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Lets say that all of the earths water becomes polluted except for an infinite well that only you have access to. Do you not have the right to get paid for it? S
by ouid 6y ago
Lets say that all of the earths water becomes polluted except for an infinite well that only you have access to. Do you not have the right to get paid for it? Shouldn't you get paid something like the value added to humanity? So, everything? You should get paid everything?
What if the situation were different, and there where billions of people searching for infinite wells when all of the water became polluted and you were the lucky one to find it. Do you deserve everything now? How else were you supposed to have been incentivized to search for infinite wells if not for the possibility that everything would be yours upon finding it.
Alright, what if it weren't water? What if it were something that, instead of keeping you alive, just made life worth living? I reckon you probably couldn't get everything for it, but surely you could get a lot.
Does that seem like a bad system to you? I tell you what. I have a lot of money, I'll pay you to go searching for the infinite well of happiness (you can't survive on credit forever), and in exchange, it becomes mine when you find it, and then I can sell it for everything.
The premise that monopoly rights on distribution are necessary to incentivize the searching is pretty severely undermined by the fact that those monopoly rights are aggregated by companies which incentivize the searching via other means.
- lawnchair_larry 6y agoYou’re comparing a routine transaction of paying someone for their performance, to an unrealistic hypothetical involving the monopolization of a critical resource required to survive more than 3 days. It’s hard to take that argument seriously. You’re misusing the word monopoly. Everyone has a monopoly on their own labor. But they don’t have a monopoly on music, and neither does Metallica. You’re not entitled to a man’s song and dance under any circumstances that don’t involve him entering into a mutually agreeable transaction with you. If this makes life not worth living, hopefully you can find someone else willing to accept your offer of giving them nothing in exchange for it. If you can’t, well, tough shit I guess. You still don’t deserve it for free. It’s not Lars’ problem if you will die without his music.
- ouid 6y agoI'm not talking about a transaction where someone performs for me, that's not what copyright refers to, I'm talking about an infinite well. And the comparison was between any infinite well and an infinite well of water. Granting someone scarcity rights on an unscarce resources is inefficient. Society would, instantaneously, produce a lot more value if all of the things that were free to reproduce were reproduced at the quantity demanded. The question of copyright has ALWAYS been one of incentive, and I think my argument to that point is pretty clear. Further, I am not misusing the word monopoly. Copyright is precisely monopoly distribution rights.