9 ms·

Debunk The Myth That Copyright Is Needed To Make Money

36 points by edwincheese 14y ago

njs12345 14y ago
That 2% figure is quite interesting (and the study beautifully typeset), but I can't read Swedish. Can anyone find a translation anywhere?
Silhouette 14y ago
How about a little full disclosure? The author of the cited article is Rick Falkvinge, founder of the Swedish Pirate Party, so not exactly an unbiased source. Aside from that, this whole article is one strawman after another. I don't know anyone who supports copyright and believes it to be the only way for creative folks to make money. The creative argument in favour of copyright is simply that more useful works get generated and distributed with it than without it. The economic argument is also very simple: the people making those works need to put food on the table. Despite all the rhetoric, nothing is stopping them from doing that in other ways right now, yet relatively few people actually are. Really, all the anti-copyright people have to do to make a rock solid argument for their case is show that industrial-scale creative work is more effective using alternative business models rather than relying on copyright. There's an entire world of creative industries and bazillions in cash going into those industries, so finding more than an occasional study and isolated success story shouldn't be that hard... if their position is actually correct.
- manaskarekar 14y ago
  Disclaimer: I have slightly skimmed the article and I don't exactly know what your usage of the word 'copyright' implies. I am making this post anyway because I think you'll benefit from these links I mentioned in an earlier post. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4591253 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4591253
  - Silhouette 14y ago
    Please don't mistake the fact that I didn't bother debunking each individual point from the article here on Hacker News for either ignorance or apathy with regard to IP laws. I'm well aware of the opposing point of view and the common arguments made in its favour. I just haven't yet seen any real evidence that supports the kind of absurdly generic claim made by Falkvinge in this article. And to be frank, I'm unlikely to be swayed by the kinds of pages you linked to indirectly in your reply, either, because they appear to repeat the same poorly thought out arguments as everyone else. Sure, performing musicians can make money playing live. Shame if you're a composer or lyricist or a technician in the recording studio, I guess. Sure, people can make low budget computer games and sell them for a nominal amount to an audience of geeks sympathetic to their pricing model. Shame if you want to play a AAA grade game with realistic graphics, professional quality character designs, professional quality voice acting, professional quality orchestral score, well-balanced gameplay, non-repetitive level designs, and an AI smarter than a snail, I guess. Sure, we can find plenty of pulp fiction quality self-published stories on-line for free. Shame if you need a well-structured, professionally edited textbook for your kid's math class complete with a full set of exercises, I guess. The same pattern comes up time and again in the cheap shots against copyright. Usually, the argument is either some variation of "plenty of work gets made anyway" but looking only at quantity and not quality, or some variation of "the artists can earn money by {some other model}" but without taking into account all the people who genuinely contribute to producing good work but aren't the immediate performer. And then someone comes along and points out the isolated exceptions: a handful of big name FOSS products (invariably in fields that are widely applicable and attractive to a lot of geeks, which is a tiny part of the overall software landscape, and invariably ignoring any role copyright played in the development model of those products), a couple of performers who've made money with a high profile online experiment (usually people who were already well known thanks to their earlier work funded by more traditional models), and so on. One of these days, I'd like to start a page with all the eternally repeated examples in this context and try to figure out how many of them there really are and what proportion of their overall industries they actually represent. Alas, since no-one is going to pay me for that work, I had better go back to building my copyright-protected company where the revenues do go straight to the handful of people who are putting in huge amounts of hard work to do things no-one has ever done before, which apparently doesn't exist in Falkvinge's mind because we're all under 40.
- theevocater 14y ago
  http://www.techdirt.com/blog/casestudies/ http://www.techdirt.com/blog/casestudies/ <= good source of case studies Also, your complaint about them being 'strawmen' is true, but makes no sense. They are common 'myths, which is to say exaggerations of things people claim everyday. You yourself make several of his 'myths' in your post. > The creative argument in favour of copyright is simply that more useful works get generated and distributed with it than without it. Translation: > Myth: Without the incentive of possibly getting money, nobody will go into artistry and create. > The economic argument is also very simple: the people making those works need to put food on the table. Despite all the rhetoric, nothing is stopping them from doing that in other ways right now, yet relatively few people actually are. Translation: > Myth: With free sharing, nobody will spend money on entertainment. They aren't supposed to be perfect quoted arguments from real live people; just push back on common rhetoric.
  - Silhouette 14y ago
    > The creative argument in favour of copyright is simply that more useful works get generated and distributed with it than without it. Translation: > Myth: Without the incentive of possibly getting money, nobody will go into artistry and create. That isn't even close to the same thing, and neither was your second example. Like Falkvinge, you have turned a relative position (without copyright, less of X would be made) into an absolute (without copyright, none of X would be made). I have never seen anyone, not even the most corrupt media industry lobbyist or the most position-distorting, bought-and-paid-for politician, argue complete absolutes like that. More importantly, I have certainly never seen anyone genuinely interested in changing copyright law for the better promoting such a position. There are alternatives to the mess that is today's implementation of copyright that don't involve killing the entire principle.
    - apotheon 14y ago
      > I have never seen anyone . . . I have. I see it all the time, mostly in online discussion. No, I don't maintain a database of every such discussion in which I've participated, tagged with metadata about the fallacies employed in various discussions. > not even the most corrupt media industry lobbyist or the most position-distorting, bought-and-paid-for politician, argue complete absolutes like that. That's because they generally prefer to avoid speaking in absolutes except in specific, rare cases. The implications are obvious, even when their phrasing allows for what they think constitutes plausible deniability. > More importantly, I have certainly never seen anyone genuinely interested in changing copyright law for the better promoting such a position. It's not the people who want to change copyright law for the better that I'm most worried about. It's the people who want to maintain the status quo, plus add more restrictions, that are the biggest problem. Maybe you haven't said such things, and maybe you're interested in improving things in your own misguided way, but (for instance) Chris Dodd is only interested in improving the position of the MPAA -- and I'm pretty sure he has a hell of a lot more sway with Congress than you. > There are alternatives to the mess that is today's implementation of copyright that don't involve killing the entire principle. Yep -- and they're great stepping stones on the way to eliminating prior restraint of the free act of creation.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- AnthonyMouse 14y ago
  >The author of the cited article is Rick Falkvinge, founder of the Swedish Pirate Party, so not exactly an unbiased source. Source bias is a concern when the source is supplying unverifiable facts. When a source is supplying reasoning, it can be evaluated for consistency and validity independent of the source and attacking the source is just the ad hominem fallacy. Incidentally, who do you think would be making anti-copyright arguments, Christopher Dodd? >Aside from that, this whole article is one strawman after another. A strawman is when you take a weak argument that opponents never made and proceed to knock it down, then use the failure of the weak argument to argue that a stronger argument is also wrong. In this case, the positions being attacked are ones that have actually been taken by industry supporters at various points during lobbying efforts to pass copyright legislation. Perhaps there are stronger arguments in favor of copyright than the ones the industry has been putting forward, but then let's hear those in the halls of Congress and stop hearing the ones that are so ridiculous that you think they're strawman arguments. >Really, all the anti-copyright people have to do to make a rock solid argument for their case is show that industrial-scale creative work is more effective using alternative business models rather than relying on copyright. The only real way to actually test the hypothesis that creativity would thrive in today's economy in the absence of copyright is to have the absence of copyright for a while and see what happens. For example, how else can you tell what derivative works would be created if permission was not required to produce them for commercial gain? (And hey, if we try not having copyright for a decade or two and it turns out badly, we can always put it back.)
  - Silhouette 14y ago
    A strawman is when you take a weak argument that opponents never made and proceed to knock it down, then use the failure of the weak argument to argue that a stronger argument is also wrong. In this case, the positions being attacked are ones that have actually been taken by industry supporters at various points during lobbying efforts to pass copyright legislation. Really? You can cite a lobbyist who actually claimed that without copyright, there was no way for any artist to make money? Or that with free sharing, no-one at all would spend money on entertainment? Or that no-one at all creates new art without the financial incentive? Lobbyists say some pretty silly things, and distort reality to absurd degrees, but even then I've never heard anyone making such a black-and-white argument before a legislative assembly. The only real way to actually test the hypothesis that creativity would thrive in today's economy in the absence of copyright is to have the absence of copyright for a while and see what happens. For example, how else can you tell what derivative works would be created if permission was not required to produce them for commercial gain? That's a fair point, but it's not a counter to my argument. There is nothing whatsoever about today's copyright law that stops someone from funding completely new works using alternative business models and giving those works away such that they can be freely distributed. If there are alternative business models that really are as effective as copyright or more so in incentivising the creation and distribution of useful works, why aren't we seeing vast amounts of such work, funded by such alternative models, in the age of the Internet? It seems plenty of people are willing to try disrupting Big Media, given the number of people who are self-publishing books instead of relying on traditional publishers, putting their band's music on-line via their own web sites, and so on. But why does almost every success story seem to stop there? One possible explanation is that the only legal barrier between those self-publishers and an Amazon-scale operation redistributing anything good via a much better known web site and taking most of the profits is copyright... [Edit: Clarified the wording in the last paragraph.]
- apotheon 14y ago
  > industrial-scale Define that in a way that makes it intrinsically desirable. Otherwise, it's a red herring.
vibrunazo 14y ago
Imagine if, before intellectual property, you put 20 smart people in a room, and tell them to come up with solutions to add incentives for creative works. None of them would have come up with "Hey! Why don't we grant inventors monopolies over inventions! We could increase the ammount and quality of inventions by limiting what others can invent!". No one would ever think that's a good idea. It's completely backwards and counter intuitive. They would come up with things like y-combinator, angel funds, startup incubators. Or straight up government money investments. These are the obvious ideas that come up when you're trying to figure how to incentive ideas. You incentive ideas by investing in them, not by limiting them. And of course, as most people here probably already know, that's not how IP was invented. It was not a conclusion from trying to come up to a solution for investing in ideas. No sane human being would have thought that was a solution. IP was invented as a monarchy monopoly to give power to the king. The "but it's good for innovation" meme was an excuse invented later when they figured they could actually make a lot of money from it, so those who were profiting off monopolies had to find an excuse to keep it. It's so mind boggling to watch so many discussions where people ask "the ultimate hard question" of "but how else could be possibly incentive ideas without copyright???". C'mon, it's so straight-forward and we've been doing it for centuries. YC alone has done much more for promoting innovative creative works than copyright has done since it's invention. Do you really care about investing in ideas? Then put your money where your mouth is, become an angel investor, and stop pretending it's a hard problem to solve.
- manaskarekar 14y ago
  "The idea that I can be presented with a problem, set out to logically solve it with the tools at hand, and wind up with a program that could not be legally used because someone else followed the same logical steps some years ago and filed for a patent on it is horrifying." -- John Carmack. http://web.archive.org/web/20010124060000/www.voodooextreme.com/games/interviews/carmack/ http://web.archive.org/web/20010124060000/www.voodooextreme....
  - petegrif 14y ago
    I may be horrifying but rediscovering something is not the same as inventing it.
whiddershins 14y ago
Please ... this article is trolling copyright holders. Each point is weak, easy to dismantle, and unsubstantiated. I started to write a long response and decided perhaps this isn't the forum, but I am surprised to see this on the front of hacker news.
tzs 14y ago
So articles about creationists chairing major science committees in the US get killed for being politics, but an article FROM A POLITICIAN pushing his political agenda is fine???
- apotheon 14y ago
  Maybe it has something to do with the fact that this is very relevant to matters such as business models and software development.
linuxhansl 14y ago
Personally I am torn on this topic. We now have this thing "information" (software, music, books, whatever) that can be useful for us, and which has the property that it can be copied infinitely without cost; but then we turn around turn it back into something that behaves like a "physical thing" by means of copyright. On the other hand, and contrary to the article, I think the current problem with the music industry is not due to copyright but due to financial monopolies (the labels) that are outmoded but hang on for dear live. Copyright is interesting even if artists were to sell their own music independently of the labels. Indeed here copyright is what would protect the artist from a label to just copy the music and selling it for profit. Also, interestingly, Open Source would not work without copyright. That's right. The GPL, (to some extend) the Apache License, and many other licenses only work because of copyright, which grants the owner the right to license software to you under a license. (Note these comments are true to copyright, but not for patents, which is a completely different story)
- jkn 14y ago
  Also, interestingly, Open Source would not work without copyright. That's right. The GPL, (to some extend) the Apache License, and many other licenses only work because of copyright, which grants the owner the right to license software to you under a license. Open Source is bigger than copyleft software. Without copyright, BSD/MIT/etc. licensed software would thrive. Also without copyright, closed source software would not generate the kind of money it does now, so there would be less incentive to invest in it vs. investing in open source software. One could say that Open Source gets a competitive advantage when all software can legally be copied for free.
- apotheon 14y ago
  > On the other hand, and contrary to the article, I think the current problem with the music industry is not due to copyright but due to financial monopolies (the labels) that are outmoded but hang on for dear live. How do you think they maintain those monopolies? Hint: a lot of it is directly related to copyright monopolies. Think of the hundreds or thousands of recording artists who would abandon the labels if they could get back the ability to publish their own songs, rather than having to ask the label for permission due to copyright assignments and work-for-hire claims. > Indeed here copyright is what would protect the artist from a label to just copy the music and selling it for profit. Nonsense. Copyright creates a market for the transfer of copyright, which immediately plays into the hands of large-scale distributors by ensuring nobody can compete with them. The economies of their scale are not natural economies; they're economies created by an artificially high barrier to entry for competitors, and the artificial scarcity imposed on markets by copyright law is the primary advantage enjoyed by such large-scale distributors. > Also, interestingly, Open Source would not work without copyright. That's right. The GPL, (to some extend) the Apache License, and many other licenses only work because of copyright, which grants the owner the right to license software to you under a license. Well, jkn already answered this point, but I'll add an additional comment on this subject: We'd be better off without copyleft licensing. Software does not have to be GPLed to be open source, and in fact the GPL and other copyleft licenses actually stand in the way of many open source projects making use of code distributed under those copyleft licenses.

36 points by edwincheese 14y ago

That 2% figure is quite interesting (and the study beautifully typeset), but I can't read Swedish. Can anyone find a translation anywhere?

Silhouette 14y ago

How about a little full disclosure? The author of the cited article is Rick Falkvinge, founder of the Swedish Pirate Party, so not exactly an unbiased source. Aside from that, this whole article is one strawman after another. I don't know anyone who supports copyright and believes it to be the only way for creative folks to make money. The creative argument in favour of copyright is simply that more useful works get generated and distributed with it than without it. The economic argument is also very simple: the people making those works need to put food on the table. Despite all the rhetoric, nothing is stopping them from doing that in other ways right now, yet relatively few people actually are. Really, all the anti-copyright people have to do to make a rock solid argument for their case is show that industrial-scale creative work is more effective using alternative business models rather than relying on copyright. There's an entire world of creative industries and bazillions in cash going into those industries, so finding more than an occasional study and isolated success story shouldn't be that hard... if their position is actually correct.

manaskarekar 14y ago
Disclaimer: I have slightly skimmed the article and I don't exactly know what your usage of the word 'copyright' implies. I am making this post anyway because I think you'll benefit from these links I mentioned in an earlier post. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4591253 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4591253
- Silhouette 14y ago
  Please don't mistake the fact that I didn't bother debunking each individual point from the article here on Hacker News for either ignorance or apathy with regard to IP laws. I'm well aware of the opposing point of view and the common arguments made in its favour. I just haven't yet seen any real evidence that supports the kind of absurdly generic claim made by Falkvinge in this article. And to be frank, I'm unlikely to be swayed by the kinds of pages you linked to indirectly in your reply, either, because they appear to repeat the same poorly thought out arguments as everyone else. Sure, performing musicians can make money playing live. Shame if you're a composer or lyricist or a technician in the recording studio, I guess. Sure, people can make low budget computer games and sell them for a nominal amount to an audience of geeks sympathetic to their pricing model. Shame if you want to play a AAA grade game with realistic graphics, professional quality character designs, professional quality voice acting, professional quality orchestral score, well-balanced gameplay, non-repetitive level designs, and an AI smarter than a snail, I guess. Sure, we can find plenty of pulp fiction quality self-published stories on-line for free. Shame if you need a well-structured, professionally edited textbook for your kid's math class complete with a full set of exercises, I guess. The same pattern comes up time and again in the cheap shots against copyright. Usually, the argument is either some variation of "plenty of work gets made anyway" but looking only at quantity and not quality, or some variation of "the artists can earn money by {some other model}" but without taking into account all the people who genuinely contribute to producing good work but aren't the immediate performer. And then someone comes along and points out the isolated exceptions: a handful of big name FOSS products (invariably in fields that are widely applicable and attractive to a lot of geeks, which is a tiny part of the overall software landscape, and invariably ignoring any role copyright played in the development model of those products), a couple of performers who've made money with a high profile online experiment (usually people who were already well known thanks to their earlier work funded by more traditional models), and so on. One of these days, I'd like to start a page with all the eternally repeated examples in this context and try to figure out how many of them there really are and what proportion of their overall industries they actually represent. Alas, since no-one is going to pay me for that work, I had better go back to building my copyright-protected company where the revenues do go straight to the handful of people who are putting in huge amounts of hard work to do things no-one has ever done before, which apparently doesn't exist in Falkvinge's mind because we're all under 40.
theevocater 14y ago
http://www.techdirt.com/blog/casestudies/ http://www.techdirt.com/blog/casestudies/ <= good source of case studies Also, your complaint about them being 'strawmen' is true, but makes no sense. They are common 'myths, which is to say exaggerations of things people claim everyday. You yourself make several of his 'myths' in your post. > The creative argument in favour of copyright is simply that more useful works get generated and distributed with it than without it. Translation: > Myth: Without the incentive of possibly getting money, nobody will go into artistry and create. > The economic argument is also very simple: the people making those works need to put food on the table. Despite all the rhetoric, nothing is stopping them from doing that in other ways right now, yet relatively few people actually are. Translation: > Myth: With free sharing, nobody will spend money on entertainment. They aren't supposed to be perfect quoted arguments from real live people; just push back on common rhetoric.
- Silhouette 14y ago
  > The creative argument in favour of copyright is simply that more useful works get generated and distributed with it than without it. Translation: > Myth: Without the incentive of possibly getting money, nobody will go into artistry and create. That isn't even close to the same thing, and neither was your second example. Like Falkvinge, you have turned a relative position (without copyright, less of X would be made) into an absolute (without copyright, none of X would be made). I have never seen anyone, not even the most corrupt media industry lobbyist or the most position-distorting, bought-and-paid-for politician, argue complete absolutes like that. More importantly, I have certainly never seen anyone genuinely interested in changing copyright law for the better promoting such a position. There are alternatives to the mess that is today's implementation of copyright that don't involve killing the entire principle.
  - apotheon 14y ago
    > I have never seen anyone . . . I have. I see it all the time, mostly in online discussion. No, I don't maintain a database of every such discussion in which I've participated, tagged with metadata about the fallacies employed in various discussions. > not even the most corrupt media industry lobbyist or the most position-distorting, bought-and-paid-for politician, argue complete absolutes like that. That's because they generally prefer to avoid speaking in absolutes except in specific, rare cases. The implications are obvious, even when their phrasing allows for what they think constitutes plausible deniability. > More importantly, I have certainly never seen anyone genuinely interested in changing copyright law for the better promoting such a position. It's not the people who want to change copyright law for the better that I'm most worried about. It's the people who want to maintain the status quo, plus add more restrictions, that are the biggest problem. Maybe you haven't said such things, and maybe you're interested in improving things in your own misguided way, but (for instance) Chris Dodd is only interested in improving the position of the MPAA -- and I'm pretty sure he has a hell of a lot more sway with Congress than you. > There are alternatives to the mess that is today's implementation of copyright that don't involve killing the entire principle. Yep -- and they're great stepping stones on the way to eliminating prior restraint of the free act of creation.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
AnthonyMouse 14y ago
>The author of the cited article is Rick Falkvinge, founder of the Swedish Pirate Party, so not exactly an unbiased source. Source bias is a concern when the source is supplying unverifiable facts. When a source is supplying reasoning, it can be evaluated for consistency and validity independent of the source and attacking the source is just the ad hominem fallacy. Incidentally, who do you think would be making anti-copyright arguments, Christopher Dodd? >Aside from that, this whole article is one strawman after another. A strawman is when you take a weak argument that opponents never made and proceed to knock it down, then use the failure of the weak argument to argue that a stronger argument is also wrong. In this case, the positions being attacked are ones that have actually been taken by industry supporters at various points during lobbying efforts to pass copyright legislation. Perhaps there are stronger arguments in favor of copyright than the ones the industry has been putting forward, but then let's hear those in the halls of Congress and stop hearing the ones that are so ridiculous that you think they're strawman arguments. >Really, all the anti-copyright people have to do to make a rock solid argument for their case is show that industrial-scale creative work is more effective using alternative business models rather than relying on copyright. The only real way to actually test the hypothesis that creativity would thrive in today's economy in the absence of copyright is to have the absence of copyright for a while and see what happens. For example, how else can you tell what derivative works would be created if permission was not required to produce them for commercial gain? (And hey, if we try not having copyright for a decade or two and it turns out badly, we can always put it back.)
- Silhouette 14y ago
  A strawman is when you take a weak argument that opponents never made and proceed to knock it down, then use the failure of the weak argument to argue that a stronger argument is also wrong. In this case, the positions being attacked are ones that have actually been taken by industry supporters at various points during lobbying efforts to pass copyright legislation. Really? You can cite a lobbyist who actually claimed that without copyright, there was no way for any artist to make money? Or that with free sharing, no-one at all would spend money on entertainment? Or that no-one at all creates new art without the financial incentive? Lobbyists say some pretty silly things, and distort reality to absurd degrees, but even then I've never heard anyone making such a black-and-white argument before a legislative assembly. The only real way to actually test the hypothesis that creativity would thrive in today's economy in the absence of copyright is to have the absence of copyright for a while and see what happens. For example, how else can you tell what derivative works would be created if permission was not required to produce them for commercial gain? That's a fair point, but it's not a counter to my argument. There is nothing whatsoever about today's copyright law that stops someone from funding completely new works using alternative business models and giving those works away such that they can be freely distributed. If there are alternative business models that really are as effective as copyright or more so in incentivising the creation and distribution of useful works, why aren't we seeing vast amounts of such work, funded by such alternative models, in the age of the Internet? It seems plenty of people are willing to try disrupting Big Media, given the number of people who are self-publishing books instead of relying on traditional publishers, putting their band's music on-line via their own web sites, and so on. But why does almost every success story seem to stop there? One possible explanation is that the only legal barrier between those self-publishers and an Amazon-scale operation redistributing anything good via a much better known web site and taking most of the profits is copyright... [Edit: Clarified the wording in the last paragraph.]
apotheon 14y ago
> industrial-scale Define that in a way that makes it intrinsically desirable. Otherwise, it's a red herring.

vibrunazo 14y ago

Imagine if, before intellectual property, you put 20 smart people in a room, and tell them to come up with solutions to add incentives for creative works. None of them would have come up with "Hey! Why don't we grant inventors monopolies over inventions! We could increase the ammount and quality of inventions by limiting what others can invent!". No one would ever think that's a good idea. It's completely backwards and counter intuitive. They would come up with things like y-combinator, angel funds, startup incubators. Or straight up government money investments. These are the obvious ideas that come up when you're trying to figure how to incentive ideas. You incentive ideas by investing in them, not by limiting them. And of course, as most people here probably already know, that's not how IP was invented. It was not a conclusion from trying to come up to a solution for investing in ideas. No sane human being would have thought that was a solution. IP was invented as a monarchy monopoly to give power to the king. The "but it's good for innovation" meme was an excuse invented later when they figured they could actually make a lot of money from it, so those who were profiting off monopolies had to find an excuse to keep it. It's so mind boggling to watch so many discussions where people ask "the ultimate hard question" of "but how else could be possibly incentive ideas without copyright???". C'mon, it's so straight-forward and we've been doing it for centuries. YC alone has done much more for promoting innovative creative works than copyright has done since it's invention. Do you really care about investing in ideas? Then put your money where your mouth is, become an angel investor, and stop pretending it's a hard problem to solve.

manaskarekar 14y ago
"The idea that I can be presented with a problem, set out to logically solve it with the tools at hand, and wind up with a program that could not be legally used because someone else followed the same logical steps some years ago and filed for a patent on it is horrifying." -- John Carmack. http://web.archive.org/web/20010124060000/www.voodooextreme.com/games/interviews/carmack/ http://web.archive.org/web/20010124060000/www.voodooextreme....
- petegrif 14y ago
  I may be horrifying but rediscovering something is not the same as inventing it.

whiddershins 14y ago

Please ... this article is trolling copyright holders. Each point is weak, easy to dismantle, and unsubstantiated. I started to write a long response and decided perhaps this isn't the forum, but I am surprised to see this on the front of hacker news.

tzs 14y ago

So articles about creationists chairing major science committees in the US get killed for being politics, but an article FROM A POLITICIAN pushing his political agenda is fine???

apotheon 14y ago
Maybe it has something to do with the fact that this is very relevant to matters such as business models and software development.

linuxhansl 14y ago

Personally I am torn on this topic. We now have this thing "information" (software, music, books, whatever) that can be useful for us, and which has the property that it can be copied infinitely without cost; but then we turn around turn it back into something that behaves like a "physical thing" by means of copyright. On the other hand, and contrary to the article, I think the current problem with the music industry is not due to copyright but due to financial monopolies (the labels) that are outmoded but hang on for dear live. Copyright is interesting even if artists were to sell their own music independently of the labels. Indeed here copyright is what would protect the artist from a label to just copy the music and selling it for profit. Also, interestingly, Open Source would not work without copyright. That's right. The GPL, (to some extend) the Apache License, and many other licenses only work because of copyright, which grants the owner the right to license software to you under a license. (Note these comments are true to copyright, but not for patents, which is a completely different story)

jkn 14y ago
Also, interestingly, Open Source would not work without copyright. That's right. The GPL, (to some extend) the Apache License, and many other licenses only work because of copyright, which grants the owner the right to license software to you under a license. Open Source is bigger than copyleft software. Without copyright, BSD/MIT/etc. licensed software would thrive. Also without copyright, closed source software would not generate the kind of money it does now, so there would be less incentive to invest in it vs. investing in open source software. One could say that Open Source gets a competitive advantage when all software can legally be copied for free.
apotheon 14y ago
> On the other hand, and contrary to the article, I think the current problem with the music industry is not due to copyright but due to financial monopolies (the labels) that are outmoded but hang on for dear live. How do you think they maintain those monopolies? Hint: a lot of it is directly related to copyright monopolies. Think of the hundreds or thousands of recording artists who would abandon the labels if they could get back the ability to publish their own songs, rather than having to ask the label for permission due to copyright assignments and work-for-hire claims. > Indeed here copyright is what would protect the artist from a label to just copy the music and selling it for profit. Nonsense. Copyright creates a market for the transfer of copyright, which immediately plays into the hands of large-scale distributors by ensuring nobody can compete with them. The economies of their scale are not natural economies; they're economies created by an artificially high barrier to entry for competitors, and the artificial scarcity imposed on markets by copyright law is the primary advantage enjoyed by such large-scale distributors. > Also, interestingly, Open Source would not work without copyright. That's right. The GPL, (to some extend) the Apache License, and many other licenses only work because of copyright, which grants the owner the right to license software to you under a license. Well, jkn already answered this point, but I'll add an additional comment on this subject: We'd be better off without copyleft licensing. Software does not have to be GPLed to be open source, and in fact the GPL and other copyleft licenses actually stand in the way of many open source projects making use of code distributed under those copyleft licenses.