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I used to agree totally, but now I have a more nuanced view. While artificial scarcity offends my hacker sensibility, I also have to admit that this creates a s

I used to agree totally, but now I have a more nuanced view. While artificial scarcity offends my hacker sensibility, I also have to admit that this creates a society I like, with talented wealthy celebrities, and a large population of people who make their living in and around the industry. I'm not sure I would like a society where creative acts only happens in home studios and the work is given away for free, and all artists have to have day jobs.

Iv 7y ago
I never said the new model was "give away everything for free" I just said that "Consider every copy needs to be paid even though making a copy is basically free of cost and that this forces us to put a terrible censorship mechanism into place" was not the right approach. Now that there are crowdfunding campaigns and tons of tools for microtransaction, that is even less excusable than when you had the effort to imagine the apparition of these obvious solutions.
- hakfoo 7y ago
  I feel like we're screwed until we get over the "ownership" model. It means we spend more effort on metadata (What are we allowed to do with it? Who owns it?) than the actual data. It has stood directly in the way of new creative types (sampling in music, for example) and locked away content where the metadata is faulty/lost (orphan works problem) It falls apart badly at scale (if you wanted to get distribution rights for everything on an OSX/Windows installation image, imagine the number of third parties alone, plus the original developers, you'd need to sign off) and then it only really incentivizes work that's commercially appealing, not necessarily the technical best. I dream of a day where people who want to create will be able to get a stipend-- it might cover a modest lifestyle, but ensures they can live the dream of being an artist/musician/programmer without having to clutch tight over every scrap of their output to keep their income streams alive. If we did it through a tax-funded endowment rather than market forces, we could probably finance a lot more creativity that way (think how many touring singers we could finance at 50k per year for the price of one Taylor Swift, or how many programmers we could hire to work om their passion projects in database theory for what is currently being spent on Oracle licenses.)
zozbot234 7y ago
In addition to what the other commenter said about crowdfunding, celebrities now get most of their money from sponsorship deals, not their actual creative activity. Yes, you need to be a real superstar to get these deals, but the world of mainstream, "celebrity" creators is driven by superstar dynamics.
VMG 7y ago
Maybe we can figure out how to finance things we like without putting people in prison though.
katbyte 7y ago
I think if copyright was 20, heck 40 years this wouldn’t be such a problem because that would means everything earlier then 1980 would probably be available online for free. Long copyrights just prop up companies and their investors not people.
brownbat 7y ago
I think that's a fair view. The only thing that gives me pause is that we transitioned to a system where individual music tracks are nearly free-on-demand* a decade ago and the sky never fell. There were transition costs, and artists get way more from live performances now, but there's still an industry. More than anything I'd just like to experiment with shorter copyright terms. I don't think the founders were crazy when they set them at around a generation. I agree that it might be risky to blow everything up, but I think there's a lot of bargaining we could do over term lengths that would be pretty harmless. * To a first order approximation. Sure, many artists technically can get something when I pull up a track on YouTube. But if I'm not playing a whole playlist, I might not even see any ads.
dexterdog 7y ago
Hardly. Top acts make 10s of millions per month today. If people didn't have to spend money on the music itself they would probably spend even more for tickets and merchandise.
matheusmoreira 7y ago
> I also have to admit that this creates a society I like, with talented wealthy celebrities, and a large population of people who make their living in and around the industry. What should we value more: hacker principles or phony outdated business models that aren't compatible with the realities of the digital age? Copyright was created back when industrial capacity was required in order to make copies at scale. People had to own stuff like printing presses in order to infringe copyright at a scale that caused any damage. This is no longer the case. Copyright infringement is trivial now. It's as easy as copy paste. To solve this, the copyright industry intends to lock us out of computing. They think unlimited computers are too powerful for mere citizens like us and we should have access to nothing but limited versions that can execute nothing but predefined functions approved by them. The mere existence of copyright is an existential threat to hackers and their values. If the preservation of free computing and internet requires sacrificing the entertainment industry, then so be it. The alternative is to sacrifice free computing. Due to the existence of subversive technologies such as encryption, governments have been increasingly adopting the same perspective as the copyright industry.

Iv 7y ago

I never said the new model was "give away everything for free" I just said that "Consider every copy needs to be paid even though making a copy is basically free of cost and that this forces us to put a terrible censorship mechanism into place" was not the right approach. Now that there are crowdfunding campaigns and tons of tools for microtransaction, that is even less excusable than when you had the effort to imagine the apparition of these obvious solutions.

hakfoo 7y ago
I feel like we're screwed until we get over the "ownership" model. It means we spend more effort on metadata (What are we allowed to do with it? Who owns it?) than the actual data. It has stood directly in the way of new creative types (sampling in music, for example) and locked away content where the metadata is faulty/lost (orphan works problem) It falls apart badly at scale (if you wanted to get distribution rights for everything on an OSX/Windows installation image, imagine the number of third parties alone, plus the original developers, you'd need to sign off) and then it only really incentivizes work that's commercially appealing, not necessarily the technical best. I dream of a day where people who want to create will be able to get a stipend-- it might cover a modest lifestyle, but ensures they can live the dream of being an artist/musician/programmer without having to clutch tight over every scrap of their output to keep their income streams alive. If we did it through a tax-funded endowment rather than market forces, we could probably finance a lot more creativity that way (think how many touring singers we could finance at 50k per year for the price of one Taylor Swift, or how many programmers we could hire to work om their passion projects in database theory for what is currently being spent on Oracle licenses.)

zozbot234 7y ago

In addition to what the other commenter said about crowdfunding, celebrities now get most of their money from sponsorship deals, not their actual creative activity. Yes, you need to be a real superstar to get these deals, but the world of mainstream, "celebrity" creators is driven by superstar dynamics.

VMG 7y ago

Maybe we can figure out how to finance things we like without putting people in prison though.

katbyte 7y ago

I think if copyright was 20, heck 40 years this wouldn’t be such a problem because that would means everything earlier then 1980 would probably be available online for free. Long copyrights just prop up companies and their investors not people.

brownbat 7y ago

I think that's a fair view. The only thing that gives me pause is that we transitioned to a system where individual music tracks are nearly free-on-demand* a decade ago and the sky never fell. There were transition costs, and artists get way more from live performances now, but there's still an industry. More than anything I'd just like to experiment with shorter copyright terms. I don't think the founders were crazy when they set them at around a generation. I agree that it might be risky to blow everything up, but I think there's a lot of bargaining we could do over term lengths that would be pretty harmless. * To a first order approximation. Sure, many artists technically can get something when I pull up a track on YouTube. But if I'm not playing a whole playlist, I might not even see any ads.

dexterdog 7y ago

Hardly. Top acts make 10s of millions per month today. If people didn't have to spend money on the music itself they would probably spend even more for tickets and merchandise.

matheusmoreira 7y ago

> I also have to admit that this creates a society I like, with talented wealthy celebrities, and a large population of people who make their living in and around the industry. What should we value more: hacker principles or phony outdated business models that aren't compatible with the realities of the digital age? Copyright was created back when industrial capacity was required in order to make copies at scale. People had to own stuff like printing presses in order to infringe copyright at a scale that caused any damage. This is no longer the case. Copyright infringement is trivial now. It's as easy as copy paste. To solve this, the copyright industry intends to lock us out of computing. They think unlimited computers are too powerful for mere citizens like us and we should have access to nothing but limited versions that can execute nothing but predefined functions approved by them. The mere existence of copyright is an existential threat to hackers and their values. If the preservation of free computing and internet requires sacrificing the entertainment industry, then so be it. The alternative is to sacrifice free computing. Due to the existence of subversive technologies such as encryption, governments have been increasingly adopting the same perspective as the copyright industry.