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Comment by AnIdiotOnTheNet | Hacker News Reader

Honestly I think we should just work at doing away with the concept. The idea of it was to encourage the creation of works by providing a limited term of artificial scarcity so said works could participate in the market. But in the information age, where copying information is as close to free as makes no odds, I think that makes a lot less sense than it used to. That's without even considering that giant corporations have subverted this system and exploited many producers of works while profiting well past the deaths of the creators.

It is my opinion that we need an alternative mechanism for funding the creation of information-works that doesn't rely on artificial scarcity.

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You have said it was originally to help out the market, and you have said copying information is now nearly free, but you forgot to say how or why the first part is incongruous with the second. Why does it make less sense than it used to? Which of our new capabilities could be leveraged by a new system?

You used to have to recoup the costs of publishing as well as fund the author. Binding books was and is not free, but copying bits effectively is.

You still didn't answer the question. Copyright was introduced because it was amazingly cheap to copy as opposed to create. If it's gotten even cheaper, that means it's more relevant, not less. So, again, how does the first part connect to the second? Explain fully why the current system isn't relevant, because there's clearly something obvious to you that isn't obvious to me.

What I'm saying is, the motivation to print pirated copies of books was to sell them to people for profit because as cheap as it was to copy books compared to writing them, it was still quite a bit above 0.

However, copying cost today is effectively 0. No one would pay money for a pirated copy of an ebook. One could (somewhat pedantically) say that this means the creator's 'exclusive right to profit' from their work is not violated because no one profits in this way from piracy[0], but that's not the point. the point is that the concept barely even made sense the first time around, but allowed a creator who didn't own a giant expensive distribution mechanism the leverage to negotiate compensation. Now the distribution is about as free as it is ever likely to get.

[0] or at least they wouldn't if it weren't for laws creating barriers that allow people to profit by providing mechanisms around said barriers.

But how would that begin to work in practice? Someone makes an album or a book and everyone an just copy it without any fee?

Yes. And why not? That I can do that so easily today even with copyright just goes to show how post-scarcity information is.

The problem, of course, is that the creators of the work still need to participate in a scarcity economy to live. There are examples of efforts being made to fund creators outside the traditional scarcity-based mechanism, such as patreon funding, github sponsorship, and the like, although I admit they appear to only currently be useful for those who would be unable to leverage the traditional system effectively anyway.

While I may not have the answer to funding creators, I firmly believe that we'd be going backwards to insist on forcing scarcity into a post-scarcity space.

How do you ensure the copy you buy isn't adulterated and modified? One benefit of copyright is that the author can ensure the "real" one is shared... which you may care about when viewing content.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/19/technology/amazon-orwell-...

Trivially solved with hashing or signing. Copyright as a legal mechanism is unnecessary to ensure 'legitimacy'.

Copyright is useful for preventing others from using characters you created, but frankly I don't see the value in that. Moreover, it isn't even effective as fan fiction is incredibly common anyway. We can see how this would work with the proliferation of open source and the commonness of forks. It really isn't a big deal.

Copyrights are not only unnecessary for ensuring that the work you receive matches the original as copyright holders are free to make modifications. Worse, with the current copyright system the copyright holders can prevent the original from being distributed at all.

Then we would be well advised to listen to the creators of such work, who largely tend to describe the type of system you want to do away with.

I don't think that follows. If we listen to car manufacturers we should replace our cars every year. Creators who make a lot of money with the current system are incentivized to perpetuate it, and some of those who don't make much imagine that they someday might.

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