Comment by wdewind | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wdewind | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Your analogy of a server based app is not a great one. If Google shared all of its source code, it would be a huge security risk and embarrassing amongst other things, but it would not lead to the end of their business by any means. Google makes money because they create a massive infrastructure that is NOT simply copyable. The fact that you can't read the actual Java, C etc. code that is executing on the server doesn't really matter: even if you could there is so much more value in the business than just that. Duck Duck Go is a great example: it has roughly the same quality search results as Google, but if you just gave the Google source code to DDG they wouldn't all of a sudden eat Google's lunch.

If you could all of a sudden press a button and copy all of that infrastructure, and spin up jobs and get the recruits that they have etc. the value provided by Google would be minimized. This is the nature of progression.

What exactly is the real value made by creating Avatar when the same value can be provided for free by an uneducated child who downloads it off the internet? Shouldn't we be organizing our economy around rewarding the things that actually do provide value (ie: getting the content to the person who wants it), rather than the thing thats correlated with providing value (content creation in and of itself)? Copyright is just a miniature monopoly.

Movie theaters still provide a great value. Despite the fact that I can rent or download a movie for much cheaper I still go to them for the end experience. We need to organize the economy around incentivizing end experiences, not incentivizing correlated factors.

You're trying to sidestep rather than confront the issue.

s/google/some company that runs on AWS

Or this: http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2010/08/17/blizza...

I'm not sure what you mean by sidestepping, and I'm also not sure what you are trying to say with that article. Blizzard sued and won based on current copyright law, which I'm arguing is FUBAR.

Edit: Ok now I see what you are saying. I stand by my argument. If your business can be duplicated by me pressing a button, your business is not providing value and the government shouldn't protect it. I don't think we are devaluing what musicians/artists do, but instead what distributors do. Concert sales are up, record sales are down. This makes sense to me.

>If your business can be duplicated by me pressing a button, your business is not providing value and the government shouldn't protect it.

So most web businesses are not providing value. Neither are any other software businesses. Neither are authors.

Except that loads of people want and need software and websites and books. Somehow it seems like this scarcity-based, property-based system of valuation doesn't work well.

Who wants to build the start-up that disrupts capitalism?

No. Most business software by itself is not providing value. You could not clone any web business (or any business for that matter) with the click of a button because the business is a lot more than software.

Providing content by means of distribution is not adding value. It's only that: distribution. The creator is adding the value. Why should he not be rewarded? With your line of argument you are in line with the entertainment industry who effectively monopolized the distribution channels for a long time.

That's the basic premise I'm fighting against. What I'm arguing is that that's not actually true.

If you cure cancer but you keep it in your basement should you be rewarded for that?

If you know the cure for cancer, but you didn't invent it yourself, should you be prevented from spreading it?

Your argument is that you never get the cure for cancer without incentivizing someone with the financial rewards to do it, which is a fair one logically, but in the case of the reality of the music industry it's quite simply not what's happened (the RIAA themselves have funded studies that actually showed piracy increasing profits). Instead the music market has been enlarged, and the RIAA is simply getting less of it. This is a Good Thing.

My argument is not inline with the entertainment industry because I am arguing that copyright infringement should no longer be a crime. People who provide the value of getting valued ideas to people should be paid for it, regardless of who created the idea. Publishers don't provide the value of creating or spreading ideas, they provide the value of selling a copy of an idea. We shouldn't give them licenses that says they do anything else because they don't.

That argument breaks down when you consider the average drug company spends more money on advertising than R&D. Many studio's spend more money on movie promotion than movie advertising.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com