But as it is, I have to choose between violating copyright (which has nothing to do with theft) and supporting companies that want turn our devices into telescreens.
Copyright is just not as important as digital autonomy, arr.
Violating copyright is a form of theft. I don't understand how you can say otherwise.
Copyright appeared only a few hundred years ago because governments and the church felt threatened by information that flowed too freely. When you violate it, the only thing that anybody is deprived of is control.
They're worlds apart. "Intellectual Property" is a propaganda term which has no basis in history or the law. Ask any lawyer.
As for the modern day, we need to find a way to separate the payment channels from the content distribution channels. They have different constraints, and by binding them together the content platforms have no choice but to place artificial constraints on the distribution channels, which means developing technologies that converge on censorship.
Instead I ought to be able to find a chunk of bits lying around on a flash drive, play them, and have my player recognize the few hundred people who contributed to the creation of those bits. After a month or so, I'd have a list of a few thousand people, each with a percentage by their name. Supposing I've allocated $30 for content that months, at the end of the month my money goes directly to those people.
That guy who scraped the video and posted a copy. He's doing one of two things:
- helping propagate the original, so the original people end up getting paid from the file he hosted
- obfuscating the source somehow, in an attempt to prevent the proceeds from going to the original creators
In the former case, we should thank him.
In the latter case, he'll get caught: it's pretty easy to prove that you had access to some bits before someone else did. When we catch him, we'll just annotate his obfuscated copy with a link to the original metadata, so payment flows are restored. This ought to even work retroactively.
It's no more complex than what we're doing, with these third party content platforms trying to put handcuffs on our devices all the time. It's just a different model which we're not exploring because the existing model is in the way.