#abolishcopyright. Musicians if you’re listening, find a different way to earn a living than depending upon the enslavement of ideas (and by extension, individuals). Copyright is abhorrent, and needs to go. There are better ways.
This is particular to creative works. Free Software gets around this with lots of subsidies, commodified complements, corporate investment, and occasional labors of love. The fact that software is highly collaborative and that licenses like the GPL exist helps. A handful of collaborating developers can produce a spare-time project that is actually useful to other people who will sponsor development of further improvements to the project. Music does not work that way.
If you want music to be libre, someone needs to subsidize the cost of creation: The wages for the musicians for one-two months, the wages of the technicians, the rent for the studio, and also subsidize the cost of writing the song in the first place.
The current paradigm amortizes those costs among all listeners of a song, with some profit for the facilitators.
Entire genres of music have been created from inexpensive musical equipment and free software. Art has never been more accessible to the people than it is now.
Then we simply never get their work. Some people would absolutely continue to create for the fun of it, but they'll remain the minority.
Movies you'd watch in a Theater? Completely gone. Commercially funded TV shows, gone. A vast majority of books, written by full time writers and researchers, gone.
And I'll also posit that most music would go away too. Even the amateurs I know expect to be paid for a gig. Most musicians are not willing to busk for a living.
And, don't forget, software development relies heavily upon Copyright as well (licenses, your work-for-hire, etc).
The idea that people would stop creating is absurd. I work in Cancer Research and the absolute least contributing people in the medical industry are the ones obsessed with patenting and copyrighting their work, which is usually garbage and of frivolous value compared to the hard grunt work of millions of unsung heroes grinding it out for non-monopoly wages.
I was an engineer at Microsoft and the average code there was total garbage compared to the open source code powering top public domain projects.
And no modern epic is significantly better than Ἰλιάς.
Every letter we are using; every word; every bit of tooling; was made by other people in a long pyramid stretching back tens of thousands of years and billions of people wide. All of us are putting grains of sand on top.
Really? Sounds pretty terrible to me. Few books. Few videogames. No movies. No TV shows. Most of the internet obliterated. Any content that is created is copied and regurgitated so much you'd be hard pressed find out who actually created it.
I personally like consuming entertainment. I work with the creative side of my brain all day long, and being able to go home and turn it off with some relatively mindless entertainment (my form is a combination of books and videogames). I'd hate to come home one day and only have a zero budget, poorly tested, game to play, or a book that I've already re-read enough to quote it by memory.
> And no modern epic is significantly better than Ἰλιάς.
Pure opinion. And in any case, there's only one Iliad. There's hundreds of other "modern" epics out there - many of which I find more entertaining, though they are not as literarily significant.
> the open source code powering top public domain projects
Is it worth re-iterating that all of the open source licenses is supported by copyright protections?
> All of us are putting grains of sand on top.
Which obviously has its own value, as aptly demonstrated by the entertainment industry as a whole being valued in the trillions of dollars.
Copyright criminalizes remix culture and leads to evils like Youtube arbitrarily giving strikes because 5 seconds of a taylor swift song was in the background, suppression of criticism, and depriving the poor from access to modern culture.
aren't*
Might have lower production quality and less glitzy marketing, but the vast quantity of free music out there is proof that many will continue making music regardless of financial incentive.
There's a really happy medium that neither side ever talks about. Just dramatically reduce the legal length of copyrights. One year maybe?
I think artists would not be dissuaded from working and would monetize the roughly the same with 20-30 year copyright terms.
The promise of fame and fortune is a product of an industry that is based on physical media being the only way to share information. The bit has liberated music for everyone yet we cling to the past.
Most artists with regular output do not. The problem with a day job is it takes away from what a person can produce. For example, a content creator (i.e. YouTuber) with a day job is lucky to get out one-two videos a week. A full time content creator can produce one to two videos a day, often with better quality since they can focus on the work.
Youtube content creators are a good example of people monetizing art without the need for copyright. Donations and voluntary funding are key parts of the content creator world already. Copyright is not particularly important unless they are getting strikes from a copyright troll.
This already happens today (Linus with his tech tips is only one example); without the ability for creators to fight back, it would only get worse.
EDIT: That this is unpopular doesn't make it wrong. Even beyond the (currently) illegal reposting, there are lots of rights aggregators who pay viral content creators, and re-sell their content to TV channels (Chive TV, anybody?). The "pay creators" part goes away if you take away copyright.
After that much time, it's a crime keeping the copyright monopoly: it's either exhausted all possible profit, so there's no point, or it's been around long enough that everything after it is influenced by it, like season 4 and earlier of The Simpsons, and the original Star Wars movies.
In other words, that seems like a decent cut-off point to say that if you still want to hold copyright on them, then you're rent-seeking off of stuff that has kinda become "cultural identity" stuff, specifically because it's what people grew up watching and influenced by.
No, that's not correct. 14 years was the original term set by law not the Constitution, and the difference is important. Copyright and patents do not formally exist in the US Constitution, because IP was a contentious issue even then. Instead there is a clause that empowers Congress to decide to do so if they wish, but there is no requirement. Article 1 Section 8 Clause 8 says Congress shall have the power:
>"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
But there is nothing specific set out in the Constitution. If there was, it'd be near impossible to change at this point, for better or worse. On the one hand that might mean we'd have much shorter terms then now. On the other hand, it would also mean that if the courts had gone similarly badly in deciding stuff like software patents it'd be near totally hopeless, rather than merely very difficult, to reform. But since it's all down to "merely" legislation Congress could completely change things around on a dime through normal law if there was the political will for it. Though note another complexity is that the US has signed treaties around certain parts of IP as well, including minimum terms. While those too can be renegotiated, or revoked by Congress, it's a higher domestic political and geopolitical bar.
There are lots of interesting reform proposals, within various bounds of feasibility. Hopefully one of them can take off at some point and momentum can slowly start building to go in the other direction then the maximalist positions taken for the last few decades.
You don't want to use that line of argument, since authors and musicians are among the very few categories of workers with that privilege. As much as I agree with you (and actually think that privilege to be expanded to all workers), you won't find any solidarity from the common public on that line.
Don't forget software developers. All of our various licenses (and even our work-for-hire for various companies) relies upon copyright as well.
There's also reporters, photographers, journalists, YouTube content creators, TV, and movies, just to name a few off the top of my head.
So we built a fake framework on top of something plentiful and cheap to copy, to make it more expensive so some people can make money out of it.
How do you suggest an author (artist, musician, etc) make a living, if it takes them 6 months of normal working hours to produce a book and they get an expected $0 of revenue from that book?
We need to stop assuming that having no copyright means that the work cannot be monetized. It just can’t be monetized as if it was a physical object or service rendered. Vinyl records, tee shirts, patronage, book signings, lectures, anything that isn’t copyright dependent can be monetized easily.
The fans of art are aware that paying for it will help create more art they like. This is a personal connection that the fan has with the artist and keeps the art accessible for the casuals.
Copyright also allows more creators to create without requiring them to be a live personality as well; to split their time between creating and hustling for money.
I'm not sure I follow, my understanding is that patronage, say from the Medici family, led to a proliferation of art.
What hit album have you (and your band-mates) written and performed for free?
What feature-length, CGI enhanced movie have you produced, cast, and distributed for free?
What TV show have you produced, cast, and distributed for free?
I'm not trying to call you out specifically, but your post uses "I", so I'm responding appropriately. For better or worse, garage bands, open source developers, and patreon writers are the vast minority of copyright users.
The difference is that the original instance of the work potentially required considerable time and money, whereas its copies are essentially free to produce. There's no difference between the bits of the "original" and the bits of each copy, but concluding that copies of a work should be free for all because the act of creating that copy is free, is fallacious and intentionally misleading.
How about movies? They'd cease to exist (barring a few youtube-quality productions).
Patreon, Twitch, Cameo, OnlyFans, et al, are providing ways to connect with your community and earn a living through their support, which is not only very important during shutdowns when live events are harder, but will be a long term trend.
On the production side costs continue to drop, and if we #abolishcopyright cost of living across the world will drop dramatically, so will be easier to balance the budget.
I sincerely doubt that. Food and shelter won't magically cost less because there is no copyright.
I suppose, in reality, this has been the case for around 3 decades now. Unless you have the marketing department, you don't make money from music sales.
I could scale back my contribution to each artist to pennies each (which doesn't actually work, given the $0.30 cent/3% CC cut), but then we're back to where we are today.
Patreon (and their ilk) is not tenable at scale.
Yes to this. Having an imagination means you can think of different ways to monetize your work that isn’t trying to put an imaginary wall around ideas and information.
Patents and copyrights are literally ideas put on paper that one is claiming legal dominion over. Unless you are making physical media, your products are your ideas.
It’s a tradeoff, not a cure for problems artists face. The current system favors wealthy institutions over artists. No one is willing to donate to a giant record company but fans of the work will readily give money to the artist just because they like them. Patronage is a better system for artists.
None of those scale. I pointed this out elsewhere, but how much money would a creator on Patreon make if all creators were on Patreon, hoping to make at least $1 per month per follower? Musicians alone would push me into the hundreds of dollars (which really means a vast majority of musicians would make nothing from me; less than they're getting via Spotify).
How much are you willing to pay for tickets to the 20th tour in a week that's in your area? For their merch? As for myself, precious little. Probably not enough to even cover their tour costs, let alone the cost of producing the music (and merch) in the first place.
> Patents and copyrights are literally ideas put on paper that one is claiming legal dominion over.
Patents and copyrights make it practical to cover the costs of realizing those ideas in the first place. Ideas aren't worth anything until they're realized, be it in writing for a book, or a performance for a song.
Books often take a minimum of 6 months of full time effort to produce. There's multiple people involved - the writer, the editor, the proofreader, the typesetter. How do they pay for it if they can't make any money from actually selling the book?
Music takes weeks or months of effort in a studio to produce. How do you recoup those costs if you can't sell the output?
Same as it is currently and ever was.
The main point is that every avenue of monetizing art is create something that isn't your art that is scarce and then sell that. Why not just have a system where you can make the art itself scarce?
That's the poster's modus operandi here: he doesn't miss an opportunity to advertise his two favorite topics – abolishment of intellectual property and his own whitespace-based data notation – whether it's on-topic or not.
The correct term is #ImaginaryProperty
Yours truly, Breck Yunits
This isn't Twitter. I'm not sure what you hope to accomplish by using hashtags on HN, but it makes you look like an immature child – similar to writing "M$" in the 90s and early 00s.
I'm wondering if you knew that Karl Marx summed up the desire of communists in one sentence [in The Communist Manifesto]?
"...the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property." [1]
That's it.
That's what all the fuss is about. It was a revelation to me because it seemed too simple at first, yet that's all that communists desire to bring about. This desire includes abolishing 'intellectual property' (trade secrets, copyrighted material, patented processes etc.). As you rightly described, any human knowledge originates socially to start with: “We are all putting grains of sand on mountains built by our ancestors”. This inheritance is what we aim to communize. Even though the communist manifesto is over 170 years old, Marx' critique remains as relevant as relevant as ever: capitalist firms caused the opioid crisis in the US; all over the world there's a landlord crisis - with many suffering homelessness (despite there being vacant buildings) [2]; capitalists have moved much of the industrial production to the global south - e.g. clothes are produced in sweatshops in China/Bangladesh/Eritrea; Playstations are causing wars in Congo [3]; our smartphones are made with conflict resources [4]; and we have a toxic e-waste crisis that is blocking us from re-using black-boxed hardware/components (as well as trade secrets and patents stopping many from being able to learn about technology and science in the first place - artificial scarcity of expertise created by capitalists) - as well as well as this e-waste leaching chemicals and poisoning the land, predominantly in the global south [5].
With 'abolishing private property' we don't mean that we want to get rid of the idea of all property systems. We want to get rid of today's bourgeois property system, as it has allowed a small minority to exclude others and plunder the commons [6], resulting in the division of labor and alienation. It's not about having a big or small capitalist government (capitalist governments are the ones who grant monopolies in the first place). We want full democracy in the workplace. That is what we call socialism, communism, or a communist production system. We also believe that this system, communism, is humanity's true nature.
The reason we have been persecuted is because many capitalists are very happy with their 'haul' (and the power-over others domination that comes with it), and because we communists want to continually ask the question: "how we can constantly expand who benefits from new science and technology?" (which we refer to as communizing/socializing the means of production).
I'm a bit scared this might be something you already know, so please do let me know if I've overstepped. My yearning by writing this is to meet my needs for connection, clarity and cooperation, yet this might not be the best strategy.
I also want to share with you this awesome video I watched a few days ago, in case it interests you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--TsGaNyr0U
[1] The Communist Manifesto (chapter 2), https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-m...
[2] Push (2019) - a short new documentary about venture capital and the financialization of housing. Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2iLWpuZrd-I, full: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWSVG9nsRa4 (you can easily download with yt1s.com if you're not currently in the US/Canada, if it's geo-blocked)
[3] Inside Africa's 'PlayStation War', https://www.wired.com/2008/07/the-playstation-2/, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2J7efsz_Y-c
[4] Blood in the Mobile, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tv-hE4Yx0LU
[5] Agbobloshie, Ghana https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mleQVO1Vd1I
[6] Professor Guy Standing on 'rentier capitalism', https://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-08-03/book-day-corru...
If you have copyrights and patents, you do not have property rights. Once you implement those, you then remove the rights people have over their atomic property, like computers and paper and printers et cetera.
You cannot have a logical conversation with anyone who uses the term "intellectual property", because at that point it would be like trying to talk to someone about "fire water". There is no such thing.
The reason why that term became so big is that because during the Cold War capitalism and property rights were all the rage, so the proponents of copyrights and patents jumped on the bandwagon and rebranded their issues to be about property rights, even though they were the opposite. It was a very shrewd move, and I'm amazed at how effective it was. It would be like the cigarette industry was able to convince people that cigarettes were actually "health sticks".
That is why you will never see me ever ever use that term, and instead I will refer to them as "Imaginary Property" rights, and encourage everyone else to do so (I read the "Imaginary Property" term for the first time right here on HN).
So all that said, I am a strong believer in property rights. I believe Marx was wrong, and that property rights are an engineering solution to the problem of "how do we assign decision making power over scarce atoms in an efficient way".
I believe the real problem is copyrights and parents. Abolish those and you will eventually unchain the minds of billions of people, and we will be living in a lot more intelligent and prosperous world.