IP is an obsolete idea of a bygone century
it arose from a legitimate answer to material scarcity, but it's nonesense in the digital space
people who advocate for IP and DRM and all such thing are in the end advocating for scarcity.
it arose from a legitimate answer to material scarcity, but it's nonesense in the digital space
people who advocate for IP and DRM and all such thing are in the end advocating for scarcity.
You either must be able to fund it through ads, host it on platform which make piracy effectively impossible and/or impractical like Apple's App Store, YouTube etc. or be independently wealthy and just do it as a hobby?
e.g. screw all the authors who are writing books, Amazon should just be able to distribute (or sell for some "convenience" fee) books to everyone who has a Kindle without paying anything to them? That (which would be the logical outcome of nothing having no IP protection) certainly sounds like a reasonable opinion..
If in some hypothetical future you can't turn a profit because everyone is pirating it, these games will either:
1. stop existing
2. be lower quality
3. follow the steps of free mobile games - full of ads, microtransactions, etc.
Would they still pay for it if all the content could be posted ( by 3rd parties ) on platforms like YouTube and viewed for free (besides the ad revenue which would be going to Google rather than to the author and/or companies that produced the content in the first place)? Of course that question doesn't make a lot of sense since most of that content wouldn't exist in the first place...
(I wasn't talk about piracy but rather responding to a comment advocating the total abolition of IP laws)
Sure, same logic as "people steal when it's easy to do so"
>music piracy almost disappeared when convenient streaming services appeared
Too much to go into now, but Spotify is definately next on the list of enshittification. It's very easy to "end piracy" when your plan is to capture the market with unsustainable business models and clamp down later when money is tight.
>Make something as easy as pirating and people will pay for it.
We're kind of seeing that right now with Gamepass. And all that does is make me fear for the end of games preservation as we speak. But I suppose that's the market demand, so it is what it is.
We already saw what happened with the mobile scene with this. apps are essentially "free" so it's easier than piracy to jump in. I'm not sure if that's an ideal model either.
Also phones can emulate and there's some interesting homebrew they can thus run like micromages.
I would. Many people who contribute to FOSS either already or proceeded to work on proprietary technology which makes money. Like Nintendo. The FOSS work in good times is a passion hobby, not a means to live.
It'd be nice, but charity for most ventures has never ventured to be a way for the charity giver to sustain a liveable wage. If it could do that then I'd be more on board for FOSS being a model to follow. Instead, just like when you list a couch on Craigslist, you want to charge even a small price (and maybe not even collect the money) just to filter out the most unhinged customers who somehow become even more unhinged over literal free stuff.
Not everything revolves around software.
Also even then OSS generally seems to only be universally successful in areas where software is a "cost centre" i.e. companies are willing to invest into it when it makes it cheaper for them run their business than building/buying proprietary stuff or they build their products on top of it (A but almost never when it's the actual end product targeted at consumers.
And if we extend the definition of software to video games, OS is not even a thing there (besides middleware of course which falls into the previous category).
Plenty of ways for artist to monetize. Selling a copy of the art is one way, very cherished by publishers. Creators for the most part don't make money off copy distribution of their art. That was the case with physical copies, still the case with online distribution.
The good old "let's protect the artists" is a fallacy. It's only to protect publishers and distributors. These IP laws, at least their interpretation acts against the public interest, creators included.
Other forms of monetisation of art? Performance, training and teaching, patronage, custom requests, etc.
Ask Taylor Swift where most of her money is coming from, that's not from Spotify.
e.g. how many successful fiction authors don't make money off copy distribution of their "art"?
Regardless I don't see how is this a legitimate argument (even if it were accurate), authors/creators should be free to chose their monetization model themselves.
> These IP laws, at least their interpretation acts against the public interest, creators included.
On the whole I certainly don't agree at all (obviously the current system is not perfect and need to be improved. Also could you explain how exactly they act against creators interests?
> Performance, training and teaching, patronage, custom requests, etc.
Yes, let's go back to the middle ages when when you could only be an artist/writer/etc. if you found a rich patron willing to support you
If musicians can create and distribute their content on their own (for free) and sustain themselves entirely from donations and/or performances they are completely free to do that. What does that have to do with IP law?
Donations are exactly that, a rich patron willing to support you.
So you're basically getting upset over some made up reality where currently musicians don't need support from rich people, but that reality only exists in your head.
First I was never talking about musicians specifically, secondly modern (Patreon/etc.) style donation model is in my opinion overall much better that being dependent on a small number of rich donors. However that seems besides the point, authors/creators are free to chose how they distribute their content and what business model they want to adopt (obviously different models work better in different industries).
You are somehow implying that denying them that choice would improve something? Can you explain?
> like that's not the case today, which is either duplicitous or just naiive.
Really? Most successful authors are musicians are dependent on 1 or 2 individual patron? Not thousands or even millions of people willing to pay for their content (in some form)?
>The good old "let's protect the artists" is a fallacy. It's only to protect publishers and distributors.
Who do you think is the first to be cut when publishers/distributors are low on money? It's not like they need that money to live. They can shut down the business and still retire comfortably.
>Ask Taylor Swift where most of her money is coming from
okay.
>Swift's income streams include revenue from her concert tour ticket sales, music catalog, streaming deals and record sales. She also owns numerous pricey properties across the U.S. Both Bloomberg and Forbes pin her net worth at an estimated $1.1 billion on the low end, based on analyses of her fortune.
so... either she's really good in real estate or she command enough power to get a fair cut from stuff 99.9% of artists barely get anything out of.
Never thought about comparing Swift to the typical music market but I was expecting something a little bit more surprising.
What a nonsensical, bad-faith, mis-representation of GP. At this point you might as well start talking about hot air balloons, another thing that wasn't mentioned in GP. If this is what you're going to be doing, you shouldn't be on this website at all. Your comments particularly stand out as always being on the wrong side of the conversation, no matter what point is brought up. It's obvious you just want to be a contrarian for no sake at all.
To be fair the same could be said about any comment in this thread advocating the complete abolition (as opposed to reform) of IP laws. Ofcourse, Maybe they are not directly "bad-faith", just not thought through at all and/or extremely ideological.
Can you elaborate? I haven't seen a single coherent logical argument explaining why why IP laws should be abolished (instead of reformed) in this entire thread and/or why and how would that benefit creators?
On another level, we could pivot to UBI instead of dedicating ressource to enforce fake scarcity.
I keep hearing this, but I have yet to see one person truly live off of donations. Patreon is backed by expecting services in return, so most Patreons are definitely not donations.
It is probably possible, but only for people making funds that are already at points many would call "wealthy".
>we could pivot to UBI instead of dedicating ressource to enforce fake scarcity.
I'm all for UBI. But I don't even see that in much talks in the US, just a few tests by private companies (how very American). Might as well have short term ways to survive while just blueskying entire economic models.
So what? Not everyone wants to engage in all of the PR/marketing stuff that's necessary to make any money from that and it would still generally result in significantly lower revenue.
> On another level, we could pivot to UBI instead of dedicating
And fund it how exactly? Even if that were sustainable why do you think that content creators should be fully content living of UBI + a few pennies in donations while people working in most other industries should be able to money the same way they previously did?
IP protection (even if often implemented in a suboptimal way which of course should be improved) have been one of the primaries force behind human progress over that last 300+ years.
That's not a difference, PR/Marketing is already used to profit over IP work.
> Even if that were sustainable why do you think that content creators should be fully content living of UBI + a few pennies in donations while people working in most other industries should be able to money the same way they previously did?
This is assuming creators are fully content on how stuff work now, and I'm betting that's not the case for the vast majority, most of them cannot make end meets with the current system, regardless of how hard they work on their book/song/game/etc, and they have to have a side job just to put food on the table.
> IP protection (even if often implemented in a suboptimal way which of course should be improved) have been one of the primaries force behind human progress over that last 300+ years.
That's a bold claim. Most of, if not all, human progress on this period is directly attributable to the use of fossil fuel, from the steam engine to the modern use of it, and how it empowered us to do so much more with less human-hour.
The alternative option would have meant that individuals would have had to spend significant amounts of time and resources to "invent" new products, and the only ones to profit would be the companies that had the capacity to manufacture them (while keeping all of the profits for themselves). Does that seem like an environment that's highly conducive to innovation?
> they did it because they needed a telephone,
There is a pretty extensive section named "The race to the patent office" on Graham Bell's Wikipedia page.
Do you think Watt would have successful at building his steam engine had there been no patents that allowed him to attract investors? Or he would have just spent all of his live working as an engineer or a surveyor because he couldn't have afford the significant capital required to develop the engine?
people invent stuff and put it out in the public domain every day, not everyone is a robber baron. look at youtube or hackaday one day, maybe you'll learn something.
The work necessary to properly answer this question is a team of 100+ domain experts working for at least 5 years. There's no way you're getting a good answer to this question in a comment thread on a website for programmers. Why even ask that question - what value do you expect out of the responses?
Why even make that argument in the first place then? It's the equivalent (following your logic) of saying that "it would be nice if we were living in an utopian society with no material scarcity" which doesn't mean much unless you can at least provide some explanation of how we should get there.
> The work necessary to properly answer this question is a team of 100+ domain experts working for at least 5 years.
I don't think we live in a video game where you can just spend "research points" to develop new economic systems that somehow magically improve economic productivity and solve complex socio-economical problems?
Making an argument doesn't require to describe every step to it, if I told you could use your GPS to navigate to work, you're not gonna ask me how to launch a satellite in space.
> It's the equivalent (following your logic) of saying that "it would be nice if we were living in an utopian society with no material scarcity"
Copyright have nothing to do with material scarcity, neither does UBI, that is about money, a man made social construct, not a material thing.
I would like eco-friendly flying cars to exist so that I could avoid traffic in the morning, I think that would solve all the mass transit and infrastructure problems in major cities.
No clue how to build one but I'm sure that 500 experts should be able to accomplish it if they really tried it. Until they do that nobody is allowed to question the validity of this universal solution to all transportation related problems that humanity is facing.
It is all fine and well to say "We should have public rail" but with out any idea of how it should be implemented and what it will take to get there, the idea falls flat on it's face. You have to be able to support it with funding increases and possibly eminent domain.
If you advocate for healthcare reform, great! So do I! And since you have no preference about how and what shape the reforms should take, you agree with me that we should abolish all health insurance companies! That would definitely reform the system but you might not like the outcome.
A large number of our current issues come from law and policy that was passed to address issues of the day with no understanding of how or why things were happening. Let's not continue that trend.
For instance, here's discussion about a blog post titled So you want to compete with or replace open source https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40993787
With no copyright, it would be akin to using permissive BSD-style licensing, which is by no means everyone's preference.
I presume you don't hold that IP is an obsolete idea of a bygone century, as ysofunny put it.