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It took me a while to be convinced that copyright is strictly a bad idea, but these two articles were very convincing to me. https://drewdevault.com/2020/08/24

It took me a while to be convinced that copyright is strictly a bad idea, but these two articles were very convincing to me. https://drewdevault.com/2020/08/24/Alice-in-Wonderland.html https://drewdevault.com/2020/08/24/Alice-in-Wonderland.html https://drewdevault.com/2021/12/23/Sustainable-creativity-post-copyright.html https://drewdevault.com/2021/12/23/Sustainable-creativity-po...

SketchySeaBeast 1y ago
The first article is saying that "Copyright is bad because of corporations", and I can kind of get behind that, especially the very long term copyrights that have lost the intent, but the second article says that artists will be happier without copyright if we just solve capitalism first. I don't know about you, but that reads to me like "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch you must first invent the universe". If an artist produces a work they should have the rights to that work. If I self-publish a novel and then penguin decides that novel is really good and they want to publish it, without copyright they'd just do that, totally swamping me with their clout and punishing my ever putting the work out. That's a bad thing.
- Zambyte 1y ago
  > If an artist produces a work they should have the rights to that work. That would indeed be nice, but as the article says, that's usually not the case. The rights holder and the author are almost never the same entity in commercial artistic endeavors. I know I'm not the rights holder for my erroneously-considered-art work (software). > If I self-publish a novel and then penguin decides that novel is really good and they want to publish it, without copyright they'd just do that, totally swamping me with their clout and punishing my ever putting the work out. That's a bad thing. Why? You created influential art and its influence was spread. Is that not the point of (good) art?
  - SketchySeaBeast 1y ago
    > The rights holder and the author are almost never the same entity in commercial artistic endeavors. There's definitely problems with corporatization of ownership of these things, I won't disagree. > Why? You created influential art and its influence was spread. Is that not the point of (good) art? Why do we expect artists to be selfless? Do you think Stephen King is still writing only because he loves the art? You don't simply make software because you love it, right? Should people not be able to make money off their effort?
    - Zambyte 1y ago
      > You don't simply make software because you love it, right? I can't speak for Stephen but I absolutely do. I program for fun all the time. > Should people not be able to make money off their effort? Is anyone arguing otherwise?
      - SketchySeaBeast 1y ago
        Removing copyright is removing a lot of the protections that enable users to get paid for their efforts. How would a novelist make money, and why would someone pay them, if their work is free to be copied at will?
        Zambyte 1y ago
        > How would a novelist make money Maybe selling books? Maybe other jobs? The same way that they made money for thousands of years before copyright, really. Books and other arts did exist before copyright! > and why would someone pay them, if their work is free to be copied at will? I don't think it's really a matter of if people will pay them. If their art is good, of course people will pay them. People feel good about paying for an original piece of art. The question is really more about if people will be able to get obscenely rich over being the original creator of some piece of art, to which the answer is it would indeed be less likely.
        SketchySeaBeast 1y ago
  - noirscape 1y ago
    It may surprise you, but artists need to buy things like food, water and pay for their basic necessities like electricity, rent and taxes. Otherwise they die or go bankrupt. In our current society, that means they need some sort of means to make money from their work. Copyright, at least in theory, exists to incentivize the creation of art by protecting an artists ability to monetize it. If you abolish copyright today, under our current economic framework, what will happen is that people create less art because it goes from a (semi-)viable career to just being completely worthless to pursue. It's simply not a feasible option unless you fundamentally restructure society (which is a different argument entirely.)
    - Zambyte 1y ago
      Amazing. Have you considered reading the articles I linked? They aren't even that long.
      - noirscape 1y ago
        I did and they aren't convincing. The first is an argument of how a popular interpretation of a work still under copyright can subsume the fact the original work is in the public domain, using Alice in Wonderland as an example. (I also happen to think it's a particularly terrible example - if you want to make this argument, The Little Mermaid is by far the stronger version of this argument.) It also misidentifies Disney as the copyright boogeyman, which is a pretty common categorical error. (Disney had very little to do with the length of US copyright. The length of copyright is pretty much entirely the product of geopolitics and international agreements, not Disney.) Its an interesting argument, but not one I find particularly convincing for abolishing copyright, at most shortening the length of it. (Which I do believe is needed.) The second one is the "just solve capitalism and we can abolish copyright entirely" argument which is... a total non-starter. Yes, in an idealized utopia, we don't need capitalism or copyright and people can do things just because they want to and society provides for the artist just because humans all value art just that much. It's a fun utopic ideal, but there's many steps between the current state of the world and "you can abolish the idea of copyright", and we aren't even close to that state yet.
- jasonjayr 1y ago
  But in this idealized copyright-free world, those self-publishing companies could just as easily take Penguin's top sellers and reproduce those. The thing that'd set apart these companies are the services + quality of their work.
  - SketchySeaBeast 1y ago
    Is not part of the quality of the work the contents of the book? What are these companies putting within the pages? We've taken the greatest and longest part of the effort and made it meaningless.
- int_19h 1y ago
  The problem of "how do artists earn enough money to eat?" is legitimate, but I don't think it's a good idea to solve it by making things that inherently don't work like real property to work like it, just so that we can shove them into the same framework. And this is exactly what copyright does - it takes information, which can be copied essentially for free by its very fundamental nature, and tries to make it scarce through legal means solely so that it can be sold as if it were a real good. There are two reasons why it's a problem. The first reason is that any such abstraction is leaky, and those leaks are ripe for abuse. For example, in case of copyright on information, we made it behave like physical property for the consumers, but not for the producers (who still only need to expend resources to create a single work from scratch, and then duplicate it for free while still selling each copy for $$$). This means that selling information is much more lucrative than selling physical things, which is a big reason why our economy is so distorted towards the former now - just look at what the most profitable corporations on the market do. The second reason is that it artificially entrenches capitalism by enmeshing large parts of the economy into those mechanics, even if they aren't naturally a good fit. This then gets used as an argument to prop up the whole arrangement - "we can't change this, it would break too much!".
  - SketchySeaBeast 1y ago
    The end product being inexpensive is a good thing - it means that the producer can sell it well below the cost it took to produce it, otherwise a novel would cost whatever it takes for Stephen King to live for 3 months. I feel like you're shoving all information under the same label. The most profitable corporations are trading in information that isn't subject to copyright, and it's facts - how you drive, what you eat, where you live. It's newly generated ideas. Maybe it is in how the data is sorted, but they aren't copyrighting that either. If we're going to overthrow artificial entrenchments of capitalism, I feel like there's better places to start than a lot of copyright. Does it need changes? Absolutely, there's certainly exploitation, but I still don't see "get rid of copyright entirely" as being a good approach. Weirdly, it's one of the places that people are arguing for that. Sometimes the criminal justice system convicts the wrong person, and there should be reform. It's also often criticized as a measure of control for capitalistic oligarchs. Should step one be getting rid of the legal system entirely?
dmonitor 1y ago
You need some mechanism in place to prevent any joe schmoe from spinning up FreeSteam and rehosting the whole thing.
- pitaj 1y ago
  There can be many incentives for people to use official sources: early access, easy updates, live events, etc
  - Zambyte 1y ago
    "Early access" doesn't work in this context, but yes for the other means.
  - dmonitor 1y ago
    There's no reason FreeSteam can't also do that, though. There's no copyright, so just have an extension of the steamapp that changes it to point to your server when downloading games / checking ownership. Piracy stops being a service issue when pirates are allowed to make nice services.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- zelphirkalt 1y ago
  Just to challenge that idea: Why?
  - dmonitor 1y ago
    People would use that service instead of Steam, publishers would add annoying DRM to mitigate lost sales, etc etc. The current illegality of the piracy website prevents them from offering a service as nice as Steam. It has to be a sketchy torrent hub that changes URLs every few months. If it was as easy as changing the url to freesteampowered.com or installing an extension inside the steam launcher, the whole "piracy is a service issue" argument loses all relevance. The industry would become unsustainable without DRM (which would be technically legal to crack, but also more incentivized to make harder to crack).

SketchySeaBeast 1y ago

The first article is saying that "Copyright is bad because of corporations", and I can kind of get behind that, especially the very long term copyrights that have lost the intent, but the second article says that artists will be happier without copyright if we just solve capitalism first. I don't know about you, but that reads to me like "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch you must first invent the universe". If an artist produces a work they should have the rights to that work. If I self-publish a novel and then penguin decides that novel is really good and they want to publish it, without copyright they'd just do that, totally swamping me with their clout and punishing my ever putting the work out. That's a bad thing.

Zambyte 1y ago
> If an artist produces a work they should have the rights to that work. That would indeed be nice, but as the article says, that's usually not the case. The rights holder and the author are almost never the same entity in commercial artistic endeavors. I know I'm not the rights holder for my erroneously-considered-art work (software). > If I self-publish a novel and then penguin decides that novel is really good and they want to publish it, without copyright they'd just do that, totally swamping me with their clout and punishing my ever putting the work out. That's a bad thing. Why? You created influential art and its influence was spread. Is that not the point of (good) art?
- SketchySeaBeast 1y ago
  > The rights holder and the author are almost never the same entity in commercial artistic endeavors. There's definitely problems with corporatization of ownership of these things, I won't disagree. > Why? You created influential art and its influence was spread. Is that not the point of (good) art? Why do we expect artists to be selfless? Do you think Stephen King is still writing only because he loves the art? You don't simply make software because you love it, right? Should people not be able to make money off their effort?
  - Zambyte 1y ago
    > You don't simply make software because you love it, right? I can't speak for Stephen but I absolutely do. I program for fun all the time. > Should people not be able to make money off their effort? Is anyone arguing otherwise?
    - SketchySeaBeast 1y ago
      Removing copyright is removing a lot of the protections that enable users to get paid for their efforts. How would a novelist make money, and why would someone pay them, if their work is free to be copied at will?
      - Zambyte 1y ago
        > How would a novelist make money Maybe selling books? Maybe other jobs? The same way that they made money for thousands of years before copyright, really. Books and other arts did exist before copyright! > and why would someone pay them, if their work is free to be copied at will? I don't think it's really a matter of if people will pay them. If their art is good, of course people will pay them. People feel good about paying for an original piece of art. The question is really more about if people will be able to get obscenely rich over being the original creator of some piece of art, to which the answer is it would indeed be less likely.
        SketchySeaBeast 1y ago
- noirscape 1y ago
  It may surprise you, but artists need to buy things like food, water and pay for their basic necessities like electricity, rent and taxes. Otherwise they die or go bankrupt. In our current society, that means they need some sort of means to make money from their work. Copyright, at least in theory, exists to incentivize the creation of art by protecting an artists ability to monetize it. If you abolish copyright today, under our current economic framework, what will happen is that people create less art because it goes from a (semi-)viable career to just being completely worthless to pursue. It's simply not a feasible option unless you fundamentally restructure society (which is a different argument entirely.)
  - Zambyte 1y ago
    Amazing. Have you considered reading the articles I linked? They aren't even that long.
    - noirscape 1y ago
      I did and they aren't convincing. The first is an argument of how a popular interpretation of a work still under copyright can subsume the fact the original work is in the public domain, using Alice in Wonderland as an example. (I also happen to think it's a particularly terrible example - if you want to make this argument, The Little Mermaid is by far the stronger version of this argument.) It also misidentifies Disney as the copyright boogeyman, which is a pretty common categorical error. (Disney had very little to do with the length of US copyright. The length of copyright is pretty much entirely the product of geopolitics and international agreements, not Disney.) Its an interesting argument, but not one I find particularly convincing for abolishing copyright, at most shortening the length of it. (Which I do believe is needed.) The second one is the "just solve capitalism and we can abolish copyright entirely" argument which is... a total non-starter. Yes, in an idealized utopia, we don't need capitalism or copyright and people can do things just because they want to and society provides for the artist just because humans all value art just that much. It's a fun utopic ideal, but there's many steps between the current state of the world and "you can abolish the idea of copyright", and we aren't even close to that state yet.
jasonjayr 1y ago
But in this idealized copyright-free world, those self-publishing companies could just as easily take Penguin's top sellers and reproduce those. The thing that'd set apart these companies are the services + quality of their work.
- SketchySeaBeast 1y ago
  Is not part of the quality of the work the contents of the book? What are these companies putting within the pages? We've taken the greatest and longest part of the effort and made it meaningless.
int_19h 1y ago
The problem of "how do artists earn enough money to eat?" is legitimate, but I don't think it's a good idea to solve it by making things that inherently don't work like real property to work like it, just so that we can shove them into the same framework. And this is exactly what copyright does - it takes information, which can be copied essentially for free by its very fundamental nature, and tries to make it scarce through legal means solely so that it can be sold as if it were a real good. There are two reasons why it's a problem. The first reason is that any such abstraction is leaky, and those leaks are ripe for abuse. For example, in case of copyright on information, we made it behave like physical property for the consumers, but not for the producers (who still only need to expend resources to create a single work from scratch, and then duplicate it for free while still selling each copy for $$$). This means that selling information is much more lucrative than selling physical things, which is a big reason why our economy is so distorted towards the former now - just look at what the most profitable corporations on the market do. The second reason is that it artificially entrenches capitalism by enmeshing large parts of the economy into those mechanics, even if they aren't naturally a good fit. This then gets used as an argument to prop up the whole arrangement - "we can't change this, it would break too much!".
- SketchySeaBeast 1y ago
  The end product being inexpensive is a good thing - it means that the producer can sell it well below the cost it took to produce it, otherwise a novel would cost whatever it takes for Stephen King to live for 3 months. I feel like you're shoving all information under the same label. The most profitable corporations are trading in information that isn't subject to copyright, and it's facts - how you drive, what you eat, where you live. It's newly generated ideas. Maybe it is in how the data is sorted, but they aren't copyrighting that either. If we're going to overthrow artificial entrenchments of capitalism, I feel like there's better places to start than a lot of copyright. Does it need changes? Absolutely, there's certainly exploitation, but I still don't see "get rid of copyright entirely" as being a good approach. Weirdly, it's one of the places that people are arguing for that. Sometimes the criminal justice system convicts the wrong person, and there should be reform. It's also often criticized as a measure of control for capitalistic oligarchs. Should step one be getting rid of the legal system entirely?

dmonitor 1y ago

You need some mechanism in place to prevent any joe schmoe from spinning up FreeSteam and rehosting the whole thing.

pitaj 1y ago
There can be many incentives for people to use official sources: early access, easy updates, live events, etc
- Zambyte 1y ago
  "Early access" doesn't work in this context, but yes for the other means.
- dmonitor 1y ago
  There's no reason FreeSteam can't also do that, though. There's no copyright, so just have an extension of the steamapp that changes it to point to your server when downloading games / checking ownership. Piracy stops being a service issue when pirates are allowed to make nice services.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
zelphirkalt 1y ago
Just to challenge that idea: Why?
- dmonitor 1y ago
  People would use that service instead of Steam, publishers would add annoying DRM to mitigate lost sales, etc etc. The current illegality of the piracy website prevents them from offering a service as nice as Steam. It has to be a sketchy torrent hub that changes URLs every few months. If it was as easy as changing the url to freesteampowered.com or installing an extension inside the steam launcher, the whole "piracy is a service issue" argument loses all relevance. The industry would become unsustainable without DRM (which would be technically legal to crack, but also more incentivized to make harder to crack).