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Comment by matheusmoreira | Hacker News Reader

The music industry has no explanation for anything. Its entire existence is based on made up concepts that are irrelevant in the 21st century, ideas such as copyright. To actually explain things is to prove their own irrelevance.

They're not like us, they don't know or care what user agents are. The only thing that matters to them is control. To them, the idea that someone might do something they didn't approve of is an atrocity that must be combated at all costs. They actually think that browsers are glorified passive content consumption platforms where they get to set the rules and it's take it or leave it. Even something as basic as user scripts is an affront to them because it means the user is not a passive consumer anymore.

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What does this drivel even mean? What interest does the music industry specifically have against anything but "passive consumers"? It's a shallow attempt to recast people not paying for their music as some sort active citizenry?

What's the music industry's fear? People making their own remixes and becoming too powerful, rhythmically? No. They don't like people not paying. People don't like paying. Therefore they avoid it. It's not courageous nor morally repugnant, but the motivation is entirely self-interested and the result is mildly negative for the actual people working in creative industries.

What does this drivel even mean? Everyone likes to be paid. Everyone does not like to pay. Digital technology has eliminated media scarcity. Some people want to artificially create scarcity so that other people are forced to pay them. Fortunately it is pretty obvious to most people that there is no real advantage to anyone in society to artificially create this scarcity.

> People making their own remixes and becoming too powerful, rhythmically? No.

Yes, actually. It's not uncommon for remixes to be taken down.

> What does this drivel even mean?

This "drivel" means exactly what I wrote: there is no acceptable explanation for anything they do. Nothing they say will ever change the fact that copyright is fundamentally incompatible with the 21st century, the age of free flowing information.

> It's a shallow attempt to recast people not paying for their music as some sort active citizenry?

Shallow?

These corporations have robbed the whole world of our public domain rights. They lobbied the US government multiple times until they made copyright duration functionally infinite. They use the US government to impose their copyright on the rest of the world. They work on DRM which means they are completely opposed to the computing freedom we all enjoy today and are atively working to undermine it. And on and on.

Of course copyright infringement is active citizenry. It's civil disobedience and at this point it's a moral imperative. To pay them even one cent is to empower them to do even worse.

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