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Comment by xhkkffbf | Hacker News Reader

This is terribly naive. When digital replication is easy -- as it is with arts like music or software -- piracy destroys innovation and hurts creators who want to earn a living by selling their creations. It's not like the farmers or the apartment owners are going to let people "pirate" a warm place to sleep or a good meal.

IP haters often point to people who've successfully managed to encourage pseudo-piracy and made money. The Grateful Dead, for instance, let people freely copy mix tapes of their concerts and made their money on gate revenues. (They didn't let people in for free. Nope. )

If digital piracy is unchecked, then it forces artists to dream up other ways to make money. This creates inefficiencies and it just isn't fair to those who just want to sell their creations without holding a concert or drumming up some other scheme to get people to pay. Most "open source" companies spend endless hours trying to concoct ways to open source just enough of their product while forcing enough people to pay so everyone can eat.

I've found that most of the people who speak like pitaj are in universities and they make their money through some mixture of outrageous tuition bills that can't be dodged or government funding from taxes that can't be escaped.

There's no such thing as a free lunch.

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> When digital replication is easy -- as it is with arts like music or software -- piracy destroys innovation and hurts creators who want to earn a living by selling their creations.

There's no evidence this is true. This is already the world we live in, and creativity is high.

> It's not like the farmers or the apartment owners are going to let people "pirate" a warm place to sleep or a good meal.

I made a specific point that IP is fundamentally different.

> The Grateful Dead, for instance, let people freely copy mix tapes of their concerts and made their money on gate revenues. (They didn't let people in for free. Nope. )

That exactly the point. Monetizing through live shows is already how most music artists make money.

> This creates inefficiencies and it just isn't fair to those who just want to sell their creations without holding a concert or drumming up some other scheme to get people to pay.

It's competition that benefits the consumers of those creations and an opportunity for middle-men to connect creators with consumers (see Patreon). Define "fair" when copyright is often used as a way to censor and steal from smaller creators.

> Most "open source" companies spend endless hours trying to concoct ways to open source just enough of their product while forcing enough people to pay so everyone can eat.

And the outcome is that the public has access to countless sets of open source software alternatives. Which is amazing for users and innovators.

> I've found that most of the people who speak like pitaj are in universities and they make their money through some mixture of outrageous tuition bills that can't be dodged or government funding from taxes that can't be escaped.

Not true for me.

Just on the open-source thread of things, one thing to note is that the "copyleft" regime depends on copyright to work. As do many of the schemes open-source projects use to monetize.

"Stealing from smaller creators" by the big guys isn't a problem I foresee getting smaller in an IP-free world.

> one thing to note is that the "copyleft" regime depends on copyright to work

The idea of copyleft doesn't. The particular implementation in our regulatory reality does, because RMS & others figured out how to hack a system typically used for rent-seeking and restricting innovation (thus lots of parties are investing money to preserve it), and use it for the opposite goal.

Without IP how can you enforce copyleft? Someone could just take your code and modify it and distribute modified binaries without you being able to do anything.

> Without IP how can you enforce copyleft? Someone could just take your code and modify it and distribute modified binaries without you being able to do anything.

You can, for example, reverse-engineer these binaries or develop binary patches (without IP laws, all of this becomes legal).

You wouldn't have to. Without copyright, it seems to me that everything becomes copyleft by default.

I could, for example, modify any piece of software I like, and legally distribute modified copies to others. Even if I didn't want to share my modifications with a larger community (or didn't want to do it for free), I couldn't stop it - someone else could do that for me. And as 'wolfgke points out, being open source doesn't matter much here.

> You wouldn't have to. Without copyright, it seems to me that everything becomes copyleft by default.

No, without copyright, you cannot force the other party to give you access to the original source code.

BTW: There does not seem to exist an open source license that tries to emulate "no copyright"/"no IP". I.e. the license allows reverse engineering of all binaries derived from it virally, create modifications etc. and perhaps allows to use patents; but the license does not give you the right to demand access to the original source code.

You argued upthread for reverse engineering. Binary is the source code, albeit in less convenient form. So maybe it wouldn't be strict copyleft, but close enough.

> Binary is the source code, albeit in less convenient form.

At least the copyleft defenders would not agree.

> Binary is the source code, albeit in less convenient form. So maybe it wouldn't be strict copyleft, but close enough.

Buddy, you must never have worked with a decompiler. To say nothing of the source file structure and comments that are lost along the way.

Instead we get tarball dumps with no change history.

Tarball dumps are OK. The GPL doesn't require change history. Although it can be quite helpful, it would be quite hard to define universally - what level of history is required? It could range from "every character typed" to "changes from the last public release", which is essentially what we have now.

GPL requires source code, which it defines as "the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it."

This prevents release of compilable-but-obfuscated code, or transpiler output, etc., or intentional removal of information required to build the software (though this clause causes GPL-compatibility issues with authenticated-build platforms).

The difference between sifting through tarball dumps and puzzling through binaries is essentially of degree, not kind. If there's a line to draw, perhaps it should have been at "intentional removal of information".

Employees can take source code with them when leaving a company and share it with others.

In the existing legal system you can't. But we could write laws that allow this to be a thing (i.e. instead of the current situation of "you have full control over who can copy/redistribute your IP" it becomes "anyone can copy/redistribute your IP but you are allowed to specify X criteria including the requirement to redistribute source code").

Something contemporary American culture has entirely forgot is the principle of a right to repair.

Even in a post-IP world you can have it be law that anything sold must include its documentation, manuals, and thus in the case of software on the sold product, its source code.

The fact so few realize how grossly unjust it is that most products sold today not only are undocumented but are intentionally obfuscated to make repair nigh impossible in order to drive replacement is the origin of the problem, though.

It's even worse - this is something of a yesterday's problem. We have a growing trend of turning products into services, which not only prevents you from repairing things (which you now don't own), but also restricts ways you can use them and creates an aggressive form of planned obsolescence.

I don't know what this abstract "idea of copyleft" is, but the underlying principle behind the GPL could not be achieved without copyright. The GPL doesn't merely embody some notion of "right to repair" or "right to tinker." Its principle is to put the user on the same level as the original developer. It therefore requires not only source code, but source code in the "preferred form of the work for making modifications to it," plus everything required to build that source code:

> The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable. However, as a special exception, the source code distributed need not include anything that is normally distributed (in either source or binary form) with the major components (compiler, kernel, and so on) of the operating system on which the executable runs, unless that component itself accompanies the executable.

A world where you could freely modify binaries and distribute the results would not provide the same freedoms that are essential to the GPL. Copyright is absolutely necessary to accomplish that goal.

The GPL also embodies the fundamental moral theory of copyright: "I created this thing, so I get to decide the terms on which you use this thing." The GPL doesn't just embody the idea that users should be free to do what they could in a state of nature. It is fundamentally predicated on the idea of enforced reciprocity.

> the underlying principle behind the GPL could not be achieved without copyright. The GPL doesn't merely require you to let other people reverse engineer your binaries, it contemplates that the distributed source code will be in the "preferred form" for working on it. There is no way to enforce that provision without copyright.

Sure there is. The GPL just used copyright as a hack to enforce on a limited basis what the creators explicitly think ought to be a universal obligation not dependent on the use of some upstream content that imposes the rule, for which the natural enforcement mechanism would be for the rules to be in law directly instead of copyright. “Copyleft” essentially implies that—its twisting what proponents see as a bad law into a tool for approximating the nearly diameteically-opposed law they wish existed in its place.

> The GPL doesn't just embody the idea that users should be free to do what they could in a state of nature. It is fundamentally predicated on the idea of enforced reciprocity.

Only because reciprocity is prevented by default through copyright law. In the state of nature, I could not prevent you from modifying my published software, and you couldn't stop me from taking your published modifications and using them, or distributing around. GPL is crafted to create an enclave supported by copyright law, in which things behave similarly to the desired "natural state".

As for source vs. binary thing, I feel that if there were no restrictions on binaries, there would also be no reason to not release source code in the first place. This makes the source code aspect important for real-world GPL, but not necessarily a core issue for a hypothetical copyright-free world.

Your explanation is completely inconsistent with the stated rationales behind the GPL: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html

> A program is free software if the program's users have the four essential freedoms: [1]

> The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0). > The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this. > The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2). > The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

The FSF twice says that having "source code is a precondition" for the freedoms the GPL seeks to protect. And that makes sense. If what you care about is allowing users to "study how the program works" and "change it so it does your computing as you wish," mere freedom to reverse-engineer binaries is insufficient.

Indeed, your interpretation makes the first two freedoms meaningless. It doesn't infringe copyright to reverse-engineer programs for study, or modify them for your own use. You don't need the GPL to enable those freedoms. Those two freedoms only make sense if you read them to mean that users should be able to study and modify the program in the "preferred form" for doing so (i.e. buildable source code).

By "stealing" I meant literally taking their money, not using their art.

Copyleft is a strategy to reach a specific goal in order to address a specific problem. It is not in itself the goal.

In order to ask if copyleft would still be an effective strategy in a non-copyright world we would have to ask if the problem would still exist and how it would look like. Then we would have to compare copyleft to other strategies to see which would be most effective.

Personally I think that if the anti-copyright movement would managed to gain enough political support to remove copyright then copyleft would not be the most effective strategy to gain the goals defined by software freedoms.

Not only plain old copyleft relies on copyright, but also the model of publishing code under the GPL and charging for a commercial license. I have used three such libraries in client work, and I absolutely love this model:

- We can audit software before buying

- We have the ultimate "right to repair"

- Open source/hobby projects can automatically use it for free (SAAS/closed source projects often offer this as well, but there's more friction)

And even if we are not technically required to upstream any patches that we make under the commercial license, the average engineering team will try to keep their downstream patches to a minimum, and the easiest way is to get them merged in the original GPL version.

How would this concept work for authors who write high quality novels?

You can't sustain that model through live performance. You could release books chapter by chapter, and try to fund creation through the Patron model, but that leads to a very different type of product that is honestly inferior.

You can see this in the books that have done well for free on Kindle. Sometimes you want to consume a piece of art that doesn't need to hook the consumer in the opening minutes, and also the artist may need to find a way to fund YEARS of work before producing anything that would entitle them to micro-payments.

Kickstarter.

You think Cormac Mccarthy could have gotten the funds to write Suttree through Kickstarter?

Or honestly even AFTER writing Suttree would have been able to get enough funding to write one of his better books?

I am with pitaj here, intellectual property is fundamentally wrong, but this is a good example of something that I'm not sure would work under no copyright. "Pay what you want" is one way, though I don't have any statistics on if that collects enough money. Another could be selling signed copies or otherwise making some copies exclusive in a way that copying them nullifies. Pay what you want + signed copies + patreon style donations might be enough?

I don't have a good answer to this. I would therefore suggest decreasing the duration of copyright to somewhere around 5-10 years to give the copyright holder time to sell the work with exclusive rights, after which the work enters public domain (like copyright was initially intended to work).

In germany, for a while, there was no copyright on books, so authors faced the same problem.

This was largely solved by selling high quality books as the competition only made cheap books. This seems to have largely worked until newspapers got angry that a small percentage of people read the news without paying.

I think that is just your opinion, it is a different kind of product which has direct feedback from an active readership that is directly funding your product. Leads to less snafus like George RR martin who is ostensibly making a product for readers but is so disconnected from the readership that he thinks 5+ years between books is ok.

http://topwebfiction.com/ is good example of works that are mostly funded by patreon(young adult focused) that sidestep this problem.

If I had a coffee shop, and people were justing taking the coffee without paying for it, yeah, I could probably think of another income stream, like charging for WiFi. But just because I COULD think of another way to make money doesn't mean that I shouldn't be allowed to get paid for the coffee, just because some folks think coffee should be free.

The vast majority of human expression was created before the concept of "IP" existed. The business models we've had in the last few hundred years are the aberration, not the other way around.

Creators aren't entitled to a "fair" world. Nobody is.

Speaking of "fairness": How is it "fair" that someone should be entitled to profit again-and-again from a single act of work, just because that work was "creative"? Shouldn't the laborers who carried the stones to build a bridge be entitled to an ongoing royalty paid by everyone who crosses?

> The vast majority of human expression was created before the concept of "IP" existed. The business models we've had in the last few hundred years are the aberration, not the other way around.

That's probably not true, for two reasons. The general reason is that most of anything was created recently, due to the exponential growth of human population and society. The specific reason is that copyright was developed hand-in-hand with the technology for creating easily-reproduced works.

> Shouldn't the laborers who carried the stones to build a bridge be entitled to an ongoing royalty paid by everyone who crosses?

There are, of course, toll bridges and roads, including private ones. (The fact that the laborer doesn’t get the payment is a function of the arrangement between the laborer and the person who owns the bridge, not a function of the nature of the property right.)

>There are, of course, toll bridges and roads, including private ones. (The fact that the laborer doesn’t get the payment is a function of the arrangement between the laborer and the person who owns the bridge, not a function of the nature of the property right.)

You mean like publishers and creators?

The automatic status of property rights and protection by both government and industry inherent within the long established framework of IP is very functionally different in nature from a labourer attempting to arrange an adhoc right to payment from future travellers for work they have put into a bridge.

   just because that work was "creative"?

That's where the IP theory all falls down. Originality or uniqueness doesn't exists, creation is all about recreating from what you learned from others. Creation is stealing in a moral and respectful way. Protecting your creations with IP laws is immoral and unrespectful against your public and previous artists you took from

That's a straw man. Copyright doesn't prohibit someone from learning from your work. It prohibits (in the US) five specific acts: reproduction, preparation of derivative works, distribution of copies, public performance, and display. You don't need to be able to define a work of purely unique expression. All you need to be able to do is define when a work is sufficiently original that it's not a derivative work or reproduction.

1. Protecting with IP ¡= Copyright

2. I didn't say Copyright prevents others from learning

3. A work is never sufficiently original, it's always a derivative

>Creators aren't entitled to a "fair" world. Nobody is.

This is psychopathic. Everyone deserves a fair world. That's a huge part of what society is all about. "All men are created equal" is a great thing for a society to aspire to.

I think you're conflating "deserved" with "entitled", when they're not the same at all. Deservedness is more an ideal concerning what one is merited, whereas entitlement is the practical application of "what is yours by legal right". Placing entitlement on intellectual property is - and always has been - a grey area, as there's no physical limitations preventing two people from having a roughly similar idea. There's plenty of limitations preventing two people from owning the same phone, car, or home.

>>Creators aren't entitled to a "fair" world.

>This is psychopathic.

You cannot imagine an interpretation of his words that makes them not psychopathic?

> Shouldn't the laborers who carried the stones to build a bridge be entitled to an ongoing royalty paid by everyone who crosses?

Creators are actually mostly in the same class as the laborers - neither one gets recurring payments, as they've both likely sold the rights to their product for a more immediate payment. The ultimate goal of these laws is to create a formal title that can be bought up by the rent-seeking class.

Skilled stone Masons are paid for the "transaction" of laying stones.

A music streaming "transaction" pays an Artist $0.005, on a good day. Not enough to make a living and sustain cultural values.

> Shouldn't the laborers who carried the stones to build a bridge be entitled to an ongoing royalty paid by everyone who crosses?

If that laborer decided that his works had to be pay that way, sure.

> How is it "fair" that someone should be entitled to profit again-and-again from a single act of work, just because that work was "creative"?

What he does is owned by himself. He shared it with you on a specific terms, that you don't share it with anyone else.

He profit again and again from his single act of work, because that's how he decided to sell it. There's millions that does a work, sell it and are done with it. I do it everyday at work, I do 8 hours of software development and that source code is now the property of the company where I work. That's my choice though.

You're making my point. It's not a matter of "fairness", as the OP was suggesting. It's a matter of market custom. There is no natural law that says that royalty-based payment systems for "intellectual property" work are required. It's a custom.

From your profile “A boring, not-young, not-cool, not-working-at-a-startup IT generalist.”

Do you expect people to pay for your work? Do you voluntarily give your labor away for free? Do you sell software?

I sell my time, by the hour or by the deliverable. I expect to be paid once (and only once) for work I perform. Sometimes I give away my labor for causes I consider worthy. In general, unless I've got a contract that specifies how I'm paid I don't on spec. I don't feel any entitlement to compensation for work performed outside such an agreement.

All work I produce for profit is expressly for-hire and "owned" by the paying Customer. I've got no rights in the products of my work. I've never produced work that my Customers have subsequently licensed or sold, nor would I take on such work. There's plenty of work to do w/o going down that distasteful road.

Any software, writing, photography, music, and other creative endeavors that I've pursued in my personal time and that I have distributed have been permissively licensed or disclaimed to be in the public domain. Fundamentally, I believe an idea can't be "owned". Anything I communicate to others is no longer "mine". It belongs to humanity. Attribution of authorship has a moral component to me (i.e. plagiarism is morally wrong), but making derivative works or exact copies of the works of others isn't wrong. All human expression is derivative.

The current copyright regime in the United States is such a perversion of the original intent that I consider it immoral to participate in it for profit and I have varying degrees of contempt for those people or companies who do. The social contract is skewed too far from the benefit of the public, in favor of the entrenched copyright interests (who, by and large, aren't creators). If the copyright regime were returned to the original term and renewal I might change my opinion, though I still wouldn't participate personally. That would, at least, bring works into the public domain in a sensible time period.

By and large the "entertainment industry" is the object of my ire, because their lobby has been the one seeking to increase copyright terms and to make draconian laws, like the DMCA, to limit individual rights. I think the "tech industry", as we know it, would function in substantially the same manner w/ shorter copyright terms (and w/o software or business process patents-- though that's not really what we're talking about here).

Have I benefited from the current copyright regime? Sure. A lot of the work that I do involves support of non-Free software. Like I said-- if we went back to sensible copyright terms I think the tech industry would be mostly the same.

Perhaps I'm a hypocrite who can't ever be redeemed for working in the tech industry. I was born into the "IP" regime that exists today (at least, prior to the Sonny Bono copyright extension act and the DMCA), but I'm trying to navigate it with the moral compass that I've got.

> If digital piracy is unchecked, then it forces artists to dream up other ways to make money.

I think you've accurately captured the state of the world for the vast majority of owners of IP who wish to profit from their work. It is extremely rare for royalties to produce any significant percentage of revenues for artists. Most revenue comes from merchandise, live performances, custom work, and so on.

With this in mind, I submit that the actual value of IP in most cases is close to zero.

I think it also must be noted that this would be the case with zero piracy as well. It's not pirates who eat up all the IP revenue, it's the middlemen between the artist and the audience.

It may also be worth considering how value is created by the intermediaries. In the case of, for example, a hit single it's not obvious to me how much of the financial value came from the music itself and how much from the promotion of it.

Which only makes me wonder further if the underlying IP is really valuable or not.

That's a fair point. Come to think of it, hit singles seem to be a lottery - most of the successful ones aren't much different from the unsuccessful ones, except that they reach the threshold of popularity (after which it becomes a positive feedback loop for a while). Spending money on promotion increases the chances of a single to win the lottery.

So I guess I must concede the point. At least in pop music, it could be argued that the value of the work alone is small, and almost all of the value is created by third parties. You gave me something to think about.

Given an IP strong environment, promotion via piracy, either by blatant give away, "free", or by tolerating some piracy can be high value when compared with the cost of promoters.

A few examples:

Official torrent with tip jar, purchase here info included. One could host this torrent too.

Download here page with ads and opportunity to buy, pay what one wants to pay.

Pay for copy, or stream it anytime from our nice server...

Social media, coupled with variations on the above can get word out quickly.

These things, and the many variations on them possible, are of least advantage to the big players, and can be a serious advantage for new, small, up and coming players.

Piracy does not eliminate any sales opportunities. And it can often garner attention where buying that attention can be otherwise costly.

Being relevant opens a lot of potential doors.

> With this in mind, I submit that the actual value of IP in most cases is close to zero.

I heartily endorse this opinion or viewpoint.

After accepting this as true, we must confront why "intellectual property" in the form of taxpayer-funded enforcement of ownership of an idea exists.

Mickey Mouse.

This creates inefficiencies and it just isn't fair to those who just want to sell their creations without holding a concert or drumming up some other scheme to get people to pay.

Are you arguing that it's unfair that a business needs to sell something that people are willing to pay for in order to make money?

That’s a specious argument. People are willing to pay large amounts of money for content. That has nothing to do with the propriety if people taking that content for free, other than it proves that those people are getting a valuable thing for nothing.

If the tried and true method of getting paid is through concerts, Patreon, crowdfunding new albums, or selling CDs in the street, I don't think the market is as "unfair" as xhkkffbf is arguing.

I agree that this has nothing to do with the propriety of people taking content with a price tag for free. But I think muddling the market sense of fairness (I don't want to/cannot perform in a concert; people should pay me for selling MP3s online) and the ethics of copying data is dangerous. Especially when we are solving the problem through legislation.

There's nothing tried and true about that method. Artists do it because they have to, and the overwhelming majority of them are unable to make a full-time career out of it, and either relegate art to a side-hustle or take full-time jobs adjacent to their art (like recording engineering or record production).

> Are you arguing that it's unfair that a business needs to sell something that people are willing to pay for

I argue against that media companies are using goon squads (police, judges, industrial-prison complex) to rob people who pirate their money or their freedom.

The fact that pircay exists exactly does show that their exist people that do not want to pay.

> The fact that pircay exists exactly does show that their exist people that do not want to pay.

Many people use piracy to get art they literally cannot buy legally. Many others use it to get digital versions of physical media they bought.

I also know a lot of rich people who pirate the shit out of anything they can find.

> does show that their exist people that do not want to pay.

Of course not? This entire thread is talking about how IP is a sham. Its totally out of touch with physical reality. The original design of IP to begin with was more to protect the printers than the artists themselves - the problem that needed addressing in the 17th-18th century during the dawn of IP protection wasn't that creativity was this new thing people were trying out - it was that industrial printing of media was suddenly a thing at a scale whereby the manufacturers of books wanted their infrastructure protected from scalpers undercutting their expensive runs of literature.

IP was conceived as a romantic way to protect the middle men of creativity from the start, and while those middle men still exist, their function has been totally technologically obsoleted to the point where random strangers I have never and will never meet are offering to send me copies of things I want for free. That is damn magic that could not have happened even thirty years ago. There was always a marginal cost to information transfer that is now gone, and with its departure the hollow justifications for information monopolies at gunpoint are plain to see as immoral and unreasonable.

They always were, it was always a protection racket for middle men, but at least last century the economic indicators aligned marginally with the concept. Now they are in total opposition to physical reality and those that realize it are less guilt tripped by pirating some corporation larger than several nations works.

This sounds like a personal attack and I feel your comment would be better without it.

> When digital replication is easy -- as it is with arts like music or software -- piracy destroys innovation and hurts creators who want to earn a living by selling their creations.

The "creation" is the work, which can still be sold. Copies of the work cost nothing and does not make any sense to sell them.

It seems like this is the best way to go, but capitalism's competitive nature is a problem. If a shipping company hires developers to write logistics software, and then everyone has access to the software, the company will have spent money but gained no edge. Same with novels. If everyone can freely print and sell a story, who's the sucker that'll pay the writer?

Of course, I see this as a problem with thr economy. Freely distributing ideas is better for society as a whole than keeping secrets.

Look no further than the Linux kernel for an example of almost every major tech company being invested in the largest software project in history because its in all their individual self interests to not try to reinvent a wheel that big for a competitive advantage.

The prevalence of proprietary kernel drivers likewise lends credence to the value in having forced openness, which would fall under more right to repair than IP for consumers of products hosting software.

I don't think people stealing would stop an artist from creating art. I think for people who view it as an ends to a mean, and make a living, it might make them seek other means of employment. But for the idealistic morons out there who create for the sake of creating, this wouldn't stop them in the least bit.

> But for the idealistic morons out there who create for the sake of creating, this wouldn't stop them in the least bit.

You'll notice the bait-and-switch modern society does here. We're supposed to value and respect artists, because they're "morons (...) who create for the sake of creating", who want to express their feelings and communicate their thoughts. And then we're given "artists" whose primary purpose is to make money through their creative works. I think we shouldn't be calling these two groups of people using the same word.

I think for the consumer who is willing to put in the effort, it's not hard to find the true artists. Sometimes they may be on the billboard 100, but chances are most of them are not. There's a rabbit hole of art to consume and pontificate over. I don't think the tragedy is that more people aren't aware of great artists. I think the real tragedy is that even if they were aware of it, they wouldn't give a damn.

Perhaps a solution should be engineered for that consumer who is looking, and that would be an art to avoid the mainstream bloat that would come with producing a mechanism like that.

There absolutely is a thing called a free lunch. In fact their is an album named after it "fat of the land"

I pirate all the time even though I do try and buy the legal options first. When in a lot of cases. Kodi with a couple add-ons take care of the rest. I bought a physical copy of some book but the company drm servers are no longer maintained I'm out of luck. Pirated copies to the rescue. There is an entire generation that was raised to not give a shit about copyright.

I've probably committed five felonies today yet paid once because I'd prefer to do that.

So why bother paying any attention to copyright law? There are zero repercussions.

Linux and the open source ecosystem is evidence that creativeness is not limited to creators who sell a product.

Digital replication is easy and the mass adoption of digital mediums has rendered old business models ineffective. This is called progress. We've created something so great (computing, the internet) that its displaced much of what was before.

The root model is still very much effectual: trade goods and services. If you sell a hardback copy of your book then you can make a margin from people who buy it to have in their offline library. If you perform your music live then you can profit off of your audience. If you open source your software then you can build a company offering consulting around it.

Just think about the amount of advertising and reach that people have access to now. Using your example; giving away a million mix tapes to sell a hundred thousand tickets to your concerts is likely better than selling a thousand mix tapes because no one knows who you are and few want to take a chance.

Say we succeeded in creating a crime free society. Would people be justified in their complaints about the lack of police jobs?

The word you're looking for is a "public good", a good that is non-excludable and non-rivalrous. In economics it is well known that businesses operating in the free market will always underproduce public goods if at all. We've already solved this issue with other public goods like infrastructure and defense, which is to fund it publically.

> ... or government funding from taxes that can't be escaped.

This is bad why? You seem to have issue with the fact that it's being funded in a way that you can't be avoided, but this is true even for private institutions. The truth is that in perfectly competitive markets most companies do not make enough profit to reinvest into research. Most research instead come from near-monopoly markets that have the profits to invest in research. Take for example the development of UNIX at Bell Labs. I doubt anybody living in that era could've avoided telephone charges entirely.

You say this with such authority, but you are being naive yourself about the history of arts and economics. The window of history when art was considered "IP" that couldn't exist otherwise is vanishingly small, less than 100 years. Art survived and prospered somehow before IP laws, even after the printing press.

IP is a construct created by capitalism to monetize art and information. It is not a real thing and it is not a necessary thing. People create things just fine without and industrial complex behind them, and if losing that is the cost of all art being accessible to everyone, I am fine with that deal.

"Digital Piracy" is not a real thing. It's a convention you're advocating for, and one that reasonable people have still not heard a decent argument for adopting.

Piracy is not something that just replaces all forms of paid ownership of digital media.

Piracy is just another competitor on the market; if for the customer the pirated copy provides a better experience at a cheaper price, no IP law will be able to stop the customer from using the better solution. That's capitalism at work.

If you want piracy to stop the solution is simple; provide a better product. Either by providing a better experience (Netflix until recently, Steam) or at a cheaper/equivalent price (Offering your product for free or under an open source license).

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