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Comment by kiba | Hacker News Reader

I question the assertion that copyright is necessary for compensating intellectual labor.

For example, there will always be a need and demand for technical documentation, engineering, legal writing, etc, all of which will and must exists without copyright. A lawyer's product is specific to his client, and bridge engineers' output are a correctly designed bridge.

You can extend it to musicians and artists. A musician get paid to play gigs at wedding, or artists being commissioned to create works for their patrons.

Copyright enables certain business models and change the quantity and quality of the work available, for ill or good but it isn't strictly necessary and may even be detrimental.

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The idea that copyright is necessary for this is ridiculous: copyright is necessary so that publishers and other middlemen can sell copies of their catalog, often with no more than a pittance to the artist. I’ve talked to a bunch of published authors who spent years of hard work on their books who receive no money at all, or an insignificant amount, from ongoing sales.

What happens without copyright is that hustlers trawl new releases, steal them, rebadge them and maybe run them through a light edit pass using AI, republish them, and take credit and all revenue. A version of that is already happening via AI assisted piracy but without copyright it gets easier because you can steal whole coherent works.

That is until the bottom drops out of even that.

Writing is tough to make a living in because it’s over saturated with content. This makes it worse by taking price to zero. Instead of too many artists chasing too few dollars you have too many artists chasing zero dollars.

This is how you get a future where novels are full of product placements because ads are the last way for artists to eat. I imagine this is what novels would be like in the Idiocracy world, which I realized a while back is not a film covertly about eugenics. It thinks it is but it’s really about the dark side of the Information Age.

For God’s sake look at what happened to the open web where everything was free and copyright was ignored. That would happen to literature.

> This is how you get a future where novels are full of product placements because ads are the last way for artists to eat.

That's a problem with ads. Advertising as it is today needs to be banned. It's a cancer that corrupts every medium of communications.

> Instead of too many artists chasing too few dollars you have too many artists chasing zero dollars.

Taking the advertising cancer out of consideration, the bottom will drop out of that, and you'll have much fewer writers, and much better writing.

The Information Age killed the business model based on selling copies of creative works. Copyright is a desperate attempt at saving those business models, by legally constraining digital data to behave like physical objects. This is just fighting against the nature of digital data as a medium. It ultimately cannot succeed, it's increasingly costly to maintain, and the side effects are only getting worse.

> For God’s sake look at what happened to the open web where everything was free and copyright was ignored. That would happen to literature.

Yes, it flourished and reached amazing quality levels and very good SNR - that is, until marketing people went on-line too, which is when it all went to shit.

So a musician who writes great original music that a large number of people want copies of so they can listen to it whenever they want should spend much of their time playing gigs and weddings instead of spending it writing more new music?

I didn't say anything about a musician should be doing X or Y.

I only question that copyright is necessary to make a living. A musician can teach people how to play music, for example.

That's what they already do, if you add concerts to the mix. Their publisher already takes approximately all the money from selling copies anyway. And that's who the copyright is really protecting.

Also: a musician who writes great original music should keep writing great original music, instead of forever charging rent on the music they already wrote.

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