But now we're moving away from physical media, we're fast moving to a world where all you can even "own" legally is a DRM laden copy that can be revoked at any moment by the digital store front providing it. Your windows 11 upgrade requires hardware TPM (a form of hardware DRM that everyone used to really fear) chip support to even install.
And this seems to be the world the hacker news what and tech crowd really wants. I personally miss the old mid 2000's slashdot days when everyone knew better. I haven't changed -- they changed.
That has more or less come to pass and naturally it's not perfect. But streaming is really young still, we're really just ending the first boom cycle now with predictable gnashing of teeth and disillusionment. For music, at least on the creator side, it's generally seen as a catastrophe. But it doesn't mean the future has to be like this.
The past had its own problems, which IMO is why "everyone knew better" -- everybody was dealing with the problems of physical distribution (but don't forget how many musicians in particular felt Napster was destroying music!).
I was never the hugest Kim Dotcom supporter back in the day or now, maybe that means I'm part of your sheeple crowd, but I supported torrenting, hated the RIAA, etc etc. I don't think about the RIAA these days -- my hatred is directed at Spotify and other rent-extractors, and I dream of a utopia where they are all permanently disrupted by decentralized technologies, or at least global forces are replaced by more local-serving ones.
The real trend on HN is low-effort comments like this that generalize about HN. How about making an actual argument defending Kim Dotcom?
> Top comment reads something like "Yea but maybe its time to call it quits" ... Shame.
But ... what happens to your point when your comment becomes top-voted like it is now? Is HN redeemed because apparently everybody on HN agrees with you that HN is terrible?
> US Industrial Complex
At this point I wish Eisenhower hadn't coined the famous phrase. Everything gets called some variation of Foo/Bar Industrial Complex which sounds smart and describes nothing.
> How about making an actual argument defending Kim Dotcom?
I'm sure having a few kids takes the wind out of the middle-aged pirate ship's sails, but there are plenty of younger folks here who just value the startup culture, technology for its own sake, hustle, and have other values we can admire.
I adore the level of professionalism, diligence, and expertise I'm seeing in new grads who grew up knowing what a giant software company is (unlike us when they were kind of emerging as we were kids).
I think Apple is a good example. There's plenty of critiques to Jobs (neither saint nor villain, but man) but he at least understood something: functionality and aesthetics go hand in hand. It always sucked to pay a premium for Apple hardware (and I even long protested it, fearing we'd get what we now have). But at least the hardware was higher quality (I'm aware of arm, that's not what I'm talking about), the aesthetics were great, in both the physical machine and the software. But now, what is the innovation? Smaller? Thinner?
I feel like Pantheon captured this very well when they have Pope saying he doesn't know what he's doing so he's really just trying to get Steve back to tell him what to do. I feel like this has happened all over Silicon Valley (and the rest of the world). The metrics became the targets. The hacker mentality of make products that make a better world and get rich while doing it are not as valued, even if it was always a facade. We still had deep respect and revered the hackers that rejected the money. The reason to learn to program was not to get rich, but to control computers. And whatever that meant to you, is true (even with silly bitter "vim vs emacs" rivalries. But even that illustrates a difference of today). The days people wrote the hacker manifesto, the deep ties to anti-authority, the liberation that the net could provide, all that and more. Now, I see two very different classes of students when I teach. There are the kids who love computers. Sometimes they skip class, sometimes they come in for a sense of duty, but when you provide an environment to let them be free they will give you the best projects even if they fail the tests. But most students just want an A and a good paying job.
I could never blame anyone for that! Life sucks, and we all gotta live. But the passion is different. Less finding problems to solve and more finding problems that allows them to use a specific tool (whatever is most popular at the time: currently ML). I don't blame anyone, but yeah, it is different. These things still exist, and probably even in higher quantities than ever before, but I'm willing to bet that it is not true for percentage. It's like we won, but forgot why we did all this in the first place.
So by some odd alchemy, if you take your salary from a company that creates it from things you morally detest, but you don't work in those specific departments, you're not at all a hypocrite?
It's like a libertarian working for the Stasi but saying it's alright because he's only doing microphone maintenance for them.
> I want to convert those people, not push them away.
On this I sympathize, though it has its limits too.
> So by some odd alchemy
Nothing wrong with that, and you should share your viewpoints freely. But I think it's pretty clear that the vast majority of Americans agree with the protection of intellectual property, and acknowledge that sharing copywritten material is piracy, even if they do it themselves.
Blaming AI seems like using it as a balm for your cognitive dissonance.
And this isn't even something that's in contention, both of America's major political parties have accused the other of doing it.
> But I think it's pretty clear that the vast majority of Americans agree with the protection of intellectual property, and acknowledge that sharing copywritten material is piracy, even if they do it themselves.
Okay sure man, I guess we'll just take your opinion as representing "the vast majority of Americans" and go carry on from there.
There is something about treating the RIAA as the scary internet boggy man in 2024 that just seems so quaint.
but if you understand that you also understand what his point was even if clumping it wrongly under the misdirection of blaming riaa.
Hacker News of all places! Never would have expected a website created by a billionaire venture capitalist to lean into intellectual property absolutism. Completely out of character for venture capitalist community to bend the knee to industry associations.