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Comment by joebadmo | Hacker News Reader

I keep seeing this argument and I keep not understanding it. Is it an economic argument? What is the economic point? The economic point to me seems to be that musicians were previously making money on inefficiencies that streaming services have now solved. Just like newspapers made a lot of money on classifieds before craigslist. Sucks for musicians, but it's an economic reality.

Or is it a moral argument? That musiciancs deserve to be paid a certain wage, and that streaming services are taking that away? This seems pretty absurd to me.

I think musicians need to come to terms with reality, which is not that different from old reality, actually: recorded music is basically a commodity, unless you win the megahit lottery. The way to make money as a working musician is through the scarce products you can provide: live performances, merch, and relationships with your audience. Google Amanda Palmer.

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The argument is that the music labels have basically thrown in the towel against piracy and are resorting to an extremely un-lucrative streaming model supported primarily by advertising (free Spotify is still an amazing service for consumers), because at least they'll be getting SOME earnings from people who refuse to pay for the music they listen to (previously, pirates). It's sad for the labels, and even sadder for the musicians who get virtually nothing.

Spotify would be going nowhere fast if it wasn't for the enormous piracy problem.

Piracy will be a problem because marginal cost of distribution is ~0. There's not that much money to extract from distribution anymore because the industries are not providing that much value. They only really provide value to the few artists that they promote well enough to become megahits. Artists that try to play that lottery generally get what they deserve.

Industry wants you to conflate its incentives with artists' incentives, but that's never been true.

Again, musicians need to focus on where they can actually provide value. Recorded music isn't it. They'd be better off considering it marketing. They should be happy that distribution is now basically free, instead of previous situation where they basically had to pay labels for it.

The means to create music is getting cheaper all the time, and there are more ways to fund it than ever before.

In short, the old business model doesn't work anymore, if it ever did. Find a new one.

I suppose authors should rejoice now too, since those troublesome distribution costs have disappeared, marketing is free and they can travel about the country providing real value through public readings and book signings.

Sure, if they can get that to work. It's not the way I would try to provide value if I were an author. The point is that artists need to deal with the realities before them and stop listening to the lies that industry tells them.

You again seem to be making some sort of moral judgment about the situation. I'm talking about economic reality.

If authors think that they can make money by charging for copies (which have a marginal cost of ~0) because they think their product is that much superior to everyone else's, then that's great, but that will obviously only work for a small minority of authors, if at all.

I'm saying extracting money from copies is the old game, and it's over. The new game is trying to figure out how to make money from the value you can provide. And the fact is that the technology that's destroying the old model is also enabling new ones. The most obvious business model going forward is toiling in obscurity on your own dime and releasing a free product. If it's good enough, i.e. if people value it enough, then you can crowd-fund (a la kickstarter) the production of subsequent products. Here your value is as a creator of products, not a distributor. That's just the first thing that occurs to me after ten seconds of thinking about it. I'm sure there are many other viable models.

To me, the future looks vibrant and refreshing. There are fewer gatekeepers to our collective culture, we have more direct access to creators of culture, the experience is more interactive, the barrier to entry is lower, and the exchange of ideas is freer. I hope it's a future filled with more Amanda Palmer and less Avatar.

There's two issues here.

1. Pirating other peoples work is morally wrong.

2. You're kidding yourself if you think the economics that ruin labels and retailers are not going to just as quickly ruin independent acts.

As is painfully obvious from the example of authors - they rely entirely on people honouring their intellectual property and would have basically no income without selling 'copies.'

Just because musicians have a few alternative options, eg. live performances, doesn't change the underlying argument. What goes for authors, or filmmakers, should go for musicians or any other artists.

Why do you keep talking vaguely about alternative business models? There are none. Nobody's going to invent an ingenious new way of making money out of music. There's live performance or there's selling intellectual property. That's it.

Ah, so it's two separate arguments, a moral one and an economic one.

1. I disagree. I'm curious as to the precise moral dimension you're talking about here.

2. You're kidding yourself if you think you can stop it, or that by plugging your ears and closing your eyes you can make it all go away.

Most of your argument seems to be that because artists rely on selling copies now, that it must always be so. The fact is, artistic expression predates copying technology. Art fits into the technological capabilities that exist, not the other way around. Before image copying tech, artists made paintings, drawings, and sculptures, and sold them. There were other business models as well, like private and religious patronage. In ancient times, oral poets travelled and essentially gave live concerts. Dramatists had state sponsorship. Many of these business models and even entire mediums died out as our technology changed. That's what happens.

Maybe authors as we know them will figure out a way to survive, or maybe they'll die out. Same goes for filmmakers, musicians or any other artists. There's nothing special about the particular art forms we have now.

I keep talking vaguely about alternative business models because we're at a transition point. They haven't been invented yet.

"Nobody's going to invent an ingenious new way of making money out of music. There's live performance or there's selling intellectual property. That's it."

That's the spirit! You'd better tell Amanda Palmer, though, I don't think she got that memo.

1. We could go on for several pages about the 'precise moral dimensions' but we both know that taking somebody's work, for nothing, against their wishes, is not cool. If you don't want to pay for it, do without it. Civilisation is built on mutual respect of rights.

2. Maybe piracy is here to stay. I just resent the sneaky suggestion that its only the lumbering, dinosaur labels with their outmoded industrial apparatus that are going to suffer. It's not true at all. The people with the most to lose are the artists themselves - especially the more intellectual ones, eg. authors. In your brave new world, The Beatles would have continued touring pub venues and only the lucky few who got to see them would realise how much they stood out from the 10,000 other bands doing the same thing.

Oh and religious and aristocratic patronage as a primary 'business model' royally sucked - that's basically why the copyright model and the arts have thrived over the last few hundred years. Its why we get to watch 100MM budget movies. It's a bloody good system and it's a crying shame to throw it away just because of piracy.

1. "we both know that taking somebody's work, for nothing, against their wishes, is not cool."

I'm really not sure I agree with that.

"Civilisation is built on mutual respect of rights."

Which rights are you talking about in this case exactly? The only one I can detect from your position is the right to be compensated for your work, which doesn't sound like a natural right at all.

2. Well, my position is that a lot of artists are suffering now, under the thumbs of the dinosaurs (to mix metaphors) you're trying to defend. In the future, those artists (as well as those industry players) who cannot or will not adapt will suffer.

"In your brave new world, The Beatles would have continued touring pub venues and only the lucky few who got to see them would realise how much they stood out from the 10,000 other bands doing the same thing."

But in my brave new world, I actually get to take part in deciding who stands out and who doesn't, instead of waiting for big labels to tell me, and I can rapidly communicate my decision to many other people very quickly. I take a more direct, decentralized stake in my cultural heritage. I find this pleasing.

"religious and aristocratic patronage as a primary 'business model' royally sucked"

I wasn't saying it was great. I was saying that artists adapt to the circumstances. They will continue to do so.

"why the copyright model and the arts have thrived over the last few hundred years"

I neither grant this premise, nor understand the causal connection you present.

"Its why we get to watch 100MM budget movies."

I've found that by my own measure, in the last couple of decades, the quality of a movie has had a generally inversely proportional relationship with the size of its budget. My theory explaining this is that with a larger investment, you need a broader base audience and relatively "safe" content, which translates to bland, soulless, lowest common denominator fare. I'll be happy to see this die.

"It's a bloody good system and it's a crying shame to throw it away just because of piracy."

I really don't think it's a good system at all. Its primary purpose was to promote continued innovation and creation. I've yet to see convincing evidence that it has done so, or that innovation and creation would suffer in its absence.

BTW: Thanks for indulging the argument without resorting to the ugliness that so many of these threadsd tend to devolve into. Even if neither of us convince the other, I find this exchange meaningful and clarifying of my own thoughts. I hope you feel the same.

The copyright model and the arts have thrived for the last few centuries because copyright was such a vast improvement on what came before it. It led to an explosion of creativity and entertainment industry.

Now while a fatted arts industry will always contribute a lot of bloated, formulaic works (although I think people would have to admit that even the more braindead hollywood titles have a lot going for them beyond the plot and script), it also allows big money to spent on worthwhile projects. Think of all the great movies that have been made in the last 70 years - they may not have been the most expensive for their time but they were generally still pretty damn costly to make. And even the shoe-string budget attempts probably would not have been made if the possibility for a massive pay-day did not exist (eg. Blair Witch Project).

I think people have got their priorities mixed up. Accessing art is not the problem. We have limited leisure time to spend, so even if we could, we would not want to buy every album/movie/book we could. These items are cheap, though, so since price is not really a concern, our worry should be ensuring that artists and the creative industries have economically viable roles. And do we really want to live in a world where the quality of the TV and film output never rises above the level of, say, Spain?

"The copyright model and the arts have thrived for the last few centuries because copyright was such a vast improvement on what came before it. It led to an explosion of creativity and entertainment industry."

You keep saying this and I keep not believing that that's all there was to it. It was also a matter of people having way more disposable income and leisure time than ever before, as well as the means of production becoming readily available to the masses.

You're also mostly talking about an era during which the marginal cost of distribution was significantly greater than zero. That's not the case anymore.

"our worry should be ensuring that artists and the creative industries have economically viable roles"

I disagree with this. I think most of our enduring works of art come from a time before copyright. Some, e.g. works of oral tradition like Homer, the Ramayana, the Bible, Gilgamesh, etc. actually depend on the unrestricted free exchange of ideas.

We just passed through a historical window in which the confluence of surplus disposable income and leisure and scarce distribution models made a few artists very rich (but a few corporations even richer). I would argue that this was never an optimal distribution. Anyway, it's coming to a close. Art will go on.

"And do we really want to live in a world where the quality of the TV and film output never rises above the level of, say, Spain?"

The only Spanish works I'm familiar with are Guillermo del Toro's The Devil's Backbone and various films by Pedro Almodovar. They were better than anything on, for example, this list:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_films#Mo...

It is true that artistic expression predates copyright. But isn't it the case that, before copyright, full-time artists either had wealthy patrons (Roman Catholic Church, the nobility) or lived in poverty? Copyright made it possible for an artist to make a living without having a wealthy patron.

I don't think we want to go back to a world where artists are funded by rich people because in that world, the rich decide what works get created.

Copyright is the only proven way of producing an abundance of art CREATED FOR THE GENERAL PUBLIC, not for the Church or some nobleman. Just look at how many books and songs we got in the 20. century. Thousands of consumers each paying a small amount is a fundamentally democratic idea.

I think it should be possible for a writer, musician or developer to make money from ACTUAL creative work -- not from concerts, book signings or t-shirts. I don't see why so many people seem to wish for a world in which a hairdresser gets paid for his work, but a composer or software developer gets nothing. Do we really want a system which rewards the creation of tangible products like tables and haircuts, but not the creation of ideas? In the 21. century? Seriously?

To those who ask "why create artificial scarcity?": For the same reason we have environmental regulations. Environmental regulations also create artificial scarcity. We make it artificially expensive to release CO2 into the air or to fish cod out of the sea above a certain limit. Why? Because this is necessary to ensure continued abundance.

Unless someone proposes a better model which enables people to make a living by creating reproducible works, I will remain a (critical) supporter of copyright. In general, I think we should strive to create a system which rewards contributions to our society.

"before copyright, full-time artists either had wealthy patrons (Roman Catholic Church, the nobility) or lived in poverty? Copyright made it possible for an artist to make a living without having a wealthy patron."

Even if the former is true, I don't think the latter is.

"I don't think we want to go back to a world where artists are funded by rich people because in that world, the rich decide what works get created."

How is this not the situation now? Musicians and filmmakers work at the pleasure of large corporations, who have neither the general enrichment of the culture nor the livelihood of the artist as a priority.

"I think it should be possible for a writer, musician or developer to make money from ACTUAL creative work..."

That's not really the way capitalism works, though. They don't have a natural right to be compensated for the work they want to do. If they did, I'd sit at home and write essays on my blog for 40 hrs/wk instead of going to my government job. Artists have to figure out how to get paid just like the rest of us. Copyright isn't working. See Amanda Palmer for a model that's an alternative both to being owned by a corporation and to starving. It involves a lot of direct relationship with audience.

(You'd think HN of all communities would get this.)

Environmental regulations are not really artificial scarcity, though. It's more like trying to internalize tragedy of the commons externalities. I think of it like an insurance policy, where you charge people who are having a negative effect that won't be felt until later, so you can pay to deal with it when the time comes.

Your reply conflates two things: copyright and big labels. The control of artistic expression landed in the hands of big corporations because only big corporations could handle three expensive things: 1) production, 2) distribution and 3) promotion. All three of these things have recently become way cheaper thanks to digital tech. Big labels are becoming less powerful every minute. It is now perfectly possible for an unsigned band to produce their own recordings in a home studio, sell them on the Web and promote them on the Web as well. If copyright is abolished, this will no longer be possible because the band will no longer have any right to profit from the use of their songs. Even if a million people love their song and listen to it every day, they get zilch.

In short, I see the big label problem, but the problem was never copyright. The problem was expensive production/distribution/promotion.

"They don't have a natural right to be compensated for the work they want to do."

Copyright does not give people the right to get compensated for what they want to do. It compensates people if they make something that other people want to use.

I don't want to talk about "natural rights". I find the notion fuzzy and suspect. I think it only complicates the issue at hand.

I would like to live in a world where people get rewarded when they contribute to society. (Someone who writes a song or book or software program that a lot of people like is a contributor to society.) Either you find that vision desirable or not.

If I conflate the two, it's because big labels are generally the only ones with enough resources to enforce their copyrights.

"Copyright does not give people the right to get compensated for what they want to do. It compensates people if they make something that other people want to use."

Fair point. But the economic argument I'm making is that copies of music, for example, is a commodity at this point, because of the ~0 marginal cost and more or less substitutable.

My point is that I believe that artists will figure out how to get compensated for the contributions to society. Charging for copies isn't going to be part of it.

> I don't think we want to

Who is "we" and when did those "we" give you the right to make claims in our name? Neither you nor anybody else can decide what "we" want. Only we can decide what we want. Let stop making assumptions and simply have a vote on copyright policy.

>Copyright made it possible for an artist to make a living without having a wealthy patron.

Excuse me, but that is bullshit. You seem to have exactly zero clue about the origins of copyright. Since I've explained this countless times here already, let me just quote myself from an older comment of mine:

The fact is, copyright was never meant for creators. It was invented by distributors for distributors. The first copyright law was a censorship law to limit the amount of books printed when the printing press was was getting widely available in England that gave a total monopoly on publishing to a guild of publishers, without even attributing a book to the original author, but instead to the guild member who registered the book, attaining its newly invented "copyright".

So no, copyright was never meant to "make it possible for an artists to make a living".

>Copyright is the only proven way of producing an abundance of art CREATED FOR THE GENERAL PUBLIC.

Proven? Your throwing around fallacies here. There's nothing proven about this, it's quite the opposite already. Unlimited sharing has enabled the creation of more art than ever before.

>I think it should be possible for a writer, musician or developer to make money from ACTUAL creative work

If he or she can find a way to make money from it, sure why not. The point is, you cannot make that money with distribution anymore. That's a reality and there's nothing you can do about it.

>Do we really want a system which rewards the creation of tangible products like tables and haircuts, but not the creation of ideas? In the 21. century? Seriously?

Again your throwing completely unrelated things together.

- A table is indeed a tangible good. You make one, then you can sell it, and have to make another.

- A haircut is not a tangible good, it's a service. The hairdresser gets paid for the work he/she has done.

- The creation of art isn't a tangible good either. It's best likened to a service, except many people do it proactively instead of waiting for someone to pay them to create art.

Yes, we as a society should find ways to reward the creation of art. Copyright is not, and never was, the solution.

>Environmental regulations also create artificial scarcity.

Except there already is scarcity in nature. If there would be an infinite amount of fish, it would make no sense to regulate catching. Huge abundance != no scarcity. With reproducible art, there is truly no scarcity.

You made a logical mistake of confusing these two statements:

1. "Copyright made it possible for an artist to make a living without having a wealthy patron" 2. "Copyright WAS MEANT to make it possible for an artists to make a living without having a wealthy patron"

You seem to think that by disproving (2) you also disprove (1), which is false. (1) is true. (2) may well be false, it doesn't matter.

Your comments about a haircut being a service, not a product, have no bearing on my point that we are approaching a situation in which a hairdresser is rewarded by society for his work, but a songwriter is not. I'm sorry, but pointing out mistakes like this (and if you'd applied the principle of charity you would've seen that it is not quite a mistake) only distracts from the actual discussion.

I'm glad you agree we should find ways to reward the creation of art. I am open to possibilities other than copyright. But so far all I've seen is a lot of handwaving and no workable model.

You can argue the morality of it all you like, but practically, piracy (or free distribution) isn't going anywhere. It's too easy to copy digital goods. The entire internet is built on copying. Everything you use is copied several times just to get it to you.

You're not going to stop it, so if you are an artist or author you should try to find new ways to make money. Crowd-sourcing is one way. Hell I'd pay several hundred dollars to George R. R. Martin to get him to hurry up on his next book.

Edit: Accidentally wrote Robert Jordan instead of George R. R. Martin

Robert Jordan is dead, so I'm not so sure what you expect to happen through that donation...

Oops.. Not sure why I typed that, I was thinking of George R. R. Martin. Thanks for pointing that out.

> "Hell I'd pay several hundred dollars to George R. R. Martin to get him to hurry up on his next book."

Put me down for a wad of cash too, maybe not that much though.

But you/we don't need to appeal to a hypothetical on these things, the crew of SMBC Theater got 5 times the capital they asked for from their fans using Kickstarter to produce a movie.

> 1. Pirating other peoples work is morally wrong.

No it isn't. It's your word against mine, who's right? There is no other way to find out what the majority of people think about copying than to let them vote on it. Copyright policy should be decided in a democratic manner. If the people want copyright to exist and be enforced, enforce it. If they dont want it to exist and want to copy stuff, just let them. This is how democracy works.

> 1. Pirating other peoples work is morally wrong.

This (you making a proclamation) isnt how democracy works.

The reason I pointed out that it was morally wrong was so we could separate that from the economic argument. I could go into detail about why it's morally wrong but what's the point. People are just looking for excuses to justify their behaviour. Imagine you pass an artist with a stall on the street. You say you like one of his paintings, but it's £500. You say that's too much for you, so he shows you a print you can buy for a modest price. You then say you won't buy the print, but then proceed to take a picture of it, make your own copy, and then start selling copies to other people. All against the express wishes of the artist. Does that strike you as a decent thing to do?

> People are just looking for excuses to justify their behaviour.

You're right. My point was that if the majority of people want to copy stuff, it should be legal.

> but then proceed to take a picture of it, make your own copy, and then start selling copies to other people. (...) Does that strike you as a decent thing to do?

You are intentionally conflating filesharing and "selling copies" with the intent to make filesharing be in the same category. But these two imho are different things. In my experience, a large number of people who consider filesharing not morally objectionable, _do_ consider selling copies objectionable.

> All against the express wishes of the artist.

What the artist wants is irrelevant. The point of a democratic vote on copyright policy is not to fulfill artist's wishes, but to have people vote how _they_ want copyright to be. Democracy. Not just some bribeable politicans deciding whats best for authors and the industry.

> Does that strike you as a decent thing to do?

I consider selling copies without the author's consent wrong and I would vote for it to stay illegal. I consider non-commercial, private filesharing not wrong, even if authors oppose it because it may leads to less sales, and I would vote it to be fully legalized.

I just want me and millions of other interested people to be _able_ to directly influence copyright policy by directly voting on it in a fine grained way. I dont want to just give a party my vote and then let them allegedly "represent" me, because at least with respect to copyright, they dont. I want direct democracy.

Having a copyright law that allows consumers to make copies but prohibits the sale of those copies doesn't seem very workable to me. You'd be saying that making money from other peoples work is wrong/illegal, but at the same time saving money by copying without permission is right/legal. In both cases one party is extracting value from the work of another, against their wishes. Seems that the copyright system we have now where the creator is the 'owner' of the intellectual property and sets the conditions for its disposal has a much stronger foundation.

At any rate, surely you'd have to agree that if we changed copyright laws, it would only apply to work created from that point onwards. You couldn't reasonably shift the goalposts for works already published under the guarantee of copyright protection - that would be like raising income tax then applying it retrospectively.

So what it seems to me is that people want to have their cake and eat it. They want free access to the works of a copyright funded/enabled culture, but they'd rather not be left with the lacklustre non-protected output.

At any rate, let me rephrase my question. Would taking a picture of the print an artist was trying to sell you and then making a copy strike you as a decent thing to do? Would you happily say to their face, 'I'm not going to buy your print, but I'm going to take a photo of it so I can make my own copy?'

(we could go a bit further and mention distributing other copies to all your friends so none of them will buy it either, but I don't think that's even necessary)

> we could go a bit further and

No, sorry, I dont think you make any point worth further discussing.

Nice way to dodge the question again. First time you said it was because it conflates two issues, second time you said it was because I asked you already.

I'll ask you one last time. Do you think it's decent behaviour to turn down the purchase of a print that you like, and tell the artist that instead you are going to take a photo and make your own copy for free?

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