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Comment by paulhauggis | Hacker News Reader

Do you believe in unions then? Unions are pretty much the same thing. They inflate wages and force companies to pay workers a wage that would otherwise be much less. Unions have also prevented some jobs from being automated (IE: making them obsolete).

"start talking about the possibility of completely upending the copyright system and replacing it with something that makes sense now that we have the Internet."

If a company pours millions of dollars into something that many people enjoy, why shouldn't their works be protected?

You talk about changing the system and I feel like what you really want is no protection for content creators.

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>Do you believe in unions then? Unions are pretty much the same thing. They inflate wages and force companies to pay workers a wage that would otherwise be much less.

That's the neoliberals or naive american's view on unions.

People all over the world would beg to differ.

Unions restore (some) of the imbalance in power between the employeer and the individual worker.

The protect people that need a job to feed their families against blackmail from those offering a job, and force companies to pay a wage that would otherwise be much less (at the threshold of substinence, if there weren't any unions around, such as it was in the 19th century).

Unions have also won many cherished rights, from prohibiting child labour, to the 8-hour work week, to work safety measures...

> to the 8-hour work week

You're a couple deacdes early with that

LOL, missed that!

"If a company pours millions of dollars into something that many people enjoy, why shouldn't their works be protected?"

Kodak poured millions of dollars into the film development system. Why shouldn't they have their revenue stream protected too? Why not freeze the progress of technology to ensure that no business ever becomes obsolete?

We had entertainment before copyright. We will still have it afterwards.

This is a false analogy. Kodak's revenue stream was not protected, but people were prohibited from stealing their film. The film business disappeared because of alternatives that the market preferred.

The case of content is different. Free content is not taking much market share from professional producers. A small subset of people are illegally stealing professionally produced content via torrent sites, but that group is small enough that it's still economically viable to spend $50M to make a great movie.

If we eliminate copyright, that group grows large enough that nobody will spend $50M to make a movie, and the big-budget movie will disappear. The big-budget movies don't disappear because people don't want to see them, or because free content has displaced them in the market. They disappear because so many people steal the content against the wishes of the publisher, it's no longer economically viable to produce the content at all.

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