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Comment by newt_slowly | Hacker News Reader

If everyone pirated, the only people who would create content would be people doing it purely for the sake of art or their own enjoyment, far more people would be personally involved in creating art (in music for example, there would be far more people going to see local performances if there were less music produced as mass media due to loss of profitability), mass media would be reduced and more art would be local (and still physical), increasing the richness and diversity of the media landscape.

In my opinion, that would be a far superior world to the one we live in.

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How would you create Titanic locally? Who would invest the massive amount of money required to make a film, especially one like that, without expecting a return?

What’s so special about that cinema? Won’t we live without it? It’s just pure entertainment. I can live without it quite all right.

That’s a whole different discussion. I was replying to a comment that seemed to suggest that we could have a remotely comparable but decentralized entertainment industry somehow.

I’m not interested in a conversation about whether we really even need entertainment, that’s a whole different premise.

It might have come out 50 years later than it did but then it might have been done thousand times cheaper made by a handful of people using appropriate technology for fun.

Does society really benefit that much by seeing piece of entertainment 50 years earlier at the cost of millions of dollars?

If making a movie about going to space costs more than actually going to space maybe you shouldn't do it and wait instead till video creation technology advances enough so that single person can do it as passion project? Maybe what copyright enables is just a pathology?

How would you create the Encyclopædia Britannica locally? Who would invest the massive amount of money required to make an encyclopedia, especially one like that, without expecting a return?

People who want to see it created and are able to rally other people to help them of course.

That's not to say that no copyright means no way to fund big projects, you just have to collect those funds up front or rely on generosity - both of which are less likely to succeed because copyright makes the result into something you "own" rather than society and people are less inclined to fund your own private enrichment.

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