Today's copyright is much different, due to massive lobbying efforts by those who would benefit most. Authors life + what, 100 years or so, is way too long (and that's completely discounting those who would want copyright to be perpetual). So you have a situation where a person creates a work, a large rights owner buys it up, and then they get to milk all the benefits while preventing the public from having their rightful free access.

Restore copyright to 14+14 years (with a single exception, the original artist and only the original artist gets 28+14, if they sell their rights to the work then the recipient only gets 14+14). Destroy the DMCA. Those are the two most important things to restore copyright to a proper moral standing. Otherwise, copyright as it stands right now is immoral and unjust, and thus (some of) those who pirate are doing so for fully ethical reasons, and are on the better side of history in the long run.

Of course, some people just want free shit. However, those people will always exist no matter how reasonable copyright is. Hell, I don't mind getting free shit when I pirate something, even if I'm doing it for moral reasons.

But it's important to remember that no copyright at all would hurt small and medium creators immensely. Big corps could just pick things that are trending up, rip them off instantly and scale their ripoff much better thanks to their great workforce and marketing reach. That would create a big disincentive for independent creation of IP.

Like you, I would just prefer if copyright was kept in place but its duration decreased drastically compared to now. It doesn't seem likely given the lobbying strength of the corporations that benefit from the current situation sadly.

The big assumption in this argument is that large corporations that depend on copyright would still exist, but it seems pretty clear that they would not. If copyright didn't exist, then there would be nothing for them to monetize. The first broadcast, distribution or performance of a work could recorded/copied and redistributed with no penalty, so large corporations are just as disadvantaged as small players. How do you see large corporations forming and perpetuating themselves in order to exploit these smaller players?

This is in fact the origin of the legal concept of copyright: established printers who had more money and equipment than authors would print up copies of popular written works, distribute and sell them, and return nothing to the author.

Not anymore. Most CDN's will do that for free. Distribution is easy. Spotify makes money because open source pirating networks attract the attention of law enforcement.

It's also tech literacy. Artists under may be able to host their own servers, but not well. They'd be the biggest targets of all the big hacks (which still happen to said billion dollar corps in 2023), you would want someone who can secure them for you. And they may not know how to host a server to begin with.

It is in fact neither expensive, nor complicated, eg. napster.

This is very much not the case. In fact Spotify’s revenue in its last full year was less than half of the combined revenues of the three major record labels for a similar period.

Spotify generated €11.7 billion in revenue in 2022, approx $12.9 billion.

Universal Music Group generated €10.3 billion in revenue in 2022, approx $11.3 billion

Warner Music Group generated $5.9 billion in their fiscal year ending Sep 30 2022

Sony Music generated ¥1.3 trillion (approx $10.1 billion) in their fiscal year ending March 2023.

Total revenues of major labels: $27.3 billion.

Spotify: https://s29.q4cdn.com/175625835/files/doc_financials/2022/q4...

UMG: https://www.universalmusic.com/universal-music-group-n-v-rep...

WMG: https://investors.wmg.com/static-files/f35e3e8a-8ae2-4960-95...

Sony: https://www.sony.com/en/SonyInfo/IR/library/presen/er/pdf/22...

Maybe centralized distribution. Bittorrent appears to be a fairly cheap and reliable method for serving content that scales nicely as more people join the swarm.

And at that scale for serving other businesses, people will start being more concious about what and how they seed. People already get into drama over that as is.

> ...then there would be nothing for them to monetize...

... other than the works of every single person they could possibly get their hands on, as is happening with the AI companies.

And they would slowly dwindle and die as their revenue streams dried up. I'm still not seeing the issue. They're already "harming" small creators in these same ways, particularly because extended copyright means we can't have derivative works, thus stifling innovations of smaller creators right now.

> You think Disney isn't just gonna go out and straight up hoover up every single byte of music & video in existence that they can get their hands on and start reselling it?

Reselling what? Something you would be able to download for free on the Internet if copyright didn't exist? An open source Spotify would immediately pop up that would only charge you enough to cover hosting. What commercial enterprise do you think could compete with that long-term?

What you are describing is a commercial enterprise.

Presumably they wouldn't just do literally nothing in this new Copyrightless world, I imagine with their trillions of dollars they can come up with new business ideas in this new world devoid of intellectual property rights.

> They're already "harming" small creators in these same ways, particularly because extended copyright means we can't have derivative works, thus stifling innovations of smaller creators right now.

Okay, but I don't get what type of innovations - other than AI chatbots, and I mention this with a huge asterisk because all people are asking for is for these trillion dollar corporations to pay the people who's work they're benefiting from - are being stifled right now? There's more media than ever before and it's only accelerating despite all the claims of stifled innovations. Genuine question, do you have a list of things that you'd say are being stifled by over-aggressive Copyright laws? Even if we venture out of Copyright and into Patents and Big Pharma, I especially can't imagine many people who have the skills necessary to come up with new medicines doing their work for no compensation.

> Reselling what? Something you would be able to download for free on the Internet if copyright didn't exist?

But who would create all of this free music for the open source Spotify to gobble up? Sure there'll be a chunk of people out there still creating things because they want to create things, but they also have to put food on the table at the end of the day, how are they gonna do that if everything they ever produce just gets swallowed by the black hole known as the internet? Why would anyone create anything at all, if the moment they do it gets redistributed to everyone else for free? Even open source licenses often come with strings attached, I can't imagine that most people would be happy with all their work being gobbled up without even acknowledgment of where the work comes from, which is already a part of the most commonly encountered OSS licenses.

I just don't see how this world you're envisioning can exist in a non-Utopian non-post-scarcity world where the majority of people are living paycheck-to-paycheck and are barely scraping by as is.

> An open source Spotify would immediately pop up that would only charge you enough to cover hosting.

Who'd wanna pay for that, if you can just download the music yourself?

> What commercial enterprise do you think could compete with that long-term?

You're literally describing a commercial enterprise here, the only difference being that the OSS version of Spotify just doesn't pay artist's for their music (ignoring that Spotify already barely pays artists anything). Spotify already charges people to cover hosting (+ employees and all the other associated costs), is an OSS version of Spotify that just pirates their catalogue really innovative to you? Cause that's exactly what you've described here.

Software, music, graphics are all subject to substantial restrictions on new works because of copyright. You don't even notice it because it's become so normalized.

> Sure there'll be a chunk of people out there still creating things because they want to create things, but they also have to put food on the table at the end of the day

95%+ of musicians don't make money from music distribution, they make it from performances when touring. Eliminating copyright would have no impact on this. It's the same reason open source developers can still feed their families.

Graphic artists would still be commissioned for custom works, although AI will now eat into that too somewhat.

Many, many people would continue to write, compose and create art despite no financial incentives. Just look at all of the fanfiction and fan art out there.

> Who'd wanna pay for that, if you can just download the music yourself?

You absolutely could, but people often pay for extra convenience: an easily searchable index, music recommendations, playlists that can sync across devices, and so on.

> You're literally describing a commercial enterprise here,

I'm more describing an almost non-profit that provides a convenient interface. Spotify isn't just charging for hosting, it also has to pay licensing fees for music rights and profit margins for investors. Neither of those factor into this new fictional world we're discussing.

I'm not sure why this OSS version of Spotify has to be "innovative", the innovation is the low cost access to all of humanity's musical creations.

Copyright was intended to advance progress in the arts and sciences, but it's honestly doing the opposite, and has been for quite some time.

I think they mean derivative works. If one wanted to make e.g. a fan-made Star Wars movie or open source version of a closed source game, under the current regime they could and have been sued into oblivion. Tons of examples of this occurring for media. In software, copyright is used by trillion dollar entities to bully smaller projects aiming for things like interoperability to be distributed.

So boutique designers that can charge high prices due to artificial scarcity would not be a thing. If there are no more boutique designers, then these firms will have to commission designers themselves, or we rely on open source design work, eg. students who are learning design, enthusiasts, and so on. I'm not really seeing a real downside here. Yes, things would be different, but would they be worse? I don't think so.

Do people forget that copyright was made to protect the investor first, and then to progress society second? If the inventor has no incentive to invent, you can't benefit and advance society off their shoulders. So the inventor gets their due payment, then after benefiting for most their life or so (14 + 14, in a time where life expectancy was 40 years old), release to the public around the time that person is retired or dead.

The downside is that the spark would never come in a lot of places. You can't lower the cost of what doesn't exist.

This is not correct. It's a failure to understand that invention does not come only from external motivation, but also, possibly mostly, from internal motivations. The motivation to understand the world, to improve people's lives, to build something cool, useful or meaningful. It's a huge motivation behind the success of OSS.

I don't understand how people can just completely ignore all of the evidence that the world would not collapse if IP rights were significantly relaxed or even eliminated. People wrote, painted and composed music long before copyright. Sometimes this work was commissioned, sometimes it was done purely for pleasure. Some of the most creative periods of human history took place when there was no notion of IP rights.

> Do people forget that copyright was made to protect the investor first, and then to progress society second?

I don't think this is correct either. The whole purpose of giving inventors/authors these rights was to promote progress. The inventor comes second, not first:

> The Congress shall have Power [...] to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

In other words, "we grant these rights to authors and inventors in order to promote progress of science and useful arts", ie. these rights are conditional on the understanding that they promote progress. If they do not promote progress then they should be revised or rescinded.

It could be and is possible. But many important inventions weren't made by the rich elite that never had to worry about paying monthly expenses (many also were. But it just feeds back into the elite that way, which people seem to have in this topic). You're not going to get innovation from someone who's worried about if they can make rent that month. That's generally why entrepreneurs of all kinds either seek such funding with a pitch or simply work in industry in R&D. Both are ways to survive before the big break.

>The whole purpose of giving inventors/authors these rights was to promote progress. The inventor comes second, not first:

Sure that's the government's first angle. But the government has many other ways to promote progress; it won't be the biggest loser if copyright breaks down, especially not in such a globalized world.

Inventors are the target audience of these laws to incentivize them to invent. So I the spirit of the law the inventor comes first. Similar to how gambling laws audience is to protect the vulnerable despite the real reasons government banning them coming down to a lack of ability to properly tax (and probably some puritanism value too).

because if you listen to more than 3 artists, the ripoffs are cheaper. And as is, Spotify has original music but barely pays the artist.

Sad fact is that very few people care about who is behind the art they consume. Maybe they care about celebrity gossip, but that's it.

>while I torrent/share/sample/remix/cover their entire collection?

under this theoretical system, the 90-9-1 rule applies. Very few people will bother producing their own music, so the worries of pirating is way bigger than non-corporations remixing/covering

This doesn't refute the tweet. You're just saying you want a monetization strategy that enables an information business model that you like (small/medium creators) instead of one that you don't like. It's still not a moral right, and your belief that the law should help artists is not innately superior to a belief that the law should help Disney or that the law should help corn farmers.

Additionally, it's arguable that copyright is needed for small/medium creators to succeed. Most successful independent creators monetize through patreon or personal commissions, neither of which are actually hindered by lack of copyright.

Except that they are already doing this, and since money == "justice" in this country and most of the rest of the world, their big bag of money means that you have zero realistic chance in winning any attempt at suing them for doing so.

Copyright is a great conversation to have, but it's a bit like sitting around talking about how to best dry off a plate in the Titanic dining room.

This is false: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15309950

We’d probably also see rapid advances in homomorphic encryption to enable deployed software.

All day every day every industry every level.

"How?" is infinite different ways not any particular one.

Usually it's down to something being 0.001% prettier or more convenient or even a totally fabricated impression that everyone else does it (which then becomes true but is only true after the idea was used).

They sucessfully harness the desire for conformity in some people and also the desire for non-conformity in other people, at the same time for the same products.

They completely effectively harness countless well studied aspects of human nature.

If you're like me, sitting here writing about how cynical and manipulative they all are, they have angles that work on that too.

Not without government intervention, they don't. In fact, they wouldn't even exist without government intervention.

They use the government where possible, but as just one of countless tools. They don't always get what they want from the governemnent, yet they still make money. As often as not, corporations end up making more money as a result of losing some fight with a government.

All they need to make money is activity. Any activity, even "the government just took away something we were using and dinged us for $200M" 6 months later they are worth twice what they were before, because that was big activity.

If the government takes away a toy they were making money from, they just figure out some other new toy, and in the end the shake-up and (forced) opportunity for change was worth more than what they were making from the status quo.

Yeah but fencing it off from others does require government support. If it's human nature to create, it's also human nature to copy. If you create some new worthwhile invention, I'll just copy your invention without even asking you, and without the government there's nothing you can do to stop me.

There are countless things anyone can copy or do for free already right now, that countless people pay a company for, for no reason at all. No government enforcement of anything involved.

Name one.

There are people (not huge corps in this case) selling CDRs of PDFs from archive.org on eBay. But more to the point, people buying them.

The completely intangible nothing that differentiates a Burberry bag from any other medium quality bag.

Now that last one almost sounds like the opposite point since the intangible nothing is exactly what the government is protecting there, but the government does not enforce that you need to pay Burberry to get a bag exactly like it in both quality and aesthetic, but people voluntarily do anyway.

>> Name one.

> 3% tax on every transaction in your entire life going to Visa by using a debit card instead of cash.

There's a reason for that: Visa and MasterCard have monopoly power obtained via anti-competitive practices which were enabled by contract law. Visa and MasterCard prohibited member banks from issuing their own cards. Discover and American Express among others sued Visa and MasterCard for this about 15 years ago.

> the government does not enforce that you need to pay Burberry to get a bag exactly like it in both quality and aesthetic

The government does enforce that. A potential Burberry competitor cannot sell a bag "exactly like" Burberry's because to do that it would have to have the Burberry logo, which is a trademark protected by federal law.

What do the customers get? They get nothing more than the social status of other people seeing them have it. That value is something that doesn't exist except that Burberry created it out of thin air. The tools that Burberry uses to to produce those sales are not the government protection of the exclusive right to sell a bag of a certain style, it's the knowledge of human nature, in this case, status displays.

If those customers value that social status, how did you derive the authority to tell them they're wrong?

Of course, you don't have that authority. Nobody is in a position to tell other people what they should or shouldn't value. Some people value the exclusivity of fashionable brands, but that exclusivity cannot be maintained without government involvement. Without it, there's nothing to stop somebody besides Burberry from creating indistinguishable copies of Burberry bags, complete with the Burberry logo, at lower prices. If they're indistinguishable then who wouldn't buy them at the lower price? If they're indistinguishable, how would you even know it's a copy? If it's indistinguishable, is it EVEN a copy?

No. Monopoly control of something--a resource or in this case an idea--requires the power to enforce that monopoly. Typically, governments have that power and among the ways to exercise it is to grant and protect patent and copyright and trademark monopolies.

You didn't have to. When asked to name one example of corporations getting people to pay for things they don't have to, both of the examples you named were examples of a monopoly. Burberry, for instance, has a monopoly. Only Burberry can make bags with the iconic pattern and logo, and if you value the iconic pattern and logo for reasons you're not obliged to justify to anyone else, you DO have pay Burberry for the privilege. That's a monopoly, and it wouldn't exist if the government didn't maintain it.

Governments just make it easier for people who can hire lawyers to assert this. Much easier to send out a C&D (which stops most infractions) than to generate some sort of "code of quality" or whatnot.

Your claim that we're splitting hairs, microscopic or otherwise, is not strengthened by adding the word "clearly." If you don't like calling a trademarked logo a monopoly then I suggest you take it up with Wikipedia. Go ahead and edit at least these pages to correct their errors which tend to confuse trademarks with government-granted monopolies, something that is "clearly" a mistake according to you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government-granted_monopoly

>Even if governments didn't exist, people find all kinds of ways to differentiate "value" from brands. The entire hobbyist collectors market works this way.

Works what way? I have no idea what you're talking about.

>Governments just make it easier for people who can hire lawyers to assert this

Without governments there wouldn't even be lawyers.

>Much easier to send out a C&D (which stops most infractions)

Who's going to listen to a "C&D" if the government is unwilling to enforce it?

Again, there would not be big corporations without patents, copyrights, trademarks, and other forms of government-granted monopolies. If you think there somehow would be, I'd love to hear it.

You have just spent a day refusing to hear it.

It is patently ridiculous to think that money will fail to money just because of any single aspect of the environment.

No, I have spent a day trying to persuade you to explain it. Now, I'm prepared to accept that you can't.

For copyrights it works be nice to get some of our culture sooner, but I don't think it harms us. Same for patents. You can make an argument that both should be shorter. I would also accept that software patents shouldn't exist)I think they are definitely rubber stamped to much) but how is the small creator harmed?

We should make clear that copyright is about publishing not using and that any usability infringements are infringements on ownership i.e. stealing.

Curiously, the US does recognise this concept to an extent in its legal treatment of fonts, but unfortunately that remains the exception rather than the rule, and even that exception is not recognised in the global copyright treaties. There is still a long list of software and hardware that is protected from otherwise normal competition by repurposing copyright to prevent things like easily exporting a user’s own data to use with different software or swapping out a failed hardware product for an after-market alternative that wasn’t made by the original manufacturer. In this respect, copyright now acts like bad patents, subverting the original intent and corrupting any reasonable moral/economic arguments behind it, and instead merely providing a legal weapon for powerful incumbents to inhibit creative work it was supposed to encourage.

It's kind of the same category as fonts and recipes, which you can figure out by inspection mostly. If you want to protect something like that then a patent might be in order, though let's not get into that mess...

Music used to be a copyright on a melody. Arrangers/producers had nothing. Recorded music now has expanded to have "production rights". This a copyright on the way the released recording "sounds". The recent Ed Sheeran court case is a good example how weird that can get.

So APIs could be get there with the right crop of lawyers and court cases. ?

That was what every single person thought right until Oracle won a suit against Google for use of the Java's API.

What means it's protected by copyrights. Fair use on the US is a murky thing that only large corporations have the legal power to bet on.

But the sibling saying it's about the organization of the files may be on point. I remember it being about the organization into packages, but I can easily be wrong here.

People want information to be free and have largely price anchored on free, but information of any quality is extremely labor intensive and expensive. That radical mismatch between desire and reality has and will continue to twist the market into weird and increasingly hostile shapes.

My real point is the second part: quality media of any kind is very expensive and labor intensive to produce. Piracy can result in only two possible things: (1) even more restrictive and arcane DRM, or (2) the media you like just stops getting produced at all.

If people flatly refuse to pay and insist on pirating, option (2) is the final endpoint. You just won't get the product because nobody will make it.

Free is a lie. When you insist that things must be free, you're lying to yourself. When companies tell you it's free, they are lying to you (usually to get you hooked for surveillance or later monetization).

There is always the Analog hole¹, and I don't think that can ever be resolved. You only need one A/D conversion where quality is paramount and after that you have DRM free copies.

> the media you like just stops getting produced at all.

This is a sacrifice I'd be willing to make if it means eliminating DRM and other schemes that do NOT promote the progress of science and the useful arts.

¹ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole

I feel like I must not understand your point, because this seems odd to me. You’re saying it’s better to have no high quality media at all than to have any form of DRM?

If it makes you feel any better, I think this is where we are headed because as you correctly point out DRM doesn’t really work. The future is cheap trash produced almost for free by AI, crowdsourced filler like TikTok, or ads and propaganda funded by someone other than the consumer to push a message.

The period from the birth of recorded media to the birth of easy digital reproduction will be remembered as this weird golden age when massive amounts of incredible recorded art, film, and music were produced because there was an economic model for it.

I used to have the “information wants to be free” view until I saw how much effort goes into producing any form of media of any quality. It’s not easy or cheap at all and if it’s not funded it won’t happen.

I get your point, but there’s plenty of high quality media produced without financial incentive or with alternate funding schemes (donations, gov grants, patronage). I think hyperbole weakens the argument here.

It is rather odd seeing a such a visceral reaction to a tweet that is, in essence, true. Copyright exists for the reason you give, and that's what the tweet is alluding to. I think we should always be reassessing the reasons for our laws. I'm inclined to think that while copyright is "a monetization strategy that enables some information related business models at the expense of others" It is one that overall benefits society, albeit I would also like to see changes along the lines of what you suggest.

Having said that I don't think it inevitable that it will always be the case. Should there be one-day a post scarcity world where no-one is required to earn money to survive, perhaps it would be better to make all information un-owned.

I am put in mind of a map I once saw showing the world map stretched to show an even population density, and then the birthplaces of the greatest intellectuals and artists that the world has produced. Realized creativity came from where the money already was. Vast populations of poor regions would have been producing individuals with a similar potential. Potential that went unrealized. That may seem unrelated to the topic of copyright, but I'm not sure it is. If we are to make decisions about which way we are headed, it is worth thinking about where we could go.

People deserve free shit. If it costs ~$0.00 to copy something, the morally just thing to do is to give everyone who wants it a copy. If we could generate infinite socks for free, it would be outrageous to tolerate anyone living with cold, blistery feet.

The only reason copyright exists is to incentivize the creation of new shit. If we need to fund sock R&D, maybe we need a revenue stream for that.

This is such a great way to put it. It's as if we're living in a world where a sci-fi replicator exists and abundance is possible, but we're not allowed to use it, so nothing changes. Meanwhile, corporations just manufacture a product once, then copies it for free forevermore, selling each one for a price with an infinite profit margin.

Luxuries are just that. And what makes this conversation so muddy online is how so many people seem to do this because they desire luxuries, not because they need a texbook to gather knowledge, nor some gray market luxuries like an old game that isn't sold and was never even available in your native language (possibly requiring a fan patch to translate for them).

People want the best, latest, and greatest, for free right now, and some flimsy justification to rationalize them as a good person for pirating it. It just feels entitled.

OK. So how do we do that?

There are two issues that need to be solved when it comes to funding the development of things that have zero marginal cost of production.

1. How much total funding should we provide for a given category of such goods, such as music or movies or books or computer programs?

2. How do we decide what particular creators or particular works to fund?

Historically the answer has often been "government does both". For example the rulers of renaissance city states would choose artists to fund. These states would compete to have the best artists. The church was also often a major source of funding for music and painting and sculptures (I say "the" church because there was usually a state mandated religion).

In the US "government does both" would probably not be politically tenable. It probably needs to be something that at least approximates a free market.

The first thing that comes to mind is to actually have a free market in these goods. The issue there is that free markets work best when certain requirements are met. The mathematical economists can prove that if goods have some certain properties ("rivalrous" and "excludable" goods) then a free market in those goods leads to optimal production and consumption of those goods.

Some examples of such goods are food, bicycles, washing machines, and basically most physical goods that an individual can own and use.

That does assume a somewhat ideal free market with plenty of competition, low barriers to entry, and things like that, so real free markets usually aren't actually optimum, but they can decently approximate it.

When you have goods that are non-rivalrous and non-excludable free markets, even ideal free markets, are not optimum. The market under produces the good, in the sense that consumers can afford more of and want more of the good than the market produces.

Digital music, movies, books, and software are generally in that category.

There are a few approaches that have been suggested to handle this under production problem.

1. Don't handle it. Individual artists can make their money elsewhere and do art as a hobby, or make their money off of donations, or find a wealthy patron, or something like that. If it means we no longer have new big art, like movies that involve several hundred people working for several years to make, so be it.

2. Government funds it and chooses which art to fund. Maybe based on polls or something, or maybe there is a Ministry of the Arts that picks. As mentioned earlier, this is probably too "not free market" for the US.

3. Government funds it, but funding is distributed via some objective method that doesn't involve the government deciding what art to fund. For example they could get statistics from major download sites and divvy up the money based on popularity.

Richard Stallman has suggested such an approach for music copying, with the money distributed in proportion to the cube root of popularity.

As far as how much to fund, that could also be somewhat tied to how much people download, probably by a tax on something that correlates somewhat well with downloading. Since the vast majority of copying will take place using the internet, and the vast majority of people consume art, the most common suggestion I've seen is for the tax to be on internet service.

4. Legally treat these goods as if they were rivalrous and excludable. This is the approach taken under current copyright law. Then the free market does handle the production problem. The market determines how much money goes to new art and to which art that money goes. But it does mean the consumer pays more than the ideal free market price for that art which would be the marginal cost of production (which is essentially zero for digital goods).

I never said the address needs to be your home address, you could send a PO Box register to a shell company and have a hobo pick it up and transport it across the country for you if anonymity is an issue but privacy certianly isn't an issue here.

Biggest one for this audience would be code (since in high likelihood if you have the other's its likely pirated unless you are streaming your own ripped media ) if you would even be allowed to redistribute the code you have written, you probably would have some deep seated issue eith just handing it off to some stranger for free unless of course, you like me, are a big proponent of OSS.

But even then I have several proprietary codebases that I own but sure wouldn't share willingly.

What if it cost $.05 to copy? Why is moral and just (related but not equivalent) bound to cost?

As to a real example: a professor of medieval history has incurred the cost of his education, including reading handwriting in a foreign language, the cost of time, effort, travel and more in researching and writing and has now typed up a book on his computer and it is "free"[1] to distribute so it's morally just to give a copy to all who want it?

You pretty much cloaked your greed in a word salad of meaningless moralizing with a jargon dressing and no real context.

[1] Even digital requires the cost of equipment, electricity, and access, so if you bind morally just to free it doesn't exist.

Let me restate what I clearly and obviously wrote: The history professor has no moral obligation to give his book away digitally.

The person I replied to stated unequivocally that people deserve free stuff if it cost nothing. I refuted both that argument and the argument that anything is distributed, let alone produced, without cost.

Is that clear enough or do you want to build another strawman?

administer and fund party elections

protect party power thru primary voting restrictions - and then by doing all that

gift parties a veneer of gov authority (which helps lock out competition).

Electoral turnovers flush corruption and improve economic power for general public: https://www.nber.org/papers/w29766

The drop off in allegiance to religion since the 00s has broken thousands of years of socialized obligation to maintain a specific historical story.

Our brains devalue sources of information after a certain amount of time: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/mom-voice-kid-brain-teen...

It’s been roughly 15 years since the cloud app boom really took off with users, people are tired of social media. Seems likely this trend of getting sick of the same old holds throughout life. Lack of obligation to historical story is revealing interesting things about our ebbs and flows.

See also dwindling interest in comic book movies, a trend that took off with iron man… 15 years ago

iPhones -> goggles within a similar timeframe

15 years before that, in the early 90s the information super highway was taking off

15 years before that we got sick of the oil crisis triggered by policy 15-ish years before Reagan (3-5 year margin of error)

Thomas Jefferson is said to have written the Constitution ought to be rewritten every 19 (15+4) years or else the dead rule by fiat decree. Today we find the philosophy is embedded in our biology.

And then, dismantle the patent system just as well. Particularly "patent trolls" that just sit on patents and don't even actively license them at all are a scourge on innovation, and companies like Qualcomm that do use their patents but refuse to license them in a way that can be described as "reasonable" to anyone but lawyers aren't much better.

Patents used to be a good thing but have devolved into just another way for the largest players in capitalism to bully competition, and (like copyright) it incentivizes predatory rent seeking behavior over what's healthy for society at large.

Patents however? There's reports about lawsuits just about every month or two here on HN [2], more than enough cases of small shops getting sued left and right - and even corporate giants like Apple are virtually defenceless in patent courts. Software patents make the issue even worse.

On top of that, patents are useless against China. The only thing Western companies can (and regularly) do is to prevent the sale of infringing stuff in Western markets, but no one in China and many other places of the world gives any fuck about Western patents.

Another issue - particularly in pharmaceuticals - is: even if you patent a molecule, say an insulin derivative, you don't have to patent and thus reveal how you produce the stuff. That means that even after the patent for a specific variety of insulin has expired, a generics competitor still can't readily use that patent because the precise steps of manufacture are still proprietary. Meanwhile, the original manufacturer just makes a tiny variation of the insulin molecule, ceases production of the old one, and charges "new medication" prices from insurances because it's technically not the old medication any more. It worked in the past for simple, chemically synthesizable molecules, but it doesn't work for the more complex stuff that needs GMOs as a production/harvest vector.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_Case#Home_media_and_strea...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

I'd be fine with just a fixed 28-year duration of all copyrights. That way you don't have to worry about whether the original author (who could be a company) is dead or alive.

A fixed 28-year duration would be shorter and simpler.

The root of your argument seems to be that the public has a right to free access of someone’s work, why?

In the US, copyright is the means to incentivize people to make creative works. Copyright is a limited-time exclusive right. When that right expires, the First Amendment is no longer constrained by the Copyright Clause. (I wrote more about the Copyright Clause in a different comment [1].) In other words, sharing and modifying public domain works is protected by freedom of expression.

Copyright is a social contract. The author receives: exclusive copying rights to the author's creative works. The public receives: the author's creative works at some point in the future, though the author (or rather the rightsholders, should the author partially, temporarily, or permanently give the copyright to other people) can set licenses for certain people (such as buyers and remixers) to access/copy the works now.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38812469

But that doesn't mean DMCA as a whole needs to expire. It just needs to be reeled the hell in and especially punish blatantly false claims.

Meanwhile, the current safe harbor standard requires service providers with user-uploaded content to remove material as soon as possible solely based on a claim of infringement with respect to that material [1]:

> upon notification of claimed infringement as described in paragraph (3), responds expeditiously to remove, or disable access to, the material that is claimed to be infringing or to be the subject of infringing activity.

Again, these infringement notices can be automated or BS [3] (whether intentional or not), but the service provider has to comply to avoid third-party liability. The obvious result is overblocking. The safe harbor standard should be modified to require the service provider to take down allegedly infringing content only after the service provider receives an according court order to do so. That would be a huge improvement to DMCA 512 on its own, though it shouldn't be the only one.

DMCA 1201 (17 U.S. Code § 1201 [4]) is unfixable in my opinion. That's the part on technical restrictions: bypassing technical restrictions to access copyrighted copyrighted material is treated as copyright infringement of that material, even when the actions the person does with the locked-down material wouldn't be infringing. For example, you can't modify DRMed software (requires bypassing the DRM) on your own computers i.e. the rightsholder has control over how your computer runs the software. Because of that, DMCA 1201 is one of the key obstacles to right to repair. (The US Copyright Office periodically evaluates requests for specific, narrow exceptions to DMCA 1201 which expire every three years. People have to ask for a small portion of their rights back every three years [5]. But as I mentioned, I don't think DMCA 1201 should exist at all, unlike with DMCA 512.)

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/512

[2] https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2017/01/dmca-counter-noti...

[3] https://www.techdirt.com/2023/12/04/google-takes-down-downlo...

[4] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201

[5] https://www.eff.org/issues/dmca-rulemaking

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Everything below this line is bonus. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Both regular copyright law and the technical restrictions portions prohibit people from copying the files/software they bought for their personal use. Want to modify DRMed software on your own computer as I mentioned before? Double infringement. Want to copy music from a DRMed DVD to your computer or phone for easier listening? Double infringement. Want to copy a DRMed e-book so you can read it using a different app/e-reader? Double-infringement.

Regular copyright law alone has yet more problems than those within DMCA 512. For example, copying copyrighted works to preserve them is infringement, even if the preservationists/archivists would never publish any copies until after the copyright terms expire. Combined with excessively long copyright terms (life of the author plus 70 years for most works in the US, flat 120/95 years regardless of death in a few cases [B1]), preservationists are forced to let copyright material on old media disintegrate while copyright holders do nothing about it [B2]:

> The verdict is in: adding an extra 20 years to the US copyright term was a “big mistake.” This is not a quote from someone who is equivocal about copyright; it is a quote from the former head of our Copyright Office. Another former Director of the Copyright Office proposed shortening the copyright term by 20 years unless copyright owners “assert their continued interest in exploiting the work by registering with the Copyright Office in a timely manner.” Copyright holders such as Disney could readily secure “the full benefit of the additional twenty years,” while all of the works no longer being exploited would enter the public domain, fulfilling copyright’s goal of benefiting the public.

> Indeed, there is a consensus among policymakers, economists, and academics that lengthy copyright extensions impose costs that far outweigh their benefits. Why? The benefits are minuscule—economists (including five Nobel laureates) have shown that term extension does not spur additional creativity. At the same time, it causes enormous harm, locking away millions of older works that are no longer generating any revenue for the copyright holders. Films have disintegrated because preservationists can’t digitize them. The works of historians and journalists are incomplete. Artists find their cultural heritage off limits. (See studies like the Hargreaves Review commissioned by the UK government, empirical comparisons of the availability of copyrighted works and public domain works, and economic studies of the effects of copyright.)

[B1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_St...

[B2] https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2024/

By the way, Tom Scott has an insightful video called "YouTube's copyright system isn't broken. The world's is." [B3] on problems with copyright law which exist worldwide. One of the issues Scott discusses is misplaced ire toward YouTube's takedown system.

[B3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Jwo5qc78QU

The current regime for individual creators is automatic life + 70 years, which is just way too long. For example, Lewis Carroll died in 1898; if the current regime had been in place, Disney would have had to get permission from Carroll's estate to make Alice in Wonderland all the way through 1968.

I'm not sure I follow your point. Copyright operates by preventing trade. If something is under copyright, ~every person possible is banned from freely trading that thing.

That is because the warranty grantor chose to write that into the warranty, is it not? Or do you see someone else being the cause?

Same way, it would feel wrong to have copyright protection and have it go away if the item is sold to someone else.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/misinterpreting-copyright.en....

> When the US Constitution was drafted, the idea that authors were entitled to a copyright monopoly was proposed—and rejected. The founders of our country adopted a different premise, that copyright is not a natural right of authors, but an artificial concession made to them for the sake of progress.

Specifically,

> The copyright system works by providing privileges and thus benefits to publishers and authors; but it does not do this for their sake. Rather, it does this to modify their behavior: to provide an incentive for authors to write more and publish more. In effect, the government spends the public's natural rights, on the public's behalf, as part of a deal to bring the public more published works. Legal scholars call this concept the “copyright bargain.” It is like a government purchase of a highway or an airplane using taxpayers' money, except that the government spends our freedom instead of our money.

But what "natural rights"?

> the freedom to lend a book to your friend, to sell it to a used book store, to borrow it from a library, to buy it without giving your name to a corporate data bank, even the freedom to read it twice.

...as well as

> fair use

I find his perspective compelling. Yet, he only cites the Constitution and one court case. Copyright has a long and complex history. I wonder what the essay "leaves out" and what other "categories of interpretation" exist.

It made sense in the days of Old Edo. it doesn't make as much sense now. It complicated the used game market in Japan for ages.

Morale rights in French law gives the author possibility to forbid the use of their work based on social reputation it might imply. For example a compositor can refuse that a song they wrote would be used publicly by a political party as an anthem because this party promote ideologies that the author doesn't want to be associated with.

It also allow author to forbid any further publication of what they published in the past, and ask for unsold copies to be destroyed.

None of the things within morale rights is about making money, at least in intent.

The reality is actually more interesting than this post.

The US Copyright Act of 1790 was meant to provide an incentive to authors, artists, and scientists to create original works by providing creators with a monopoly. The monopoly was limited in order to stimulate creativity and the advancement of “science and the useful arts” through wide public access to works in the “public domain.” Major revisions happened in 1831, 1870, 1909, and 1976. Source: https://www.arl.org/copyright-timeline/

As to moral right, from Wikipedia: "Modern copyright law has been influenced by an array of older legal rights that have been recognized throughout history, including the moral rights of the author who created a work, the economic rights of a benefactor who paid to have a copy made, the property rights of the individual owner of a copy, and a sovereign's right to censor and to regulate the printing industry. The origins of some of these rights can be traced back to ancient Greek culture, ancient Jewish law, and ancient Roman law.[2] In Greek society, during the sixth century B.C.E., there emerged the notion of the individual self, including personal ideals, ambition, and creativity.[3] The individual self is important in copyright because it distinguishes the creativity produced by an individual from the rest of society.[citation needed] In ancient Jewish Talmudic law there can be found recognition of the moral rights of the author and the economic or property rights of an author.[4]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright#Early_dev...

The 1980s ('88?) accession to the Berne Convention presumably was also a 'major revision' as the convention, then over 100 year old, removes the registration requirement.

Copyright is, somewhat ironically, essential for FOSS licenses that place conditions on a distributor. Governments could no doubt use some other instrument for this purpose.

Unsure if the original baiter meant this

I absolutely do not want any AI model to use my stuff as training data, to be used on a website or for advertizing. You want to make money off my stuff, you pay.

But maybe the opinions of rent seekers don't always result in the best for economy and society.

> Julian Sanchez, who has been doing excellent work on copyright issues of late, has a nice post about how such arguments are totally irrelevant to copyright policy. He notes that it’s no surprise that artistic and creative people want greater copyright privileges, and fewer exceptions such as fair use, but that’s meaningless:

> > These will often be wonderful, likeable, creative people, and the correct policy response to these objections as such is: Cry me a fucking river; now piss off.

> And the reasoning why is that copyright policy is not about what someone deserves or about rewarding people based on some moral grounding. Its purpose is and has always been clear: to provide incentive to promote progress.

It actually refers to what you’re implicitly defending here: capturing the value of people’s production. Training AI on other people’s labor without paying them for it and then extracting value from it is rent-seeking.

Consider what happens to AI companies’ value if they had to enter into mutual agreements with their data sources. AI company value will be almost solely determined by the AI company’s own value contribution, which is close to zero, while the data sources’ value would be unaffected or go up.

If your business model relies on you leveraging the work of others without mutually agreeable remuneration, chances are good you’re the rent-seeker.

A more apt comparison would be that a cracked version of your software is being used by OpenAI for profit without paying you for a license at all. Would you not object to that?

If Entity A has copyright on a application nothing is stopping Entity B from writing a competing application, they just have to invest their time and effort into the application like Entity A did. If Entity B thinks they can eat Entities A lunch with a different pricing model / cheaper price they are free to do so.

If Entity A has patent protection on a application then no one else can make the "same application"* (without licensing the patent) and Entity A has a monopoly on that market for the life of the patent (upto 20 years iirc).

* This would all be down to how the patent is written, and personally I am against software patents, but patents can often be bypassed even if that means that the bypassed version could be incompatible with the patented version. I also think that the length of copyright protection is too long, but I don't think it should be abolished either.

Pay the musician $400-$500 for each song and then you don't need to pay a recurring fee for it in perpetuity.

Also I'm pretty sure if your carpenter has been studing to produce the works they produce and each work takes several months to a yeah then my estimated price above is off be at least 1 but probably more factors or 10

If it wasn't expensive time wise a musician can happily give you a no-redistribution license verbally, you may want it in writing to prove they gave it to you but that is about how loose these things are.

If you ask me "hey can I use this in my video for free" and you respond "yeah sure no problem" that's all it takes, if its in a text even better.

Granted most musicians don't currently have redistribution rights to their own music but that is between them and their lack of hiring a good contract lawyer, and this would fall under contract law not copyright.

Understand you are paying a lawyer to make intent clear in the first place since how do you define "use", we I might define it differently and the court may as well unless it is made explicit what "use" means.

There is a reason that even the licensing agreement you didn't read for most software is so verbose and licensing for any creative work is about as obtuse.

Intent is important though, if I intendef for you to use it to listen to at home but you instead played it tp a crowd of 20000 people and earned a fat paycheck there is a big difference there morally and under current law legally.

Most musicians want their music listened to, they just want a little money back for that... Same with other art forms.

In my mind, subscriptions imply support and/or updates, and I don't want to work on my software forever. But I don't necessarily want to give it out for free either. one lump sum sounds fine for me.

Well maybe calling it funny is not the right take.

Your response isn't addressing what my response was addressing.

> In general, copyrights and patents generate royalty income reported on Schedule E, Supplemental Income and Loss, unless it is characterized as business income reported on Schedule C, Profit or Loss From Business (Sole Proprietorship). However, who owns the intellectual property, i.e., the creator or the party who requested its development, also determines the type of income reported. The proper classification of royalties also affects the recipient’s tax liability in other ways, including self-employment tax, investment interest deduction limitations, and the new 3.8% net investment income tax on unearned income.

Seems like that is already the case.

Meanwhile, if you need a payment plan to pay off a book, you're in a very dark place and you probably should simply pirate it. But selling a book to person B in 20 years doesn't sound like "rent", despite the fact that I have heard that "media older than 10 years is fair game to pirate". 10 years in industry can be a step for an artist, not a career's worth of time like the original copyright law time period.

You appear to be arguing against buying a house/book when I wrote about building/writing?

As in, if I write a book, and then thanks to copyright law own the right to make copies (hence the name) I and my estate get to make money from every new[0] copy sold for 70 years after death. That's what I'm saying smells like rent.

[0] But not re-sold copies because first-sale doctrine, and I hope equivalents but that's a US law and I don't know what if anything is the equivalent in my jurisdiction, but I hope there is.

> Rent seeking is an economic concept that occurs when an entity seeks to gain wealth without any reciprocal contribution of productivity. An example of rent seeking is when a company lobbies the government for grants, subsidies, or tariff protection.

This logic always comes to conclusion with things like disposing of disabled and elderly.

In other words, not a great argument.

> A businessman could not build it for a profit, since he cannot claim a price from each user. This certainly is the kind of activity that governments would naturally undertake. Even if the operators were able—say, by radar reconnaissance—to claim a toll from every nearby user, that fact would not necessarily make it socially optimal for this service to be provided like a private good at a market-determined individual price. Why not? Because it costs society zero extra cost to let one extra ship use the service; hence any ships discouraged from those waters by the requirement to pay a positive price will represent a social economic loss—even if the price charged to all is no more than enough to pay the long-run expenses of the lighthouse.

> https://truthonthemarket.com/2021/06/22/the-virtues-and-pitf...

If one is to pay any amount of money more than the marginal cost, and decides not to that is an example of dead-weight loss.

I think the major issue here is that those that wish to abolish copyright and patents aren't then actively promoting another idea, as you say. Let's look at spaces where it is currently illegal to copyright or patent something, say, Maths formulas. Do we have no one working on new maths? No. We have plenty of Mathematicians. They either work for companies creating trade secrets, or they work for Universities releasing their work in journals for all to use.

So let's re-imagine a system where copyrights and patents are abolished. As Samuelson argues, as this is non-excludable and has zero marginal costs, it is a perfect fit for the government to take charge. Given that the current system produces dead-weight loss bringing down the production of the entire country, if we remove this dead-weight loss than the country will have much higher productivity. That higher productivity will drive higher taxes, and those higher taxes will allow the government to expand tenure track positions in public universities. Those tenure track positions can then go on and create new works and patents. The demand that those works create will then bring students to study and allow the works to proliferate.

Would you prefer a system where copyrights and patents were abolished but there were 100x more tenure track positions? Where 10% of the population held such a role?

An interesting way to start a comment.

> No one would buy tables from those carpenters...

There are companies owning large portions of markets where they can do exactly what you describe. Through market manipulation, political manipulation and probably other tactics I don`t know. This is a moral issue.

> If you create something and I take that and I end up earning money off your work..

While I agree with that statement, this is not the moral issue we are discussing. We are discussing the morals of rent seeking behavior, which you shrug of as "your 1 million users will quickly become 0 users" as if that will always be the case.

Regarding monetization:

- either you developed said software as an employee, than you were properly paid for it and it is not content

- your user bought liscenses from you for whatever conditions you agreed upon

- you sell it as a SaaS, and you get monthly subscription fees

- you give it away for free

Obviously, all those payments end when the conrtact with your customers end. If your next of kin runs the software 90 years from now, and customers still use it, of course cuatomers will pay, or not, as laid out above.

I support your right not to share your creations.

Given the collective disdain for anyone pursuing a liberal arts education, I don’t see the patron model resurrecting en masse. I don’t feel entitled to the work output of anyone for anything. I’d much rather give creators a chance to become self-sufficient than live with the alternative. There I see only bland corporate cash grabs and a further shift to subscription-based access to any content.

To be sure, we already have some of that. But, we also have artistic output from others that wouldn’t be able to subsist without the promise of protection afforded by copyright.

If anything, I'd expect the funding will go to those who can sustain themselves on things like Patreon and Kickstarter, where money is provided before the work is created, making the copyright protection irrelevant. And while the big corporations will get to own those Patreons and Kickstarters, hopefully there will be enough competition to keep their greed in check.

(Also, maybe more people will learn to tip for content even when they receive it for free)

It would be a death sentence to any smaller creator and services like Patreon would probably not even exist.

Do you really envision a small creator publishing a new kids cartoon and then Disney swooping in and... Creating a 2nd season for it and making money off of it?

The absence of copyright does not necessarily mean the absence of trademark.

If I want to make O-shaped oat cereal, I can. That doesn’t (and shouldn’t) give me the right to put it in a yellow box and call it Cheerios.

Isn't that exactly what they did in early years with Snow White, Pinocchio, fairy tales, etc?

In our no copyright world, you say that they will publish their own "Disney's Goatman" alternate 2nd season and market it heavily, and then sell merchandise to make back the money (because they won't profit enough off of tips or Patreon or Kickstarter or just charging for it because people can just "pirate" it). My first question would be, why would they even bother with publishing a show? Why not just release the Goatman merchandise and profit directly without spending the cost of making their own show. They could even just advertise John Doe's Goatman, it would be cheaper. But even if they do publish a "Disney's Goatman", why would anyone who liked "John Doe's Goatman" watch it, given that what they liked is John Doe's writing and creativity? And if "Disney's Goatman" was actually really good and popular, who was actually harmed by that? Do you think people will like "John Doe's Goatman" any less? There would be less money going to the 3rd season Kickstarter for "John Doe's Goatman"? Furthermore, in our current world, what really is stopping Disney from releasing their own original kids cartoon about Mangoat, a lovable half-man half-goat who has charming woodland adventures full of wit and wonder? Sorry, but it just doesn't really make sense to me when I think about the details.

Disney doesn't make a second season, they make an entirely new show that uses the brand and appeal of the character. They frame it as being "the foundation" or "the original."

My first question would be, why would they even bother with publishing a show? Why not just release the Goatman merchandise and profit directly without spending the cost of making their own show.

Because the amount of resources available to Disney is orders of magnitude larger than random John Doe, and thus the potential revenue and audience is larger.

Why not just release the Goatman merchandise and profit directly without spending the cost of making their own show.

Again, because Disney marketing a show is orders of magnitude more effective than random guy's Kickstarter.

But even if they do publish a "Disney's Goatman", why would anyone who liked "John Doe's Goatman" watch it, given that what they liked is John Doe's writing and creativity?

When it comes to big brands, the average person doesn't care about the author. People go watch Disney or Pixar movies because the brand is well-known and the product is widely marketed. No one cares who the creators are.

And if "Disney's Goatman" was actually really good and popular, who was actually harmed by that? Do you think people will like "John Doe's Goatman" any less? There would be less money going to the 3rd season Kickstarter for "John Doe's Goatman"?

You, John Doe, are, as there is now considerable confusion in the marketplace and you will be less able to capitalize on your creation and expand it into a media franchise.

Furthermore, in our current world, what really is stopping Disney from releasing their own original kids cartoon about Mangoat, a lovable half-man half-goat who has charming woodland adventures full of wit and wonder?

There are still issues with blatantly copying works in a way that is confusing to the consumer. It seems pretty likely that a multinational corporation with marketing budget measured in billions will out compete a small time creator.

Let's use a real-world example to illustrate the point better. Imagine that we have no copyright laws. J.K. Rowling writes the first Harry Potter book and it sells well. She only received 2500 pounds as an advance for the work. The publisher (or Disney, or whatever other company) realizes they have a winning franchise on their hands, commissions more books, movies, theme park rides, on and on. It eventually earns billions of dollars.

That all happened in real life, except we do have some copyright laws and Rowling earns a percentage of whatever profits come from the use of her creation. She is now a billionaire. In a world without those laws, she gets what, a few hundred thousand dollars in sales from the first book, maybe? The rest goes to some corporation.

Framing it as the original is false advertisement and illegal. Just because you get to use another's creative work doesn't mean you get to lie about who made what when.

Is the brand and appeal of the characters the only value of the original work? If you made a bad show but with some appealing characters, is it even a problem if they are used to produce a much better work? I mean, surely for you who made the bad work, but in this case this doesn't seem like that much of an injustice.

> Because the amount of resources available to Disney is orders of magnitude larger than random John Doe, and thus the potential revenue and audience is larger.

I don't really feel like that answers my question, obviously they can afford it. If their new show really is better then it makes sense to boost the brand, but if the premise is that the independent creator came up with something new and good that the rich capitalist cannot replicate with their lack of creativity and thus can only exploit, then it seems like a waste of money to even bother.

> When it comes to big brands, the average person doesn't care about the author. People go watch Disney or Pixar movies because the brand is well-known and the product is widely marketed. No one cares who the creators are.

Okay, but then why even bother with copying? If people don't care about the branding of the original product, what is gained by copying that brand? If I never heard of Goatman then I wouldn't care for Disney's version of Goatman (except if what I care about is Disney's brand and then Goatman is immaterial). Or if literally all that is copied is that idea of having a half-goat half-man have wonderful woodland adventures full of charm and wit, then I'm not sure if anything of value has really been copied.

> You, John Doe, are, as there is now considerable confusion in the marketplace and you will be less able to capitalize on your creation and expand it into a media franchise.

Or you, John Doe, are publicly recognized as the original creator of Goatman (as to claim otherwise would be either false advertising or outright fraud), drawing attention to the original vision, and if the original vision is actually better than the copies, to profit from it.

As John Doe though, I don't know about all that "media franchise" part. Certainly my skills are limited to Writing, Animation and Character Design, I've never actually designed a toy line and so have nothing to offer there.

> There are still issues with blatantly copying works in a way that is confusing to the consumer.

This I fully agree with, transparency, clarity, correct and clear attribution are all incredibly important and should be protected by law. It is also no accident that many people know who Toby Fox or Notch are, but no one can name say the lead designer of any Ubisoft game that outsold Undertale by 100x.

> Let's use a real-world example to illustrate the point better. Imagine that we have no copyright laws. J.K. Rowling writes the first Harry Potter book and it sells well. She only received 2500 pounds as an advance for the work. The publisher (or Disney, or whatever other company) realizes they have a winning franchise on their hands, commissions more books, movies, theme park rides, on and on. It eventually earns billions of dollars.

> That all happened in real life, except we do have some copyright laws and Rowling earns a percentage of whatever profits come from the use of her creation. She is now a billionaire. In a world without those laws, she gets what, a few hundred thousands dollars in sales from the first book, maybe? The rest goes to some corporation.

Thank you for a concrete and detailed example, I feel it really helps me understand your reasoning. (Sorry if that comes across sarcastic via the medium of HN comments, I mean it sincerely)

Let's say that the first book was published and was a great success. JKR's publisher sees the opportunity and contracts out the work to author the 2nd Harry Potter book, hoping to capitalize on the first's success. At the same time JKR either crowdfunds or contacts another publisher to work on the sequel. The audience who loved the original book then gets to make a choice between reading JKRs sequel which has a large sticker on it "From the same author as Harry Potter!" or a different sequel with a smaller sticker at the legally mandated font required for liability that says "Consumer Protection Alert: This book was not written by the author of the original prequel". Which do they choose? And if they chose and preferred the non-JKR sequel, then what exactly is the problem? And why isn't the contracted author publishing their own books, given they can out-write JKR?

As for making billions of dollars off of movies and theme parks - sure. JKR would not have made billions. But then, neither would anyone else. Theme park builders would all have to compete for building the actually best Harry Potter theme park instead of licensing a monopoly and so the only theme park builder making real money would be the one that creates the best theme park. Possibly, one of them would even pay JKR to advise in the creation of the park, so they could advertise it as "From the original author of Harry Potter!", and if JKRs branding as the author of Harry Potter was worthwhile, that would still be a lot of money. Certainly this is better for the public. And as certainly, this wouldn't have prevented the creation of Harry Potter in the first place, because JKR is an author and not a theme park builder, and even if motivated by money rather than creativity, could not possibly imagine a Harry Potter theme park as motivation for her work.

And to take it one step further, once JKR has made billions from her work, is there really an appreciable difference between the gigantic Disney corporation and the gigantic JKR estate? Is there any appreciable difference between JKR paying someone to produce a Harry Potter work (whether a book or a Theme Park) that has no creative input from her (and thus hardly her own work) vs. Disney currently underpaying someone for their work and giving them no (or negligible) credit.

Beyond that, Eliezer Yudkowsky could start making money off of the hard work and creativity he put into Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, and countless other similar smaller authors (that you never heard of, because their brilliant Harry Potter fanfiction is non-monetisable) could also start benefiting from their creativity and hard work.

Thinking about it further and trying to synthesize a more coherent view from both of our arguments, it seems that we don't disagree that people will tend to spend on brands, but it is your opinion that the "Harry Potter" brand is a much stronger brand the the "J.K. Rowling" brand, or that at least via the power of marketing, large corporations will bring forward the "Harry Potter" brand in prominence over the "J.K. Rowling" brand (which incidentally, is something they already do), and since the "Harry Potter" brand is (sort of) free for all without copyright, then they would win over JKR. I don't think it would work quite like that for a few reasons.

1. If we assume that "piracy" is legal, then surely people will feel a lot more guilty "pirating" from a real person brand like JKR than from an abstract "Harry Potter" brand or a "Disney" brand.

2. If people can choose how to spend their money between the different works they enjoy, then it is a much more appealing proposition to pay for something that would not otherwise exist (e.g. small author on KS) as otherwise they would not actually get to enjoy the work. Giving money to Disney that is already swimming in money is a waste.

3. To emphasize the previous point, people can already pirate almost any work they want. Obviously, if it was legal and easy, there would be more piracy, but all the same some people would still pay. What do you think would motivate those people to pay for something they could obtain freely?

4. If people choose to spend money on Disney works that they could cheaply obtain elsewhere, then surely that is because Disney produces consistently high quality and enjoyable works and those creative efforts are worthwhile and deserve compensation.

5. If Disney were to copy the idea of Goatman I proposed above I don't think anyone would object to that given how little my idea matters compared to the actual creative work of making the Goatman show.

To summarize my reply, I'll just say this: no, Disney making billions from something they didn't create is not equivalent to its creator making those billions. Fanfiction is not equivalent to actual, geniunely good creative works, and "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality" is a bad joke, not a serious argument for copyright reform. Everything else in your scenario would make the marketplace more confused, more derivative, and less beneficial to original creators. Enforcing all of these other various laws you propose sounds more egregious and difficult than just enforcing current copyright laws.

I really don't see how any of this is supposed to be an improvement over the current situation, and frankly I don't quite understand how "more fanfiction" and "I don't have to pay for stuff" is supposed to be a compelling argument.

I mean, they just market it as "the TRUE story of the Satyr, the Goatman" or whatever. Goatman hybrid is a very old (and fortunately, public domain) idea. Marketing even with today's restrictions has 1000 ways around such issues.

>Is the brand and appeal of the characters the only value of the original work?

not only, but it is a big pull. It may even be the main pull when talking about a young child audience. That's how existing dubious Disney clones operate right now.

> is it even a problem if they are used to produce a much better work?

That's the sad part. it doesn't have to be better, it just needs to market well and sell merch. I don't think it's controversial to say we're in a world where the highest quality art isn't the most profitable.

But regardless of quality, yes. Morally it is a problem when someone who made an idea successful isn't reaping its reward. Because a corporation stole the idea and threw more marketing at it. it would only intensify the starving artist trope.

>and good that the rich capitalist cannot replicate with their lack of creativity and thus can only exploit, then it seems like a waste of money to even bother.

yes, that is the point. EVERYTHING would be a waste of money because everything can be mass produced or mass marketed. But not everyone can mass market nor produce goods, that's where corporations always win.

We see that right now with modern art. albums don't make music artist rich, tours and merch do. Cartoons don't make animators rich, merchandise does (and the animators barely get that). Video games seem to be the only medium that can self-fund itself, but that industry is just as much a gamble as every other art. a few make it big, most suffer, be it indie or AAA studios. I don't see a copyright free world doing anything but making this issue worse.

>If people don't care about the branding of the original product, what is gained by copying that brand?

money? The brand matters, the creator doesn't. Very few creators are a brand in and of themselves, even creators of otherwise iconic brands (Many know Walt Disney, but probably not the creative mind behind Looney Toons, nor Scooby Doo, nor Tom and Jerry. But all 3 of these IP's have lived for decades past the creators' deaths to extract more profits).

so if you're not a marketing whiz who wants to plaster your name on every single thing you touch, you will be out-marketed for your brand through brute force. Even if you are a brand, it won't be easy in this new world.

>The audience who loved the original book then gets to make a choice between reading JKRs sequel which has a large sticker on it "From the same author as Harry Potter!" or a different sequel with a smaller sticker at the legally mandated font required for liability that says "Consumer Protection Alert: This book was not written by the author of the original prequel". Which do they choose?

In reality, the storyline splits, and you just create two camps of enthusiasts, neither of which are the main money makers for the books. And then a 3rd and 4th camp of casual readers who are confused when discussing the story with each other (just because a sticker is mandated doesn't mean the won't try to muddy the marketing in other ways).

Odds are the mandated non-Rowling work will STILL sell better if it's marketed more, can reach more stores, and otherwise has more copies printed. That's the big issue with the idea here; diehards tend to be the kinds of people in such discussions but are a minority in the market. And many seem to fall under the just world fallacy that everyone will think like diehards and buy the "best" book if given a choice. I'm not as assured. Many marketing tricks today would fail if people thought that way. So that's where the govt. has to step in to protect the creator, in the interest of ensuring future creators aren't discouraged and stagnate the market. Or worse, ends up with a monopoly which would be much harder to break up.

>And to take it one step further, once JKR has made billions from her work, is there really an appreciable difference between the gigantic Disney corporation and the gigantic JKR estate?

a magnitude of difference yes. Rowling is worth 1b, Disney 165b. Sure, Rowling can now become the very corporation she was shunned away from when pitching her first book, but she "fortunately" seems more content being angry on Twitter instead of exploiting artists that way.

I get what you mean, but I think the discussion on how much money a creator can/should make on a work is a taxation issue, not a copyright issue.

>I don't think it would work quite like that for a few reasons.

well, to address your points:

1,2) no, not really. to go back to video games, I'm pretty sure indie devs have worse piracy rates than AAA games riddled with DRM. Again, I'm not confident that the goodwill of the masses wins out here. People overall simply don't care abut the creator, just the content and their own self gratification

3) Funnily enough I will go back to the argument people love to bring out for piracy: "Piracy is a service problem - Gabe Newell". In some ways I agree, it's hard to be "free, easily downloadable, freely sharable" content. But due to copyright, piracy is much clunkier than it can be.

- Has to be semi-hidden so not everyone knows about it, nor how easy it can be

- Piracy sites have their own agendas so they take in the seediest of ads. Some near malware. No one wants to risk downloading a $10 movie if there's a risk of ruining their OS with viruses

- Torrents are very complicated for common users compared to simply pressing "download". seeder/leecher relationships make download speeds weird (and you may not even be aware of what THAT is), you can download a torrent file which isn't the media itself, and downloading files itself is "messy" on a bare bones OS. Among other reasons. So it's a lot of hoops that gives a smooth seemless service a chance to prevail

All this goes out the window if pirates don't have to hide. Imagine Plex linked with Bittorrent in the backend powering a download service, in one seemless package, available on the App Store, Google Play, and downloadable on all desktop OS's. You pretty much solve the service issue outright, and any shortcomings can be made up for by being completely free. No premium service can compete if they can't litigate.

This is all very possible to setup yourself, but not everyone has the ability and few have the patience to keep it maintained. They will throw $10/month at a streaming service instead. Ultimately, litigation keeps piracy clunky enough that services can outcompete on convinience.

4) but again, Disney isn't out qualitying competition (especially not nowadays), they are out-marketing. Especially out-marketing the cheap knockoffs who are comparatively playing penny slots by having a few copies in the wal-mart bargain bin. There was a point where your point was true, but that hasn't been the case for decades.

5) only the creator would. And if you don't then no one else will. But that's how the world works; no one cares about you, the creator. You need to care about yourself to survive in the industry. The government doesn't care neither, but you can exploit their bottom line to help protect yourself.

Or idk, maybe you already won the lottery and can afford to be leeched off. most others can't. People would care less if they didn't need to work to live, but most do.

The anti-copyright position is grounded in the fact it's an artificial tort with no basis in natural law. In fact, contrary to it. We are apes, and we ape.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/canadian-wins-240-million-suit...

If it were legal to simply copy ideas from anyone without caring about copyrights, I seriously doubt they'd have any issues with doing so.

To be clear I'm not disagreeing with you but I think it does show that the underlying issue is maybe deeper than copyright itself and goes more in the direction of class relationships in a capitalist society.

You have said above that :

> My content is mine

Okay. So how do you define your content?

If you write something, you are using an alphabet that others have over a long period of developed. You use combinations of alphabetic characters to form words that have also been developed over time by others. You use combinations of words in particular ways that are semantically meaningful because of the development of that semantics over time by others.

If you draw something, you again are using form and structure that is comprehensible because such things have been developed by others before you over long periods of time.

Any ideas you have are based on what has been shown to you by others and these ideas are a part of the collective intelligence of societies.

So, if you expect others to

> ask for, and get permission, to do so

Have you done so yourself?

There is an old old saying that there is nothing new under the sun.

All to often, people seem to claim for themselves a privilege that they will not allow others to utilise.

My wife is an artist (in various areas) and people are willing to pay her for some of her works because they like her renditions. Yet, all of her art is based on what she has seen in the world around her. I love her handiwork, but none of it is solely hers. It is based on what has gone before her.

An addendum: If people think your stuff is worth something and they want you to create it for them then they will pay you what they think it is worth and not what you think it is worth.

It is yours as in, it's your property (like your car). It's not yours as in, derived entirely from you (like your hand). That's the thing.

The generation of copyrightable material can't exist in a vacuum, I can't even tell if your works are music, video, written or what else, but I know for a fact that you can't produce them if you don't take in a whole lot of stuff from society in the first place, of course morality points to giving back to the community. Public domain is not charity, it's due diligence.

But we agree that the public can probably get an even better deal if it allows for monetization of those works, as that will promote their generation. That's what copyright is. That's why it's just a monetization scheme.

How much of your education and upbringing did you get for free? You were brought up and educated by society to be in the fortunate position of being a content creator. You are now suggesting that you owe nothing back to society in return.

Whether one owes or has an obligation to society or not is the big philosophical divide in society these days. No doubt education and upbringing aren't completely free but formal training is only a small aspect of a citizen's socialization and training, the rest comes from his/her interaction with society—which is free.

"...(and let's be real, in this specific topic we're really talking about megacorps with literally trillions of dollars in their coffers..."

I agree, but this is a separate issue and I should have made a distinction between what one 'owes' society and what megacorps are leeching from society for free.

Then there's the question of how much prior art one has learned (no one creates in a vacuum, one always builds on the works of others, so there's a philosophical argument about how much original content one has actually created).

Look at it this way: megacorps are not only leeching information from society for free (through AI and other means) but also they're 'stealing' once-open stuff from the public domain and making it proprietary on the flimsiest of grounds through questionable patents and trivial copyright—all of which is legal.

Most megacorps are public companies and thus are owned by shareholders who, in turn, are citizens in society. If hef19898 wants AI megacorps etc. to stop stealing his content then he will have to get cooperation from his fellow citizens—many of whom are shareholders in said companies.

Fact is, in the great scheme of things the pecuniary interest of these shareholding citizens holds much greater sway in society than do the moral rights of hef19898 and his ilk.

If this were not so then said megacorps wouldn't be able to 'rape' the defenseless as they have been doing for decades. As I've mentioned, hef19898 and ilk simply don't have the numbers to change things.

It's obvious, there are no masses with placards blocking Pennsylvania Avenue or throngs protesting around the Capitol to bring the megacorps to heel. Until then hef19898 will just have to accept that his content will be stolen.

As for education, the social contract where I live is the following: Education is free, as in state financed through taxes we all pay, up to grad school. MBAs and PhDs are different, the former cost you money, the latter get you paid.

None of that contract includes giving content I create for myself, I said I do it as hobby, away for free so others can monetize it. Nor does it mean to use the skills I earned during my education for minimium wage, quite the opposite, the more I make the more taxes I pay.

Were I a professional cobtwbt creator, as in earbing my living with it, that would make copyright violations even worse, because they directly impact my ability to pay bills.

Tght huge corps abuse copyright and trademark laws doesn't mean those are bad, just imagine how abusive those big corps would be if the small creators would no protection of their work whatsoever.

The truth is everyone who has a business or "creates content" or does any economic activity owes it (to themselves, but also) to the society they are inserted in: be it material stuff like roads to carry your products and an affluent and secure population to buy it, or immaterial stuff like, oh I don't know, the collective achievement of Humanity so far on whose shoulders we all stand.

Correct. This content creator has also been a software engineer for 20 years. Paid a lot of taxes. Not sure why I'm supposed to owe anything to anyone.

For who?

how so? You sell a work, people buy it and are taxed. You make income and the govt. takes some of that income as tax for that very societal eductation they cultivate. trying to evade that is in fact punished, severely.

What more do you owe society than a literal part of your wealth? From the govt's POV, giving away stuff for free is worse than selling it.