I also pirate every single book I read. Sometimes I buy them though.
I also pirate every single show I watch. I never buy them.
Music is a bit difficult, but I pay for Spotify, but I wouldn't mind paying for the service if Spotify had no rights to the songs and wasn't compensating the artists.
So... do you want someone to present you with evidence that paying people for their work is a good thing? We're getting to the point of arguing the color of the sky here.
The world doesn't owe you a business model. It's not work if someone doesn't value it, just like a street performer isn't working just because they're putting on a show.
If people can't make money without the government enforcing artificial scarcity of their output, they can always chose another business model.
People with a conscience and an ounce of empathy will always value creative work if they themselves intend to make a profit with it in someway. If you take someone's work, and use it to make money, you should pay them for that work. Its really not that hard of a concept.
>If you take someone's work, and use it to make money, you should pay them for that work. Its really not that hard of a concept.
How many paid products are using foss software without paying the developers. 99%? I do not consider that being evil.
If there are no IP laws nobody will have the expectation to have control over what other people do with their creative output. If you are unwilling to accept that you do not get to make art, the same is true now for art as well. If you do not want someone to make a parody of your art your only option is to never publish it.
> People with a conscience and an ounce of empathy will always value creative work if they themselves intend to make a profit with it in someway.
Is that empathy, or just self interest / good business? If I need a product I can't produce for my business to make a profit I'd better be giving my supplier a cut, lest they stop supplying me. With intangibles it's more fluid than with good bound by scarcity, but novel expressions of creativity become not-novel pretty quickly and, inevitably, you're going to need to go back to the well.
> If people can't make money without the government enforcing artificial scarcity of their output, they can always chose another business model.
Okay, but this literally goes for every single good ever. Case in point: theft. If theft wasn't "arbitrarily" made illegal, then there exists no business models for anything, ever. Because you could just steal it for free.
The idea behind IP is that IP is a good but an ephemeral one, one without a physical manifestation. So, we need to translate a type of theft that works for that.
Or, we could not. But keep in mind IP doesn't just mean music. It means, like... everything that isn't physical. Including my job, and probably your job too.
I think I've spend more on street music than any other music.
Imagine I put up a ghetto blaster and a hat. I play the finest music ever made. Would you put money in the hat? Would the idea to put money in the hat ever cross your mind? Would one even understand they want you to put money in the hat for playing the music?
Moreover, technological progress shouldn't be stifled by attempts to create artificial scarcity by technical means (read: DRM, war on general purpose computing, "The Right to Read", etc).
A lack of IP protection would incentivise even more extreme DRM. DRM exists because copyright law alone is considered insufficient protection by rights holders. A lack of such laws would not get rid of DRM, it would do the opposite.
Research. Which really is an interesting case study. While patents exist, most research is distributed freely, except for a fee to an intermediary for doing absolutely nothing. My ideas are, after I published them, free to use and I have absolutely no right to tell orhers what to do or don't do with this.
Even corporate funded researchers, e.g. for AI, will publish and most of the published results are not protected by patents. Everyone is free to implement someone else's research paper and use it for their own commercial application. Science is also gravitating more to open access, e.g. with arxiv for mathematics and CS. Nobody owns "the right" to some mathematical proof or concept.
Citation is of course encouraged, but plagiarism is not a legal matter, much less a criminal matter.
They wouldn't exist in the way they do now. It would be different. They existed before intellectual property. There are other models.
You've been conditioned to believe the current model is the only one that works. I'd argue that this is, in large part, because a bunch of interests who aren't "creators" profit from this current regime.
I fully agree, but the vision is not practical unless you want to change the entire economy around the shift.
Yes, artists existed before IP but they also existed before the internet and digital works. Prior to the internet, creative works met real material limits and real scarcity due to the limitations of physical media. In the digital age, these limits are obliterated. You then have two options:
1. You instate something like IP to make digital markets roughly (and admittedly arbitrarily) like real material markets.
2. You establish no such system. No property rights exist in digital space.
I am a major fan of (2) myself, but history gave us (1). At this stage, too many people make a living off digital markets for us to just impose a radical shift—you're taking about reworking the entire global economy here. Without concomitant shifts toward socialism globally this would probably just result in digital space becoming sparse and people adopting "analog only" release models to try and sustain incomes off of creative work.
If you want to abolish IP, go the full mile and abolish the principle of property period. The distinction between IP and physical goods is just an accidental feature of digital technology. If you are against the idea of IP you are against property. Period. And I'm in full agreement, but I also don't think it's easy to achieve this at this historical juncture. Go read Proudhon.
Everything in my post is true. And I do not intend to be inflammatory.
>How can you possibly justify this?
Easy. I buy the books from authors I respect. Books are mostly passion projects anyway and most of the ones I read are from authors who absolutely do not make a living from them or are dead.
The other category of books are scientific publishers I hate all of them and they do not deserve a single cent from me. I would feel bad giving them any money at all. I also am already paying their authors with my taxes.
For shows. I hate most of them anyway and I wouldn't mind if corporate entertainment were gone.
For musicians. I see it the same as with books. I support the artists I like and I give them money for products they put out.
Nobody owes an artist his existence. Especially since most artists are commercial failures any way and somehow that does not threaten the art itself.
Also consider YouTube. Do you think YouTubers would care about IP laws being abolished? Their products are available for free anyways and they commercialize themselves in many different ways.
You aren't thinking far along enough in your arguments.
If you abolish IP youtubers will not be able to make money because if I rip someone's monetized video and host my own ad-free copy, people will prefer to watch that and seeing as there is no legal claim over their IP, the youtuber has no recourse to get me to take down the video. There you go, I just divested a youtuber of a potential revenue stream.
This is why people who favor IP argue that it stimulates the creation of creative works. Look, whether we like it or not, everyone needs to earn wages in our system. If you can earn wages solely on creative works, you are empowered to spend more time and energy on those works because they give you a direct return. If the return on creative works becomes effectively zero modulo charity of consumers, you will have way less resources to devote since now you need to spend them making wages in other ways.
I am all for an IP free world, but I think it requires a fundamentally different economic reality from the one we currently have.
>If you abolish IP youtubers will not be able to make money because if I rip someone's monetized video and host my own ad-free copy, people will prefer to watch that and seeing as there is no legal claim over their IP, the youtuber has no recourse to get me to take down the video. There you go, I just divested a youtuber of a potential revenue stream.
Haha. Do you think that isn't happen right now? Anyways it is irrelevant to the YouTuber, ad revenue is just a small part of it. As blockers are widely in use and YouTubers still exist. YouTube ad revenue is low anyways.
YouTubers make money through merchandise and sponsorships. Merchandise can not be replicated as people buy it to support the YouTuber (selling merchandise while lying that it is to support the creator is fraud, even without IP) and for sponsorships it is irrelevant who also watches the video.
If anything the YouTuber should upload to the ad free site himself to get more reach.
Yes.
I also pirate every single book I read. Sometimes I buy them though.
I also pirate every single show I watch. I never buy them.
Music is a bit difficult, but I pay for Spotify, but I wouldn't mind paying for the service if Spotify had no rights to the songs and wasn't compensating the artists.
So... do you want someone to present you with evidence that paying people for their work is a good thing? We're getting to the point of arguing the color of the sky here.
The world doesn't owe you a business model. It's not work if someone doesn't value it, just like a street performer isn't working just because they're putting on a show.
If people can't make money without the government enforcing artificial scarcity of their output, they can always chose another business model.
People with a conscience and an ounce of empathy will always value creative work if they themselves intend to make a profit with it in someway. If you take someone's work, and use it to make money, you should pay them for that work. Its really not that hard of a concept.
>If you take someone's work, and use it to make money, you should pay them for that work. Its really not that hard of a concept.
How many paid products are using foss software without paying the developers. 99%? I do not consider that being evil.
If there are no IP laws nobody will have the expectation to have control over what other people do with their creative output. If you are unwilling to accept that you do not get to make art, the same is true now for art as well. If you do not want someone to make a parody of your art your only option is to never publish it.
> People with a conscience and an ounce of empathy will always value creative work if they themselves intend to make a profit with it in someway.
Is that empathy, or just self interest / good business? If I need a product I can't produce for my business to make a profit I'd better be giving my supplier a cut, lest they stop supplying me. With intangibles it's more fluid than with good bound by scarcity, but novel expressions of creativity become not-novel pretty quickly and, inevitably, you're going to need to go back to the well.
> If people can't make money without the government enforcing artificial scarcity of their output, they can always chose another business model.
Okay, but this literally goes for every single good ever. Case in point: theft. If theft wasn't "arbitrarily" made illegal, then there exists no business models for anything, ever. Because you could just steal it for free.
The idea behind IP is that IP is a good but an ephemeral one, one without a physical manifestation. So, we need to translate a type of theft that works for that.
Or, we could not. But keep in mind IP doesn't just mean music. It means, like... everything that isn't physical. Including my job, and probably your job too.
I think I've spend more on street music than any other music.
Imagine I put up a ghetto blaster and a hat. I play the finest music ever made. Would you put money in the hat? Would the idea to put money in the hat ever cross your mind? Would one even understand they want you to put money in the hat for playing the music?
Moreover, technological progress shouldn't be stifled by attempts to create artificial scarcity by technical means (read: DRM, war on general purpose computing, "The Right to Read", etc).
A lack of IP protection would incentivise even more extreme DRM. DRM exists because copyright law alone is considered insufficient protection by rights holders. A lack of such laws would not get rid of DRM, it would do the opposite.
FOH with that Calvinist nonsense
I do not mind if these artists do not get paid. I absolutely realize that much of corporate art would not exist without IP laws and I accept that.
For books, most of the ones I read are passion projects and if I like them I buy them as thanks to the author/publisher.
I also have absolutely no problem with paying people for their work, I just do not believe they have any rights to their so called "IP".
May I ask what you do for a living?
Research. Which really is an interesting case study. While patents exist, most research is distributed freely, except for a fee to an intermediary for doing absolutely nothing. My ideas are, after I published them, free to use and I have absolutely no right to tell orhers what to do or don't do with this.
Even corporate funded researchers, e.g. for AI, will publish and most of the published results are not protected by patents. Everyone is free to implement someone else's research paper and use it for their own commercial application. Science is also gravitating more to open access, e.g. with arxiv for mathematics and CS. Nobody owns "the right" to some mathematical proof or concept.
Citation is of course encouraged, but plagiarism is not a legal matter, much less a criminal matter.
This has to be bait.
How can you possibly justify this? Do you propose professional artists/authors/musicians just shouldn't exist?
They wouldn't exist in the way they do now. It would be different. They existed before intellectual property. There are other models.
You've been conditioned to believe the current model is the only one that works. I'd argue that this is, in large part, because a bunch of interests who aren't "creators" profit from this current regime.
I fully agree, but the vision is not practical unless you want to change the entire economy around the shift.
Yes, artists existed before IP but they also existed before the internet and digital works. Prior to the internet, creative works met real material limits and real scarcity due to the limitations of physical media. In the digital age, these limits are obliterated. You then have two options:
1. You instate something like IP to make digital markets roughly (and admittedly arbitrarily) like real material markets. 2. You establish no such system. No property rights exist in digital space.
I am a major fan of (2) myself, but history gave us (1). At this stage, too many people make a living off digital markets for us to just impose a radical shift—you're taking about reworking the entire global economy here. Without concomitant shifts toward socialism globally this would probably just result in digital space becoming sparse and people adopting "analog only" release models to try and sustain incomes off of creative work.
If you want to abolish IP, go the full mile and abolish the principle of property period. The distinction between IP and physical goods is just an accidental feature of digital technology. If you are against the idea of IP you are against property. Period. And I'm in full agreement, but I also don't think it's easy to achieve this at this historical juncture. Go read Proudhon.
They will exist regardless. The profit motive makes inferior art. Nothing of value is lost if one has to dance for the sake of dancing.
>This has to be bait.
Everything in my post is true. And I do not intend to be inflammatory.
>How can you possibly justify this?
Easy. I buy the books from authors I respect. Books are mostly passion projects anyway and most of the ones I read are from authors who absolutely do not make a living from them or are dead.
The other category of books are scientific publishers I hate all of them and they do not deserve a single cent from me. I would feel bad giving them any money at all. I also am already paying their authors with my taxes.
For shows. I hate most of them anyway and I wouldn't mind if corporate entertainment were gone.
For musicians. I see it the same as with books. I support the artists I like and I give them money for products they put out.
Nobody owes an artist his existence. Especially since most artists are commercial failures any way and somehow that does not threaten the art itself.
Also consider YouTube. Do you think YouTubers would care about IP laws being abolished? Their products are available for free anyways and they commercialize themselves in many different ways.
You aren't thinking far along enough in your arguments.
If you abolish IP youtubers will not be able to make money because if I rip someone's monetized video and host my own ad-free copy, people will prefer to watch that and seeing as there is no legal claim over their IP, the youtuber has no recourse to get me to take down the video. There you go, I just divested a youtuber of a potential revenue stream.
This is why people who favor IP argue that it stimulates the creation of creative works. Look, whether we like it or not, everyone needs to earn wages in our system. If you can earn wages solely on creative works, you are empowered to spend more time and energy on those works because they give you a direct return. If the return on creative works becomes effectively zero modulo charity of consumers, you will have way less resources to devote since now you need to spend them making wages in other ways.
I am all for an IP free world, but I think it requires a fundamentally different economic reality from the one we currently have.
>If you abolish IP youtubers will not be able to make money because if I rip someone's monetized video and host my own ad-free copy, people will prefer to watch that and seeing as there is no legal claim over their IP, the youtuber has no recourse to get me to take down the video. There you go, I just divested a youtuber of a potential revenue stream.
Haha. Do you think that isn't happen right now? Anyways it is irrelevant to the YouTuber, ad revenue is just a small part of it. As blockers are widely in use and YouTubers still exist. YouTube ad revenue is low anyways.
YouTubers make money through merchandise and sponsorships. Merchandise can not be replicated as people buy it to support the YouTuber (selling merchandise while lying that it is to support the creator is fraud, even without IP) and for sponsorships it is irrelevant who also watches the video.
If anything the YouTuber should upload to the ad free site himself to get more reach.