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Comment by fragmede | Hacker News Reader

Because it's self indulgent wankery. If I, as writer and an artist, have just the most absolutely brilliant thoughts, and write them down into a book or draw the most beautiful artwork, I can earn money off that well into my afterlife with copyright. Meanwhile the carpenter who is no less bright, can only sell the chair he's built once. In order to make money off of it, he must labor to produce a second or even a third chair. Why does one person have to work harder than the other because of the medium they chose?

Meanwhile in China, just because you invented a thing, you don't get to sit back and rest on your laurels. sipping champagne in hot tubs, because your competitor isn't staying put. He's grinding and innovating off your innovation so you'd also better keep innovating.

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The only people making chairs by hand today are exceptionally well-paid artisanal craft carpenters and/or designers/studios.

It's not at all unusual for popular/iconic furniture designs to be copyrighted.

Reality is people who invent truly original, useful, desirable things are the most important human beings on the planet.

Nothing that makes civilisation what it is has happened without original inventiveness and creativity. It's the single most important resource there is.

These people should be encouraged and rewarded, whether it's in academia, industry, as freelance inventors/creators, or in some other way.

It's debatable if the current copyright system is the best way to do that, because often it isn't, for all kinds of reasons.

But the principle remains. Destroy rewards for original invention and creativity and you destroy all progress.

You’re right—original inventiveness drives progress. But IP protection isn’t the only (or best) way to reward it. Removing it often accelerates innovation.

Look at open source. If Linux had been closed-source with licensing fees, the internet wouldn’t exist as we know it. Open ecosystems build faster. Contributors innovate because they can build on each other’s work freely.

Market pressure drives innovation. Reputation beats monopoly. Monopolies slow everything down. And collaboration multiplies progress.

There’s plenty of people who create without external reward.

Or simply for the most minimal of external rewards: recognition and respect.

Or for the purest: seeing others live longer and happier as a result.

This position suggests that there was no progress before we had copyright. I think you're vastly overstating the power of the incentives we've set up to drive creative behavior, and even with your caveats I think you're overstating their efficacy. Copyright and patents have done more to consolidate wealth within middleman industries that aggregate these properties than they have to enrich the actual creatives doing the work, as it is with all systems. For every system we put in place to reward behavior that we enjoy, the system always benefits those that choose to game the system more than those that were originally intended to be rewarded.

And the results are observable empirically: very few people are told by anyone that's been out in the world that they should choose to become a writer or an inventor, because writers and inventors simply don't make that much money. The system you claim is so necessary seems to be completely failing in its core mission.

For example, take a look at writers making a decent living on a platform like Substack. Copyright is literally doing nothing for them. People can freely copy their substack and post it everywhere online. The value is that the platform provides a centralized location for people to follow the person's writing, and to build a community around it. In cases where artists and inventors have become rich, I look at the mechanism behind it, and often it's an accident that had nothing to do with intellectual property rights at all.

And not only that. People who do make a living producing creative stuff have to constantly monitor themselves for any hint of copyright infringement, because a copyright strike on their channel is existential. Even if the majority of the time the strike was total baloney. It makes it tough to create when you can be three strikesed or demonetized for playing something that sounds like a record label's melody for 20 seconds on your channel.

"are the most important human beings on the planet"

While I don't disagree with what you are trying to say, saying it this way is hyperbolic. There are so many people doing important things. Think about parents.

> Destroy rewards for original invention and creativity and you destroy all progress

You won't destroy the progress completely but there definitely will be a lot of unfairness like people monetizing someone else's music due to having better SEO skills and more free time than the artist. And the artist cannot hire SEO specialist because he has no money.

Nah I made a beautiful bench just the other week. I’m not well-paid artisanal craft carpenters and/or designers/studios.just a regular fella who has a dab hand at carpentry

One reason so many people are amenable to the copyright argument is at least partly because of these counterarguments that posit that every writer must be an elitist or fabulously wealthy vs. instead of someone who spent X years toiling away at their craft or skill while working menial/multiple jobs.

yeah we should abolish copyright and make it so that creators get paid for every eyeball that's looking at your content. first, we establish a total panopticon. and then you get paid when people engage with your content, like, the system records that a person watches your movie, doesn't matter how they got a copy of your movie, but this person watches your movie, and that watch gets sent into the system and you get paid out from it. no more copyright, just horribly invasive tracking of everything everywhere. Call it copythrough.

That would never work, but like writing sci-fi.

This has nothing to do with stifling innovation.

I am yet to meet a writer who doesn't even attempt to write for fear that whatever they write will be found to be in violation of copyright (unless they are the type of writer that is always finding excuses not to write).

Several people have made successful careers out of fan fiction...

JK Rowling never has to work again in her life because she wrote a couple of books that were exceedingly popular. Because she doesn't have to work, she's not been forced to come up with new stuff. How is that not stifling?

The same analogy could be applied to business though. Some Colonel invented a fried chicken recipe and started a chain of restaurants, now he doesn't need to work anymore.

In my opinion, if someone creates something that has value for a lot of people, they should get rewarded for it.

...it's worth noting that J.K. Rowling is still coming up with new stuff. I quite like her ongoing Comoran Strike detective series. They're published under a pen name, but it's Rowling.

She comes up with new stuff all the time. She's had a separate career as a writer of thrillers, and is still working in the PotterVerse.

She's an awful person for other reasons, but that's beside the point here.

Reality is most trad-pub authors have full-time jobs anyway to pay the bills. If you're not one of a handful of publishing superstars, trad-pub pays incredibly badly as a result of corporate consolidation and monopoly dominance.

To be clear - there are far more people living parasitically off investments, producing nothing at all and extracting value from everyone else, than there are talented creators living the high life.

Notch (Marcus Persson of Minecraft fame) is probably a more compelling example.

She made enough money selling books by the 5th book that she'd never need to do anything again and live better than 99% of people on the planet.

What do you want?

She's not allowed to make money selling books?

What I want is irrelevant. She's now able to rest on her laurels thanks to copyright. She's earned it. I very much enjoyed the books! Under our current culture and level of technology, that's the dream.

But why shouldn't everyone get to live like that? we have the technology to feed all the people, it's just a distribution and organization problem. "just". Money, and capitalism is how we've organized things and it's worked great for a lot of people but it's also left a lot of people behind.

We keep making adjustments to the system but we don't have to be trapped in the system. we can take a step back and look at things and say, hang on a minute, if the goal in life is to feed and clothe everybody, we've either succeeded beyond our wildest dreams, or utterly failed.

> But why shouldn't everyone get to live like that?

Because we don't have that much money?

You pick one example and ignore thousands of writers who didn't even return costs after publishing a book. Also, as another example, a great Russian 19th century poet and writer Alexander Pushkin left lot of debt after his death. He supported publishing other writers but it turned out to be a commercial failure. Maybe this fact will make you less unhappy about supposedly unclouded lazy writer's career.

I'm not ignoring that, I'm saying that a differently organized society would have everybody working 40 weeks a year instead of the ridiculous inequality we face today.

I am not working 40 hours a week so although equality seems fair I don't really like your idea.

I don't think it is that easy. Take musicians for example. There are several thousands most popular and rich, some that can only gather a small club and a long tail of people who can only play music on their day off. And now with development of generative models their financial situation is going to get only worse.

The income from the book is scaling by its number of customers, versus roughly one person at a time who can enjoy the chair. It incentivizes finding ways to entertain more people with your effort.

The carpenter can sell the design of the chair.

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