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Comment by vehemenz | Hacker News Reader

People have different views about ethics. Fortunately, there is no truth of the matter, so anything goes as long as we're internally consistent.

I think ad revenue models are unethical. Promotion of extremist content is unethical. Privacy-invading data collection is unethical. Honestly, I think shitty content, in general, is unethical too.

On the other hand, I think it is ethical for an entrepreneuring developer to charge users $5 to bypass bad faith actors, at the (questionable) expense of "content creators". And I'd feel pretty good about paying the $5 too.

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> Fortunately, there is no truth of the matter, so anything goes as long as we're internally consistent.

I don't think that what you said is internally consistent. Now, we may disagree about exactly what you mean, but it sounds like you are putting forth some form of moral relativism, which has appeared in various forms over the millennia. Many ways of phrasing moral relativism have logical inconsistencies in them.

I think the "anything goes as long as we're internally consistent" is a statement that any ethical system, E, is correct if and only if E is internally consistent.

And "there is no truth of the matter" is saying that "no ethical statement is true in all systems of ethics".

Now, is the "anything goes" statement an ethical statement? Is it true in all systems of ethics? If both, then this is a contradiction. If it is not an ethical statement, then what does "anything goes" even mean? If it is not true in all systems of ethics, then how can you defend it without begging the question? I'm not trying to enumerate all the possibilities, but just illustrate my skepticism... I don't see an easy way out here. It's not impossible, just really quite tricky, and if you value being internally consistent, maybe you should dig deeper.

To quote Stephen Fry, moral relativism is just another way of saying "thinking".

Morals can come from culture, they can come from religion, or they can come from individual contemplation. Morals are axioms.

The one thing we can say for sure about them is that nobody agrees on what they should be.

Saying that advertising is a pest that should be actively removed is not even an uncommon viewpoint. The city of Sao Paolo famously banned all advertising.

Please provide clarification: is something "relative" if people disagree on it? If there are two different interpretations of a single data set, for example, does it mean that the reality of what that data means is "relative" or just that one or both interpretation don't have enough information (or appropriate understanding of it)?

Basically, I want to know what "relativism" actually means to you since your quote seems to imply that anything you think about is "relative". Thank you, I'm excited to hear your response.

Moral relativism is the opposite of moral absolutism.

Moral absolutism is the belief that certain actions are intrinsically moral or immoral.

For example, cannibalism. Say there is some tribe that eats their dead. A moral absolutist would say that "cannibalism is immoral", and therefore conclude that the tribe is immoral[1].

Whereas a moral relativist would say that, if you had grown up in a tribe of cannibals, then eating people would be a perfectly normal thing to do, it would be moral from the tribe's reference frame, and immoral from our reference frame.

Yes, different moral systems can be compared along certain objective dimensions. Objectively, cannibalism causes certain diseases such as kuru.

However, choosing which dimensions to optimise for is itself a subjective process. Objectively, cannibalism prevents food waste :)

Relativism is precisely what allows for meaningful disagreements to occur. Otherwise a disagreement would simply degenerate into a loud exchange of axioms (this often happens).

My problem with moral absolutism is that it requires a healthy dose of chronocentrism to buy into it without reference to some codified set of morals such as a religion. What is considered moral or immoral has changed dramatically in the last century alone. At some point in the future, our morality will be as unrecognisable to future generations as Ancient Greek morality is to us.

[1] Historically, this sort of moral absolutism was the impetus for certain missionary activity. No not that kind.

> The one thing we can say for sure about them is that nobody agrees on what they should be.

That’s not relativism.

Moral relativism is a form of realism, so there would be a truth of the matter.

What I mean by "anything goes" is that ethical discourse is not concerned with truth per se, since its "propositions" do not map to the world. But if we want to talk about ethics sensibly, we could hold any ethical views really, so long as they are internally consistent.

If you feel ad-supported content is flat out unethical, how would you prefer to pay for media online?

Remember the times before Spotify? Piracy was the only way to get a lot of music ; there simply weren’t any paid options.

Nowadays the market for buying or streaming digital music has made paying for digital music viable.

With a lot of YouTube content, the situation is very similar today; there isn’t a way to pay for content without simultaneously being exposed to ads and the associated tracking/profiling/stalking. Maybe as adblocking becomes more common, creators and platforms will be forced to accommodate for the change in demand.

YouTube premium removes ads on YouTube so that covers half the woes.

That Spotify model basically already exists on YouTube with YouTube Premium. YouTube pays creators directly when a Premium viewer watches.

I remember buying cassettes and then CDs, either from a known distributor or litte hole-in-the-wall shops.

When digital music was getting big, it was mostly experienced through DJs at parties. They got their records from distributors and there were ways of pressing small amounts of vinyl cheaply.

Artists who didn't have a record deal had to hustle, selling their tunes directly from the trunk of their car or any means necessary.

Lots of musicians didn't make their money from these routes, instead they gave their music out for free as promotional material for live shows where they charged tickets.

Even if we jump forward to now, there's a few listener-supported models like soma.fm which may not last forever but have survived without resorting to ads or piracy.

Piracy is fun for the consumer, while it lasts, but it suffocates the artists and was never a viable solution.

For anyone willing to pay, there is always a way to get your wares if you know what you're looking for.

Electronic music wouldn't exist if it wasn't for ignoring copyright laws. The entire scene is built off the back of sampling and mix tapes.

Likewise MP3 players and similar portable music devices (like the iPod) were technically advocating breaking copyright laws in some countries. Like here in the UK where it was illegal to rip a CD you owned. That law was clearly idiotic but the only reason it changed was because everyone was already doing it.

I'm not trying to argue that piracy is good. However it's not as black and white as some make out.

Small nitpick- I'd say one of the hallmarks of electronic music was that it wasn't built from copyrightable samples. It was trackers and analog-then-digital synths and all sorts of microtonal weirdness which had never been heard before.

It's a nitpick because I agree large swaths of the dance and hip-hop music we have today wouldn't exist if not for copyright violation, no denying that.

However, if we can put aside the legal angle, there's an understood difference between copyright violation for the purpose of sampling and remixing vs. outright "gonna steal your stuff because I don't want to pay for it."

Tiny anecdote fwiw, I once worked a summer gig for a wedding/bar-mitzvah DJ who had a legal license to rip and play mp3s. Iirc part of the deal was they had to be a certain quality, e.g. 320kbps straight from the source.

Or at least that's what he told me (this was AJ the DJ in Houston, Tx circa 2000 if anyone wants to do the fact-check legwork)

> I'd say one of the hallmarks of electronic music was that it wasn't built from copyrightable samples

Yup, exactly. See, for instance, the 1937 ondes Martenot composition Oraison as an example.[0] Other electronic progenitor genres, e.g musique concrete, did use samples but they were widely not copyrighted sounds.[1][2]

Hip-hop, however, would not exist without illegal sampling.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EU0ISo996A

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9pOq8u6-bA

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8_fhIKeOX0

Quoting artists from the 30s is a little disingenuous but maybe I should have been more explicit and said "electronic dance music" (which is also the significantly larger body of creative content). And in those genres copyrighted samples were used heavily.

> Small nitpick- I'd say one of the hallmarks of electronic music was that it wasn't built from copyrightable samples. It was trackers and analog-then-digital synths and all sorts of microtonal weirdness which had never been heard before.

Depends on the genre to some extent but it's worth noting that Amiga trackers could double as samplers and even the Atari ST could trigger hardware samplers. A lot of electronic producers would swap samples even for percussion (eg the Amen break which is used massively in jungle and early DnB and was ripped from a B-side on a Winstons record). Even some riffs that sound like synths are actually samples layered over a piano roll. But you're absolutely right that synths and drum machines were also pivotal too. I wasn't trying to suggest that the entire scene existed only for sampling but instead stating that sampling was one of the cornerstones that lead to the creation of many of the genres we still listen to now.

> However, if we can put aside the legal angle, there's an understood difference between copyright violation for the purpose of sampling and remixing vs. outright "gonna steal your stuff because I don't want to pay for it."

If we're putting aside the legal angle, then it really depends on who you ask. Electronic (house, techno, trance, hardcore, etc) producers had no issue with their records being copied and shared on DJ mix tapes because that was a way for smaller artists and DJs in the scene to breakthrough. But as a DJ you'd sometimes avoid including tracks from big commercial labels -- particularly if you were a headliner DJ and thus your mix tape would been heard by more people -- because mainstream artists wouldn't turn the same kind of blind eye to their tracks being on mix tapes (source: I'm an ex-DJ)

So it really depends on the scene and sometimes even the individual.

Right, yeah, that's why I said _copyrightable_ samples.. e.g. sampling a sound from just about anywhere and slotting it into a tracker or drum machine is probably fine.

I do agree the waters get muddy once it's multiple seconds long.. IANAL but there's the famous vanilla ice lawsuit, and I think there was some fair use wiggle room if it's under some amount of time (forgot the exact limit), it is fine to use.

Good point about the DJ mixtape thing. I am guessing a lot of composers/producers got the raw end of that deal, but you are right, it helped a lot for promotion and growing the scene

> Right, yeah, that's why I said _copyrightable_ samples.. e.g. sampling a sound from just about anywhere and slotting it into a tracker or drum machine is probably fine.

I was talking about copyrighted samples. eg

Fatboy Slim - Rockafella Skank: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLjgXPDzeZo

Daft Punk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MhmnKUOxB4

Prodigy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIMQtMSnpBA

...and these are just 3 headline artists. Sampling was common place in the underground scene too. eg The Amen break is a percussion loop that basically invented Jungle and early Drum and Bass, and that was a copyrighted loop too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFKMtv8tU0U

> I do agree the waters get muddy once it's multiple seconds long.. IANAL but there's the famous vanilla ice lawsuit, and I think there was some fair use wiggle room if it's under some amount of time (forgot the exact limit), it is fine to use.

Fair use doesn't cover sampling. Artists need to clear any samples used. If a sample is used creatively enough then there is a chance it might sound different enough that it goes unnoticed with anyone accosiated with the original artists estate. But that's a calculated risk the sampling artist chooses to take rather than their automatic right under copyright law.

> Good point about the DJ mixtape thing. I am guessing a lot of composers/producers got the raw end of that deal, but you are right, it helped a lot for promotion and growing the scene

Producers (nobody calls those kinds of artists "composers") didn't get the raw end because it wouldn't have affected their sales; if anything, it helped promote them). Bare in mind that mixed records on a cassette mix tape cannot be used for anything other than home listening (DJs didn't work of cassette players) and dance tracks didn't typically make for good home listening because they'd have long intro and outro sequences purposely designed for beat mixing. So mix tapes served an important role.

The only caveat some artists would have placed was any unreleased promos stayed off mix tapes (unless specified otherwise) because those promos were often secret weapons for headliner DJs.

Erm... you've told me twice about the amen break.. I saw Aphrodite, dieselboy, and a bunch of other jungle artists live, sometimes in small hole in the wall places before they got big.. hung around the goa/psytrance scene a bunch too, and was idealistic about temporary autonomous zones and stuff for a while.

Not unfamiliar with how the sausage was made. Long time ago though.

Not a musician myself.. I dabbled a bit in Max/MSP, Acid (the program), Fruity Loops, and used to go wild with Rebirth or whatever it was called, but it was all just messing around.

Did have had plenty of conversations with musicians who called themselves composers, esp. as they would make their living composing tunes for video games and film etc. Sure "producers" is the more common term, but it's a bit reductive for you to say "nobody". How about Squarepusher, Simon Posford, and folks like that? Guarantee you they have been called all kinds of things, hehe.

Anyway, when it comes to actually creating original tunes, my experience and recollection tells me it's by far mostly about synthetic instruments and laying out tracks, e.g. actual original compositions. Significantly large samples of copyrighted material play a very small part, in the big picture. Of course there's some notable exceptions, but it's a drop in the ocean compared to original material.

Not talking about DJing. By definition that is literally just sampling/remixing. And of course you have famous DJ's who put out mixes and nobody knows how hard the original music synthesis freak worked to get that fat bass line sounding just right. (Not dismissing the skill of a DJ, I liken it more to a conductor than a composer or the orchestra. Hard and important skill, just different)

Re: fair use, I believe you're wrong. It isn't a hard law but in general the length of the sample is one of the major factors taken into account to determine whether a judge will lean one way or another.

P.L.U.R.

> Erm... you've told me twice about the amen break

Because you believed I wasn't talking about copyrighted samples and yet that break is copyrighted. Hence why I reminded you of that break.

> Did have had plenty of conversations with musicians who called themselves composers, esp. as they would make their living composing tunes for video games and film etc. Sure "producers" is the more common term, but it's a bit reductive for you to say "nobody".

That's because they're a different scene entirely from what we were originally discussing. I didn't say "nobody in music calls themselves composers". I believe the term "producer" originates from "record producer", which film and game composers are not.

> How about Squarepusher, Simon Posford, and folks like that? Guarantee you they have been called all kinds of things, hehe.

From wikipedia:

Squarepusher: Musician record producer DJ

Hallucinogen: DJ, record producer, sound engineer

Yeah I'm sure they have been called other things too but that doesn't mean it is the common vocabulary nor even what they identify themselves as.

As an aside, Squarepusher is one of my all time favourite artists. Seen both live but I have a special love for IDM

> Anyway, when it comes to actually creating original tunes, my experience and recollection tells me it's by far mostly about synthetic instruments and laying out tracks, e.g. actual original compositions.

You keep saying that and I keep saying that it depends on the genre and artist. However that doesn't mean that sampling wasn't a massive part of the scene. I've cited examples to that end too.

> Significantly large samples of copyrighted material play a very small part, in the big picture.

Shall we just overlook the examples I've cited then....

> Of course there's some notable exceptions, but it's a drop in the ocean compared to original material.

That really wasn't the case when I was active in the scene as a DJ and producer. However lets avoid the anecdotes:

From Wikipedia: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_(music)#Impact)

"Sampling has influenced all genres of music.[5] It is a particularly important part of pop, hip hop, and electronic music,[14] equivalent to the importance of the guitar in rock.[5] It is a fundamental element of remix culture."

If one compares the sampler to dance music as the guitar of rock, then it's hard to argue that sampling isn't a significant influence on dance music.

Also since you seem to be a fan of Goa, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goa_trance#Sound)

"A popular element of Goa trance is the use of vocal samples, often from science fiction movies."

However I'm not disputing that synths are also used heavily too.

> Not talking about DJing. By definition that is literally just sampling/remixing.

DJing is not remixing. Some techno DJs will argue otherwise but as one of those multi-turntable techno jocks I found the arguments about DJing being "live remixing" to be overstated. That doesn't mean it isn't still a creative process though.

> And of course you have famous DJ's who put out mixes and nobody knows how hard the original music synthesis freak worked to get that fat bass line sounding just right.

I really don't understand your point here. DJs can't "fatten" up a bassline of an existing track live. They can layer other basslines over an existing track (a trick I'd do regularly) but that's very different to remixing and sampling.

> Re: fair use, I believe you're wrong.

I'm not. To quote Wikipedia again (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_(music)#Legal_and_eth...)

"To legally use a sample, an artist must acquire legal permission from the copyright holder, a potentially lengthy and complex process known as clearance"

Responding to all your points would require repeating things I have already said above, and I feel like you are deliberately trying to pick an argument at this point, which is clouding your judgement.

I guess that's not a super nice thing, so I'll share my reasoning, but I'm not really interested in taking this further unless you have something new to add:

1. your quote on fair use literally stops a few lines before citing the opposite of your point. any basic search on fair use will tell you that the length of the sample is one of the fundamental factors.

2. it's trivially easy to find music industry sites that call Posford and others "composer", such as discogs

3. Your distinction of exactly which types of music we are talking about appeared out of nowhere and doesn't seem to have any rules, feels like changing the goalposts to me.

4. I literally said that the original music synthesis person makes the bass line fatter. This is the work that goes into producing electronic music. It's original and not an issue of sampling.

5. You're ignoring the most fundamental fact: if we take the sum total of modern music, the amount of it which is composed of definitely copyrightable samples is extremely small relative to the amount of synthesis and traditional composition. I don't want to guess an exact number, but I would be shocked if it came anywhere even close to as high as 1%. You seem to think it's somewhere like 50% or more. My takeaway is you are only accounting for very specific sub-genres (e.g. if you think Goa trance is mostly composed of vocal samples, waaaayyy off, but vocal trance, certain kinds of hip hop.. yeah, of course).

Whatever, man, to be honest I am just not enjoying this convo anymore. Forgive me but I'm gonna bow out.

I think the issue here is you're conflating a whole bunch of other genres as "electronic dance music" but which are not. Film and computer game music, early goa, etc. None of that is part of the underground clubbing scene. So yeah, the points you're making are correct but you're arguing a different point to the one I was.

Take Posford for example. Discords says he is a composer and record producer. This suggests that Simon has released other creative works outside of dance music; and given Goa's roots I'd say that was more likely than your argument that they're both listed as synonyms. The fact that Discogs also describes him as a sound engineer further illustrates that it's a list of his achievements rather than a thesaurus of related terms.

> 5. You're ignoring the most fundamental fact: if we take the sum total of modern music, the amount of it which is composed of definitely copyrightable samples is extremely small relative to the amount of synthesis and traditional composition.

I agree but I also never once said "the sum total of modern music". I was talking specifically about the evolution of electronic dance music. I said:

"Electronic music wouldn't exist if it wasn't for ignoring copyright laws. The entire scene is built off the back of sampling and mix tapes."

Quite why you decided to bring film scores into the equation and then blame me for moving the goal posts I don't know.

Lastly I'm not denying fair use exists. I'm saying selling records doesn't fall under fair use. There are a thousand other ways to use samples outside of that and some of those will constitute as fair use.

Fair enough :)

I don’t necessarily think ad funded content is bad. But YouTube seems to do it the worst. 2 ads at the start, sometimes they can’t be skipped. Ads in between at weird places. Now there are 2 ads at the end too.

Spotify is ok. Ads. Bunch of uninterrupted songs. Ads. Like radio. Many Anime streaming services are similar. Ads bookend the content.

YouTube could have spent time curating good content and building a platform worth a damn. Instead the vast vast majority is trash. There are really only a handful of content creators that make anything good. And it seems like more and more of them have patreons or their own sponsorships. I again don’t mind these. But I have direct ways of paying the creators. And if they moved somewhere else I’d follow them.

Would you consider paying for YouTube and Spotify instead? Both are available ad-free.

I can easily afford that but I never want to pay a single penny to Google/Alphabet Inc. More of an ideological thing than economical, probably many have different reasons here instead of not being able to afford it.

Also, "then don't use" is not an option either as almost all the content out there is uploaded to YouTube, so it isn't like same content is available on Vimeo/Facebook etc.

Without trying to sound too puritanical, your stance sounds like a way to avoid paying creators

Nope, seriously. If there were a way to directly pay the good content creators (not talking about $5, Patreon etc, but having a microtransaction everytime I watch a nice video like 0.05 each which does sum up to something similar aggregated) I'd love to.

If you pay a company built around ad revenue to remove ads in one particular product, you now have a big flag “has money and willing to pay” on your profile.

No ads on that product, sure, but very much not coincidentally you cannot opt out of all ads across Alphabet, and the flag is a very strong signal for elsewhere you will be shown ads (even if it’s not made directly available to advertisers in targeting settings).

Google had the whole 'you can outbid advertisers if you want' feature but killed it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor

You know the content creators themselves can decide where they want to have ads? Also Youtube has even skippable ads, Spotify doesn't, but somehow Spotify does it better?

Your points are highly subjective dear sir.

I didn’t know the creators themselves are setting the ads.

Yes, I would take quality content with unskippable ads that bookend what I want to watch or listen to, vs what appears to be random sometimes. Or just companies sponsoring the creators. I suppose I’m used to the old TV and radio model.

YouTube as it stands just recommends garbage. And everything has garbage click bait titles. The fact that the quality is so poor doesn’t make me want to pay for anything.

That is not completely true. There are many who are not deciding on what ads are shown and have no control over it.

If you think the content is shitty, why would extend effort to circumvent the revenue model to access it anyway?

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