Comment by nonrandomstring | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nonrandomstring | Hacker News Reader

nonrandomstring

I have always thought that the fundamental toxic conceit of "Intellectual Property" lies in an obscure fear. And I think this case supports that.

To be clear, I'm not touching on legal or economic arguments about payment, rights, control or attribution. These may or may not address the many injustices facing creative people.

In the deeper spiritual conversation about ownership and acts of thought, is the spectre of fear; that one has passed one's creative peak. That you'll never make anything as good as that again. From that fear comes the rejection of creativity as an inexhaustible living process, and the urge to commodify, to cast the past in stone and build a fence around it.

This case, which is more formally about 'derivative works', is about stopping an art-form from living.

For me the antidote to that whole control pathology lies in Kahlil Gibran's "On Children": You are the bows from which your children (creations) as living arrows are sent forth. Real creators have the courage to let go.

I wonder how much of this kneejerk reaction can be rooted back to being taught in school that copying is bad. If someone's copying me, they didn't have to do the hard work I did, and therefor it's immoral, even if it doesn't cause any loss for me.

Well the loss you mention is not the only argument. The argument is about future incentives. If anyone is free to copy and fully use my work I will not do some of the work.

It's about where the bar is. Most people agree copying someone's else novel and selling it is wrong. Copying parts of it that went into popular culture? Making variations on some characters? Those are more interesting. We just need to find some reasonable rules to balance various incentives.

> If anyone is free to copy and fully use my work I will not do some of the work.

Why?

Please read me carefully: I am not accusing you of resentment.

But I already excluded issues of finance and recognition in my conditions above.

So, other than spitefulness and resentment, what else might possess us to declare that if "anyone is free to copy and fully use" some work, then it's not worth doing?

Do you not feel the incredible plenitude and abundance of creativity that urges you toward generosity?

Is capitalism responsible for somehow poisoning us with the idea that scarcity is necessary for valuable endeavour?

> But I already excluded issues of finance and recognition in my conditions above.

Finance is pretty important though, if you want to feed and shelter yourself and your family. Most other types of work cannot be made worthless by others seeing it and copying it.

But the work of researching and thinking and producing a solution can, so the government figured there should be a way to recoup costs and provide incentive.

It's not about resentment. It's about reward. Unless you're in a very privileged position you need to make money from your work or you won't be about to continue doing it. If you have done great work you hope to be rewarded for it and that includes financials.

I want to live in a world where people who do awesome work are awesomely rewarded for it.

I don't get what you're about with the scarcity argument. Everyone is free to write a novel or create software or whatever. I just want people who do the work to be in position to profit from it not someone who didn't do the work

But I'm telling you, for the third time now, that money is excluded from the argument I am making. Yet you keep dragging it back to the same spot again. Are you entrenched in that you are not able to see the world in any other way than through money?

Yes, money is important. Now, can you forget that? Put it aside and try to move on to a higher level of thought?

("No" is a perfectly acceptable answer that would satisfy my genuine curiosity)

The point he's making is that you can't just say "money is excluded from the argument I'm making" and still be anywhere relevant to reality.

People dislike copying because for most people it's an attack on their income, either by taking their recognition (eg copying "free" images from a photographer) or by actually taking their income (eg copying paid art).

If you exclude financial arguments you exclude the vast majority of people who share their work.

To bring this around to code, most popular licenses allow copying someone's code with proper attribution, so clearly copying is okay as long as you don't take recognition from a work that isn't profit motivated.

I think "No" would have saved you many words. Nonetheless I am disappointed that there appears not a single voice amongst you who can conceive matters of creation outside a framework of money, income, profit, reward, theft, entitlement, licenses, capitalism, communism.... they really have you where they want you.

This website used to be called Startup News. It probably still should be.

Or did the idea of what a "start-up" is mature to incorporate bigger ideas about value?

Can't you just engage with their argument?

It seems pretty obvious to most people, that some artists would be unable to produce certain works of art, if they did not have the funding to pay their bills.

Why are you unable to understand this? Just engage with the argument.

> Can't you just engage with their argument?

No.

Because it is not an agument, it's a diversion, and an attempt to drag a much more complex and interesting debate into the long grass.

> It seems pretty obvious to most people, that some artists would be unable to produce certain works of art, if they did not have the funding to pay their bills.

You're correct. It is obvious. Indeed it's so boringly self-evident it precludes discussion. It's dull, maudlin, perennial and a pointless spiral down into lamentation of broken political and social systems that are utterly beneath the level at which I wish to engage.

Are you familiar with the expression "Never argue with an idiot because they'll drag you down to their level and beat you with experience"? That.

> Why are you unable to understand this?

I understand it perfectly. I'm just not interested in it.

> Just engage with the argument.

Your entitled indignation that I refuse to be dragged into the mud amuses me.

> You're correct. It is obvious.

So then yes, you agree with everyone else completely, that many artists would be unable to produce certain art, if they were unable to make a living from it.

Great, you agree with everyone else entirely. Not sure why you would be so upset with everyone if you simply agree with everyone's main point, 100%.

> that I refuse to be dragged

You don't have to be dragged anywhere if you simply agree with the point, that you called obvious, which is that many artists could not produce work if they could not live off of it.

This doesn't have to be an argument. You just agree with them, and you called it obvious.

Unfortunately this HN forum is not conducive to long exchanges. (I probably won't read further replies as they slip off the bottom of my workflow here). I appreciate your reply and willingness to have a good banter.

Our difference is that "artists" are driven by complex psychological and spiritual motives, way beyond money, which is a necessary but insufficient component of the artistic life. Some commenters don't like it when I say you're an accomplished craftsman but not a "real" artist if your preoccupation is with money. I can understand why that hurts, especially if one is besieged by brutal, empty capitalism and looming AI predating on your soul.

But I stand by this. And most of Art-history and the philosophy of art bears me out. And my point is that the artist who sacrifices (prostitutes) themselves on that altar of anomie and alienation is an accomplice in their misery - however strong the need to "put bread on the table". We are more than this.

Sorry, but you already said that you agree with the point, and called it "obvious".

So yes, you agree and think the point is obvious.

And now you are just moving the goal posts to something else, using a lot of words, in order to ignore the fact that you just agreed and said it was obvious.

This is why we need some form of universal basic income..

I would like to make money out of my work if we have UBI as well, you know?

It does cause loss for you. How many hours you spent on that original work have been wasted. You could have just spent 10 minutes copying someone else.

To the downvoter, please do some free contract work for me. It causes you no loss.

Hi. I’m an artist. I have spent most of my life practicing my craft. I think that until we have abandoned the concept of “working for a living”, this line of thought is a bunch of wankery.

If I create something that people are willing to keep buying for decades without any more work on my part, then I have a nice source of recurring, passive income that I am very motivated to defend by stopping anyone else from profiting off of it. I am also a human being who needs to do things like take a break from working now and then so I don’t burn out. And explore new avenues of expression without worrying about spending a while making stuff that’s not good enough to get paid for. And work on big, weird projects. Having something that keeps selling without me putting in any work is great for all of those things.

The fundamental toxicity here is that we live in a capitalist hellscape, not that artists would like to use their skills to get by in said hellscape.

Would you prefer a communist hellscape where you only get paid if the Commissariat of Art likes it, or a monarchist hellscape where you only get paid if the Duke of Something is your patreon?

Or, as a thought experiment, some sort of UBI so that artists can follow their muse without having to find buyers for their work.

Would you gladly slave away for the rest of your life so artists and random layabouts can “follow their muse”?

I don't mind money for artist, but the problems are wannabe morons that can't draw a circle with the bottom of a bottle.

I don't mind money for scientists, but the problems are wannabe morons that try to prove the Earth is flat.

You can continue the list...

The hard problem is a better method for resource allocation.

In the communist hellscape you would have a minimum of food and housing guaranteed and could survive regardless of the Commissariat pays you or not.

The monarchist hellscape is pretty much equivalent to the capitalist hellscape, except you are trying to seek patronage from the public rather than a single entity. The capitalist hellscape is a hellscape because disposable income is disappearing from the middle class.

In a communist country, can you send a letter saying that you will never return to the car factory because you are going to make sculptures all day long? Are they really going to continue giving you house and food or the secret police will ask nicely to reconsider your decisions? (Assuming it's not https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_Rouge and there is enough food.)

> Hi. I’m an artist. I have spent most of my life practicing my craft. I think that until we have abandoned the concept of “working for a living”, this line of thought is a bunch of wankery.

If you seriously think that the deepest spiritual questions of why we create are "a bunch of wankery" then you are no artist. A producer of things, maybe. A very successful producer of wonderful, beautiful and desirable things perhaps.

But not an artist.

Ah yes, and now we have the “you can’t be a real artist if you consider any practical realities of putting food on the table with your work” wankery. I’ll just go subsist on moonbeams and philosophy so I can be a real artist then.

Wanker.

I won't push you on it any more, because you're not ready. But I hope that one day you'll find a whole lot more to the world than what you see now.

Congratulations on maintaining your sense of smug superiority throughout this discussion.

I am, as I said, a working artist. I have done multiple solo projects that spanned one or more years, each more ambitious than the last. I have cover quotes from four people with something like seven Hugos between them on my last graphic novel.

I am now returning to a project that I put down for a couple of years because it got to a point where the polish it needed was not compatible with the ways my income is structured. I recently had a boring corporate art gig work out really well so I get to spend at least a few months not worrying about where my rent is coming from, and I’m stopping less ambitious projects that were easier to crank out at high speed in favor of this crazy thing. They were also ones that felt more likely to be popular. The serious big projects? I care that they please me, first and foremost; I do them because I have something I need to say through the medium of words and pictures,

I do not worry that I have peaked. I worry about paying my fucking bills in a world that’s increasingly more hostile to making a living as an artist. I worry about every social site wanting to hide posts that link to my site because these corporate hellsites are optimized to keep people scrolling past interchangeable “content” that fills the space between ads.

When I finish this project, I am confident that my next project will build on the lessons I learnt doing this one, as it built on what I learnt in my previous major workings. Perhaps it will be even more ambitious. Perhaps it will be deliberately much less ambitious, so I can kick back and have some fun without pushing myself to new heights for a while. I’ll still keep getting better, every time you draw something you get a tiny bit better at drawing that thing, and it doesn’t go away unless you suffer major brain damage. Hell, even that isn’t necessarily an obstacle - there’s a story about one Warner Brothers animator in the forties who had a bad concussion in a car accident, and found that his abilities had taken a major leap forwards once he was healed up and ready to get back to work. Lose my drawing arm? I’ve seen friends shift off their dominant hand due to injury, and go from uncoordinated wobbly messes to just as good as before in a month or two of breaking out the drills they used back in art school. Eventually there is a point where my whole body will start to break down. That is when I expect to peak: when I am physically incapable of manipulating tools and seeing my canvas.

But sure, I’m “not ready” and there’s “more to the world”. And worrying about intellectual property has nothing to do with wanting to be able to make a living. And I’m not really “an artist”.

But you’re still a pretentious wanker.

Why did it take you getting really quite angry before saying some truly interesting and engaging things?

If you hadn't been so vulgar this could have turned into a really interesting conversation about capacity, maturity, self-development, ... all the things I wanted to talk about that aren't the dull, common rubble of how shit life is under late capitalism. It's shit. We get it. The only important question is what you're going to do about it. But if you only see threats (pretentious wankers) everywhere, those options are going to be quite limited.

And I'm not hurt by what you say. I'm British and a writer. Of course I'm a pretentious wanker and I'm pleased you're smart enough to see it.

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