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Copyright law has a place, but as it currently stands, it doesn't protect independent artists sufficiently, while giving large media firms disproportionate powe

Copyright law has a place, but as it currently stands, it doesn't protect independent artists sufficiently, while giving large media firms disproportionate power. This ultimately hurts small content producers a lot more than it helps them, because they have to compete with companies much larger than them that can afford to use their economies of scale to bully independent artists into submission. The fact that it's so much hassle to buy something just goes to show that Google has no incentive to compete on product, where the product is the marketplace itself. Piracy is an indication that the market has failed to produce a satisfactory distribution mechanism, and allowing large corporations to use legal action to shelter themselves from having to improve their offering hurts both consumers and small businesses. "Piracy is a service problem." - Gabe Newell

matheusmoreira 6y ago
> Copyright law has a place Yes, in a pre-computer and pre-internet society. It has no place in the 21st century. > allowing large corporations to use legal action to shelter themselves from having to improve their offering hurts both consumers and small businesses You know what sucks? Wanting to buy something, being willing to pay for it and finding out that what I want is not available to me. Because of copyright. Every day I log into Netflix and search for something I want to watch, Netflix autocompletes the movie's name and yet it doesn't actually show up in the results. It's there, just not available to me. I lost count of the number of lesser known works I wanted to view but couldn't because they aren't popular and therefore not profitable. I don't even try to find them anymore. Somehow, copyright stops the service from offering the content to me. I suppose I'm part of some irrelevant market segment they don't care about. So it's not just a service problem.
- s1artibartfast 6y ago
  >You know what sucks? Wanting to buy something, being willing to pay for it and finding out that what I want is not available to me. Because of copyright. This seems to me to be a very strange mindset. Someone else has created content you want, is not offered for sale to you, so you it is in your right to seal it? What makes this OK and where does it end?
  - philipov 6y ago
    > What makes this OK and where does it end? What makes it okay is that intellectual property can be copied infinitely without depriving the original owner of it, and the fact that they refuse to sell it to you means you're not even depriving them of potential income, so there's no way of claiming there was any damage done. It ends when you start talking about actual property that has limited physical supply. Intellectual property isn't real. It naturally has infinite supply, so its market value should be zero.
    - brigandish 6y ago
      Its market value should be whatever people in the market are willing to pay for it given that the owners are willing to sell it at that price. There are lots of things that have artificial scarcity through the simple act of ownership and this is one of them.
      - banannaise 6y ago
        And artificial scarcity is just kind of... fine? We don't mind people intentionally destroying (or locking away) things just to increase the monetary value of other things?
        brigandish 6y ago
        Why would you assign malign intention to it? The facts are that there is scarcity and that where there is scarcity and demand then the monetary value will rise above zero. Just because someone can make something unlimited doesn't mean they should, especially to satisfy your desires - that's the job of you and your hard work or your wallet. The same goes for the "it won't deprive you of anything" argument. There are plenty of things we all own that if someone borrowed it wouldn't necessarily negatively affect us, but that doesn't mean that we should lend them while we're not using them, especially not for free simply because it would satisfy someone else's desires and pocket if it were free. There should be better delivery of items given the tech we have (it's better than it was but could be much better); there should be copyright laws that benefit the actual creator more, not just huge corporations (these appear to be getting worse); the price of media is often too high (though again, it's a lot better than it was); none of these are solved by pretending we could or should live in a communist utopia.
- philipov 6y ago
  > I suppose I'm part of some irrelevant market segment they don't care about. So it's not just a service problem. That is exactly what a service problem looks like. The service problem is caused by having strong copyright available to large corporations that can use it as a profit optimization tool. The role of copyright should be to protect small content creators, but that is not how it is implemented.
kelnos 6y ago
> "Piracy is a service problem." - Gabe Newell Yup. I'd been a relatively happy HBO Now user for years, but just canceled because they recently inexplicably broke playback on Linux browsers (which had worked properly for years). I had a useless back-and-forth with a customer service rep about how increasing friction like this -- especially with someone who is perfectly willing and able to pay for the service -- just drives people to piracy.
- godelski 6y ago
  I had this problem with Netflix for awhile. I could play it in Linux Firefox if I switched my user agentstring. Contacted them saying "Hey, just unblock the useragent." They were insistent that that's not what they were doing and that they didn't block linux or Firefox. Even got pushed up a tier. A month later they unblocked it, but still, why block it in the first place?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

matheusmoreira 6y ago

> Copyright law has a place Yes, in a pre-computer and pre-internet society. It has no place in the 21st century. > allowing large corporations to use legal action to shelter themselves from having to improve their offering hurts both consumers and small businesses You know what sucks? Wanting to buy something, being willing to pay for it and finding out that what I want is not available to me. Because of copyright. Every day I log into Netflix and search for something I want to watch, Netflix autocompletes the movie's name and yet it doesn't actually show up in the results. It's there, just not available to me. I lost count of the number of lesser known works I wanted to view but couldn't because they aren't popular and therefore not profitable. I don't even try to find them anymore. Somehow, copyright stops the service from offering the content to me. I suppose I'm part of some irrelevant market segment they don't care about. So it's not just a service problem.

s1artibartfast 6y ago
>You know what sucks? Wanting to buy something, being willing to pay for it and finding out that what I want is not available to me. Because of copyright. This seems to me to be a very strange mindset. Someone else has created content you want, is not offered for sale to you, so you it is in your right to seal it? What makes this OK and where does it end?
- philipov 6y ago
  > What makes this OK and where does it end? What makes it okay is that intellectual property can be copied infinitely without depriving the original owner of it, and the fact that they refuse to sell it to you means you're not even depriving them of potential income, so there's no way of claiming there was any damage done. It ends when you start talking about actual property that has limited physical supply. Intellectual property isn't real. It naturally has infinite supply, so its market value should be zero.
  - brigandish 6y ago
    Its market value should be whatever people in the market are willing to pay for it given that the owners are willing to sell it at that price. There are lots of things that have artificial scarcity through the simple act of ownership and this is one of them.
    - banannaise 6y ago
      And artificial scarcity is just kind of... fine? We don't mind people intentionally destroying (or locking away) things just to increase the monetary value of other things?
      - brigandish 6y ago
        Why would you assign malign intention to it? The facts are that there is scarcity and that where there is scarcity and demand then the monetary value will rise above zero. Just because someone can make something unlimited doesn't mean they should, especially to satisfy your desires - that's the job of you and your hard work or your wallet. The same goes for the "it won't deprive you of anything" argument. There are plenty of things we all own that if someone borrowed it wouldn't necessarily negatively affect us, but that doesn't mean that we should lend them while we're not using them, especially not for free simply because it would satisfy someone else's desires and pocket if it were free. There should be better delivery of items given the tech we have (it's better than it was but could be much better); there should be copyright laws that benefit the actual creator more, not just huge corporations (these appear to be getting worse); the price of media is often too high (though again, it's a lot better than it was); none of these are solved by pretending we could or should live in a communist utopia.
philipov 6y ago
> I suppose I'm part of some irrelevant market segment they don't care about. So it's not just a service problem. That is exactly what a service problem looks like. The service problem is caused by having strong copyright available to large corporations that can use it as a profit optimization tool. The role of copyright should be to protect small content creators, but that is not how it is implemented.

kelnos 6y ago

> "Piracy is a service problem." - Gabe Newell Yup. I'd been a relatively happy HBO Now user for years, but just canceled because they recently inexplicably broke playback on Linux browsers (which had worked properly for years). I had a useless back-and-forth with a customer service rep about how increasing friction like this -- especially with someone who is perfectly willing and able to pay for the service -- just drives people to piracy.

godelski 6y ago
I had this problem with Netflix for awhile. I could play it in Linux Firefox if I switched my user agentstring. Contacted them saying "Hey, just unblock the useragent." They were insistent that that's not what they were doing and that they didn't block linux or Firefox. Even got pushed up a tier. A month later they unblocked it, but still, why block it in the first place?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]