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Copyright infringement is to artists as H1-B Visa abuse is to programmers. Both make it harder to earn a living and depress wages/destroy jobs in their respecti

by Noos 10y ago

Copyright infringement is to artists as H1-B Visa abuse is to programmers. Both make it harder to earn a living and depress wages/destroy jobs in their respective fields. Both tend to hit the individual or little guy harder than the big company/rockstar-copyright infringement can siphon enough sales from small presses or independent artists to make it no longer profitable to operate. Many programmers seem to have no real care for creators, so it seems moral to them to more or less destroy their wages, force them to make money not off of creating, but touring, beg for tips via Patreon, etc. If the same thing was done to them, they'd be howling how unfair it is. How about your job pays you little to nothing and you need to advertise and get people to support you monthly on a crowdfunding site just to make ends meet in your field?

Karunamon 10y ago
Copyright infringement is to artists as H1-B Visa abuse is to programmers. Both make it harder to earn a living and depress wages/destroy jobs in their respective fields. See, here's the biggest problem with "copyright infringement" as a term; it's too broad. It covers $random_co using your stuff commercially, but it also covers your gran downloading songs from sketchy websites in Russia. I don't think even the most die-hard of $(insert favorite adjective form of term under discussion) would excuse the first, but quite a few normal, reasonable people would excuse the second, in part, because the economic "harm" is unambiguous in the first case, and impossible to quantify (possibly negative) in the second. Large multibillion dollar organizations suing grandmothers, printers, and dead people, and claiming $(insert noun form of term) is responsible for $dubious_bignum in "lost sales" isn't helping.
- Noos 10y ago
  It's not unambiguous. If enough grannies decide to pirate goods (edit), the effect is the same, or if anything worse because they are distributed and impossible to stop, where as repurposers can be at least targeted. If you own a physical goods store, shrink is shrink...a professional thievery team vs 100 grannies and kids shoplifting results in the same loss, but if anything, it's easier to watch out for and stop the team. Problem is distributed theft is a new thing for us as people, and it seems to be very hard for us to stop or deal with.
  - Karunamon 10y ago
    The ambiguity comes because laws are supposed to be a reflection of morals, not the other way around, and a very significant chunk of society, myself included, doesn't see downloading a file from the internet without the author's blessing as a wrong. If enough grannies decide to pirate goods (edit), the effect is the same I question whether this is a thing that significantly exists in the real world, especially given a number of studies [1] that show "pirates" purchase significantly more media (numbers ranging from 30% to 300%) than non-"pirates". If you have numbers on "losses" that don't come from sources that invent numbers out of whole cloth [2], I'd love to see them. You can't simply treat an unauthorized copy as a lost sale [3]. And for the sake of pete, stop calling it "theft", or at the very least stop making flawed analogies to physical goods. [1]: http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/research/telecoms-research/online-copyright/deep-dive.pdf http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/research/telecoms-... [2]: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120206/04501417667/ny-times-riaa-mpaa-exaggerate-piracy-impact-stats-were-going-to-assume-theyre-true-anyway.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120206/04501417667/ny-ti... [3]: https://archive.is/HLFhA https://archive.is/HLFhA
  - intended 10y ago
    What loss? Was the granny going to pay for it all? Do note that the same people who were pirating games/movies i Decades ago are now making them or buying them. Not to mention that There's more content to consume today - for free, than there is to buy.
- andrepd 10y ago
  Offtopic, but why use the $igil, and still say (insert ...)? :) They have the same meaning.
  - duskwuff 10y ago
    $(cmd) is a Bash syntax which runs a command and interpolates it into a string.
slavik81 10y ago
> Many programmers seem to have no real care for creators Programmers are creators of lots of copyrighted works. Claiming that programmers just want to dismantle somebody else's livelyhood is misguided when we use on the copyright system heavily in our work as well. On another note, I'm sad to see you downvoted. Your point of view is widely shared by the public and if we're going to enact any change, we as a community should listen to and think about how to address your points.

by Noos 10y ago

Karunamon 10y ago

Copyright infringement is to artists as H1-B Visa abuse is to programmers. Both make it harder to earn a living and depress wages/destroy jobs in their respective fields. See, here's the biggest problem with "copyright infringement" as a term; it's too broad. It covers $random_co using your stuff commercially, but it also covers your gran downloading songs from sketchy websites in Russia. I don't think even the most die-hard of $(insert favorite adjective form of term under discussion) would excuse the first, but quite a few normal, reasonable people would excuse the second, in part, because the economic "harm" is unambiguous in the first case, and impossible to quantify (possibly negative) in the second. Large multibillion dollar organizations suing grandmothers, printers, and dead people, and claiming $(insert noun form of term) is responsible for $dubious_bignum in "lost sales" isn't helping.

Noos 10y ago
It's not unambiguous. If enough grannies decide to pirate goods (edit), the effect is the same, or if anything worse because they are distributed and impossible to stop, where as repurposers can be at least targeted. If you own a physical goods store, shrink is shrink...a professional thievery team vs 100 grannies and kids shoplifting results in the same loss, but if anything, it's easier to watch out for and stop the team. Problem is distributed theft is a new thing for us as people, and it seems to be very hard for us to stop or deal with.
- Karunamon 10y ago
  The ambiguity comes because laws are supposed to be a reflection of morals, not the other way around, and a very significant chunk of society, myself included, doesn't see downloading a file from the internet without the author's blessing as a wrong. If enough grannies decide to pirate goods (edit), the effect is the same I question whether this is a thing that significantly exists in the real world, especially given a number of studies [1] that show "pirates" purchase significantly more media (numbers ranging from 30% to 300%) than non-"pirates". If you have numbers on "losses" that don't come from sources that invent numbers out of whole cloth [2], I'd love to see them. You can't simply treat an unauthorized copy as a lost sale [3]. And for the sake of pete, stop calling it "theft", or at the very least stop making flawed analogies to physical goods. [1]: http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/research/telecoms-research/online-copyright/deep-dive.pdf http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/research/telecoms-... [2]: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120206/04501417667/ny-times-riaa-mpaa-exaggerate-piracy-impact-stats-were-going-to-assume-theyre-true-anyway.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120206/04501417667/ny-ti... [3]: https://archive.is/HLFhA https://archive.is/HLFhA
- intended 10y ago
  What loss? Was the granny going to pay for it all? Do note that the same people who were pirating games/movies i Decades ago are now making them or buying them. Not to mention that There's more content to consume today - for free, than there is to buy.
andrepd 10y ago
Offtopic, but why use the $igil, and still say (insert ...)? :) They have the same meaning.
- duskwuff 10y ago
  $(cmd) is a Bash syntax which runs a command and interpolates it into a string.

slavik81 10y ago

> Many programmers seem to have no real care for creators Programmers are creators of lots of copyrighted works. Claiming that programmers just want to dismantle somebody else's livelyhood is misguided when we use on the copyright system heavily in our work as well. On another note, I'm sad to see you downvoted. Your point of view is widely shared by the public and if we're going to enact any change, we as a community should listen to and think about how to address your points.