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Comment by tjr | Hacker News Reader

The current hypothetical non-piracy model for music is broken, and it always has been.

I agree with that. My main concern is not people who make unauthorized copies of music and then later buy copies; I personally think that's great, and ought to be somehow legal. I am concerned about people who make unauthorized copies of music with no intention of ever paying for it and just flat out don't care because they don't feel it's worth paying for, even though they clearly see it as something of value, since they listen to it.

The huge difficulty is, how can you reliably discern between these classes of unauthorized copying?

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It would be better to step further back and separate copying from production. People should contribute to production and be able to freely copy what is produced. The two are not really in conflict, in fact they are mutually supportive. Copyright artificially induces this opposition when it has no absolute need to. We now need a better arrangement.

I'm not sure I understand. Can you provide an example?

Any system where support or funding for production does not depend on restricting copying: those should be inspirations for alternatives. Open-source/free software, Wikipedia, the BBC, science/academic research . . .

The internet is a communication device, and we should be using to its max. All questions about distinguishing different kinds of copying, and whether one is moral or not, do not reach the real heart of the matter. All copying (assuming good stuff) is good, ultimately, and we ought to fit our commercial system to that, not the other way around.

"Open-source/free software"

This isn't true freedom. I am not allowed to copy open source software into my commercial application without releasing my revisions.

It's also funny that you mention open source, because it's eventually going to bring down the wages of developers. This is because the difficult parts (IE: the software that needs to be engineered) is given out for free and businesses only need the mechanics to make changes (lower education, skillm and pay requirements).

I totally agree.

The problem is how do you make it possible for the best people making music (or whatever other internet good) to completely sustain themselves via things they put online.

Are you implying this isn't happening already?

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