Comment by pimterry | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pimterry | Hacker News Reader

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> if those industries are unviable without copyright protection, they could go away entirely.

These creative industries include all of software development, music, TV, movies, books, media, art, etc. You do technically solve the problem of copyright by shutting all those down, but I'm not sure it's a solution anybody will vote for.

If you can come up with a serious alternative though, which can sustain those creative industries without requiring copyright, now is probably the best moment in all of history to seize the day and make that happen. There's going to be a big shake-up regardless, it's the perfect chance for alternative models.

Bear in mind that dropping copyright entirely doesn't just hurt Disney and Sony Music though - with no copyright the GPL and all other open-source licenses are unenforceable, anybody can copy & sell anybody else's art or design without permission, Spotify doesn't have to pay musicians even $0.01 any more, etc etc etc. It's not an easy problem.

I don't think that no one would create new software/music/books/movies/art/etc. without copyright. Humans have done so for millenia before, they still did so in absence of copyright protections. I don't see how this is not a serious alternative - the only major losers would be the middlemen, not the artists themselves.

> Humans have done so for millenia before

This is categorically false for both software and movies.

For other media, this ignores the effect of zero-effort copying.

Eh, I could definitely see the artists losing.

The most obvious scenario that comes to mind for me is, imagine an independent artists launching their (book/film/album/etc) and the same day someone with more resources and experience takes the work and markets it better than the OG author ever could on their own.

It would be great if such "creative" works were simply impossible to monetize. I already don't pay for these and try to find unknown artists / writers who have a job and do stuff simply because they enjoy doing it.

That’s… awful.

What's awful here? This way it's just a social interaction with both sides satisfied, where's the problem?

I see a problem today, being spammed with shitty commercial "works" whereas I'd like to see something genuine and not just made for money.

If not for the ability to monetize, there would be a small fraction of the total available work out there. From music, to movies, to video games. And for many, the quality we come to enjoy just wouldn’t be possible. Do you think we’d have a Skyrim, or GTA, or equivalent if there weren’t millions to be made to employ thousands of people to make it happen? What about the largest and most influential films and TV shows of the past decade? These things take money to produce. I could see the argument for music, maybe, but even then I don’t think it’d be sustainable. Just because an artist may enjoy working on their art after working 50 hours a week to pay the bills doesn’t mean they should HAVE to if their art is good enough and desired enough to sustain them, thus allowing them to create more and of a higher caliber (in theory).

I don't consume any of those, I'm just saying what would be better for me.

However, abolishing copyright is not the same as making monetization illegal. My view is that people should be paid for their WORK, and copying something doesn't make the author work more.

This'd mean the funds 'd need to be bootstrapped (crowdfunding?) before the work is done, but then it'd be free to distribute it.

The first sentence of your initial comment I responded to was ‘It would be great if such "creative" works were simply impossible to monetize.’

The difference being that the artist can still be monetized, even if the art isn't.

You don't need to monetize via capital though -- you can pay people to do the creating directly. Eg. One of the biggest ways independent artists already get paid is via services like patreon

In a copyright-less system you’d monetize the creation (eg via patronage), so someone else distributing the work is fine, even helpful.

It makes no sense to add artificial scarcity to ideas, the cost of replication is inherently zero and all kinds of noxious consequences on society (like derivative works being impossible to create) shake out as a result. If the goal is encouraging creation why are you punishing and penalizing the creation of derivative works?

Letting megacorps monopolize popular culture for 100+ years after its inception is a relatively newfangled idea and it’s baffling that so many people just blindly accept that this is the way it has to be. Copyright works against individuals in almost all cases, we benefit much more from free interchange of ideas. Social diffusion and remixing is a fundamental human force and this AI stuff forced the issue by doing the exact same things with impossible precision and scale, such that the absurdity of the system for humans is revealed as well.

The current copyright regime is the social equivalent of “we could have a cop taking down license plates if we wanted”. And AI does the “so it’s therefore legal to automatically and instantly record everyone’s license plates at every intersection in the country 24/7”. The principle is the same but the ease of use reveals the absurdity of the principle.

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