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Comment by krig | Hacker News Reader

Brilliant, I agree with just about everything said in this post. There is no credible evidence that piracy actually damages artists, and plenty of empirical case studies where it greatly benefited them. It is horrendously disappointing to see the american government, supposedly the elected representation of the people, ignore all the scientific evidence produced and wholly adopt the viewpoint they are fed by a miniscule but rich group of media companies. If only there was some way of stopping the flow of money from corporations into politics...

I just posted a similar rant on my own website on the characterization of pirates that also refers to the Swiss study that Coulton brings up, plus another study commissioned by the Dutch government that reached very similar conclusions.

http://tusk.se/2012/01/20/piracy-3-character/

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The only thing I don't understand completely is his actual stance on copyright. He says he's okay with the notion, since he and many other artists benefit from it. But he quite clearly doesn't think piracy hurts artists, and doesn't seem to think that downloading poses a threat (or at least not enough of a threat to warrant taking down websites).

I agree with the latter, but I'm not sure how Coulton finds the latter consistent with the former. Perhaps he believes copyright should only apply to commercial violations, or should only require attribution, which would make since considering that his works are released under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/. But does he believe other artists should be allowed to place their works under stricter licenses (i.e. ones that would allow them to sue a kid for downloading an MP3)?

Copyright does quite a lot more things than just enabling restrictions on distribution. There's the right to be credited, some limits on derivative works, and limitations to commercial violations. I suppose not every musician would be pleased to find their music used as the soundtrack of a porn movie without their knowledge, for example.

There are remedies other than copyright law.

For example is someone took something I wrote and published it under his own name, that would be fraud.

Or if someone used my song for the soundtrack of a porn without making it clear that I wasn't involved, I would argue defamation because they led the public to believe that I was involved in pornography.

Copyrights is the same as creating a legal monopoly to a particular item/idea. Hence, from a pure economic perspective, it creates deadweightloss, or over all less for the economy. Hence assuming an efficient market, it is a VERY bad thing.

However, since we don't live in an efficient market, we have these things that prevents anybody from creating things called the barrier to entry. This could be startup capital, facilities, or whatever that is needed to manufacture and distribute the items. This prevents anybody from just making a movie, since you would need all the equipment and crew to shoot it. Copyright basically guarantees a limited monopoly for the creators to give them a reduction in risk involved in creating the item.

But the bottom line is, copyright is not a good thing, and it is only as good as the barrier to entry is. With the barrier to entry for making creative media so much lower than what it was before (anybody can record an album using Garageband), the reduction of risk, in the form of copyright, might not justify the overall loss created by the deadweightloss. Essentially it is a comparison of deadweightloss vs opportunity cost of not having the idea ever created. And in the current time, because the opportunity cost is so small, copyright laws should adjust itself, which it hasn't.

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