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Comment by ysofunny | Hacker News Reader

the english empire once tried to mantain a monopoly over steam loom machines

the americans cheated their way to competition,

heck, even before that, the english empire got jumpstarted by stealing gold from the spanish (who were themselves exploiting it away from aztec and other mexican natives)

I'm saying it's business as usual, but also, culture doesn't work like tangible physical widgets so we must stop letting a few steal this boon of digital copying by means of silly ideas like DRM, copyright, patents. all means to cause scarcity

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The textile industry in Brno here in Czech Republic (sometimes called "Moravian Manchester") was hugely helped by a local noble posing as a worker in England & the smuggling detailed self-drawn plans of industrial machinery back:

"Brno’s fortunes were changed forever when a young freemason called Franz Hugo Salma set out for England in 1801. He intended to steal the plans for the most modern textile machinery in the world. His crime, the first recorded act of industrial espionage, boosted the competitiveness of Moravian textiles. Soon after smuggling the plans out disguised as a worker, and handing them over to Brno’s fledgling textile industry, Brno became the most important textile centre in the Habsburg empire."

You can even go see some of the original plans in a museum:

"Eleven designs are still preserved in the library of the Rájec chateau. They form a unique set of documents demonstrating both the level of wool processing technology at the turn of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, as well as the aims and means of the relatively rare business of industrial espionage at that time."

https://www.gotobrno.cz/en/brno-phenomenon/this-is-brno-kate... https://www.gotobrno.cz/en/place/salm-reifferscheidt-palace/

Hollywood became popular for filmmaking because they were literally the opposite side of the country from Thomas Edison and his patents...

That and the predictable weather (old film needs lots of light).

This is interesting, is it really true?

United Kingdom was the first to steal a Chinese invention called gunpowder, use it to maximum effect and they were also at the opposite sides of the world.

Do not forget the first law passed by a new nation in which every citizen has the right to burn trees and produce potassium a critical mineral in gunpowder. That nation was either Greece or America, i forget which one.

In the Western civilizations, when we are stealing copyrighted material and patents we are not messing around. I remember when the Byzantine empire tried to steal secrets of silk production also from Chinese, that was so much fun. Great times we lived in the past, even greater now!

People criming in the past is not an excuse for companies committing crimes today. You’re excusing lawlessness.

Cain killed Abel and got away with it!! I can kill someone today too!!!

I think it’s fine to criticize the hypocrisy of viciously defending the copyrights you own, while gleefully running roughshod over the ones you don’t.

But it’s also possible that copyright as a concept, or in its current implementation, is bad and unjust.

I’m sure some copyright holders would like nothing more than to see an argument that elevates copyright violation to the level of murder, morally or legally. But I think it’s more akin to jaywalking - violating an unjust law that mostly shouldn’t exist.

the reform needs to happen at the layer where whether a copyright is valid or not is decided upon, not before (at the point of "should copyright exist") and not after (enforcement).

a world without copyright means those with the largest advertising budgets will reap nearly all the rewards from new IP created by small artists. BigCorp Inc. can just sit around and wait for talented musicians to post something interesting on soundcloud, for example, then just have their in-house people copy it and push it out to radio and streaming platforms via their massive ad budgets and favorable relationships for getting new material onto the waves immediately. meanwhile the original artist gets nothing.

the position of advocating against all copyright protections at all only makes sense for people who are already wealthy enough that they don't need proceeds from their art to survive.

I don’t think this is true. At least in music, bands make far more money from touring and merch than they do from music sales.

If copyright disappeared altogether, most smaller artists would be just fine because they have loyal fans and adjacent monetization strategies.

See: Grateful Dead. They did just fine despite encouraging infringement of IP.

IMO copyright mostly serves to protect the very biggest artists and companies, not the small ones.

I think the point was that the big corporations get the money from selling music.

And saying that bands currently make more money from touring kind of proves the point. They get too low % cut of music sales.

But the point of the response is that "getting money from selling music" is, in digital era, artificial scarcity. I.e. the copyright laws that big corporations are lobbying for continued enforcement and tightening, are the very thing that create this artificial scarcity that they are best positioned to profit off.

Cut out copyright, and no one will be getting any money from selling music per copy (or equivalent) - as it should be.

digital music is not artificial scarcity, because it's not the copied bits that are the resource, it's attention. we only have so much time and attention for consuming media, and only so much attention and memory space in our brains for keeping track of where to find it. large budgets can easily dominate these channels and limit the average person's apparent choice.

this is what I mean when large players would outcompete smaller players in a digital marketplace with no copyright. the only way for this to work would be with a benevolent neutral 3rd party managing the marketplace, like Steam, so users can easily see when a large player is cloning a smaller players work - but even then it still depends on the good will of the general public to prefer the "original" artist which is not guaranteed.

Are you talking about mere distribution? In that case, a few large players leveraging scale to drive costs down to near zero sounds great.

I’m still not seeing how lack of copyright hurts small artists or consumers. Small distributors, maybe, but that’s not doing harm to the arts.

> the position of advocating against all copyright protections at all only makes sense for people who are already wealthy enough that they don't need proceeds from their art to survive.

This makes it sound like the majority of people produce more content than they consume.

The reality is that 99.99999% of people do not produce "art", let alone with the intention of living of it.

Whatever harms you might envision for the tiny minority who do want to try living off copyright, those concerns are dwarfed by the benefits for the rest of us.

Further, not many people who are serious about reform are literally "advocating against all copyright" A reform that simply curbed the duration to something less insane than 150 years would resolve much of what makes copyright bad, even if it continued to exist.

Cain was severely punished.

וְעַתָּ֖ה אָר֣וּר אָ֑תָּה מִן־הָֽאֲדָמָה֙ אֲשֶׁ֣ר פָּצְתָ֣ה אֶת־פִּ֔יהָ לָקַ֛חַת אֶת־דְּמֵ֥י אָחִ֖יךָ מִיָּדֶֽךָ׃ Therefore, you shall be more cursed than the ground, which opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand.

https://www.sefaria.org/Genesis.4.12

Jack the Ripper killed people and got away with it!!! Happy?

Better! Thanks.

But the crime is creating something new. If laws are enforced that criminalise creation, then the world will be rather static.

It seems to be a consistent direction of history's arc that the people who make it easy to create and innovate get ahead.

We don’t allow indiscriminate human experimentation in medicine. We have crimes against this, and yet we still have new medicines. Sure, it won’t be as quick if we could just use humans as test subjects from the start, but that’s an unethical line. Innovation done immorally is progress that shouldn’t have been made. The ends don’t justify the means, but I’m not an ethical nihilist.

The crime is downloading and copying and distributing copyrighted materials! Not creating the LLM! Get the crime right

Those medical policies have condemned thousands, possibly millions, to lives of unnecessary pain and suffering. They're more damaging than copyright.

Ok, I’ll go tell the Nazis that their medical experiments using live humans were A-OK!!!

You actually don’t know that. The question would be, what proportion of human experiments are successful, and you don’t know the answer to that question, so the victims of experiments could dwarf the beneficiaries of successful research. That’s always the hard thing with basic utilitarianism.

1) It is an experiment. The point is to test something that nobody is sure about. Whether the result is expected or unexpected there isn't really such a thing as "unsuccessful"; even duplication of work is considered useful.

2) If you think the cost-benefits are bad, my advice is don't sign up to be experimented on. Nobody has to be experimented on if they don't want to be.

1) Experiments, by their nature, must spend resources in order to produce tangible results. In this case the relevant results are saved lives, and the expenditure is often going to be lives. You framed your comment in these terms, I’m arguing the costs very well may not be justifiable by the benefits. You’d need to make a case for that.

2) What if the families of experimentees receive payment? Allowing that would be a short way down the slippery slope from allowing the experimentation, and would make the matter of consent more difficult to assess.

Interesting, if we're to trust what NotOpenAI and Facebook say about their IP, the US should pay the UK reparations for IP theft based on textile industry profits starting in the 1850s until today?

Why do I get sued when I share some BitTorrents but $bigcorp can just do it with 1000 scale without problems?

The issue here is not copyright/patents/etc - the issue is that the law is applied selectively — the issue is that Aaron Schwartz is dead for sharing knowledge with the public and Zuccborg is a billionaire building his torment nexus

I mean this news broke today. It may be premature to declare that nobody will sue Meta. In fact I would cheerfully bet that someone will, and that they will spend more in defense/settlement than any 1000 individuals would.

I don't think I've heard the term "English empire". Is it an attempt by the Scottish to pretend they weren't involved?

Just like Austria's greatest historical accomplishment: convincing the world the Hitler was German

I was assuming they were talking about pre-1706 given the Spanish gold context.

Is this an attempt to imply the Scots had imperial ambitions and have not been fighting to keep their homes free of invasion for several thousand years?

Fuck this sounds familiar right now

>Is this an attempt to imply the Scots had imperial ambitions and have not been fighting to keep their homes free of invasion for several thousand years?

Obviously yes. Who have they been fighting to avoid invasion exactly?

>Fuck this sounds familiar right now

Maybe you read it in a history textbook.

Hmm, no you misunderstand. Scotland was consumed by monied interests from across the water long ago. Now there’s just scattered populations, many of us dispossessed of our ancestral homes and not all by choice.

The past doesn’t vanish because of what Rome and its inheritors accords as history. Some of us have long memories.

It is particularly a prescient notion because I happen to be living in Canada. If you’ve read the news you should understand what I’m saying.

Didn't Scotland try to make an empire in Eastern Canada, eastern USA, Africa, and Panama, then bankrupt themselves and agree to the Act of Union with England making Great Britain?

Lol. If you call a segment of the merchant class (kind of like silicon valley) the entirety of the country and ethnic group.

But that would be a major misunderstanding. So no.

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