Letting everyone do things in their own self interest, unchecked, is rarely found in stable societies. For example, one persons interest (getting music for free) may not align with another's (the starving artist's).
The "starving" or small time artist is an excuse that is useful for corporations when they want to manipulate public opinion. No music label cares even the slightest bit about individual artists or their fair payment, they care about megahits and big sellers.
If you want to support your favourite artist that isn't already a millionaire or multi-millionare paying for spotify isn't it.
To actually support "starving artists" visit their shows, buy some merch (however even this isn't the case anymore for some) or look for independent artists on bandcamp (bandcamp takes 15% of a sold album).
If all you do is pay for spotify or something like that you are not supporting a "starving artist" any more than someone downloading the songs, maybe even less because sharing the music on the right filesharing forums might at least lead to some of the sales (merch/concert) above.
For anyone interested have a look at https://informationisbeautiful.net/2010/how-much-do-music-ar...
To add to that: Big labels hurt small time artists immensely. If you are an artist on youtube getting hit with a (false) copyright claim by a large label is a constant threat to you. It even happens to people with songs with millions of views [1]. We have reached a point where using certain chords or chord progression can get you stomped by music labels.
Music labels are not in any way friends or allys to "starving artists", only to millionaire artists.
But at same time, merch have higher entry gate. You are unlikely to buy a merch created for someone you don't really know. (Unless it is just good enough that you are willing to just use it like a general T-shirt...etc)
But the musician herself is irreplaceable. If you want to make money by making music, be sure to develop a relationship with your audience rather than police it in order to ensure you're getting paid.
Computers exist and are networked. Data is trivially and infinitely copyable. The clock will not be rewound back to the dark ages where data was a finite product that people could buy and sell. No matter how much the music industry rages and sues, it won't change the fact that YouTube is just sending me data via HTTP and there's absolutely nothing they can do if I decide to redirect that data to my hard disk instead. It's up to them to adapt to their new reality. If they can't, that's their problem.
Is Widevine problematic?
Do you have an industry/example in mind where this is the case? All of the "profit from something created" schemes that I can think of require that the something exists before it can be sold. I can't think of anything that's sold based purely on promises, without extreme risk being involved. And when this is the case, it seems there's some partial initial payment (and initial debt put on the creator of that something) to mitigate some of that risk, with complete payment after the thing is finished.
An employment would be one way.
Demanding things on behalf of “starving artists” otherwise sounds exactly like the “starving FLOSS maintainer” who burns out because nobody will find their work. Unfortunate but it’s on them to find a sustainable business model if they want it as an income stream. A ban on general computing will not save either the artist nor the programmer.
How so? All employment arrangements I've been involved in paid based on time that was previously worked (like, paid monthly for previous month), with the pay being for the clear, partial, progress that is shown during that time that I worked. I've never been paid, in anywhere near full, for time I will work in the future, or progress I will make. I've never seen as employer that pays, in full, for to-be-completed work. This seems extremely risky. Do you have an example?
Crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter where people treat creations as an investment. Patronage platforms like Patreon where people can support creators they like on a regular basis.
Maybe that's the answer. Maybe not. I don't really know. I just know copyright is insane.
> All of the "profit from something created" schemes that I can think of require that the something exists before it can be sold.
That works for physical goods which are naturally scarce. Data is infinitely abundant. Supply is infinite. Price might as well be zero.
The value is the labor that creates the data, not the data itself. The artists, the programmers, these people are valuable. There needs to be some way they can get paid for the act of creating rather than sales of the artificially scarce product of their labor. Because that artificial scarcity was dead the second computers were invented.
No record label in existence would give you any money before you prooved to them somehow that you are able to do the music you want them to finance you for.
As a member of a band myself I don't care when people download our music, rather the opposite, I like it when people dig the music. And if they dig it enough, they will also buy a shirt, the vinyl, or something among those lines.
I think the difference between me and some others in this thread is, I think you have the right to make that choice. I think you also have the same right to say, "I put effort into this, and I want to limit its distribution to only those that compensated me for it".
So far corporations has been pretty unchecked, maybe that's got something to do with political instability today.
decimal_digits = ceil(bits * log10(2))
It might take hard work and a ton of money to discover that number, but once it's known it can be trivially copied. Copyright is about creating artificial scarcity for numbers. That's how insane it is.
The key fact here is that numbers are just the means of content delivery in a digital world. To be clear, personally I'm not fond of Copyright status quo, but this particular logic makes zero sense.
In cryptography there should be exactly one copy of a private key in the entire universe. When your keys leak due to a mistake or whatever, you invalidate it and make a new one, you don't sue anyone who might have a copy in order to get them to delete it.
When was the last time you ever saw that happen? Some work you grew up with enter the public domain? These companies have already made untold fortunes, several times over. So why doesn't it happen?
They altered the deal. Unilaterally. The money people paid them? They used it to hire lobbyists to change the law and rob people of their public domain rights. These monopolistic protections were meant to be limited, they had an expiration date. The corporations managed to extend copyright duration to the point it might as well be infinite. There exists a public domain but no work ever actually ascends to this mythical place. Fair use? Nobody without an army of lawyers would ever dare try for fear of being sued.
Is this the social contract you want people to respect? The one where they get everything and we get nothing? You say my view is one-sided? These corporations are the most one-sided monopolists there are.
The second people stop pretending artificial scarcity is real, it will be the end of them. Look at how Sci-Hub is shaking up the academic journals. Their end literally can't come soon enough.
But for the most part you are right.
That's a misconception.
To get a data-representation for stuff (like numbers, documents, songs, videos, pictures, text, etc.), we have to encode it. Then if we want to retrieve the thing, we'd have to decode it. It's not a number until decoded as such -- and you can't skip the need to decode data as a number because there're different ways to do it.
I appreciate that you're mostly just trying to object to laws restricting data, it's just that the bit about data-being-numbers may detract from it by starting with a misstatement.
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If it helps break the mental-association: even if we assume that all data should be read as unsigned binary-integers, are they big-endian or little-endian? For example, is "1000" 8 or 1?
Or, say a computer has unordered-storage for stuff like [bags](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Set_(abstract_data_type)#Multi... ) (which are actually used in software, e.g. [in C#](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.collectio... )). Then, what number would such data be, if the data itself fundamentally lacks a [total-ordering](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_order )?
Or, if we insist that unsigned binary-integers are the fundamental encoding, then how could non-terminating numbers be stored, e.g. 1/3 or pi? Or even just non-integers or negative-integers, e.g. 1/2 or -1? Or, if we argue that data for those numbers isn't numbers until decoded as such, then why should we say that other data is numbers before decoding?
(Not that each point would need to be addressed, just, different thought-experiments that might help break out of the misconception.)
It might be more helpful to see binary-sequences as trivially decode-able as unsigned-binary-integers, rather than actually being unsigned-binary-integers.
I don't see how it's a misconception. All data is a sequence of bits. All sequences of bits are numbers expressed in base 2. How could I be wrong here?
> you can't skip the need to decode data as a number because there're different ways to do it
> if we assume that all data should be read as unsigned binary-integers, are they big-endian or little-endian?
To me this just means all data could be represented as multiple numbers. Mentally, I visualize binary sequences as big endian. It's totally possible that there is another number that represents the same data but with different endianness.
> Or, say a computer has unordered-storage for stuff like bags
There must be at least one number that represents it, that much is certain. I'm just not particularly sure how complex that number is because when I made this argument what I had in mind was discrete self-contained files.
I don't think I understand these other possibilities well enough to comment at the moment.
> It might be more helpful to see binary-sequences as trivially decode-able as unsigned-binary-integers, rather than actually being unsigned-binary-integers.
I don't see the distinction. If you can decode data as an integer, it must be equivalent to that integer.
It's easy enough to avoid such absurdities by recognizing that data's just data; that, to get stuff like numbers, text, images, etc., we need to decode the data.
They broadcast free of charge, and when we don't consume that broadcast in the manner they hoped, they use it to justify taking away our right to run software of our choosing. It's obscene.
As in "freedom"?
>is rarely found in stable societies
As in most of the developed world?
I'm sorry, but you don't have complete "freedom" to achieve your own self interests. I once knew someone who was very interested in a car stereo. Unfortunately for him, but fortunately for others who happened to own car stereos, that car stereo was in a car that belong to the police, and he definitely saw an even larger reduction in "freedom" after that.