14 ms·

I wonder if RIAA lawyers believe themselves productive members of society, or if they recognize themselves as the parasites they are.

jacquesm 6y ago
They see themselves as the last bastion of decency in a world full of violation.
- contravariant 6y ago
  This is neither here nor there but Nobel Prize winner Gerard 't Hooft has written an opinion piece on wrong-way drivers in science who seem convinced that everyone else is going the wrong way [1] (it's in Dutch unfortunately, but then the Dutch the word 'spookrider' (lit. 'ghostrider') is a lot cooler than 'wrong-way driver' IMHO). It's a concept that's somehow always stuck with me whenever I hear about people who seem convinced everyone else is wrong. [1]: https://webspace.science.uu.nl/~hooft101/spookrijders.html https://webspace.science.uu.nl/~hooft101/spookrijders.html
  - codetrotter 6y ago
    Yeah but sometimes it really is everyone else that is wrong. For example, when most people used to think the world was flat.
    - bigbubba 6y ago
      'Everybody' thinks RMS is wrong. He has the worst case of Cassandra's curse I've ever heard of. But I think it tends to not work like this. Incidentally, the flat earth thing is mostly a myth; literate people have know the earth is round since the ancient Greeks figured it out. Columbus was ridiculed for thinking the Earth was smaller than it really is (his critics were right) and the only reason his trip didn't end badly for him is shear dumb luck in running into another continent in his quest to reach Asia the looooong way around.
      - drilldrive 6y ago
        What is RMS?
        detaro 6y ago
        Richard Stallman
      - jacquesm 6y ago
        Doubly lucky because if not for that continent he likely wouldn't have made it all the way, a trip about four times further!
    - GuB-42 6y ago
      That educated people believed that the Earth was flat is largely a myth. Not only people knew the Earth was round since antiquity, but they also had a good idea about its diameter. Heliocentrism was a bit more debated but for good reasons. Early heliocentric models were actually worse than contemporary geocentric models to calculate the motion of planets. All that to say that "everyone else is wrong" doesn't happen often in practice, at least not among educated people. And when that happens, either the evidence is solid and it is generally well accepted or it is not, and there is no reason for others to accept it. The burden or proof is for the one who makes the claim. To go back to heliocentrism, the reason it is the prevailing theory right now is because the model has been refined and now, it matches observation better than older models based en epicycles. It is not because of some philosophical reason about our place in the universe.
      - 0xdeadbeefbabe 6y ago
        > That educated people believed that the Earth was flat is largely a myth. And this is one of those rarer times that everyone is wrong who believes this myth, although maybe they are uneducated too. All this is to say go team iconoclasm.
  - 411111111111111 6y ago
    The term ghost rider exists in english as well I think. At least I could find several articles talking about ppl going the wrong way after searching for it + wrong direction. I'm not a native speaker however
  - jaggirs 6y ago
    I think he is right. But I don't like his tone. The whole writeup is a tantrum on why you should stick to "well known" facts. Which sounds to me too much like asserting the truth of things without questioning them. Yes, there are a lot of fools out there whith a spookrijder complex that are a detriment to science. And I would assume a well-known professor would rightly get tired of their emails. He only shortly adresses at the end that radical ideas are precisely what is needed for progress in science. I do not think this dismissive mentality does the situation any good. If someone comes with a radical but stupid idea, you need to first recognize the merit in the idea, and then show why it is wrong. Bashing someone with "you cannot create free energy" will only encourage him to waste his time trying to prove you wrong. I suspect a lot of these spookrijders are curious and fairly smart people, but who's ideas where offhandedly dismissed by a teacher one too many times.
  - jacquesm 6y ago
    Spookrijder translates literally into ghostrider, which is a lot nicer than wrong-way driver. The joke here goes that on the radio there is an all-bands emergency announcement about a ghostrider on A2, the main artery of the country, between Amsterdam and Utrecht. In one of the vehicles on that road someone mutters 'A ghostrider? Bloody idiots, there's thousands of them!'.
ForHackernews 6y ago
Everyone thinks they're saving the world. I'm sure the RIAA sleeps soundly knowing they're defending the rights of creative individuals to make a living and holding the line against the scourge of amoral nihilistic pirates.
- andrepd 6y ago
  I'm much more cynical. They know they're bastards but they make far far too much money to care.
  - ForHackernews 6y ago
    I doubt it. Every time there's an article on here about the latest outrage from $FaceGoogzon there's no shortage of well-paid rationalisers in the comments. I'd expect the same is true of the RIAA. Especially among their legal team: there are far more unseemly clients than the RIAA out there.
  - jacobr1 6y ago
    Everyone is the hero in their own story. Few people actually gleefully play the scoundrel. The ability humans have to self-rationalize is amazing. And even when folks are doing something they know is wrong, often it gets justified in the balance: the victim deserved it, the perpetrator is Robin Hood and proceeds will benefit those who need it more, the action makes up for a historic injustice, etc ...
    - wpietri 6y ago
      People may not play the scoundrel much, but I see plenty of people playing the ronin, the soldier of fortune. E.g., the contract programmer on a 6-month gig where they know the project is fucked, but as long as the check clears, it's not their problem. The sysadmin who doesn't much care what's on the servers. Plenty of others, for sure.
- RobRivera 6y ago
  There's plenty of people out there who simply do X for financial payout Y. As a matter of fact, the financial services sector thrives with such people
johannes1234321 6y ago
In their self view they ensure that artists earn money for their living, thus allow artists to survive. And there is some truth to it. Finding the right balance is hard ... but in my view they "rights holder industry" is too strong indeed.
- grumple 6y ago
  I'd be interested in seeing how much money from their suits gets to the artists, or even to distributors - or what effect on revenue their deterrence causes.
  - bigbubba 6y ago
    Right, these lawyers are parasites sucking blood not just from society in general, but also blood from most of the artists ostensibly represented by the RIAA. If any artists come out ahead from anything the RIAA's lawyers do, it's only the elite already-wealthy ones.
  - redwall_hp 6y ago
    It's not really a secret. The music industry has always been about concerts: radio play (or streaming, which uses the same revenue model) doesn't pay anything and artists get pennies on the dollar for record sales. The RIAA represents record labels more than artists.
  - johannes1234321 6y ago
    For German GEMA (which is working a bit different from RIAA, so can't be fully conapred) there are some numbers on Wikipedia, till 2012: https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gesellschaft_f%C3%BCr_musikalische_Auff%C3%BChrungs-_und_mechanische_Vervielf%C3%A4ltigungsrechte#Umsatz https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gesellschaft_f%C3%BCr_musika... They made 820 million € in revenue, 128M€ are their "costs", 692M€ of that 15% are their fees, remainingnis split between labels and artists and artists got 316.5M€, thus a quite low fraction ... and in German law the creator is theoretically stronger positioned than in US copyright. (Now this isn't 100% fair as analysis, as some of the payments to labels go to artits, as well and labels also do some marketing etc benefiting the artist ... and then there is this weird distribution mechanism where a successful artist gets over proportionally more ... but in the end: "small" artists only get a very tiny part of the cake)
simias 6y ago
This line of questioning on Startup News is quite amusing to me, I must say. How many of us can really pretend to make society a better place?
- madhadron 6y ago
  I work on managed databases. I actually do think that is a positive effect on the world, like many other obscure but important pieces of infrastructure.
- katsura 6y ago
  At least some of us don't try to actively make it harder/worse. So that's a plus.
  - Cthulhu_ 6y ago
    I'm convinced the companies considered as 'evil' now didn't think they would at first either. Something something unintended consequences. I mean Reddit; bastion of free speech or platform for hate speech? (they cracked down on that over the years) Dropbox; File synchronization and sharing platform or child porn exchange? Airbnb; Great way to find an affordable place to stay and / or rent out unused room, or platform for dodgy landlords that scam people with pretty pictures? Coinbase: Platform for libertarian wet dream crypto exchange, or platform for laundering your ill-gotten gains? Just to name a few YC examples. Everything can be used for bad things and make the world a worse place, and they don't always do the right thing.
    - kortilla 6y ago
      But who goes into being an RIAA lawyer position thinking it’s going to be good at first? You have to have believed in the RIAA’s stance from the get-go because it hasn’t really changed.
      - HelloNurse 6y ago
        Or you have to be a morally and professionally substandard lawyer who cannot find a better job.
blueline 6y ago
yeah unlike us hackers who are saving the world with targeted ads and food delivery
- bigbubba 6y ago
  Technology has had an impact on nearly any industry you can think of. As such, there is no shortage of tech work outside of ad tech. Ten years ago I worked on ad tech shit for Amazon, but I quit when I realized that made me a parasite. I don't work in food delivery, but I'd say getting a pizza from point A to B is a hell of a lot more productive than being a lawyer for the RIAA.
  - wpietri 6y ago
    Yeah, same. Years ago I did work for a medical advertising company. They were lovely, smart, creative people. But the more I thought about it, the more I didn't want to aid for-profit manipulation of people. I've stayed away from ads since, and never regretted it.
  - _jal 6y ago
    Appified pizza delivery is rent seeking. There is zero need for a multinational between hungry people and food delivery. Inserting them raises costs, lowers service quality, and lowers revenue to restaurants. Off topic, but I would like to note this thread's congruence to Snow Crash: There's only four things we do better than anyone else: music movies microcode (software) high-speed pizza delivery
    - bigbubba 6y ago
      I was thinking more along the line of the people who actually deliver the pizza. It's an honest job, unlike being an RIAA lawyer or ad tech programmer. But next to either of those, even delivery app developers are saints.
    - slugiscool99 6y ago
      Snowcrash was kinda crazy in how it predicted where things would go.
Yetanfou 6y ago
I wonder this about a large majority of corporate lawyers who somehow seem like members of a parasitic species which has found a host which they can exploit for resources by inducing changes in their behaviour, comparable to the way the Toxoplasma parasite makes mice less scared of cats [1]. [1] https://www.pnas.org/content/104/15/6442 https://www.pnas.org/content/104/15/6442
rch 6y ago
I think if people are paid well enough, they can convince themselves that the harm they do is a net positive because it demonstrates that the system needs to change.
ardy42 6y ago
> I wonder if RIAA lawyers believe themselves productive members of society, or if they recognize themselves as the parasites they are. At least one way they could rationalize their actions is by taking an outlandish but not uncommon view of property rights: that no one would bother to create anything without being able to profit from ownership of it, and the more they can profit the more they'll create. There's also the even more outlandish view that whatever the market does is good for society by definition, so if the market pays you to do something you can assume it's beneficial to society.
oconnor663 6y ago
I mean, if we believe it benefits us to have copyright laws, then obviously it benefits us to have copyright lawyers, and the rest is just implementation details. I'd wager 99% of people believe copyright laws are a net good.
- nybble41 6y ago
  > I'd wager 99% of people believe copyright laws are a net good. If asked, a majority might say that (though IMHO nowhere near 99%). Their actions indicate otherwise, however, and a person's beliefs are better judged by their actions than by their words.
0xdeadbeefbabe 6y ago
Things could be much worse; it's remarkable they don't sue about being called a parasites.

jacquesm 6y ago

They see themselves as the last bastion of decency in a world full of violation.

contravariant 6y ago
This is neither here nor there but Nobel Prize winner Gerard 't Hooft has written an opinion piece on wrong-way drivers in science who seem convinced that everyone else is going the wrong way [1] (it's in Dutch unfortunately, but then the Dutch the word 'spookrider' (lit. 'ghostrider') is a lot cooler than 'wrong-way driver' IMHO). It's a concept that's somehow always stuck with me whenever I hear about people who seem convinced everyone else is wrong. [1]: https://webspace.science.uu.nl/~hooft101/spookrijders.html https://webspace.science.uu.nl/~hooft101/spookrijders.html
- codetrotter 6y ago
  Yeah but sometimes it really is everyone else that is wrong. For example, when most people used to think the world was flat.
  - bigbubba 6y ago
    'Everybody' thinks RMS is wrong. He has the worst case of Cassandra's curse I've ever heard of. But I think it tends to not work like this. Incidentally, the flat earth thing is mostly a myth; literate people have know the earth is round since the ancient Greeks figured it out. Columbus was ridiculed for thinking the Earth was smaller than it really is (his critics were right) and the only reason his trip didn't end badly for him is shear dumb luck in running into another continent in his quest to reach Asia the looooong way around.
    - drilldrive 6y ago
      What is RMS?
      - detaro 6y ago
        Richard Stallman
    - jacquesm 6y ago
      Doubly lucky because if not for that continent he likely wouldn't have made it all the way, a trip about four times further!
  - GuB-42 6y ago
    That educated people believed that the Earth was flat is largely a myth. Not only people knew the Earth was round since antiquity, but they also had a good idea about its diameter. Heliocentrism was a bit more debated but for good reasons. Early heliocentric models were actually worse than contemporary geocentric models to calculate the motion of planets. All that to say that "everyone else is wrong" doesn't happen often in practice, at least not among educated people. And when that happens, either the evidence is solid and it is generally well accepted or it is not, and there is no reason for others to accept it. The burden or proof is for the one who makes the claim. To go back to heliocentrism, the reason it is the prevailing theory right now is because the model has been refined and now, it matches observation better than older models based en epicycles. It is not because of some philosophical reason about our place in the universe.
    - 0xdeadbeefbabe 6y ago
      > That educated people believed that the Earth was flat is largely a myth. And this is one of those rarer times that everyone is wrong who believes this myth, although maybe they are uneducated too. All this is to say go team iconoclasm.
- 411111111111111 6y ago
  The term ghost rider exists in english as well I think. At least I could find several articles talking about ppl going the wrong way after searching for it + wrong direction. I'm not a native speaker however
- jaggirs 6y ago
  I think he is right. But I don't like his tone. The whole writeup is a tantrum on why you should stick to "well known" facts. Which sounds to me too much like asserting the truth of things without questioning them. Yes, there are a lot of fools out there whith a spookrijder complex that are a detriment to science. And I would assume a well-known professor would rightly get tired of their emails. He only shortly adresses at the end that radical ideas are precisely what is needed for progress in science. I do not think this dismissive mentality does the situation any good. If someone comes with a radical but stupid idea, you need to first recognize the merit in the idea, and then show why it is wrong. Bashing someone with "you cannot create free energy" will only encourage him to waste his time trying to prove you wrong. I suspect a lot of these spookrijders are curious and fairly smart people, but who's ideas where offhandedly dismissed by a teacher one too many times.
- jacquesm 6y ago
  Spookrijder translates literally into ghostrider, which is a lot nicer than wrong-way driver. The joke here goes that on the radio there is an all-bands emergency announcement about a ghostrider on A2, the main artery of the country, between Amsterdam and Utrecht. In one of the vehicles on that road someone mutters 'A ghostrider? Bloody idiots, there's thousands of them!'.

ForHackernews 6y ago

Everyone thinks they're saving the world. I'm sure the RIAA sleeps soundly knowing they're defending the rights of creative individuals to make a living and holding the line against the scourge of amoral nihilistic pirates.

andrepd 6y ago
I'm much more cynical. They know they're bastards but they make far far too much money to care.
- ForHackernews 6y ago
  I doubt it. Every time there's an article on here about the latest outrage from $FaceGoogzon there's no shortage of well-paid rationalisers in the comments. I'd expect the same is true of the RIAA. Especially among their legal team: there are far more unseemly clients than the RIAA out there.
- jacobr1 6y ago
  Everyone is the hero in their own story. Few people actually gleefully play the scoundrel. The ability humans have to self-rationalize is amazing. And even when folks are doing something they know is wrong, often it gets justified in the balance: the victim deserved it, the perpetrator is Robin Hood and proceeds will benefit those who need it more, the action makes up for a historic injustice, etc ...
  - wpietri 6y ago
    People may not play the scoundrel much, but I see plenty of people playing the ronin, the soldier of fortune. E.g., the contract programmer on a 6-month gig where they know the project is fucked, but as long as the check clears, it's not their problem. The sysadmin who doesn't much care what's on the servers. Plenty of others, for sure.
RobRivera 6y ago
There's plenty of people out there who simply do X for financial payout Y. As a matter of fact, the financial services sector thrives with such people

johannes1234321 6y ago

In their self view they ensure that artists earn money for their living, thus allow artists to survive. And there is some truth to it. Finding the right balance is hard ... but in my view they "rights holder industry" is too strong indeed.

grumple 6y ago
I'd be interested in seeing how much money from their suits gets to the artists, or even to distributors - or what effect on revenue their deterrence causes.
- bigbubba 6y ago
  Right, these lawyers are parasites sucking blood not just from society in general, but also blood from most of the artists ostensibly represented by the RIAA. If any artists come out ahead from anything the RIAA's lawyers do, it's only the elite already-wealthy ones.
- redwall_hp 6y ago
  It's not really a secret. The music industry has always been about concerts: radio play (or streaming, which uses the same revenue model) doesn't pay anything and artists get pennies on the dollar for record sales. The RIAA represents record labels more than artists.
- johannes1234321 6y ago
  For German GEMA (which is working a bit different from RIAA, so can't be fully conapred) there are some numbers on Wikipedia, till 2012: https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gesellschaft_f%C3%BCr_musikalische_Auff%C3%BChrungs-_und_mechanische_Vervielf%C3%A4ltigungsrechte#Umsatz https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gesellschaft_f%C3%BCr_musika... They made 820 million € in revenue, 128M€ are their "costs", 692M€ of that 15% are their fees, remainingnis split between labels and artists and artists got 316.5M€, thus a quite low fraction ... and in German law the creator is theoretically stronger positioned than in US copyright. (Now this isn't 100% fair as analysis, as some of the payments to labels go to artits, as well and labels also do some marketing etc benefiting the artist ... and then there is this weird distribution mechanism where a successful artist gets over proportionally more ... but in the end: "small" artists only get a very tiny part of the cake)

simias 6y ago

This line of questioning on Startup News is quite amusing to me, I must say. How many of us can really pretend to make society a better place?

madhadron 6y ago
I work on managed databases. I actually do think that is a positive effect on the world, like many other obscure but important pieces of infrastructure.
katsura 6y ago
At least some of us don't try to actively make it harder/worse. So that's a plus.
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  I'm convinced the companies considered as 'evil' now didn't think they would at first either. Something something unintended consequences. I mean Reddit; bastion of free speech or platform for hate speech? (they cracked down on that over the years) Dropbox; File synchronization and sharing platform or child porn exchange? Airbnb; Great way to find an affordable place to stay and / or rent out unused room, or platform for dodgy landlords that scam people with pretty pictures? Coinbase: Platform for libertarian wet dream crypto exchange, or platform for laundering your ill-gotten gains? Just to name a few YC examples. Everything can be used for bad things and make the world a worse place, and they don't always do the right thing.
  - kortilla 6y ago
    But who goes into being an RIAA lawyer position thinking it’s going to be good at first? You have to have believed in the RIAA’s stance from the get-go because it hasn’t really changed.
    - HelloNurse 6y ago
      Or you have to be a morally and professionally substandard lawyer who cannot find a better job.

blueline 6y ago

yeah unlike us hackers who are saving the world with targeted ads and food delivery

bigbubba 6y ago
Technology has had an impact on nearly any industry you can think of. As such, there is no shortage of tech work outside of ad tech. Ten years ago I worked on ad tech shit for Amazon, but I quit when I realized that made me a parasite. I don't work in food delivery, but I'd say getting a pizza from point A to B is a hell of a lot more productive than being a lawyer for the RIAA.
- wpietri 6y ago
  Yeah, same. Years ago I did work for a medical advertising company. They were lovely, smart, creative people. But the more I thought about it, the more I didn't want to aid for-profit manipulation of people. I've stayed away from ads since, and never regretted it.
- _jal 6y ago
  Appified pizza delivery is rent seeking. There is zero need for a multinational between hungry people and food delivery. Inserting them raises costs, lowers service quality, and lowers revenue to restaurants. Off topic, but I would like to note this thread's congruence to Snow Crash: There's only four things we do better than anyone else: music movies microcode (software) high-speed pizza delivery
  - bigbubba 6y ago
    I was thinking more along the line of the people who actually deliver the pizza. It's an honest job, unlike being an RIAA lawyer or ad tech programmer. But next to either of those, even delivery app developers are saints.
  - slugiscool99 6y ago
    Snowcrash was kinda crazy in how it predicted where things would go.

Yetanfou 6y ago

I wonder this about a large majority of corporate lawyers who somehow seem like members of a parasitic species which has found a host which they can exploit for resources by inducing changes in their behaviour, comparable to the way the Toxoplasma parasite makes mice less scared of cats [1]. [1] https://www.pnas.org/content/104/15/6442 https://www.pnas.org/content/104/15/6442

rch 6y ago

I think if people are paid well enough, they can convince themselves that the harm they do is a net positive because it demonstrates that the system needs to change.

ardy42 6y ago

> I wonder if RIAA lawyers believe themselves productive members of society, or if they recognize themselves as the parasites they are. At least one way they could rationalize their actions is by taking an outlandish but not uncommon view of property rights: that no one would bother to create anything without being able to profit from ownership of it, and the more they can profit the more they'll create. There's also the even more outlandish view that whatever the market does is good for society by definition, so if the market pays you to do something you can assume it's beneficial to society.

oconnor663 6y ago

I mean, if we believe it benefits us to have copyright laws, then obviously it benefits us to have copyright lawyers, and the rest is just implementation details. I'd wager 99% of people believe copyright laws are a net good.

nybble41 6y ago
> I'd wager 99% of people believe copyright laws are a net good. If asked, a majority might say that (though IMHO nowhere near 99%). Their actions indicate otherwise, however, and a person's beliefs are better judged by their actions than by their words.

0xdeadbeefbabe 6y ago

Things could be much worse; it's remarkable they don't sue about being called a parasites.