You’re suggesting that actors/directors/musicians shouldn’t be paid because the marginal cost of their product approaches $0? Wouldn’t that disincentivize production of new TV/Movies/Music? Enshrining the right to piracy is enshrining the right to destroy your artist community.
This whole thing usually goes in circles but I think I've observed a few consistent facts in the discussions on HN:
* People believe that you shouldn't be able to remix art to make money off it.
* People believe that you should be able to pirate games for free, often because they feel that the games makers are exploiting them (via DLCs, in-game purchases, whatever)
* People believe that essays, books, etc. should be pirateable
* People believe that business software shouldn't be pirateable because software engineers need to make money. You'll usually be downvoted if you suggest this on, say, a Jetbrains release or something.
All this taken together, to me, provides some amount of evidence to me that this stuff is just characteristic of the kinds of employment that most people on this forum have, rather than some sort of philosophical position people have on this issue. Hope this saves you some time in discussion.
My take is that copyright got lost when people started treating it as property. In that aspect I think GPL has a better philosophical standing as treating code as a commons to be protected from becoming property. Would not be sad to see it go out as collateral damage if it would mean abolishment of copyright and it’s philosophical failure though.
We should focus more on how to incorporate the commons in all we do. Economics, politics, justice.
This is what John Locke was talking about when he suggested that not everything can be private property.
Yochai Benklers the Wealth of Networks is a good overview of the concept of commons based peer-production, and the tragedy of the anti commons.
Any talk by Lawrence Lessing from way back when the topic was hot is fantastic takes remix culture
Personally I add to that the thinking of Henry George on how an just society should divide the land rent as public dividend. Also checkout geo-libertarianism and surrounding ideologies.
Perhaps taking it a step further:
Locke argues that land becomes property when you mix it with your labor. But only if there is no contention, the land is after all for all to share.
I’ll restate that as this:
The commons is primary. We all have an equal claim to it all.
To take something from the commons and make it private requires a fair trade. It’s not enough to put a stake in the ground and just claim it. Instead what is lost to the commons must be repaid.
Hence the question should never be, “how should x get paid?” but rather “what value can we derive from granting x exclusivity?”
Just consider for a moment the amount of resources are spent on enforcing the artificial scarcity supposedly motivating copyright.
The primary costs of policing it. Employing people to fight legal battles over it. Implementing automatic enforcements. The cost to those getting caught in violation. The cost of practioners in negotiating rights (what would it cost TPB to secure rights for everything it facilitate access too?)
Then there is the secondary costs. The opportunity costs of not having free access, the Napster that could have been. The things all those people impacted by the primary costs could have done instead, what value could they have provided?
My mind boggles when contemplating it, and I can’t for a second believe that if that is what it takes to get Game of Thrones produced, that I couldn’t live without it for a freer world.
Most content creators already aren't paid well. Value accrues to the publishers and the publishers today have massive control over distribution channels.
Isn't that mostly how Silicon Valley works too? Software developers like content creators are generally compensated well enough to live an upper middle class lifestyle, but their compensation doesn't necessarily match the value they create. Instead much of the value is captured by VC or production companies. This is because those companies are the ones who bare the largest percentage of the risk. If a project completely falls flat on its face, software developers and writers, actors, directors, etc still collect their paycheck. It is the VC and production company that lose money.
Isn't that mostly how Silicon Valley works too? Software developers like content creators are generally compensated well enough to live an upper middle class lifestyle, but their compensation doesn't necessarily match the value they create. Instead much of the value is captured by VC or production companies.
It's not just that. Society is still catching up to the ramifications of the additional value extracted by social media and tech media companies. People can't deny that automotive technology made much of the US population dependent in their daily lives on cars. (Whether this is a good or a bad thing is besides the point for this discussion. Probably bad in many ways, good in a few.) This gave the auto makers a certain responsibility for meeting minimum levels of safety, reliability, and environmental friendliness. Society eventually caught up to the implications of automotive technology, and this was reflected in laws codifying that social responsibility.
This is because those companies are the ones who bare the largest percentage of the risk. If a project completely falls flat on its face, software developers and writers, actors, directors, etc still collect their paycheck. It is the VC and production company that lose money.
Then it is also the "production company" which should bear the social responsibility for their impact on the media landscape and social discourse. As was the case for the appearance of laws and regulations covering the activities of the automotive industry, as that industry had ever greater impact upon the general public's life, so too is the case for social media tech companies.
If they reap the rewards, then they should take on the social responsibility.
I thought it was interesting to highlight the similarities because this community would likely push back much harder if you said the startup scene is inherently flawed like that comment said about content creation.
NotLD entered the public domain because of a failure to apply a copyright indication. Largely due to this oversight, and entire genre of Zombie media has flourished unencumbered by restrictive IP.
Obviously your cynical take on fan-art is despicable and ignorant, but there's no shortage of examples of what the commons can produce.
Porn is inevitable though even with the laws... I think the parent is referring to people making games and writing stories based on popular franchises.
Look at game companies stopping fan made games. I remember hearing about a fan remake of PS1 Metal Gear Solid. Was gathering huge fan far and had kojima's blessing, but the studio shut it down.
I can't speak for actors and directors, but as a musician I have made peace that the only pennies I'll be having are from live events.
Even if you pay $5 a month for <insert music streaming service> and only listen to my songs, I get literally $0.00 (up to significant figures). They pool everything together so essentially you are subsidising Justin Bieber; just putting it out there...
Exactly, yes. But many fans (of other artists; when referring to myself we'll have sampling bias) actually have no idea that their $5 doesn't go directly to the songs they listen to in a month.
> let's say
I would happily accept if we can cut out transaction costs. My idea of a "good" streaming platform for music is one with only a flat rate (say $5), no free option, and no pooling. That means that if I listen to Scatman once in the month and it is the only song I listened to, then John Larkin's estate should get exactly $5, min some small platform fee. (Sorry for picking a dead artist; royalties after death is complicated. Personally I guess I would limit mine to about 10 years, but then again I don't receive any royalties.)
Sorry, just another clarification. I am not against pirated music. But I am just explaining a possible improvement over Spotify / Apple music. Also, this "improvement" may actually discribe a niche kind of "fandomify" that maybe will always be small. But if you implement the above it puts the onus on the customer to support their artists. It also disincentivises account sharing for hard core fans that want to give money to their favourite artists.
You can easily check that your money goes where you want it to from a statement at the end of the month... If you see that Justin Bieber's Baby got $0.99 then of course it's plausible because your "friend" logged in and listened to the song 99 times out of your 500 listens that month.
Not everywhere do Pirate Party and Pirate Bay have similar or compatible goals.
In Canada, Pirate Party claims to stand for:
- Increased privacy of citizens
- Increased ability of citizens to own and control their data
- Increased visibility and public discourse &debate of technology's impact on private lives, business climate, intellectual property, societal changes, etc
As such, it is the only party here to openly tackle, let alone make it their core platform, what I personally perceive to be the defining issues of the 21st century.
I feel that Pirate Party may end up like the Green party of few decades ago -- initially perceived as fringe, marginalized, irrelevant; until we realize they are tackling emerging core societal problems.
As such, while I'm extremely in favour of supporting creators (all my software, from OS to Photoshop is legally purchased; I duly pay my Netflix/Spotify/Prime, purchase photography and clipart when I need them, go to concerts, go to cinema, tip baskers, participate in Patreon, buy webcomic books, etc; and discussion on whether those appropriately pay artists is important but orthogonal to this one), I do support Pirate Party of Canada through my membership and might consider voting if they had a local candidate.
>I feel that Pirate Party may end up like the Green party of few decades ago -- initially perceived as fringe, marginalized, irrelevant; until we realize they are tackling emerging core societal problems.
I don't know how much if at all the Canadian Green Party relates to the US Green Party, but the Green party south of the border is certainly still perceived as "fringe, marginalized, irrelevant". A quick look at Wikipedia suggests that the Canadian Green Party probably still fits that bill as well.
The Green Party is certainly marginalized here, but a lot less so than in the US. The party leader actually has a seat in Parliment and is regularly quoted on public radio. They also form a small part of the a coalition government in BC and almost did in PEI.
The Green Party here suffers from our poor electoral system (FPTP), but they definitly have supporters, even if their supporters don't vote for them for strategic reasons.
No, this incentivizes different models to reward content creators. Torrents are technologically a super efficient way to promote discovery. Off the top of my head, artists can make money off live events, live streams, interacting with their community, sponsorships, patronage, etc.
Look at what people routinely pay for in crowdfunding models, where all costs are 100% transparent and marginal cost is indeed generally low or even zero. You'll find a whole lot of indie stuff (very high-quality indie stuff in fact - because the same well-established reputational mechanisms that are active in the FLOSS community work there as well!), and few or no "actors/directors/musicians" of the mainstream sort getting any money there.
This is how it should be - there is simply no rational case for mindless entertainment ("TV/Movies/Music") that costs on the order of $10M or $100M to make!
> This is how it should be - there is simply no rational case for mindless entertainment ("TV/Movies/Music") that costs on the order of $10M or $100M to make!
How is this not just outright snobbery about what people should enjoy?
We all – not just those who go to the movies, but everyone – also pay a hidden cost: The cost of the copyright system itself. You imply that this cost is necessary for “high-scale, ambitious entertainment”, but I say that you should then be held to pay for it, instead of society as a whole.
It may or may not be true that “high-scale, ambitious entertainment” is unsupportable without copyright. If it turns out to be not supportable, it would be like the pyramids: Large, impressive, and expensive things which the structure of our society and our economy can no longer support the constructions of. I.e. the society we live in could concievably be re-organized to again support the construction of pyramids, but we choose not to do that, in order to have a modern society and economy instead.
And yet those big budget films/TV shows are one of the few things remaining that provide a common cultural experience. It’s nice to be able to talk about something besides the weather with a complete stranger.
> things... that provide a common cultural experience.
That's what the public domain is for, of course. It's too bad that this limits us to 1923-or-before material (in the U.S., and ignoring non-copyright-renewed stuff from later in the 20th c.) but that still covers centuries of shared culture - even millennia, in some cases!
True enough, but those lack the virtue of timeliness.
Absent an organizing effort, it’s unlikely you’ll catch someone who has read, say, Dracula for the first time recently just like you have and can share that initial enthusiasm for the material.
The rational case is that it's absurdly expensive to make artistic content in term of people's time, as well as the cost in things like location, filming, and support. This isn't saying there isn't unneccessary costs...part of the need for a publisher is to keep costs under control! But things like building sets, special effects and more really ramp up the cost and fast.
You are supporting an army of workers to make a decently budgeted film, for multiple years.
Why would I create an indie production of some kind for no money? Are you saying now if I want to make something I have to setup a gofundme and get it funded before I even make the product. That's fine for something, and ruins the artistic intent for other things. Imagine Star Wars being crowdfunded before it was made.
If we reach 100k we'll make sure Han Solo shoots first.
It doesn't make sense. People should be paid for providing a service, whether it's a hamburger or a movie. You don't pay someone before the goods are delivered. The modern system of pre-funding and patronization is absurd for many projects.
> ...get it funded before I even make the product.
Strictly speaking, you don't have to do this. You could make the product, send it under a strict NDA to a variety of widely-trusted 3rd-party reviewers/critics, with whatever sort of protection against leaks you might require, then put the existing product for crowdfunded "ransom" (Like Blender was, after the original company went out of business), building in whatever return you might wish to ask for in exchange for bearing the ensuing risk. This doesn't require ordinary copyright protection at all, only a very limited-in-scope protection for private, unpublished stuff.
(The "ransom" model is in fact already potentially-applicable to a lot of existing content that's generally considered worthless, but that, much like Blender itself, might be valued more in the context of an open release. Transaction costs - namely, wrt. the exceedingly-common case of "orphan works", with unknown rights-holders - get in the way of it, however.)
Maybe, but piracy skirts that issue. Who's going to protect you when someone breaks the NDA? When someone steals your production copy? Piracy is a broad brush.
You produce whatever small part of your work you can afford to on couch change, pizza favors and family support and sell it. Fund the next part from the proceeds of the first.
It lives on today in webisodes and patreonage, or, hell, TV shows, but some of what we now consider great literature was produced as serialized chapters in magazines, and only after the fact bundled together as a single volume novel.
Maybe box-office blockbusters funded as multi-million dollar investments and released all at once were just a temporary aberration, like the "album".
No, I am not suggesting that in any way. I am suggesting that when the marginal cost of their product approaches zero, a system that is based on retributing them based on the number of copies do not make sense anymore.
Actually I am goign to vote for them more because of their proposals on liquid and direct democracy, I haven't followed their debate on copyrights in the last few years. When I was the most popular proposal to replace copyright was a global license, which actually exists in a very badly implemented form in France for bars and shops.
