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Comment by andjd | Hacker News Reader

The notion that everything that can be digitalized should be free is a pernicious notion and trivializes the effort creators put into their work. Journalists, musicians, authors, and artists deserve to be able to make a living from their work, and they can't do that if their work is distributed for free.

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There is a vast gap between "able to make a living" and "able to stifle culture, censor citizenship, and lock up works for longer than a lifetime".

TBH, it's probably better to create a post scarcity society where a living isn't dependent on holding something hostage. Some variation of a basic income, that would support artists to create. But we don't have to go that far to say, copyright as it stands now is over-mighty and should have its claws harshly trimmed.

China seems to do okay without much in the way of professional journalists, musicians, authors, and artists.

I'm not saying it's right, but it should be pointed out that it can still work.

China has structured their society to operate without much copyright enforcement.

It should make people think about what kind of society they want.

China has plenty of professional journalists, musicians, authors and artists. China's newspapers are heavily censored and vehicles for propaganda but people still write for them. Musicians make money in China the same way they do in the West, gigging. Rampant piracy doesn’t stop people trying and occasionally succeeding in making a living as authors or artists either, anymore than the small chance of making a good living at it in the West does.

But think broadly about how the Western world utterly dominates music and movies. It is probably due to copyright.

No it isn't. It’s because no one speaks Mandarin and Chinese music and movies are dreadful by comparison. One of the hardest things about studying Chinese is finding media to watch to improve listening comprehension that are actually enjoyable to someone used to Western levels of quality in production, writing and story telling. Khatzumoto of AllJapaneseAllTheTime.com took s break from learning Mandarin and learned Cantonese instead because the corpus of good movies is better, and it’s mostly pre-handover Hong Kong stuff. Widespread censorship leads to terrible movies.

I live in China and I’d say it’s plausible that people watch more Japanese, Korean and Anglophone media than Chinese, dubbed and subtitled. I wouldn’t bet on it but it’s at least 30%. Chinese tv and movies are dreadful.

Try quan zhi gao shou.

(I dont know the difference between mandarin and cantonese so sorry if im wrong)

Movies? Bollywood movies sell more tickets in India than Hollywood does in US+Canada, releases more movies, etc. Sure, they make less money but India is considerably poorer than US+Canada.

Well I'd hope a country with 1.4b would sell more tickets domestically than a country with 330m.

First: The legitimate rights of a free press, and an absolute stand against censorship.

Then: The rights of the content creators to make a living.

Not the other way around.

> Journalists, musicians, authors, and artists deserve to be able to make a living from their work

At least in the US, that is not the purpose of copyright. The constitution lays out why congress has the power to grant copyrights and patents:

> To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries

Maybe they just need a new business model. Google gives away plenty for free and they’re doing fine.

Google gives nothing away for free. If you're not paying for it, you're the product.

You can still be the product even if you are paying for it. Take smart TVs for example that monetize their customers post purchase.

It is surprising to me that someone on hacker news believes this.

they're doing fine not because of giving away plenty for free.

The will also run into same problem, but they will be last man standing

This is patently wrong. But your problem is that you don’t supply any argument to support your statement so there’s nothing to discuss.

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