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There's already a MASSIVE amount of free art and culture on the internet, with very loose copyright. There's also a ton of original fiction and art for cheap,

There's already a MASSIVE amount of free art and culture on the internet, with very loose copyright. There's also a ton of original fiction and art for cheap, existing within the realm of copyright but outside of the "IP titans" of Disney, etc. What more renaissance do you want? The ability to put Spiderman in even more stuff? (Shit, even this already exists!) EDIT: downvoted, but seriously: I can spend 10 bucks a month on Spotify today and get an order of magnitude more variety and depth of non-major-label music - ON DEMAND - than I could've gotten thirty years ago for practically any amount of money.

anigbrowl 3y ago
Great for consumers, not so great for artists. Spotify and most other platforms are MITM attacks, they just hit social technology rather than silicon. There are whole books that describe and lionize the process of platform construction and preventing the establishment of direct communication between producer and consumer. Entrepreneur literally means 'bringer between' which describes the traditional mode of trade perfectly - I prefer to go to a farmer's market and buy 10 different kinds of food there than visit 10 individual farms. But as entrepreneurship moves toward exclusive distribution agreements and other contractual infrastructure, it devolves into rent-seeking.
- majormajor 3y ago
  I don't think getting rid of copyright would help musicians there, though. In the movie/TV world, today's exclusivity deals have pros and cons for artists, if you mean to highlight negative effects of copyright on artists in that regard (but how does that compare to the compensation from torrents, still)? But in the music world, there's much less platform exclusivity. (Copyright-aside, myself not having time to manage direct relationships with hundreds of musicians/bands is a good reason we still need the Spotifys of the world, though. And again, yesterday's middlemen were even more restrictive.) But I'm still really just waiting for someone in the "copyright is ruining culture" camp to tell me what exactly they want that isn't being catered to today, that is blocked by copyright? (In the US - internationally distribution systems have a lot of roadblocks so the answer becomes "access to certain pieces of foreign content at all")
  - anigbrowl 3y ago
    And again, yesterday's middlemen were even more restrictive. I slightly disagree, in that record labels had one great virtue despite their faults: they'd give promising artists an advance and help them network with producers, graphic artists and so on. Most musicians today need to invest a lot of time in being their own recording engineers and so on just to make out of the gate. The big labels were notoriously predatory, but smaller labels did and continue to provide a lot of value to artists.

anigbrowl 3y ago

Great for consumers, not so great for artists. Spotify and most other platforms are MITM attacks, they just hit social technology rather than silicon. There are whole books that describe and lionize the process of platform construction and preventing the establishment of direct communication between producer and consumer. Entrepreneur literally means 'bringer between' which describes the traditional mode of trade perfectly - I prefer to go to a farmer's market and buy 10 different kinds of food there than visit 10 individual farms. But as entrepreneurship moves toward exclusive distribution agreements and other contractual infrastructure, it devolves into rent-seeking.

majormajor 3y ago
I don't think getting rid of copyright would help musicians there, though. In the movie/TV world, today's exclusivity deals have pros and cons for artists, if you mean to highlight negative effects of copyright on artists in that regard (but how does that compare to the compensation from torrents, still)? But in the music world, there's much less platform exclusivity. (Copyright-aside, myself not having time to manage direct relationships with hundreds of musicians/bands is a good reason we still need the Spotifys of the world, though. And again, yesterday's middlemen were even more restrictive.) But I'm still really just waiting for someone in the "copyright is ruining culture" camp to tell me what exactly they want that isn't being catered to today, that is blocked by copyright? (In the US - internationally distribution systems have a lot of roadblocks so the answer becomes "access to certain pieces of foreign content at all")
- anigbrowl 3y ago
  And again, yesterday's middlemen were even more restrictive. I slightly disagree, in that record labels had one great virtue despite their faults: they'd give promising artists an advance and help them network with producers, graphic artists and so on. Most musicians today need to invest a lot of time in being their own recording engineers and so on just to make out of the gate. The big labels were notoriously predatory, but smaller labels did and continue to provide a lot of value to artists.