Just Enough Piracy Can Be a Good Thing
sloanreview.mit.edu
sloanreview.mit.edu
Shows where individual characters have their copyright held by various estates (where the original copyright holder has been dead for fifty years), the music rights have reverted back to various production companies, and the distribution rights have been sold and split and re-sold so many times the only way to discover who owns them is to let yourself get sued.
Sane trademark expiration could end up making this partially moot, however.
Just take my fucking money!
MIT also declined to press charges for trespass when asked by police.
Your second statement is misleading, in that MIT did not decline to press charges, they just declined to press charges with regard to criminal trespass and breaking-and-entering.[2] Interestingly, the MIT police arraigned Swartz on precisely those charges; it was only later that the charges under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act were used.[3]
Further, MIT insisted on seeking time-behind-bars for Swartz! From the Wikipedia article for US v Aaron Swartz: 'Marty Weinberg [Swartz's lawyer] said he nearly negotiated a plea bargain in which Swartz would not serve any time. "JSTOR signed off on it," he said, "but MIT would not."'[4]
So, all-in-all, I would say it is pretty ironic coming from an MIT blog.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massachusetts_Institute_of_Tec...
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20150912185122/https://www.polit...
> MIT also declined to press charges for trespass
What you said:
> they just declined to press charges with regard to criminal trespass and breaking-and-entering.
Where is the misleading nature of what I said about pressing charges?
"Intellectual property" is fundamentally different from classical property because information is not an exclusive good. If I hold an apple, you cannot hold the same apple, but we can both hold a digital copy with the same information.
There is no evidence that intellectual property is necessary for innovation or creative endeavors. There are many many ways to monetize creation including but not limited to subscription, donation, live shows, advertisement, and commission. http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstfinal.ht...
IP haters often point to people who've successfully managed to encourage pseudo-piracy and made money. The Grateful Dead, for instance, let people freely copy mix tapes of their concerts and made their money on gate revenues. (They didn't let people in for free. Nope. )
If digital piracy is unchecked, then it forces artists to dream up other ways to make money. This creates inefficiencies and it just isn't fair to those who just want to sell their creations without holding a concert or drumming up some other scheme to get people to pay. Most "open source" companies spend endless hours trying to concoct ways to open source just enough of their product while forcing enough people to pay so everyone can eat.
I've found that most of the people who speak like pitaj are in universities and they make their money through some mixture of outrageous tuition bills that can't be dodged or government funding from taxes that can't be escaped.
There's no such thing as a free lunch.
There's no evidence this is true. This is already the world we live in, and creativity is high.
> It's not like the farmers or the apartment owners are going to let people "pirate" a warm place to sleep or a good meal.
I made a specific point that IP is fundamentally different.
> The Grateful Dead, for instance, let people freely copy mix tapes of their concerts and made their money on gate revenues. (They didn't let people in for free. Nope. )
That exactly the point. Monetizing through live shows is already how most music artists make money.
> This creates inefficiencies and it just isn't fair to those who just want to sell their creations without holding a concert or drumming up some other scheme to get people to pay.
It's competition that benefits the consumers of those creations and an opportunity for middle-men to connect creators with consumers (see Patreon). Define "fair" when copyright is often used as a way to censor and steal from smaller creators.
> Most "open source" companies spend endless hours trying to concoct ways to open source just enough of their product while forcing enough people to pay so everyone can eat.
And the outcome is that the public has access to countless sets of open source software alternatives. Which is amazing for users and innovators.
> I've found that most of the people who speak like pitaj are in universities and they make their money through some mixture of outrageous tuition bills that can't be dodged or government funding from taxes that can't be escaped.
Not true for me.
You can't sustain that model through live performance. You could release books chapter by chapter, and try to fund creation through the Patron model, but that leads to a very different type of product that is honestly inferior.
You can see this in the books that have done well for free on Kindle. Sometimes you want to consume a piece of art that doesn't need to hook the consumer in the opening minutes, and also the artist may need to find a way to fund YEARS of work before producing anything that would entitle them to micro-payments.
I don't have a good answer to this. I would therefore suggest decreasing the duration of copyright to somewhere around 5-10 years to give the copyright holder time to sell the work with exclusive rights, after which the work enters public domain (like copyright was initially intended to work).
This was largely solved by selling high quality books as the competition only made cheap books. This seems to have largely worked until newspapers got angry that a small percentage of people read the news without paying.
http://topwebfiction.com/ is good example of works that are mostly funded by patreon(young adult focused) that sidestep this problem.
Or honestly even AFTER writing Suttree would have been able to get enough funding to write one of his better books?
"Stealing from smaller creators" by the big guys isn't a problem I foresee getting smaller in an IP-free world.
The idea of copyleft doesn't. The particular implementation in our regulatory reality does, because RMS & others figured out how to hack a system typically used for rent-seeking and restricting innovation (thus lots of parties are investing money to preserve it), and use it for the opposite goal.
> The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable. However, as a special exception, the source code distributed need not include anything that is normally distributed (in either source or binary form) with the major components (compiler, kernel, and so on) of the operating system on which the executable runs, unless that component itself accompanies the executable.
A world where you could freely modify binaries and distribute the results would not provide the same freedoms that are essential to the GPL. Copyright is absolutely necessary to accomplish that goal.
The GPL also embodies the fundamental moral theory of copyright: "I created this thing, so I get to decide the terms on which you use this thing." The GPL doesn't just embody the idea that users should be free to do what they could in a state of nature. It is fundamentally predicated on the idea of enforced reciprocity.
Only because reciprocity is prevented by default through copyright law. In the state of nature, I could not prevent you from modifying my published software, and you couldn't stop me from taking your published modifications and using them, or distributing around. GPL is crafted to create an enclave supported by copyright law, in which things behave similarly to the desired "natural state".
As for source vs. binary thing, I feel that if there were no restrictions on binaries, there would also be no reason to not release source code in the first place. This makes the source code aspect important for real-world GPL, but not necessarily a core issue for a hypothetical copyright-free world.
> A program is free software if the program's users have the four essential freedoms: [1]
> The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0). > The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this. > The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2). > The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
The FSF twice says that having "source code is a precondition" for the freedoms the GPL seeks to protect. And that makes sense. If what you care about is allowing users to "study how the program works" and "change it so it does your computing as you wish," mere freedom to reverse-engineer binaries is insufficient.
Indeed, your interpretation makes the first two freedoms meaningless. It doesn't infringe copyright to reverse-engineer programs for study, or modify them for your own use. You don't need the GPL to enable those freedoms. Those two freedoms only make sense if you read them to mean that users should be able to study and modify the program in the "preferred form" for doing so (i.e. buildable source code).
Sure there is. The GPL just used copyright as a hack to enforce on a limited basis what the creators explicitly think ought to be a universal obligation not dependent on the use of some upstream content that imposes the rule, for which the natural enforcement mechanism would be for the rules to be in law directly instead of copyright. “Copyleft” essentially implies that—its twisting what proponents see as a bad law into a tool for approximating the nearly diameteically-opposed law they wish existed in its place.
Even in a post-IP world you can have it be law that anything sold must include its documentation, manuals, and thus in the case of software on the sold product, its source code.
The fact so few realize how grossly unjust it is that most products sold today not only are undocumented but are intentionally obfuscated to make repair nigh impossible in order to drive replacement is the origin of the problem, though.
You can, for example, reverse-engineer these binaries or develop binary patches (without IP laws, all of this becomes legal).
I could, for example, modify any piece of software I like, and legally distribute modified copies to others. Even if I didn't want to share my modifications with a larger community (or didn't want to do it for free), I couldn't stop it - someone else could do that for me. And as 'wolfgke points out, being open source doesn't matter much here.
No, without copyright, you cannot force the other party to give you access to the original source code.
BTW: There does not seem to exist an open source license that tries to emulate "no copyright"/"no IP". I.e. the license allows reverse engineering of all binaries derived from it virally, create modifications etc. and perhaps allows to use patents; but the license does not give you the right to demand access to the original source code.
Buddy, you must never have worked with a decompiler. To say nothing of the source file structure and comments that are lost along the way.
GPL requires source code, which it defines as "the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it."
This prevents release of compilable-but-obfuscated code, or transpiler output, etc., or intentional removal of information required to build the software (though this clause causes GPL-compatibility issues with authenticated-build platforms).
At least the copyleft defenders would not agree.
- We can audit software before buying
- We have the ultimate "right to repair"
- Open source/hobby projects can automatically use it for free (SAAS/closed source projects often offer this as well, but there's more friction)
And even if we are not technically required to upstream any patches that we make under the commercial license, the average engineering team will try to keep their downstream patches to a minimum, and the easiest way is to get them merged in the original GPL version.
In order to ask if copyleft would still be an effective strategy in a non-copyright world we would have to ask if the problem would still exist and how it would look like. Then we would have to compare copyleft to other strategies to see which would be most effective.
Personally I think that if the anti-copyright movement would managed to gain enough political support to remove copyright then copyleft would not be the most effective strategy to gain the goals defined by software freedoms.
Creators aren't entitled to a "fair" world. Nobody is.
Speaking of "fairness": How is it "fair" that someone should be entitled to profit again-and-again from a single act of work, just because that work was "creative"? Shouldn't the laborers who carried the stones to build a bridge be entitled to an ongoing royalty paid by everyone who crosses?
just because that work was "creative"?
2. I didn't say Copyright prevents others from learning
3. A work is never sufficiently original, it's always a derivative
That's probably not true, for two reasons. The general reason is that most of anything was created recently, due to the exponential growth of human population and society. The specific reason is that copyright was developed hand-in-hand with the technology for creating easily-reproduced works.
> Shouldn't the laborers who carried the stones to build a bridge be entitled to an ongoing royalty paid by everyone who crosses?
There are, of course, toll bridges and roads, including private ones. (The fact that the laborer doesn’t get the payment is a function of the arrangement between the laborer and the person who owns the bridge, not a function of the nature of the property right.)
You mean like publishers and creators?
Creators are actually mostly in the same class as the laborers - neither one gets recurring payments, as they've both likely sold the rights to their product for a more immediate payment. The ultimate goal of these laws is to create a formal title that can be bought up by the rent-seeking class.
If that laborer decided that his works had to be pay that way, sure.
> How is it "fair" that someone should be entitled to profit again-and-again from a single act of work, just because that work was "creative"?
What he does is owned by himself. He shared it with you on a specific terms, that you don't share it with anyone else.
He profit again and again from his single act of work, because that's how he decided to sell it. There's millions that does a work, sell it and are done with it. I do it everyday at work, I do 8 hours of software development and that source code is now the property of the company where I work. That's my choice though.
A music streaming "transaction" pays an Artist $0.005, on a good day. Not enough to make a living and sustain cultural values.
Do you expect people to pay for your work? Do you voluntarily give your labor away for free? Do you sell software?
All work I produce for profit is expressly for-hire and "owned" by the paying Customer. I've got no rights in the products of my work. I've never produced work that my Customers have subsequently licensed or sold, nor would I take on such work. There's plenty of work to do w/o going down that distasteful road.
Any software, writing, photography, music, and other creative endeavors that I've pursued in my personal time and that I have distributed have been permissively licensed or disclaimed to be in the public domain. Fundamentally, I believe an idea can't be "owned". Anything I communicate to others is no longer "mine". It belongs to humanity. Attribution of authorship has a moral component to me (i.e. plagiarism is morally wrong), but making derivative works or exact copies of the works of others isn't wrong. All human expression is derivative.
The current copyright regime in the United States is such a perversion of the original intent that I consider it immoral to participate in it for profit and I have varying degrees of contempt for those people or companies who do. The social contract is skewed too far from the benefit of the public, in favor of the entrenched copyright interests (who, by and large, aren't creators). If the copyright regime were returned to the original term and renewal I might change my opinion, though I still wouldn't participate personally. That would, at least, bring works into the public domain in a sensible time period.
By and large the "entertainment industry" is the object of my ire, because their lobby has been the one seeking to increase copyright terms and to make draconian laws, like the DMCA, to limit individual rights. I think the "tech industry", as we know it, would function in substantially the same manner w/ shorter copyright terms (and w/o software or business process patents-- though that's not really what we're talking about here).
Have I benefited from the current copyright regime? Sure. A lot of the work that I do involves support of non-Free software. Like I said-- if we went back to sensible copyright terms I think the tech industry would be mostly the same.
Perhaps I'm a hypocrite who can't ever be redeemed for working in the tech industry. I was born into the "IP" regime that exists today (at least, prior to the Sonny Bono copyright extension act and the DMCA), but I'm trying to navigate it with the moral compass that I've got.
This is psychopathic. Everyone deserves a fair world. That's a huge part of what society is all about. "All men are created equal" is a great thing for a society to aspire to.
>This is psychopathic.
You cannot imagine an interpretation of his words that makes them not psychopathic?
I think you've accurately captured the state of the world for the vast majority of owners of IP who wish to profit from their work. It is extremely rare for royalties to produce any significant percentage of revenues for artists. Most revenue comes from merchandise, live performances, custom work, and so on.
With this in mind, I submit that the actual value of IP in most cases is close to zero.
I heartily endorse this opinion or viewpoint.
After accepting this as true, we must confront why "intellectual property" in the form of taxpayer-funded enforcement of ownership of an idea exists.
Which only makes me wonder further if the underlying IP is really valuable or not.
So I guess I must concede the point. At least in pop music, it could be argued that the value of the work alone is small, and almost all of the value is created by third parties. You gave me something to think about.
A few examples:
Official torrent with tip jar, purchase here info included. One could host this torrent too.
Download here page with ads and opportunity to buy, pay what one wants to pay.
Pay for copy, or stream it anytime from our nice server...
Social media, coupled with variations on the above can get word out quickly.
These things, and the many variations on them possible, are of least advantage to the big players, and can be a serious advantage for new, small, up and coming players.
Piracy does not eliminate any sales opportunities. And it can often garner attention where buying that attention can be otherwise costly.
Being relevant opens a lot of potential doors.
Are you arguing that it's unfair that a business needs to sell something that people are willing to pay for in order to make money?
I argue against that media companies are using goon squads (police, judges, industrial-prison complex) to rob people who pirate their money or their freedom.
The fact that pircay exists exactly does show that their exist people that do not want to pay.
Of course not? This entire thread is talking about how IP is a sham. Its totally out of touch with physical reality. The original design of IP to begin with was more to protect the printers than the artists themselves - the problem that needed addressing in the 17th-18th century during the dawn of IP protection wasn't that creativity was this new thing people were trying out - it was that industrial printing of media was suddenly a thing at a scale whereby the manufacturers of books wanted their infrastructure protected from scalpers undercutting their expensive runs of literature.
IP was conceived as a romantic way to protect the middle men of creativity from the start, and while those middle men still exist, their function has been totally technologically obsoleted to the point where random strangers I have never and will never meet are offering to send me copies of things I want for free. That is damn magic that could not have happened even thirty years ago. There was always a marginal cost to information transfer that is now gone, and with its departure the hollow justifications for information monopolies at gunpoint are plain to see as immoral and unreasonable.
They always were, it was always a protection racket for middle men, but at least last century the economic indicators aligned marginally with the concept. Now they are in total opposition to physical reality and those that realize it are less guilt tripped by pirating some corporation larger than several nations works.
Many people use piracy to get art they literally cannot buy legally. Many others use it to get digital versions of physical media they bought.
I agree that this has nothing to do with the propriety of people taking content with a price tag for free. But I think muddling the market sense of fairness (I don't want to/cannot perform in a concert; people should pay me for selling MP3s online) and the ethics of copying data is dangerous. Especially when we are solving the problem through legislation.
This sounds like a personal attack and I feel your comment would be better without it.
The "creation" is the work, which can still be sold. Copies of the work cost nothing and does not make any sense to sell them.
Of course, I see this as a problem with thr economy. Freely distributing ideas is better for society as a whole than keeping secrets.
The prevalence of proprietary kernel drivers likewise lends credence to the value in having forced openness, which would fall under more right to repair than IP for consumers of products hosting software.
You'll notice the bait-and-switch modern society does here. We're supposed to value and respect artists, because they're "morons (...) who create for the sake of creating", who want to express their feelings and communicate their thoughts. And then we're given "artists" whose primary purpose is to make money through their creative works. I think we shouldn't be calling these two groups of people using the same word.
Perhaps a solution should be engineered for that consumer who is looking, and that would be an art to avoid the mainstream bloat that would come with producing a mechanism like that.
I pirate all the time even though I do try and buy the legal options first. When in a lot of cases. Kodi with a couple add-ons take care of the rest. I bought a physical copy of some book but the company drm servers are no longer maintained I'm out of luck. Pirated copies to the rescue. There is an entire generation that was raised to not give a shit about copyright.
I've probably committed five felonies today yet paid once because I'd prefer to do that.
So why bother paying any attention to copyright law? There are zero repercussions.
The root model is still very much effectual: trade goods and services. If you sell a hardback copy of your book then you can make a margin from people who buy it to have in their offline library. If you perform your music live then you can profit off of your audience. If you open source your software then you can build a company offering consulting around it.
Just think about the amount of advertising and reach that people have access to now. Using your example; giving away a million mix tapes to sell a hundred thousand tickets to your concerts is likely better than selling a thousand mix tapes because no one knows who you are and few want to take a chance.
Say we succeeded in creating a crime free society. Would people be justified in their complaints about the lack of police jobs?
> ... or government funding from taxes that can't be escaped.
This is bad why? You seem to have issue with the fact that it's being funded in a way that you can't be avoided, but this is true even for private institutions. The truth is that in perfectly competitive markets most companies do not make enough profit to reinvest into research. Most research instead come from near-monopoly markets that have the profits to invest in research. Take for example the development of UNIX at Bell Labs. I doubt anybody living in that era could've avoided telephone charges entirely.
IP is a construct created by capitalism to monetize art and information. It is not a real thing and it is not a necessary thing. People create things just fine without and industrial complex behind them, and if losing that is the cost of all art being accessible to everyone, I am fine with that deal.
Piracy is just another competitor on the market; if for the customer the pirated copy provides a better experience at a cheaper price, no IP law will be able to stop the customer from using the better solution. That's capitalism at work.
If you want piracy to stop the solution is simple; provide a better product. Either by providing a better experience (Netflix until recently, Steam) or at a cheaper/equivalent price (Offering your product for free or under an open source license).
At the end of the day the plain old "give me money to give you thing" works the best for all parties involved (assuming said parties want to be involved), despite any drawbacks.
Also as a programmer i'm not sure how i'd go about doing a live show :-P
This is the heart of it for me. All the new monetization models developed in the last 20 years suck. I don't want software as a service, I don't want freemium, I certainly don't want to be the product for ad-supported software. All I want is to pay you for the thing and get the thing and then for you to leave me alone until you release a new version of the thing.
Most of the decent software I’ve seen lately has used this model of monetization.
The solution to "subscriptions for things that have no reason to be provided as a service instead of as a product" is just trusting that people will pay if they like your product, or creating alternatives in the open-source space. Which will be much easier if you can rightfully use prior work. Your other concerns already exist, so at the worst we just have what we already have.
> Also as a programmer i'm not sure how i'd go about doing a live show :-P
You may be surprised. Many programmers do live-coding sessions as they work on open source products.
This is out of necessity, not necessarily because of the desire to do so. Not every musician wants to tour 300 days a year just to make a living. Writing music and performing music are not the same thing.
You absolutely need to then do something to monetize said audience. Selling a course is the common model. But that’s selling access to information which is what we’re trying to argue against here.
I have also been pleasantly surprised that you can sell access to a livecoding series. That’s sort of like tickets to a live show.
Workshops are another form of a live programming show that people will pay money for. Have also done those and it’s a lot of fun.
Most paid forms of these are in exchange for teaching. Access to intellectual property in your brain.
I know there are training companies that charge.
You also have workshops as part of paid conferences but I assume the vast bulk of those workshops are done for free by people being paid by their employer. And Meetups are usually free with the same people from companies along with those showing off or promoting some side project.
I agree with your general point around teaching/training. It's just that you're competing with a lot of free content, often subsidized by some company's product sales.
Besides, turning my profession into a sharecropping existence on Twitch/YouTube/Patreon, choosing to either be a living ad banner or a mendicant, holds absolutely no appeal for me.
I don't think I'd go as far as the op, but the current arrangement is causing me to lose respect for the whole setup.
IP should be there to enable people to make more stuff and no more. It seems that we should be testing how minimalistic we can make it, not how maximalistic, as is currently the case.
The blurred lines case isnt going to result in more music being made, it's going to result in less, Marvin Gaye isnt going to make another album, because he's dead.
I would guess for low overhead type things a 5 year copyright term wouldn't result in less music being produced, and it shouldn't be down to me to prove that, it should be down to whoever wants longer copyright terms to prove that that will result in more content being created.
Then in the last 30-40 years all those exceptions and escape vales for the plain old method of copyright was either made obsolete or amended away. Copyright does not expire in any meaningful way, public libraries holds only a marginal amount of all the copyrighted works, public performance got locked down, and so on.
The old "give me money to give you thing" worked fined in the old times with old time copyright and society. It work crappy in current time with current copyright and current society. Thus people are rushing to find a new better way.
As a programmer we could go back to 1790 old copyright law and still have a job. Even the game industry would survive fine on it.
It seems to be working okay for YouTube and Twitch content creators. By monetizing via donations, Patreon patronage, and Twitch subscriptions, creators form a closer and more direct relationship with their audience. Twitch streamers especially are rewarded for engaging directly with people in chat.
For programmers it's different. Your best bet is to get paid by a company to work on proprietary business software, which can be highly specialized to the company and protected by trade secrets.
A consideration: Could a reason for this also be that people do want to avoid that their money goes to "evil media companies" who will use this money to fight against them (think DRM, think anti-consumer legislation etc.)?
And that sentiment is great, but while it's not unusual, it's certainly not the view that most people take. If even 10% of the people who like our stuff on social media and enjoy using the free versions actually paid even for the cheapest one-off purchase or shortest subscription to support the creators, I'd be writing to you from great hall of my palace right now.
Not in Germany. In Germany, there exists a class of criminal acts that are subsumed unter the umbrella term "Geheimnisverrat" (secret betrayal), which also includes revealing trade secrets:
> https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Geheimnisverrat&o...
No, in German law, this is a completely different criminal offence.
As I wrote under https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20811544 "Geheimnisverrat" applies to leaking confidential data (e.g. trade secrets, but not copyrighted works that are publicly available).
I will try to explain it to you again: the purpose of all the criminal offences that are subsumed under "Geheimnisverrat" in German law is to punish leaking confidential information (e.g. trade secrets).
For example, a movie that is available on a BluRay disc, is not confidential because you can easily buy it. Thus, copying a BluRay disc etc. is does not belong under the umbrella term "Geheimnisverrat" because the content of the BluRay disc is not confidential data, but copyrighted.
Thus, in German law, Urheberrechtsverletzung (roughly and often translated with "copyright violation", though not identical) and Geheimnisverrat (secret betrayal) are very different criminal acts.
Go back to the beginning of the thread:
> "Intellectual property" is fundamentally different from classical property because information is not an exclusive good. If I hold an apple, you cannot hold the same apple, but we can both hold a digital copy with the same information.
The same thing applies to these secrets. It's just a subtype of intellectual property. In the US, too, trade secrets and copyright violation are handled under different sections of the law. They are different acts, just like in Germany (hence the different name - copyright vs. trade secret).
But they're both intellectual property and the arguments against work against both.
Public money and grants avoid all of these problems. In my view, we should dramatically expand public funding for technology and the arts, especially in a world where distribution is nearly free.
But then we need a way to decide what is or is not worthy of funding.
The effect of copyright is to create a market-based approach to this, where something similar to the familiar economics of trading goods allows us to direct money to those who provide value.
A move to publicly funded creative works would prompt the kind of debates we have today about public service broadcasters in particular and about pork barrel politics in general, but on a scale several orders of magnitude larger. I find it hard to imagine how that could possibly be as effective as what we have today. The power wielded by the gatekeepers of taxpayer-funded financial support would be immense and inevitably deeply corrosive.
I see live coding happening all over Youtube and Twitch.
Edit: Medium sized channel.
[0] https://www.quora.com/How-much-does-YouTube-pay-per-1000-vie...
Well I wasn't necessarily thinking this was being compared to a full time job, just that a channel could be self supporting, but there are ways to get close:
A strong supplement to ads is direct donations/subscriptions. If you've ever seen a YouTube/Twitch chat, people send a LOT of money that way and get their message highlighted/usually responded to for their money. It's not uncommon to see mid-tier YouTubers make hundreds in one stream but its probably the exception and not the rule.
I think the best-fit to the analogy here is when you make an app for one particular customer instead of for the general public.
If the app is just a way into some other paid-for service, that could work OK. It would be similar to businesses contributing to OSS that is available at no charge today because they build related services that they do charge for. But this sort of model only works for a subset of the valuable apps produced today.
Don’t get me wrong, some things may be well suited to the current model: a hiking GPS needs good maps, good maps are expensive to make, that expense is currently recovered with copyright licenses… but even then the best maps seem to be from the government, e.g. Ordinance Survey in the UK, and that app development could easily be nationalised and funded from taxation the way all NASA’s output is.
You can't make a specific file format without using this company.
It seems any free or low cost competitor gets bought by them.
It's made the CAD world horrible.
Is your claim that the set of creative works we have today would exist in full without IP law? Because that is a bold claim, and rather easily refutable through any single example where a company's primary competitive advantage hinges upon IP rights. Potential examples abound.
You can argue that the tradeoffs in IP law are not good tradeoffs. But your post seems to think that there would be no tradeoff -- that simply we'd get all the benefits conferred to society (in the form of creative works), with none of the downsides, if we eliminated IP protections. The burden of proof is on you for that one, since I'm sure if you surveyed any company relying upon IP protections in any non-trivial way, they'd indicate that capital would have been allocated elsewhere if not for those protections.
Those are bad questions, and unanswerable on all accounts. They also don't help us because then we have to compare the subjective values of creations to pick which is better, which is impossible since it varies person-to-person. One question we could ask is "How much money flows from a consumers to creators under both systems?" That question is still hard to answer, but at least the answer would have meaning.
> Is your claim that the set of creative works we have today would exist in full without IP law?
I don't claim that everything would be the same without IP laws. However, I certainly think it would be better if they didn't exist.
> rather easily refutable through any single example where a company's primary competitive advantage hinges upon IP rights. Potential examples abound.
It doesn't really matter but I am curious what companies you're referring to that aren't acting as parasitic rent-seeking middlemen.
> You can argue that the tradeoffs in IP law are not good tradeoffs. But your post seems to think that there would be no tradeoff -- that simply we'd get all the benefits conferred to society (in the form of creative works), with none of the downsides, if we eliminated IP protections.
I don't see any evidence that lifting IP protections will result in a decrease in quantity or quality of creative works as a whole.
> The burden of proof is on you for that one, since I'm sure if you surveyed any company relying upon IP protections in any non-trivial way, they'd indicate that capital would have been allocated elsewhere if not for those protections.
Let's make it clear what you're advocating for: continued state action that benefits a minority of the population at the expense of consumers by providing the members of that minority with an artificially enforced monopoly on information.
Your argument is the status quo fallacy. Just because something currently exists, does not mean I have the burden of proof. In fact, it is you who must prove that IP is beneficial. I cannot prove a negative (that IP is not necessary or beneficial) and asking me to do so is irrational. That's like asking abolitionists to prove that slavery isn't necessary for the economy. (Sorry for the inflammatory example but it's what came to mind)
Well, there are millions of people working in creative industries today whose income ultimately derives from selling that creative work under the current IP regime. If removing IP protections is not to result in reduced output, some alternative model must either continue to provide the same incentive for the same people to do that work or provide a sufficient incentive so that others produce at least the equivalent output.
I would argue that many alternative models have been tried in recent years, and that in most cases there is no inherent reason that they could not succeed immediately if they created a more effective incentive than the existing IP regime just because we have that regime operating in parallel. And yet so far, I see little evidence that any known alternative has actually done that. There are some isolated success stories, and even those typically don't raise anything like as much funding as the the top tier of works funded through more traditional models.
Let's make it clear what you're advocating for: continued state action that benefits a minority of the population at the expense of consumers by providing the members of that minority with an artificially enforced monopoly on information.
But that minority of the population is the only group contributing any value here. What you're advocating for is everyone being able to benefit from the work of others without any obligation to give anything back. That might cut it when we're living in a fully automated utopian paradise where money is obsolete and no-one has to work for a living, but until then, the people contributing that value also have bills to pay and families to feed.
For some the result was not bad. Even good (Spotify and co are pretty cool, at least for a casual user like myself).
Some were downright awful. Games with DRM, always online requirements, decline of AAA quality single player game (at least proportionally) and user hostile monetization (micro transaction).
In a magical world where we actually had enforceable IP/piracy laws, but reasonable IP terms, I wonder how different things would be. Some stuff would likely be worse. Some would likely be better. But for sure things would be very different.
Sorry, I call bullshit and gross exaggeration.
It's a weak right, if it is one: The term of exclusivity is set by statute. Imagine real property rights having a fixed term defined by the whim of Congress. Indeed imagine any right needing to be enumerated, explicitly, and then thrown to Congress to set a time limit on it.
Nonetheless the Framers thought it worth putting in the Constitution and so we have a duty to keep this right from being controlled by big publishing interests, big pharma, etc. (also not mentioned in the Copyright Clause, just authors and inventors).
Indexing the term of copyright exclusivity to US life expectancy, for example, might make us think harder about a range of national policies.
That’s one difference, sure. But another difference is that intellectual property must be created by people, while other kinds of property often are created naturally. Somebody had to make Harry Potter. My yard was just there naturally. Why shouldn’t the property right in Harry Potter be stronger than that for land? Why is one kind of difference dispositive and the other not?
No, you suggested this out of nothing. It actually suggests the opposite, because protecting "intellectual property" takes away the freedom from other people to create it themselves as if they are somehow less deserving of something they created because they weren't the first ones to get that protection.
The lines what is really counts as "independent" are deeply blurred.
Every piece of property must be improved by labor in some way. That is how property is created in the first place: homesteading involves investing your labor into untouched land to own it, as one example.
The initial labor is what creates the property. It can then be traded and whatnot. But it was not property before the initial labor that transformed wild land to something useful.
> Land property is not created by laboring on it, in fact it was always there.
There is much untouched land on the moon. Who owns that?
Land exists before improvement, but it is not property until improved through labor by people. That's just how the property rights on which our civilization is based work.
Intellectual properties are generally more creative based endeavors and should be protected as such IMO
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Moon_Treaty&oldid...
There is no particular reason we should believe that if Harry Potter did not exist, there would be nothing similar enough to Harry Potter to serve as close substitute. Kids could have gone nuts for Barry Brassgears, the steampunk airship cabin-boy that ultimately grows in knowledge and ability to defeat Max Clanks, the industrialist bent on clearing the skies of all independent captains. Or maybe they could have latched on to Sirene Ceta, the young mermaid adventuress who stumbles into a scheme by landswoman Gail Greywave to seize control over the Pacific salmon runs, and foils it. I just made these up, but anyone can write an automated generator to spit out these pitches.
Without the copyright-based business, the type and the quality of the popular stories change, but they still get written. The problem becomes discoverability, because it is harder to make money by promoting someone else's work. More promotion creates more copies, but you can no longer monetize the copies directly. You only have author goodwill and branding to work with.
What if you manufacture a computer under a company you name Apple, and manufacture/sell computers under the mark "Apple" and even have a "Apple logo."
Do you believe other companies should be able to infringe on your name, mark and logo?
What if other manufacturers are attempting to decieve the public by trading off the good will and value you built in the name? What if other manufacturers are purposefully flooding the market with cheap knock offs of your machines and the public can't tell the difference, so they stop buying your machines and the value of your company/brand goes down to zero?
Trademark is intellectual property, you stated:
>intellectual property is an invalid form of ownership and shouldn't exist at all
>This is because claiming to be another party or claiming your product is their product is fraud.
It would not be fraud, it would be infringement of intellectual property.
But what is the practical difference if you manufacture/sell computers under your mark/logo, or if you are an author selling your book and I begin reproducing your book and selling it to the public? What if I begin reproducing Harry Potter original works or even create my own Harry Potter works and adopt the authors copyright pen name?
The act of trying to deceive people through imitation of another product should fall plainly under a better written statute against impersonation, slander, and deceptive advertising. You shouldn't be registering trademarks or having the bureaucracy associated - all you need to do is sue someone you think is trying to mislead in imitating your branding under such expanded laws to get them to stop.
Because inevitably it comes down to the interpretations of people on who is the "real" product, whatever it name may be. Trademark registration gives you a date to go by but that doesn't guarantee use of the name or nuance about presentation aside the trademark. It still ends up being in front of a judge even with a trademark in hand, and like with all the IP offices of government the trademark office is usually understaffed, overworked, and not capable of accurately auditing all incoming requests for brand protection or to verify issued trademarks are being used for their intended purpose.
Having said that, I've become a bit more pragmatic over time. I can see value in limited-time monopolies being granted by statute. (Can you imagine the wacky alternatives that private individuals and companies would write into contracts if "IP" law didn't exist?) Limited-time, being a major sticking-point with me, and something that really needs to fixed under the current US copyright regime.
There are countless examples of trade secrets that exists in this exact state. These things are already in employment contracts.
Source code is like a written recipe, you absolutely should be able to copyright it. But you shouldn't be able to patent it. All software patents do is encourage lawsuits and trolling.
But you can’t copyright recipies, AFAIK.
> If Marvel releases a movie, I can steal it and ask people to subscribe to my stolen movie service, donate to it, show it using advertisements, write a live show using the script, etc
Yes, you can do that. But you don't have access to that movie until it's released, so Marvel can sell release access to theaters and streaming services. They can crowd-fund new movies by selling exclusive early access to the final product. They can sell merchandise and other media that integrates with the movie. Perhaps they can sell super-high-quality physical media for collectors.
Obviously people are willing to pay money to see these movies. The questions is how to connect Marvel with that money, which I'm sure they can figure out.
> About the only way I can't steal it is through commission, but then how is the person paying the commission getting their money back?
Artists selling their services for commission is mostly seen for smaller works of art, like paintings / drawings or short animations.
But what would we call it?
Just ask yourself if Avengers - if the entire franchise of Marvel movies - would have been made if not for IP protections that allowed the costs of making those movies to be recouped; that allowed those movies to be profitable for the investors.
Ask yourself if we would have all the books we currently have from Steven King (or George R.R. Martin, or Stan Lee, or any other commercially popular author) if copyright (a form of IP protection) did not exist.
The answer is "No".
There are a few options for people to put their work up for free online, but if you've read or watched those, you realize that the quality is nowhere near a professionally written and edited novel or a movie with millions of post-production work budget.
In fact, an argument could be made using those same movies as an example, that these excessive IP laws have the exact opposite effect and actually end up stunting creativity and originality as the big corporations aim to milk every last penny from decades old franchises and ideas, instead of seeking new and original concepts, because the former is a far more profitable endeavor. I mean, look at the state of Hollywood right now - when was the last time you saw a truly novel and noteworthy movie, not based on an already established franchise/idea/series?
Have no doubt, even truly creative works would suffer, since there's no incentive for investors to invest even in truly creative work, since there's no monetary return on investment - just a movie which they can't monetize.
Imagine if George RR Martin had to hold a day job in addition to writing - how many books would he have actually written by this point?
In my experience, in recent years I've found to enjoy lot more independently produced content (which either happens to be free or very cheaply available) as opposed to big budget titles produced by big corporations. Not because I actively seek such content, but because I genuinely find it to be more worthwhile and enjoyable than the other option.
Now I can't really speak for motion pictures, because I don't watch tv shows and movies anymore - but I can definitely say this is very true for the music and video game industries - big investment and quality are not correlated.
It wasn't until later, sometimes centuries later, that these became broadly available to everyone.
So I guess, how much of an advance are you willing to give Steven King (or your favorite author) to write a novel for the world?
Then you're saying stuff was paid for by a rich patron.
Are you suggesting that patrons would not have stuff made if weren't exclusive?
It's worth remembering that exactly that is what happened. Rich guy paid for a thing, everyone got use of it. Some of the top works of history were created like this, and it bears consideration whether the corporations who make things for profit are as good at creating such works.
A patron, in comparison, is a single entity who is interested in the book, and who is capable of shelling out the $50,000 (a nice round number representing the salary for a good, but not great, writer and editor for the duration of getting the book produced) to have that book made. I'm not capable of doing that; I am guessing most people are not.
> it bears consideration whether the corporations who make things for profit are as good at creating such works
That's up to each person to decide. Is GRRM's Game of Thrones such a work? The Dark Tower series? Avengers Infinity War and Endgame?
Honestly, I think that yes, in many ways they are on par with or superior to books such as the Illiad and the Odyssey. They are absolutely better than Moby Dick.
It seems to me that content will get created regardless. Whether it's better is as you say a matter of taste, but both worlds have existed.
You can't be serious that Avengers is on par with the epics.
> How many patrons will pay to have something made in the current world, knowing they could just recoup their money?
How could they recoup their money, if there's no exclusivity? There's nothing to sell.
> It seems to me that content will get created regardless.
I guess ultimately, there is absolutely nothing stopping people in today's from creating the best content they possibly could, except for having to cover their cost of living. Today's IP protections allow them to cover their cost of living by creating content. A lack of IP protections means that creation will always be a second or lower priority to a vast majority of creators (those not sponsored by a patron)
To me, that means that a world that lets them create as a method of covering their cost of living is a better world for those creators.
Consumers spent money on the theater experience because it was the best way to see the movie when they wanted to see it.
Timed releases for content are fine, but if I buy a disk after the fact, I want to be able to copy it freely without DRM and jumping through stupid hurdles.
There's no audience participation in Avengers, and with today's home AV setups, there's little benefit to the theater environment; there's no incentive to pay to watch something that will be freely and legally available in a day or two (at most).
That already happens with a lot of movies where the movie is leaked (even sometimes before it lands in the cinema) and it does not seem to change anything to the theater results.
As the statement you quoted said, there is no evidence that this is the case.
Those movies made back their investment despite piracy, why would the removal of those IP protections change that? Many authors have not become commercially popular for much of their career but still wrote. How can you claim those books only exist because of copyright?
The theater offers very few practical enhancements to the viewing of a movie that aren't available in your average home theater system.
Evidence of this extremely bold claim?
Your idea of the "average home theatre" may be a bit exaggerated, particularly out of the Western market.
How exactly are these popcorn time variants acquiring high quality copies of the film in a quick time frame?
Nor world it cost so much to make movies, because the best way to do that, including the best software and hardware design, would belong to everyone.
That aside, the obvious answer would be to publicly fund this kind of activity that we deem beneficial to society.
This can be solved by government grants, a high but still normal VAT on all medicine purchases is enough to cover all our current medicine research costs, you'd just have to earmark it.
All concepts of ownership are human constructs. We have copyright because of its utility, not for some analogy to conventional ownership in law.
> There are many many ways to monetize creation including but not limited to subscription, donation, live shows, advertisement, and commission.
I don't see anyone making high-budget movies under any revenue models other than as-a-product and as-a-service, both of which fail in the absence of copyright.
> There is no evidence that intellectual property is necessary for innovation or creative endeavors.
Given that whole industries are based on copyright, I rather think the onus is on you to make the case that getting rid of it wouldn't be ruinous.
But then it would be legal to duplicate it and thus you can remove paid subscription and paid live shows from your possibilities.
What's remains is ads/commission that you do block (the internet never forget [0]).
Donations then should be the only way to make content? That seems quite bad...
I think IP is definitely abused, but still a lot of cases were it can protect people.
The bounds or plagiarism have no ties to the legal bounds of what is or isn’t copyright infringement. You can have either one without the other, or both at the same time.
How can you prosecute someone for plagiarism without copyright laws?
In the absence of government-enforced monopoly, I think the next-best alternative for creatives would be to cartelize, trading new content for subscription fees covering a range of convenience services related to creative content, such as a recommendations engine, discoverability, favorites library, notifications, artist-specific storefronts, &c.
Pay $10/month or $100/year to the cartel, and from that, the cartel pays its participating artists a guaranteed stipend for living expenses, bonuses for each new work added to the cartel's library, a bonus for each work that meets a positive audience-review threshold, a bonus for each work that meets a positive peer-review threshold, and jackpot awards for works deemed particularly notable by peers and patrons.
The cartel spends heavily on advertising and promotion, to make new art be perceived as worth the cost of patronage, and portray patronage to the cartel as cool and fashionable. Paying patrons would get first shot at premium sales, such as concert tickets in favorable locations, or the opportunity to buy the original artwork or significant artifacts of the creation process.
So you might, through your account with the arts cartel, find a new band whose sound you like, add them to your personal favorites library, be notified that they are playing live near you in October, get pre-sale tickets for the front rows of seats, and order a patron-exclusive band t-shirt to wear when you go. Then you download their newest tracks, and maybe decide they're worth $X to you, so you hit the "tip" button on your app and pay the cartel $Y so that they pay Z% of that directly to the artists. Later, you might get the opportunity to buy the actual hair net that Leadvocal Rockstar wore at the concert in a patron-exclusive auction.
Meanwhile, your uncool non-patron friends are stuck listening to Top-40 format radio stations, because it's the most reliable curated content outside the arts cartel and the soulless corporate culture-for-consumption factories.
Disney has proven that a giant aggregation of art-producers can sustain itself on almost pure self-promotion. Disney is a humongous self-reinforcing advertisement for itself, carrying multiple viable brands, each targeting different audience demographics. Disney could certainly survive loss of copyright protection, but they would definitely make less money without it, and may have trouble adapting to the new cash flows due to sheer hugeness.
As far as how well advertising works for content, aren’t we seeing enough issues with that now between ad ridden sites and pay to win games?
Remember that IP isn't just music and movies and digital data that you as random Joe or Jane Consumer want.
It includes trade secrets, design patents, etc.
You probably don't give a damn about the IP of a tissue mill that includes production data and information about how they run their machines to get a perfect roll of toilet paper every time, but the companies I work with give a lot of a damn about that and have no desire to share that information with anyone ever and hold onto that IP like their life depends on it (because it very well might)
You have to remember that "IP" isn't just stuff that you might want. You have to look past your own nose a little.
The download sites are all in developing countries where the books are not available except by import that would cost 10X or more US buying power relative to price.
In other words, I lost very little income to piracy despite publishers no longer bothering to try to take down piracy sites. In fact it's an open question if piracy helped sell more books because of engagement from readers in developing countries I would not have reached but for piracy.
The explicitly stated purpose of the copyright clause is not to protect "your lucrative concepts." It is “To promote the progress of science and useful arts," a collective benefit. So if optimal promotion of "science and the useful arts," not commerce, notably, means setting the terms to short, very short, or zero, that's perfectly legal.
Just because you aren't protected by the government, doesn't mean you can't protect your inventions through secrecy.
Tell that to Disney:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Disney_Vault&oldi...
UPDATE: Another example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20810558
Aka, "there are many ways I can personally avoid for paying for the efforts of others".
I've never seen an argument for piracy that has not descended into "I'm not paying".
Everyone seems perfectly ok with someone else paying the cost of creation. And no shit.
Who is paying for all this creation that you enjoy?
There are so many holes here. Lets see how difficult an accounting analysis of piracy is, because interpretations of an absence of data could lead to opposite conclusions.
HBO is now owned by AT&T, some of whose Internet subscribers pirate HBO shows, so how does AT&T account for that in its books? Is that a "loss"? Is it passing on surplus to the consumer?
The answer is it doesn't. There's no such thing as a GAAP piracy charge. Nobody would believe it. Estimates from industry lobbies of the cost of piracy have never shown up in a finance charge the same way that say a "goodwill writedown" has.
Conversely, content pirates value their fast Internet connections and pay more for better speeds! You will never see a major corporation attribute revenue to an illegal activity, so that value is/was permanently unmeasurable.
What about changes over time? There are so many confounding disruptions in the creative content business. Game of Thrones, the article's leading example, was itself a disruption in the content business! It's really hard to do a cause and effect here, because the most attractive interpretation--post hoc/now was caused by the past--is going to be the least durable.
This piracy analysis stuff is really abstract and often misses the point. The best thing you can personally do to support creative work is to pay for it!
Although what is really debated here is the role of middlemen in discovery, profit-maximization, etc., so I personally do something a little different: I make an effort to pay for new creators most of all, because new creators are worst represented in corporate and mass-consumer interests.
https://slate.com/business/2012/01/sopa-stopping-online-pira...
When I was a poor college student I pirated a lot of stuff. Now that I'm a wealthy engineer I've gone back and bought all the stuff I pirated and wanted to keep watching or listening to.
The middle man taking a cut is the problem. It jacks up the price to a point where it's too high - and piracy becomes extremely attractive (especially when it is more convenient to pirate a good than to buy it).
To me, the article is really describing why middle men in this supply chain harm both the creator and the consumer. That's why applying pricing pressure in the form of piracy actually benefits both the creator and consumer (and could potentially even help the middle man find the profit maximizing price, although that depends on the "Just Enough" piracy level).
But isn't this kind of true much of the time? Removing a superfluous middle man will reduce costs and make everyone better off. But unfortunately, the middle man often provides value - they aggregate lots of content and own the customer experience.
Businesses and technologies that attack the middle man are very interesting. Shopify for e-commerce is potentially another example.
A full-featured copy of Starcraft will be playable 50 years from now, regardless of whether Blizzard is still around or not. You can't guarantee that for most games these days.
> you had to connect to Battle.net to authorize your copy, even if you only wanted to play offline
Didn't work for me. This is one of the major contributors to me giving up on gaming. That and pay to win. IMO I should be able to buy a single player game that's all inclusive and not have to be connected to the internet to play it.
IIRC, when China was opening up and Windows and Office were listed at the top of the Most Pirated charts, Bill Gates commented that he thought it was OK because it is essentially starting market saturation, i.e., getting the Chinese hooked on Windows products.
I'm not sure it worked out so well that way. Anyone have any current data on how well MS is doing vs other software platforms in China?
It is anedoctal, but I never bought an original game until my late teens. When I finally had the means to buy original copies and support content creators, I did. If I don't want to pay for a game that I find too expensive or not worth, I don't download it anymore, since I already have so many options to choose from.
[1] https://www.redbull.com/nz-en/the-history-of-video-games-in-...
The reason the 'copyright' industry has protections is because their rapid change in media. Theatre -> VCR-> DVD -> blueray -> digital. They have been able to reproduce their product at extreme lost cost and charge people over and over produced large sums of money.
They used that money from their golden age to lobby for protections they shouldn't have. These protections will go away in a few decades, possibly sooner.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_Piracy_Prohibition_Act
This used to be something that NY Senators would announce almost yearly to throw a bone to the fashion industry.
I doubt it, Walt Disney died over 5 decades ago, yet Disney is still plenty busy lobbying for more copyright extensions [0].
Considering how much money they have available, and are still making, I'd be really surprised if they didn't manage to drag this on for pretty much forever. Especially considering they are not the only powerful entity lobbying in that direction.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act
Also do current digital media services even compensate artist and creators fairly? Most artists cannot live of income solely from Spotify they need todo concerts.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B07NVVRV7F/ref=stream...
20% of downloads per month or something? Or a lottery?
Or maybe this indicates that their prices are too high?
If 50% of the viewers pirated, maybe a 50% lower price would be good? Maybe another value...don't know.
(that's probably enough)
That the copyright laws are outdated given the current technological landscape is something we can agree on. That its replacement should be the law of the jungle, well, count me out from that.
Just as one example, the original versions of Star Wars shown in theaters are essentially lost now. Lucas re-cut them for home release and added horrible color grading, CGI, and even plot points. There isn't a franchise much more culturally important than Star Wars, and they can't even preserve that.
It took the (copyright-infringing) work of individual fans to try to re-create them as best as they can, and they've done a very good job. But those original prints are sitting in a warehouse somewhere, rotting away, never to be scanned in the quality available today.
I think making moral arguments about piracy is a mistake. If these companies really cared about it, they would make it more convenient to stream than to pirate. And it was going in a good direction with Netflix up until everyone decided they needed their own streaming service with exclusive content.
For eg - instead of making a website available directly to people overseas they instead license to a local monopoly that puts it on inferior systems that are mega overpriced simply because the content is not "local"