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Comment by rectang | Hacker News Reader

Musicians are apparently an exception to the HN crowd creed that entrepreneurs should negotiate hard to get the best deal possible.

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Violate an Open Source license and all hell is brought down, but Pirating music is just fine. HN has some weird ethics.

I don't think "weird" is the right term for an ethical system that is more concerned with the rights of those who are perceived as underdogs or disadvantaged than with the rights of those who are perceived as excessively successful or fortunate. The "Robin Hood" folktale is a good 600 years old, and no remotely comparable tale in which the titular character is unsympathetic ever caught on. A tendency towards "restorative justice", bringing those up high down and raising up those below seems close to being a natural state for humanity; if anything, the belief that some abstract discourse about property and contract law means that we ought to cheer for a state in which person A has orders of magnitude more power and treasure than person B to continue is the weird one.

The idea software developers and the companies they work for are the underdogs compared to musicians and the music industry is just bizarre. The tech giants could buy the whole music industry and it would be a blip on a spreadsheet.

Absolutely. The music industry has a high profile but there's comparatively little money in it. And because music, like all entertaimnent markets, is winner-take-all, most people who work in the music biz scrape by on wages that are dwarfed by the average tech salary.

That's the context in which generally well-off tech folks champion piracy and ridicule musicians who have the audacity to question tech industry exploitation.

But are the well-off tech folks the same ones who would defend open source licenses?

Let's see. I'm comparatively well-off by the standards of most working musicians. I'm an aggressive Open Source advocate. So... yes?

And yet you will certainly not find me championing piracy. I don't see what you're trying to get at.

The post I originally responded to talked about the existence of a demographic that reacts with offense to open-source licenses being violated but is indifferent towards or even advocates for music piracy, and contended that their ethics is "weird". To me, weirdness implies being uncommon, but to the extent that this demographic exists, I do not think that the ethical principles they are applying are uncommon at all: as they see it, the typical GPL violation case is perceived to involve a faceless megacorp benefitting off of the work of one or multiple hobbyist programmers scraping by while making their labour available for free, while music royalties are perceived to primarily benefit very affluent label executives and industry association lawyers. Conditional on this belief, a very commonly held ethical system says it's bad to steal from the former but good to steal from the latter. If the objection is merely that the belief is wrong, though, you can't say that the problem is that some "weird" ethics is involved.

All over this thread, it is musicians themselves being castigated. Not "music industry executives need to wake up", but "musicians need to wake up". Don't try to make this all about executives and lawyers now.

Good grief, how I hate the disregard for musicians so commonly seen in the tech industry.

> The tech giants could buy the whole music industry and it would be a blip on a spreadsheet.

For scale, the global music industry has about $20 billion in annual revenue, Google alone has about 8× that.

I don't think GPL software developers usually work for US software megacorps, and I haven't see people get up in arms about violations of non-copyleft licenses (how would you even violate those? Not crediting the original developer?). In fact, I've GPLed some of my own projects and pushback from people who seem to be associated with the Silicon Valley subculture is a pretty common occurrence (they typically want it to be relicensed under BSD or MIT or the like).

> I haven't see people get up in arms about violations of non-copyleft licenses

Oh? Then you didn't see me going off about the "Commons Clause" bullcrap.

For what it's worth, I'm a former member of the Board of Directors and V.P. Legal Affairs of the Apache Software Foundation, and I'm a music industry person who worked in a recording studio for 6 years before transitioning to tech.

It is philosophically consistent to defend attribution-based Open Source licenses and musicians' right to negotiate hard. In both cases, the rights of the creator are prioritized.

Open source of the kind that gets violated (copyleft) is generally putting the user first, rather than the developer. So in tht sense, the main beneficiary of the license – the user – is indeed the underdog.

Of course they should negotiate hard.

But if their terms are unacceptable and immovable, the other party has every right to tell them No Deal.

> [T]he other party has every right to tell them No Deal.

Sure, but that's different than "You can't charge tech companies more than they themselves are making from the music." Of course you can, and you can do so long-term provided that new tech companies appear as existing ones fail.

You're welcome to try. You're welcome to think that's reasonable.

I enjoy watching news stories about new tech companies that die after making horrible deals and investors who lose their money after investing in them. People should know better than to accept loser deals like this.

If the alternative is artists not being paid enough to make a living, then one side has to push until the other side loses. The work is being given away so cheaply by tech companies trying to commoditize their complements that there isn't enough money to support both the creators and the distributors. Why should the creators lose by default?

> The work is being given away so cheaply by tech companies

I disagree with your characterization: The work is being given away by artists, who are welcome to accept the terms that tech companies offer them.

The artists are welcome to reconsider, renegotiate.

> Why should the creators lose by default?

The creators are offered terms by tech companies. They are welcome to turn down those terms, and seek better ones.

If they lack the power to negotiate a better deal, then I suggest forming a negotiating block of some kind.

The tech companies are welcome to think those negotiations are not favorable and not accept the terms.

Or possibly the artists should form their own new tech company (cf. Patreon, Band Camp)

It's not the job of tech companies to provide a living to artists. That's what your characterization implies, and it's just not the case.

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