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Comment by 12907835202 | Hacker News Reader

But the value of something is often its scarcity...

The owner of Once Upon a Time in Shaolin by Wu Tang would be pretty mad if it was freely shared because it couldn't be bought or rented.

Context from Wikipedia for those who don't know it: "Once Upon a Time in Shaolin is the seventh studio album by the American hip hop group Wu-Tang Clan. Only one physical copy of the album was created, with no ability to download or stream it digitally. Purchased directly from the Wu-Tang Clan in 2015, it became the most expensive work of music ever sold."

You'd have to have special categories whereby quantities could be intentionally limited.

But then Nintendo would presumably argue that they intended there to be a limited number of Wii's or Pokémon Red or whatever.

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Further context: Once Upon a Time in Shaolin was bought by Martin Shkreli, who then got arrested, and the album fell into US custody. It's probably been auctioned off since.

Wu-Tang Clan intended this to be a weird kind of performance art, so I won't judge them for this. However, this kind of artificial scarcity is absolute bullshit. The whole reason why we have copyright law is so that creative works are created and made widely available, not to create new asset classes for the ten-figures class to park money in.

Nintendo's argument wouldn't be that they only intended to make so many Wiis. Their argument would be that copyright is about control, they're entitled to control, and if you don't like it you can go fuck yourself[0]. To them, Once Upon a Time in Shaolin is just copyright maximalist extremism: yes, if we think we'll make more money selling one copy and denying the rest of the world access to the work, then it's our right, and anything less than our right is equivalent to setting loose a home-invading rapist[1].

[0] This is rhetorical, I do not actually intend for any commenters on HN to do that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Valenti#Valenti_on_new_te...

> But the value of something is often its scarcity...

But the value to who. We have copyright laws (ostensibly) for the benefit of society as a whole by allowing creators to have a limited time monopoly on selling their ideas.

> then Nintendo would presumably argue that they intended there to be a limited number of Wii's or Pokémon Red or whatever.

Them arguing it doesn't make them right. Any more than it makes sense to allow Disney to keep extending copyright decade after decade simply because they're greedy.

> You'd have to have special categories whereby quantities could be intentionally limited.

This is artificial scarcity, especially when applied to things that can be distributed digitally. I don’t particularly see a reason to encourage it. It’s not like 1s and 0s are in short supply compared to, say, precious metals.

And omitting that carve out will explicitly prevent Nintendo and other companies from making that argument.

By what meaning of value?

The speculative gains such a person hopes to receive aren't a good measure of value.

If something increases pleasure via entertainment, this is objectively quantifiable. Every pair of ears that hears it increases its value. Preventing it from being heard drives that value down near zero (to 1, presumably). Even if we posit that each person who would listen would be willing to pay a different amount for that privilege, then the person who is hoarding it is driving that price down below whatever paltry price the million listeners might each pay individually.

I see no reason why copyright policy should be driven by the needs of lame publicity stunts.

> The owner of Once Upon a Time in Shaolin by Wu Tang would be pretty mad if it was freely shared because it couldn't be bought or rented.

Indeed. And? If you say that in that case it would never have been produced, well this does not change much for the N-1 current and future humans.

In the other hand, yes sometimes you might want to limit diffusion somehow, it's your right and it might be complicated. Better to have full copyright, but for 20 years. (That would mean Wii games out of copyright in 3 years), LGTM.

Let him be mad, then. I don't know why you think the masses should care if one greedy guy gets upset.

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