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> When digital replication is easy -- as it is with arts like music or software -- piracy destroys innovation and hurts creators who want to earn a living by se
by pitaj 7y ago
> When digital replication is easy -- as it is with arts like music or software -- piracy destroys innovation and hurts creators who want to earn a living by selling their creations.
There's no evidence this is true. This is already the world we live in, and creativity is high.
> It's not like the farmers or the apartment owners are going to let people "pirate" a warm place to sleep or a good meal.
I made a specific point that IP is fundamentally different.
> The Grateful Dead, for instance, let people freely copy mix tapes of their concerts and made their money on gate revenues. (They didn't let people in for free. Nope. )
That exactly the point. Monetizing through live shows is already how most music artists make money.
> This creates inefficiencies and it just isn't fair to those who just want to sell their creations without holding a concert or drumming up some other scheme to get people to pay.
It's competition that benefits the consumers of those creations and an opportunity for middle-men to connect creators with consumers (see Patreon). Define "fair" when copyright is often used as a way to censor and steal from smaller creators.
> Most "open source" companies spend endless hours trying to concoct ways to open source just enough of their product while forcing enough people to pay so everyone can eat.
And the outcome is that the public has access to countless sets of open source software alternatives. Which is amazing for users and innovators.
> I've found that most of the people who speak like pitaj are in universities and they make their money through some mixture of outrageous tuition bills that can't be dodged or government funding from taxes that can't be escaped.
Not true for me.
- zerocrates 7y agoJust on the open-source thread of things, one thing to note is that the "copyleft" regime depends on copyright to work. As do many of the schemes open-source projects use to monetize. "Stealing from smaller creators" by the big guys isn't a problem I foresee getting smaller in an IP-free world.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago> one thing to note is that the "copyleft" regime depends on copyright to work The idea of copyleft doesn't. The particular implementation in our regulatory reality does, because RMS & others figured out how to hack a system typically used for rent-seeking and restricting innovation (thus lots of parties are investing money to preserve it), and use it for the opposite goal.
- scarejunba 7y agoWithout IP how can you enforce copyleft? Someone could just take your code and modify it and distribute modified binaries without you being able to do anything.
- wolfgke 7y ago> Without IP how can you enforce copyleft? Someone could just take your code and modify it and distribute modified binaries without you being able to do anything. You can, for example, reverse-engineer these binaries or develop binary patches (without IP laws, all of this becomes legal).
- TeMPOraL 7y agoYou wouldn't have to. Without copyright, it seems to me that everything becomes copyleft by default. I could, for example, modify any piece of software I like, and legally distribute modified copies to others. Even if I didn't want to share my modifications with a larger community (or didn't want to do it for free), I couldn't stop it - someone else could do that for me. And as 'wolfgke points out, being open source doesn't matter much here.
- wolfgke 7y ago> You wouldn't have to. Without copyright, it seems to me that everything becomes copyleft by default. No, without copyright, you cannot force the other party to give you access to the original source code. BTW: There does not seem to exist an open source license that tries to emulate "no copyright"/"no IP". I.e. the license allows reverse engineering of all binaries derived from it virally, create modifications etc. and perhaps allows to use patents; but the license does not give you the right to demand access to the original source code.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoYou argued upthread for reverse engineering. Binary is the source code, albeit in less convenient form. So maybe it wouldn't be strict copyleft, but close enough.
- pitaj 7y agoBy "stealing" I meant literally taking their money, not using their art.
- belorn 7y agoCopyleft is a strategy to reach a specific goal in order to address a specific problem. It is not in itself the goal. In order to ask if copyleft would still be an effective strategy in a non-copyright world we would have to ask if the problem would still exist and how it would look like. Then we would have to compare copyleft to other strategies to see which would be most effective. Personally I think that if the anti-copyright movement would managed to gain enough political support to remove copyright then copyleft would not be the most effective strategy to gain the goals defined by software freedoms.
- gurkendoktor 7y agoNot only plain old copyleft relies on copyright, but also the model of publishing code under the GPL and charging for a commercial license. I have used three such libraries in client work, and I absolutely love this model: - We can audit software before buying - We have the ultimate "right to repair" - Open source/hobby projects can automatically use it for free (SAAS/closed source projects often offer this as well, but there's more friction) And even if we are not technically required to upstream any patches that we make under the commercial license, the average engineering team will try to keep their downstream patches to a minimum, and the easiest way is to get them merged in the original GPL version.
- ghostbrainalpha 7y agoHow would this concept work for authors who write high quality novels? You can't sustain that model through live performance. You could release books chapter by chapter, and try to fund creation through the Patron model, but that leads to a very different type of product that is honestly inferior. You can see this in the books that have done well for free on Kindle. Sometimes you want to consume a piece of art that doesn't need to hook the consumer in the opening minutes, and also the artist may need to find a way to fund YEARS of work before producing anything that would entitle them to micro-payments.
- username90 7y agoKickstarter.
- ghostbrainalpha 7y agoYou think Cormac Mccarthy could have gotten the funds to write Suttree through Kickstarter? Or honestly even AFTER writing Suttree would have been able to get enough funding to write one of his better books?
- nameequalsmain 7y agoI am with pitaj here, intellectual property is fundamentally wrong, but this is a good example of something that I'm not sure would work under no copyright. "Pay what you want" is one way, though I don't have any statistics on if that collects enough money. Another could be selling signed copies or otherwise making some copies exclusive in a way that copying them nullifies. Pay what you want + signed copies + patreon style donations might be enough? I don't have a good answer to this. I would therefore suggest decreasing the duration of copyright to somewhere around 5-10 years to give the copyright holder time to sell the work with exclusive rights, after which the work enters public domain (like copyright was initially intended to work).
- zaarn 7y agoIn germany, for a while, there was no copyright on books, so authors faced the same problem. This was largely solved by selling high quality books as the competition only made cheap books. This seems to have largely worked until newspapers got angry that a small percentage of people read the news without paying.
- jimmydddd 7y agoIf I had a coffee shop, and people were justing taking the coffee without paying for it, yeah, I could probably think of another income stream, like charging for WiFi. But just because I COULD think of another way to make money doesn't mean that I shouldn't be allowed to get paid for the coffee, just because some folks think coffee should be free.