4 ms·

I'm sorry but I don't think I follow. You disagree with the notion, that people that produce content should be paid for it? I do believe that correct attribut

by doh 8y ago

I'm sorry but I don't think I follow. You disagree with the notion, that people that produce content should be paid for it? I do believe that correct attribution and fair compensation is vital to get quality content. These proposals are not the answer though.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
pjc50 8y ago
People do deserve to be paid for their work, but at what "deadweight" cost to the rest of us? Rights collection these days works by media suppression: almost all the effort is put into preventing people from getting it, destroying copies etc. Given free reign they would put a lock on every technological system to ensure prices stay high and media inconvenient. Netflix and Spotify (and I think iTunes etc) only exist because piracy drove the media companies to negotiate.
- doh 8y ago
  I do agree with your assessment (although it's more complicated than that). Historically, rights holders (RH) used to have the upper hand, then the Internet came and took their reign down while giving upper hand to DSPs. Now RHs are trying to tip the scale back where it was. Neither is a good situation. I definitely do not know what the right solution is, but nor the status quo nor the proposal is any good. My radical view on this is to try to come up with some kind of compulsory license similar to the one that exists in music in US [0] for all content. The rates could be set up by panel of judges (similarly to US) or put in place arbitrary at lets say 50%. This way, if creator produces content and decides to distribute it, she can't prevent a platform (DSP) from distributing it, however DSP can't avoid a payment. Obviously this is a gross simplification, but I'm not seeing many ways out of this mess. [0] https://www.thebalancecareers.com/what-is-a-compulsory-license-in-music-2460357 https://www.thebalancecareers.com/what-is-a-compulsory-licen...
CuriousSkeptic 8y ago
No. I disagree with the notion that copyright is a desirable approach to any problem in this discussion (the economics of anti-rival goods and its producing) But for the record I don’t believe there is a good answer to your question that spans the entire domain of activities currently covered by copyright. And equally copyright doesn’t have much of role in generating revenue for most of it. I should add that I also believe there is a large domain of desirable activities outside content creation that suffers in similar ways from our desire to fit everything into our current economic models. As an illustration, when invited to dinner you might bring a bottle of wine, which is usually appreciated. Yet if you instead brought money of an equal amount as the cost of the bottle the host would probably be offended, and increasing the amount of money would probably do little to alleviate that. There’s a quality in the effort of buying a bottle of wine here that doesnt fit into a purely economic model of the work performed. Yet you still need time and money to perform it, so limited resources do play a role. In a similar vein there are lots of activities that requires time and money. Raising a child could be an example. Where the cost is easy to fit into the model, but the value and motivations are qualitively outside the realm of economics. I think we simply need to recognize that these values are some times public goods, and the costs needs to be covered by other means than direct free market transactions. Personally I believe that a basic income could be a part of this discussion.
- doh 8y ago
  Understood. I don't right answer either. The best I ever came up with I described here [0] but I still may be off significantly. In any way, we do have to find solution and fairly quickly, or we will get stuck with Article 11/13 and similar. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17913535 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17913535
ZainRiz 8y ago
"You disagree with the notion, that people that produce content should be paid for it?" Is that really that value that governments should be optimizing for? What about people who's content isn't all that good? Should they be ensuring payments for anyone who creates a new viral meme? I'd propose a different value: "How do we best incentivize people to produce content?" (or perhaps "quality content") Trying to make sure people can get paid is one strategy to incentivize the creation of quality content. But when you rethink of the problem in terms of optimizing for the production of quality content you can think up other strategies as well. For example, Facebook and Twitter have done a great job of encouraging people to produce content (with questionable levels of quality), without attaching any monetary rewards to it. Reframing the question in different ways will help us arrive at larger variety of solutions.
- doh 8y ago
  Deciding quality is a slippery slope. Who is going to decide the quality? Me? You? A committee? Government? Which one? "Is that really that value that governments should be optimizing for? What about people who's content isn't all that good? Should they be ensuring payments for anyone who creates a new viral meme?" That's exactly what government should do. Let the market to decide what content it perceives as good or not. The viral on its own means that the content is desired by some in the population. You or I may question its quality, but that doesn't discount its value to the ones who enjoy it. I think that's where it should stop. Government shouldn't censure content (up until is outright harmful to the society [there are mechanisms in place already to deal with this]). The curation should come from the platforms. Platform can compete for the eyeballs by picking the content they want to distribute. However creators, whoever they are, should be fairly compensated for it.
  - ZainRiz 8y ago
    I agree. Quality is a subjective word, hence the parenthesis around it. I'm sure we can think up of a better goal. My point was that ensuring people get paid is not what our end goal is. We should identify what our end goal should be and try to see if a different tactic might accomplish that goal better (with less collateral damage). For example, people who create memes (the actual memes, not the images that later become memes) are motivated by social acknowledgement. Same goes for many Facebook posts. Mandating payment systems is unlikely to motivate those types of content creation, and may in fact suppress many other types. However, creating content based on social rewards (like most social media sites currently do) does help the creation of popular content.
matheusmoreira 8y ago
> You disagree with the notion, that people that produce content should be paid for it? Nobody disagrees with that. The fact is copyright exists to create artificial scarcity. "Content", once produced, is not scarce in any way; that's why the scarcity is artificial. These laws exist to force everybody to pretend that isn't how things work. It's fundamentally dishonest. It is trivial to copy and distribute "content". People have been doing it since computers were a thing and ironically they do it better than the copyright owners themselves. It's up to the industry to find some other way to pay people. I don't really care how they're going to do it, and frankly it's nobody else's problem but their own. Instead of concentrating on a new business model, they keep embarrassing themselves with endless anti-piracy measures that do nothing but make the DRM-free copy look better than the original.
- doh 8y ago
  That's a bit harsh, don't you think? Just because something is easy to copy doesn't mean it doesn't have value. Creators should be paid for their work no matter how simple is to copy. If they are the first one who created it and someone else benefits, then they deserve to be compensated. My best solution would be something along these lines https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17913535 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17913535
  - matheusmoreira 8y ago
    > That's a bit harsh, don't you think? No. Given the chance, these people would turn all the computers we use and love into locked-down content consumption machines. I think it is safe to assume this agenda is against the interests of everyone on hacker news. In fact, if copyright holders got their way, it would be impossible to be a hacker. The only way to stop copyright infringement is to destroy computing as we know it. That is their end game. They want to take control of the user's computer and actively prevent them from doing things they don't like. This battle for copyright is similar to the battle against encryption: corporations and governments don't want you to have any control because it allows you to subvert them. > Just because something is easy to copy doesn't mean it doesn't have value. I didn't say it had no value. I said it wasn't scarce. > Creators should be paid for their work no matter how simple is to copy. > If they are the first one who created it and someone else benefits, then they deserve to be compensated. Then, for all our sakes, I hope they can figure out how to get paid regardless of how many copies are out there.
balp 8y ago
Amanda Palmer, does ahve a big point in her reformulating of the Question. It's not how do we make people pay for it, how do we let people pay for it. People want to pay for content, the current systems don't let people pay for it.
- doh 8y ago
  I agree. That's why we have to change the status quo. However the proposal from the EU commission is step in a very wrong direction.

by doh 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

pjc50 8y ago

People do deserve to be paid for their work, but at what "deadweight" cost to the rest of us? Rights collection these days works by media suppression: almost all the effort is put into preventing people from getting it, destroying copies etc. Given free reign they would put a lock on every technological system to ensure prices stay high and media inconvenient. Netflix and Spotify (and I think iTunes etc) only exist because piracy drove the media companies to negotiate.

doh 8y ago
I do agree with your assessment (although it's more complicated than that). Historically, rights holders (RH) used to have the upper hand, then the Internet came and took their reign down while giving upper hand to DSPs. Now RHs are trying to tip the scale back where it was. Neither is a good situation. I definitely do not know what the right solution is, but nor the status quo nor the proposal is any good. My radical view on this is to try to come up with some kind of compulsory license similar to the one that exists in music in US [0] for all content. The rates could be set up by panel of judges (similarly to US) or put in place arbitrary at lets say 50%. This way, if creator produces content and decides to distribute it, she can't prevent a platform (DSP) from distributing it, however DSP can't avoid a payment. Obviously this is a gross simplification, but I'm not seeing many ways out of this mess. [0] https://www.thebalancecareers.com/what-is-a-compulsory-license-in-music-2460357 https://www.thebalancecareers.com/what-is-a-compulsory-licen...

CuriousSkeptic 8y ago

No. I disagree with the notion that copyright is a desirable approach to any problem in this discussion (the economics of anti-rival goods and its producing) But for the record I don’t believe there is a good answer to your question that spans the entire domain of activities currently covered by copyright. And equally copyright doesn’t have much of role in generating revenue for most of it. I should add that I also believe there is a large domain of desirable activities outside content creation that suffers in similar ways from our desire to fit everything into our current economic models. As an illustration, when invited to dinner you might bring a bottle of wine, which is usually appreciated. Yet if you instead brought money of an equal amount as the cost of the bottle the host would probably be offended, and increasing the amount of money would probably do little to alleviate that. There’s a quality in the effort of buying a bottle of wine here that doesnt fit into a purely economic model of the work performed. Yet you still need time and money to perform it, so limited resources do play a role. In a similar vein there are lots of activities that requires time and money. Raising a child could be an example. Where the cost is easy to fit into the model, but the value and motivations are qualitively outside the realm of economics. I think we simply need to recognize that these values are some times public goods, and the costs needs to be covered by other means than direct free market transactions. Personally I believe that a basic income could be a part of this discussion.

doh 8y ago
Understood. I don't right answer either. The best I ever came up with I described here [0] but I still may be off significantly. In any way, we do have to find solution and fairly quickly, or we will get stuck with Article 11/13 and similar. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17913535 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17913535

ZainRiz 8y ago

"You disagree with the notion, that people that produce content should be paid for it?" Is that really that value that governments should be optimizing for? What about people who's content isn't all that good? Should they be ensuring payments for anyone who creates a new viral meme? I'd propose a different value: "How do we best incentivize people to produce content?" (or perhaps "quality content") Trying to make sure people can get paid is one strategy to incentivize the creation of quality content. But when you rethink of the problem in terms of optimizing for the production of quality content you can think up other strategies as well. For example, Facebook and Twitter have done a great job of encouraging people to produce content (with questionable levels of quality), without attaching any monetary rewards to it. Reframing the question in different ways will help us arrive at larger variety of solutions.

doh 8y ago
Deciding quality is a slippery slope. Who is going to decide the quality? Me? You? A committee? Government? Which one? "Is that really that value that governments should be optimizing for? What about people who's content isn't all that good? Should they be ensuring payments for anyone who creates a new viral meme?" That's exactly what government should do. Let the market to decide what content it perceives as good or not. The viral on its own means that the content is desired by some in the population. You or I may question its quality, but that doesn't discount its value to the ones who enjoy it. I think that's where it should stop. Government shouldn't censure content (up until is outright harmful to the society [there are mechanisms in place already to deal with this]). The curation should come from the platforms. Platform can compete for the eyeballs by picking the content they want to distribute. However creators, whoever they are, should be fairly compensated for it.
- ZainRiz 8y ago
  I agree. Quality is a subjective word, hence the parenthesis around it. I'm sure we can think up of a better goal. My point was that ensuring people get paid is not what our end goal is. We should identify what our end goal should be and try to see if a different tactic might accomplish that goal better (with less collateral damage). For example, people who create memes (the actual memes, not the images that later become memes) are motivated by social acknowledgement. Same goes for many Facebook posts. Mandating payment systems is unlikely to motivate those types of content creation, and may in fact suppress many other types. However, creating content based on social rewards (like most social media sites currently do) does help the creation of popular content.

matheusmoreira 8y ago

> You disagree with the notion, that people that produce content should be paid for it? Nobody disagrees with that. The fact is copyright exists to create artificial scarcity. "Content", once produced, is not scarce in any way; that's why the scarcity is artificial. These laws exist to force everybody to pretend that isn't how things work. It's fundamentally dishonest. It is trivial to copy and distribute "content". People have been doing it since computers were a thing and ironically they do it better than the copyright owners themselves. It's up to the industry to find some other way to pay people. I don't really care how they're going to do it, and frankly it's nobody else's problem but their own. Instead of concentrating on a new business model, they keep embarrassing themselves with endless anti-piracy measures that do nothing but make the DRM-free copy look better than the original.

doh 8y ago
That's a bit harsh, don't you think? Just because something is easy to copy doesn't mean it doesn't have value. Creators should be paid for their work no matter how simple is to copy. If they are the first one who created it and someone else benefits, then they deserve to be compensated. My best solution would be something along these lines https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17913535 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17913535
- matheusmoreira 8y ago
  > That's a bit harsh, don't you think? No. Given the chance, these people would turn all the computers we use and love into locked-down content consumption machines. I think it is safe to assume this agenda is against the interests of everyone on hacker news. In fact, if copyright holders got their way, it would be impossible to be a hacker. The only way to stop copyright infringement is to destroy computing as we know it. That is their end game. They want to take control of the user's computer and actively prevent them from doing things they don't like. This battle for copyright is similar to the battle against encryption: corporations and governments don't want you to have any control because it allows you to subvert them. > Just because something is easy to copy doesn't mean it doesn't have value. I didn't say it had no value. I said it wasn't scarce. > Creators should be paid for their work no matter how simple is to copy. > If they are the first one who created it and someone else benefits, then they deserve to be compensated. Then, for all our sakes, I hope they can figure out how to get paid regardless of how many copies are out there.

balp 8y ago

Amanda Palmer, does ahve a big point in her reformulating of the Question. It's not how do we make people pay for it, how do we let people pay for it. People want to pay for content, the current systems don't let people pay for it.

doh 8y ago
I agree. That's why we have to change the status quo. However the proposal from the EU commission is step in a very wrong direction.