Comment by superuser2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by superuser2 | Hacker News Reader

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I have never understood the idea that only "objects" can have value.

1) I'm paying for a formal education, not the books and the audio of the lectures. Those are often available for free, but the formal seal of approval of a university (not the sheepskin + ink) has market value.

2) I pay for The New Yorker, not the pages it's printed on.

3) A startup pays its programmers for software, which is really just ideas.

4) A company pays for the design of its building, not the drafting paper and pencils.

5) A company pays a manager (at least theoretically) for leadership, not for the transferring of ink to post-it-notes and calendars.

6) Millions of people pay for iPhone apps, which are not physical goods.

7) I'm paying (through insurance) for medical advice, not the negligible fraction of square footage I occupy while sitting in my doctor's office.

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Buying recordings is a voluntary transaction. If you don't find them valuable, don't participate. But you are still no more entitled to the sound of an artist's voice than your employer/customers are entitled to the value you provide.

Open Source is cool. Public broadcasting is awesome. Band Camp is amazing, and I agree the mainstream record label cartel is nasty. I hope we move away from it. But just as hating Walmart doesn't make shoplifting okay; disapproval of the music industry doesn't make piracy okay.

Yes, the witch-hunt is too much, but wherever did we get the idea that intellectual creation shouldn't be worth anything?

I'm so bad making my point on the internet that I sometimes say the opposite of what I'm trying to say. What I should have said is, music has been bound to a physical medium for so long that people confuse the thing of value with the object that holds it. So I agree with you... sort of.

But I'm curious: what is your opinion about the guy who doesn't buy sheet music and just memorizes the songs and teaches them to people? Do you feel he is in some way guilty of piracy?

The guy who memorizes songs and teaches them to people, at least the ones I know, don't have the mentality of "I want this song but 99 cents is too much and information wants to be free," he says, "I love this and I want to publicly engage with it." In the modern world, he's a YouTube cover artist, which I support wholeheartedly. Just as there is nothing wrong with burning a friend a CD for her birthday, or playing your iPod at a private party.

This doesn't threaten artists or deprive them of money you otherwise would have handed over, it just creates new ways to promote and engage with the artist's creation. See also Spotify, music blogs (IMHO not really piracy, but shouldn't be done without the artists' permission), radio, Pandora, last.fm, etc.

Pirate Bay is the guy who prints his own scores of someone else's work and leaves thousands of free copies on the street outside the sheet music store.

Value and price are different things.

Abstract objects -- i.e. informational goods -- certainly have value, it is just that they have practically zero price now.

Price, and paying for things, is a way to regulate how limited resources are shared out. But abundant things do not need a price -- there is plenty for everyone.

The idea that creative work be paid for through copies of it is only an artificial convention. It was just a pragmatic economic arrangement to make it possible to pay for one thing by paying for another.

In the end, we need to pay for scarcity -- creative effort and resources -- but should allow abundance -- copies of informational-goods -- to be free. That recognises the value of abstract/informational-goods by maximising the value that everyone can get from them.

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