?"

Is that really that value that governments should be optimizing for? What about people who's content isn't all that good? Should they be ensuring payments for anyone who creates a new viral meme?

I'd propose a different value: "How do we best incentivize people to produce content?" (or perhaps "quality content")

Trying to make sure people can get paid is one strategy to incentivize the creation of quality content. But when you rethink of the problem in terms of optimizing for the production of quality content you can think up other strategies as well.

For example, Facebook and Twitter have done a great job of encouraging people to produce content (with questionable levels of quality), without attaching any monetary rewards to it.

Reframing the question in different ways will help us arrive at larger variety of solutions.

Deciding quality is a slippery slope. Who is going to decide the quality? Me? You? A committee? Government? Which one?

"Is that really that value that governments should be optimizing for? What about people who's content isn't all that good? Should they be ensuring payments for anyone who creates a new viral meme?"

That's exactly what government should do. Let the market to decide what content it perceives as good or not. The viral on its own means that the content is desired by some in the population. You or I may question its quality, but that doesn't discount its value to the ones who enjoy it.

I think that's where it should stop. Government shouldn't censure content (up until is outright harmful to the society [there are mechanisms in place already to deal with this]).

The curation should come from the platforms. Platform can compete for the eyeballs by picking the content they want to distribute. However creators, whoever they are, should be fairly compensated for it.

I agree. Quality is a subjective word, hence the parenthesis around it. I'm sure we can think up of a better goal.

My point was that ensuring people get paid is not what our end goal is. We should identify what our end goal should be and try to see if a different tactic might accomplish that goal better (with less collateral damage).

For example, people who create memes (the actual memes, not the images that later become memes) are motivated by social acknowledgement. Same goes for many Facebook posts.

Mandating payment systems is unlikely to motivate those types of content creation, and may in fact suppress many other types.

However, creating content based on social rewards (like most social media sites currently do) does help the creation of popular content.

I think this is more business point discussion for a platform (how do you motivate your users to create) than for a government how to enforce that creators are not being ripped off by users and platforms.

The case you described is already covered (at least in US) by the Fair Use doctrine [0] and works, well, works ok. I don't think the government should consider the use case of copyrighted work.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use

> You disagree with the notion, that people that produce content should be paid for it?

Nobody disagrees with that.

The fact is copyright exists to create artificial scarcity. "Content", once produced, is not scarce in any way; that's why the scarcity is artificial. These laws exist to force everybody to pretend that isn't how things work. It's fundamentally dishonest. It is trivial to copy and distribute "content". People have been doing it since computers were a thing and ironically they do it better than the copyright owners themselves.

It's up to the industry to find some other way to pay people. I don't really care how they're going to do it, and frankly it's nobody else's problem but their own. Instead of concentrating on a new business model, they keep embarrassing themselves with endless anti-piracy measures that do nothing but make the DRM-free copy look better than the original.

"> You disagree with the notion, that people that produce content should be paid for it?

Nobody disagrees with that."

From your post above and your clarification below, it seems like you believe:

1. People that produce content should be paid for it.

2. The burden is on content producers to find a way to get paid and, if they don't find one, then so be it.

Those are both reasonable positions, but I don't understand how you can hold both at the same time, unless I'm misunderstanding what you mean by 'should' in the first statement. Do you mean:

A) 'Should', as in 'this is the outcome we (society) want, and so we are willing to use the resources at our disposal (e.g. the legal system) to make it so, if it doesn't happen on its own', OR

B) "I hope they'll get paid", OR

C) 'I expect they'll get paid', OR

D) Something else?

I mostly agree with A. I don't agree with the "if it doesn't happen on its own" part. If they can't make it work on their own, is it really meant to be? Should we keep making laws to support business models that worked before but don't work anymore?

When physical records were created, an industry naturally formed around them. The objective was to record good content, make copies and sell them. These copies were actually scarce. They had to be manufactured. Copying content wasn't trivial; you'd actually need to run a counterfeiting enterprise in order to do it. In that context, I'd even say copyright law sounded reasonable. It allowed the law to target and punish those counterfeiters.

Computers changed that. Now nearly everyone can suddenly become a criminal for downloading some music from sites as big as YouTube. What if 82% of a country's population engages in copyright infringement? I think it's a sign that these laws are out of touch with reality.

Instead of forcing everyone to pretend copies are still scarce, let the industry die instead. Let them go bankrupt. They should be forced to adapt by figuring out how to make money despite all the copying. If that means they'll make less money than before, then so be it.

I say A). It's the same why we have labor law, property law, ... It's vital for the society to have creative people to produce entertainment for masses (or for a few). It makes a whole.

That's a bit harsh, don't you think? Just because something is easy to copy doesn't mean it doesn't have value. Creators should be paid for their work no matter how simple is to copy. If they are the first one who created it and someone else benefits, then they deserve to be compensated.

My best solution would be something along these lines https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17913535

> That's a bit harsh, don't you think?

No.

Given the chance, these people would turn all the computers we use and love into locked-down content consumption machines. I think it is safe to assume this agenda is against the interests of everyone on hacker news. In fact, if copyright holders got their way, it would be impossible to be a hacker.

The only way to stop copyright infringement is to destroy computing as we know it. That is their end game. They want to take control of the user's computer and actively prevent them from doing things they don't like. This battle for copyright is similar to the battle against encryption: corporations and governments don't want you to have any control because it allows you to subvert them.

> Just because something is easy to copy doesn't mean it doesn't have value.

I didn't say it had no value. I said it wasn't scarce.

> Creators should be paid for their work no matter how simple is to copy. > If they are the first one who created it and someone else benefits, then they deserve to be compensated.

Then, for all our sakes, I hope they can figure out how to get paid regardless of how many copies are out there.

It’s not harsh. Although I disagree with his solution- we need copy right, but copy-rights have been terrible for us.

However - Have people (on HN) forgotten how the content companies enforce copy right ? The RiAa/MPAA?

Copy rights were to help creators earn return on their creation. Today copy rights extend far beyond the natural life of the creator and are constantly being extended to favor corporations/owners, at the expense of the commons.

The lotr will never enter the public domain. And Disney is one of the greatest problems in this field. (And now they own Fox!)

Packet sniffing was created for the *AAs. Massive invasions of privacy and the initial subversion of the internet traces to their doorstep.

Copy right was one of the first fights of the collective group of people who landed up on /. And HN

>Copy rights were to help creators earn return on their creation. Today copy rights extend far beyond the natural life of the creator and are constantly being extended to favor corporations/owners, at the expense of the commons.

Just playing devils advocate: if most copyright nowadays belong to corporations, and corporations are immortal entities, perhaps eternal copyright makes sense? Not saying that's a good thing.

> Packet sniffing was created for the AAs

I'm pretty sure tcpdump predates Napster and any involvement of the AAs in the workings of the Internet...

Nope - as I recall that was the ISPs defense “we don’t know what people are sharing since we can’t look into packets”

The first version of tcpdump dates from '88[0]. And I'm not sure it was even the first sniffer out there, quite likely not.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tcpdump

Pay doesn’t come from value. In fact markets work very hard to destroy any surplus value above costs. It’s kind of their main feature, find a cheaper way to provide the same value and _lower the price_.

Economics only focuses on balancing limited resources between competing interests and has generally nothing useful to say wrt actual value.

What is wrong with artificial rights? Aren’t a lot of rights already artificial? You can also argue that property rights are artificial: if someone points a tank at you then you will have to give up all your property, so property right pretends like that isn’t reality and is dishonest. But I’d say it is a good thing that people aren’t allowed to point a tank at me.

I don't believe in those rights either. They're just as artificial as copyright to me. Criminals and even the government itself violate property rights on a daily basis.

The low level concept that enables society's rules is violence and the threat of it.

People do deserve to be paid for their work, but at what "deadweight" cost to the rest of us?

Rights collection these days works by media suppression: almost all the effort is put into preventing people from getting it, destroying copies etc. Given free reign they would put a lock on every technological system to ensure prices stay high and media inconvenient.

Netflix and Spotify (and I think iTunes etc) only exist because piracy drove the media companies to negotiate.

I do agree with your assessment (although it's more complicated than that).

Historically, rights holders (RH) used to have the upper hand, then the Internet came and took their reign down while giving upper hand to DSPs. Now RHs are trying to tip the scale back where it was.

Neither is a good situation. I definitely do not know what the right solution is, but nor the status quo nor the proposal is any good.

My radical view on this is to try to come up with some kind of compulsory license similar to the one that exists in music in US [0] for all content. The rates could be set up by panel of judges (similarly to US) or put in place arbitrary at lets say 50%.

This way, if creator produces content and decides to distribute it, she can't prevent a platform (DSP) from distributing it, however DSP can't avoid a payment.

Obviously this is a gross simplification, but I'm not seeing many ways out of this mess.

[0] https://www.thebalancecareers.com/what-is-a-compulsory-licen...

No. I disagree with the notion that copyright is a desirable approach to any problem in this discussion (the economics of anti-rival goods and its producing)

But for the record I don’t believe there is a good answer to your question that spans the entire domain of activities currently covered by copyright. And equally copyright doesn’t have much of role in generating revenue for most of it.

I should add that I also believe there is a large domain of desirable activities outside content creation that suffers in similar ways from our desire to fit everything into our current economic models.

As an illustration, when invited to dinner you might bring a bottle of wine, which is usually appreciated. Yet if you instead brought money of an equal amount as the cost of the bottle the host would probably be offended, and increasing the amount of money would probably do little to alleviate that.

There’s a quality in the effort of buying a bottle of wine here that doesnt fit into a purely economic model of the work performed. Yet you still need time and money to perform it, so limited resources do play a role.

In a similar vein there are lots of activities that requires time and money. Raising a child could be an example. Where the cost is easy to fit into the model, but the value and motivations are qualitively outside the realm of economics.

I think we simply need to recognize that these values are some times public goods, and the costs needs to be covered by other means than direct free market transactions.

Personally I believe that a basic income could be a part of this discussion.

Understood. I don't right answer either. The best I ever came up with I described here [0] but I still may be off significantly. In any way, we do have to find solution and fairly quickly, or we will get stuck with Article 11/13 and similar.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17913535

Amanda Palmer, does ahve a big point in her reformulating of the Question.

It's not how do we make people pay for it, how do we let people pay for it.

People want to pay for content, the current systems don't let people pay for it.

I agree. That's why we have to change the status quo. However the proposal from the EU commission is step in a very wrong direction.

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