3 ms·

"The budgets would probably be lower," This is another way of saying the salaries would be lower and there would be no benefits or permanent career path in the

by api 11y ago

"The budgets would probably be lower," This is another way of saying the salaries would be lower and there would be no benefits or permanent career path in the arts. The arts would become a hobby that people do before they get a 'real job' that is able to support them as adults. What I don't think you understand is that those big-budget shallow pop pieces support the rest of the industry both directly and indirectly. Look at software for an example -- your little open source effort is in fact bankrolled by the open source ecosystem that is subsidized by Facebook, Google, big VC money, etc. The high salaries in tech are held up by the demand that these large houses create. When you cut the top of the pyramid off an industry, the result is recession -- an overall deflation of the rest of the labor market. Look at what happened to even unrelated industrial concerns in Detroit when the big-three auto makers left town. The entire economy of the city collapsed, not just car factories. I'll give you a concrete example: all the cool synth and instrument gear musicians use to innovate. It's a good example because I know people who work for Moog Music and other firms in those areas. The majority of those firms' revenue comes from larger and deeper pocketed artists and other creative concerns that buy the latest-and-greatest and the big-ticket items. Kill off all that and Moog would go out of business and all the little indie bands would no longer even be able to purchase gear. Your ability to produce an album or a movie on a Kickstarter budget is in fact subsidized indirectly by way of demand generated by the larger and deeper pocketed side of the industry and the productive economy of scale that it helps create. Industries are ecosystems and the bigger concerns within them are primary producers -- what happens to a forest if you cut down all the trees? I agree that copyright is in need of some reform, but the radical anti-copyright and 'pirate party' position is just insanely naive and would completely destroy art, music, and literature as viable career paths for anyone. It's the kind of position you encounter from people who have zero understanding of economics and/or are really naive about human nature (a.k.a. have never met a sociopath).

Strang 11y ago
I think your conflating my position with another. I understand that eliminating copyright would be a massive upheaval. I do understand that many companies, industries, and career paths would be drastically affected negatively. I just don't think that maintaining the status quo justifies the current policing of personal computer and internet usage. Nowadays, film and music are just files, and can be freely copied at will. The creative industries have refused to acknowledge this reality. I don't think any individuals should be jailed or bankrupted to maintain this illusion any longer. When the dust settles, society will still have art and entertainment. It will just be different from what we are used to.
- api 11y ago
  I don't believe people should go to jail unless they are profiting massively from copyright violation -- e.g. someone selling a bootleg subscription streaming service and pocketing the money. I also agree that the concept of copyright is a 'legal fiction' in the sense that it's a kind of hack. 'People who make intangible things should be able to get paid, so let's pretend they are physical artifacts.' But the purpose of that hack is at least in its purest sense noble. Child labor laws are also a legal fiction. There is no natural reason for them to exist. We made them up because we got tired watching the children of the poor be used up as a consumable good. Nature sucks. Civilization is a conspiracy to escape the brutal amoral Darwinism of nature. If you want to get rid of copyright, create a better alternative. But your better alternative must do the good things that the original does, otherwise it won't work. So far I don't see such a thing. The fundamental issue is present here in this sentence: "Nowadays, film and music are just files, and can be freely copied at will." Let's say I have two files. One is a music file, the other is the output of /dev/urandom. They could be of equal size, and they are equally easy to copy. But one contains the results of possibly thousands of hours of human labor not to mention the irreplaceable and ethereal quality we call 'creativity', while the other contains no actual information at all. Conflating one with the other based on how easy they are to duplicate amounts to a profound devaluation of human labor and human life. The same sort of argument sounds absurd when applied to physical goods e.g. "a t-shirt is just cotton, so why do we have to pay a premium to a bunch of factory workers?" But it is in fact the same argument, since in reality everything is just information and therefore all labor amounts to the transformation of information. Your t-shirt is just carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, etc. organized in a particular way. (This argument carried further gets really interesting, but I have work to do. Quick version: in a post-3d-printing future where everything is automated, copyright might well be the only form of property and the only mechanism for compensation available to the non-capitalist class.)
  - Strang 11y ago
    My point about copying files is more literal than that. I'm not trying to theoretically devalue the creative or economic worth of the work. I'm saying that nowadays those works are delivered as files, which are literally free to copy. They can be encumbered with DRM, but DRM is also free to remove. This is a drastic change from the days of printing presses, vinyl records, etc. The idea that these industries should be allowed to ignore this reality by punishing those who make use of it is ludicrous, in my opinion. My alternative to copyright is nothing. Let society figure out how to remunerate artists without coercion.
vezzy-fnord 11y ago
The arts would become a hobby that people do before they get a 'real job' that is able to support them as adults. This is already the case for most people, and how society at large sees it. The barista with an art degree and the waiter aspiring to be an actor are both cliches at this point. The arts are intrinsically difficult business models because of their anti-rivalrous nature, their varying scarcity and in the digital age, increasing intangibility. Just as artists had patrons in the past, today they have complicated chains of publishers and distributors they must go past. As those become less relevant with digital distribution, then the problems of saturation set in. Look at software for an example -- your little open source effort is in fact bankrolled by the open source ecosystem that is subsidized by Facebook, Google, big VC money, etc. Well, not exactly. The parts of open source that get subsidized tend to be limited in their scope, primarily user-facing and application development software -- what you would expect for media companies to care about, and what is easiest to sell as a service. Infrastructure and systems software has always been treated as more of a commodity and receives relatively little attention. Some companies devote teams to enhancing it, but much of it remains dominated by private individuals and researchers, the latter sometimes working as part of research institutes that are both privately and publicly funded.

by api 11y ago

Strang 11y ago

I think your conflating my position with another. I understand that eliminating copyright would be a massive upheaval. I do understand that many companies, industries, and career paths would be drastically affected negatively. I just don't think that maintaining the status quo justifies the current policing of personal computer and internet usage. Nowadays, film and music are just files, and can be freely copied at will. The creative industries have refused to acknowledge this reality. I don't think any individuals should be jailed or bankrupted to maintain this illusion any longer. When the dust settles, society will still have art and entertainment. It will just be different from what we are used to.

api 11y ago
I don't believe people should go to jail unless they are profiting massively from copyright violation -- e.g. someone selling a bootleg subscription streaming service and pocketing the money. I also agree that the concept of copyright is a 'legal fiction' in the sense that it's a kind of hack. 'People who make intangible things should be able to get paid, so let's pretend they are physical artifacts.' But the purpose of that hack is at least in its purest sense noble. Child labor laws are also a legal fiction. There is no natural reason for them to exist. We made them up because we got tired watching the children of the poor be used up as a consumable good. Nature sucks. Civilization is a conspiracy to escape the brutal amoral Darwinism of nature. If you want to get rid of copyright, create a better alternative. But your better alternative must do the good things that the original does, otherwise it won't work. So far I don't see such a thing. The fundamental issue is present here in this sentence: "Nowadays, film and music are just files, and can be freely copied at will." Let's say I have two files. One is a music file, the other is the output of /dev/urandom. They could be of equal size, and they are equally easy to copy. But one contains the results of possibly thousands of hours of human labor not to mention the irreplaceable and ethereal quality we call 'creativity', while the other contains no actual information at all. Conflating one with the other based on how easy they are to duplicate amounts to a profound devaluation of human labor and human life. The same sort of argument sounds absurd when applied to physical goods e.g. "a t-shirt is just cotton, so why do we have to pay a premium to a bunch of factory workers?" But it is in fact the same argument, since in reality everything is just information and therefore all labor amounts to the transformation of information. Your t-shirt is just carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, etc. organized in a particular way. (This argument carried further gets really interesting, but I have work to do. Quick version: in a post-3d-printing future where everything is automated, copyright might well be the only form of property and the only mechanism for compensation available to the non-capitalist class.)
- Strang 11y ago
  My point about copying files is more literal than that. I'm not trying to theoretically devalue the creative or economic worth of the work. I'm saying that nowadays those works are delivered as files, which are literally free to copy. They can be encumbered with DRM, but DRM is also free to remove. This is a drastic change from the days of printing presses, vinyl records, etc. The idea that these industries should be allowed to ignore this reality by punishing those who make use of it is ludicrous, in my opinion. My alternative to copyright is nothing. Let society figure out how to remunerate artists without coercion.

vezzy-fnord 11y ago

The arts would become a hobby that people do before they get a 'real job' that is able to support them as adults. This is already the case for most people, and how society at large sees it. The barista with an art degree and the waiter aspiring to be an actor are both cliches at this point. The arts are intrinsically difficult business models because of their anti-rivalrous nature, their varying scarcity and in the digital age, increasing intangibility. Just as artists had patrons in the past, today they have complicated chains of publishers and distributors they must go past. As those become less relevant with digital distribution, then the problems of saturation set in. Look at software for an example -- your little open source effort is in fact bankrolled by the open source ecosystem that is subsidized by Facebook, Google, big VC money, etc. Well, not exactly. The parts of open source that get subsidized tend to be limited in their scope, primarily user-facing and application development software -- what you would expect for media companies to care about, and what is easiest to sell as a service. Infrastructure and systems software has always been treated as more of a commodity and receives relatively little attention. Some companies devote teams to enhancing it, but much of it remains dominated by private individuals and researchers, the latter sometimes working as part of research institutes that are both privately and publicly funded.