> Unless you believe artists should make money solely from performances
That's the only business model that makes sense. Once you record a song, it's trivially copied and distributed. The musicians remain scarce: there's only one of them.
Who knows? I don't have an answer for you. Maybe crowdfunding, patronage, selling physical copies which are scarce.
What I know is this copyright business is fundamentally incompatible with the digital age we're living in. It's trivial to copy. Selling copies makes no sense.
To actually enforce copyright in the 21st century, there must be no software freedom. Only well-behaving software that refuses to copy will be allowed to run. I don't think anyone here on HN wants that.
> Most of law depends on detection, not prevention.
That's where the "there must be no software freedom" is exactly what might be mandated. It's trivial to re-purpose Apple CSAM mechanism to do this "detection" and something that might actually happen in the future.
I have. To infringe copyright at scale in the old world, you needed industrial hardware like printing presses. Centralized operations of significant size. Easy target for litigation.
Now nearly everyone on this planet has a pocket computer capable of creating and transmitting unlimited numbers of any piece of data at practically zero cost. People don't even realize they're doing it, it's so natural. They create truckloads of derivative works of copyrighted material every single day in the form of memes.
Littering and running red lights causes problems for everyone in society. Copyright infringement... doesn't. It's mostly just a small dip in the expected profits of a monopolist.
If you litter on a street I'm not on, then it doesn't affect me.
If nobody will ever get paid for intellectual property again, then it will absolutely affect me. It's the end of a whole category of creation, and a huge net reduction.
> Without technology, copyright is unenforceable. It might as well not even exist. Piracy has proven that.
Like I said, you're making no sense at all.
With or without technology (you meant with, right? no that makes no sense either) copyright is clearly enforceable.
We have over 300 years of enforcement on copyright, even when it's trivial to copy.
Technology, or copying, wasn't invented this century, you know. "Piracy has proven that"... we have hundreds of years of easy reproduction pre-copyright too.
> either we abolish copyright, or all computers will eventually be turned into consumer appliances and we'll need programming licenses to write code.
"Either we make murder legal, or nobody may own a knife or other sharp object ever again".
> ... we have hundreds of years of easy reproduction pre-copyright too.
I'd argue the world is different now. We've only had general purpose computers and ubiquitous ultra-cheap networking for the last few decades. Infringing copying on any scale required significant financial investment in the past. I think it's also safe to say there was typically financial incentive behind most mass infringement in the past (i.e. "bootlegging").
I'm not sure that's the case today. I'm guessing most infringement is today is casual-- created by the ease of copying brought on by everybody carrying around mobile computers with those ultra-cheap network connections.
> > either we abolish copyright, or all computers will eventually be turned into consumer appliances and we'll need programming licenses to write code.
> "Either we make murder legal, or nobody may own a knife or other sharp object ever again".
I'm not aware of the "legalize murder to preserve freedom" lobby (though, admittedly, the gun lobby in the United States does kinda fit that bill-- but that's a separate issue). There most certainly is a "regulate general purpose computers" lobby (e.g. "circumvention devices" and the DMCA).
> See how it's nonsense?
Equating copyright law and murder is equally nonsense.
> Infringing copying on any scale required significant financial investment in the past.
No it didn't. More, yes. But 40 years ago you just needed two VCRs and a blank tape. The only thing preventing mass reproduction was copyright law.
And pre-copyright this is also what happened. Because it was just not that hard. Even 500 years ago.
> I'm guessing most infringement is today is casual-- created by the ease of copying brought on by everybody carrying around mobile computers with those ultra-cheap network connections.
I bet less now than 20 years ago. Today you can buy spotify, apple music, google music, or whatever. You can stream stuff.
Blockbusters didn't die because of piracy, but because of streaming.
> I'm not aware of the "legalize murder to preserve freedom" lobby
It's your argument. If a thing cannot be prevented, then it should be legal. Right?
> Equating copyright law and murder is equally nonsense.
The actual argument is that society has fundamentally changed after the invention of computers. People copy, transfer and even modify copyrighted works every day without even blinking. It happens on an even larger scale than and at a fraction of the cost of VHS tape copying. Copyright no longer makes sense in the 21st century: it's become natural to infringe.
The fact that copyright no longer guarantees artficial scarcity is just yet another sign that it should probably go away.
This is showing an extreme ignorance of history, and of copyright.
There are countries (e.g. Sweden) where it's legal to rip a CD and give a copy to your friends. "Always" has been.
But it's not legal to sell copies. Or to put the music in a "holywood" movie you made and make a profit.
Copyright protects both of these. And if you think holywood movies don't properly license their music then you are mistaken.
Copyright absolutely makes sense.
Could a reform be in order? Well, could you come up with a laws or precedents where me putting a funny meme picture on my facebook wall is legally fine, but holywood taking my art and selling it as part of their product is not?
Because when you say "abolish copyright", that means no more games or movies as we know them today. You may say "good riddance", but you don't have to watch them. You can choose to only listen to music and see movies made under creative commons license. But you'll be pretty alone in that. Your life will look like that of Richard Stallman.
> But it's not legal to sell copies. Or to put the music in a "holywood" movie you made and make a profit.
Okay. Selling copies makes no sense anyway. So let people share their files in peace. No profit will be made.
> There are countries (e.g. Sweden) where it's legal to rip a CD and give a copy to your friends. "Always" has been.
My country has similar laws. Does it matter to the monopolists? No. They put DRM in their stuff specifically to stop you from exercising your legal right to copy. I remember one case where one guy backed up a game disc, lost the original and had to sue the company because the game wouldn't accept his copy. Judge made them give him a new disc. Fair use? Doesn't matter to the monopolists either. They'll DMCA content and sue companies out of existence whether they're legally justified or not.
Besides, the copyright monopolists are always trying to destroy these laws. They have considerable lobbying power and the US government imposes american laws on foreign countries via trade agreements.
> Could a reform be in order?
You can certainly make copyright tolerable. Make terms last 5-10 years. More than enough time for creators to make their millions. Anything more than that is rent seeking.
> Because when you say "abolish copyright", that means no more games or movies as we know them today.
Fine. Between computing freedom and the whole copyright industry, I choose computing freedom. Computing is much more important than some entertainment industry and I hate the way its potential is being limited because of these monopolists.
Stallman would probably disagree with me. Free software licenses depend on copyright to work.
So copyright is enforceable because you can theoretically sue everyone? There aren't enough courts.
> See how it's nonsense?
It's not. Computers are increasingly non-free and DRM is a big reason. The copyright holders want guarantees that I can't run unathorized software against their data even though it's my machine.
Combine this with worldwide governamental desire to regulate or ban encryption. It's an existential threat to the computing freedom we all enjoy today.
> So copyright is enforceable because you can theoretically sue everyone? There aren't enough courts.
This applies to every single crime. Try getting the police or courts to do anything about your stolen bike. They won't. You can have the name of the thief, with video of them stealing it, and it won't be worth their time.
Also won't be worth your time and money to sue them civilly.
Not really. Crimes are limited by reality. One criminal can only do so much.
With copyright infringement you have insane situations such as over 80% of a country's population being guilty of it. At this point, is it even a crime? More like a local custom.
> Try getting the police or courts to do anything about your stolen bike. They won't.
Maybe in the US. It's rather common here. I have examples in my family. I see it in the news nearly every week: some drug addict steals a phone, police arrests him and the phone is returned to its owner.
> So theft should be legal?
From what you just told me, it looks like it already is.
Do we? To me the choice is simple: either we abolish copyright, or all computers will eventually be turned into consumer appliances and we'll need programming licenses to write code.
It's an easy choice for me. As it should be for anyone who browses Hacker News. In a copyright world we won't be able to hack anymore.
So let the creators sort their business out. They'll find a way or go bankrupt. We must not keep inching ever closer to the dystopia where the government and monopolist corporations own our computers.
> They'll be just fine, don't worry about copyright holders.
I'm not. I'm worried about the freedom to program general purpose computers and the freedom to create derivative works. It seems like copyright holders have been consistently using their lobby to make both harder.
> Absolutely no need to make it technically impossible, or even hard.
Then why do they keep doing it? Get them to stop, please. Make them stop adding DRM to everything. Make them get rid of DMCA anticircumvention laws. Just stop interfering with our computers.
So if I record a song in a studio I shouldn't be paid because it is easy to copy that recording?
This is like saying I shouldn't be able to sell widgets at a profit to cover the cost of construction my production line or for the effort spent to create the design.
> So if I record a song in a studio I shouldn't be paid because it is easy to copy that recording?
Your work is valuable and you should be compensated for it. I just think that should somehow happen before you create the valuable data, not after.
Trying to sell copies of that data in a world where data is trivially copied and distributed worldwide just doesn't sound like a good idea to me. It was a good idea before computers and networks existed.
All creators should endeavor to get paid before they create.
The labor of creation is extremely valuable but once created the resulting data will be in infinite supply and this will drive its price down to zero. Therefore creators only have the necessary leverage before the data exists.
According to another comment on this page by the GP,
>> ownership of digital products
>There is no such thing. Data is just bits. Really big numbers. Asserting ownership over numbers is simply delusional.
I'm a musician working on an album at home at the moment. It's a bit odd to hear I'm delusional, or worse, "simply delusional", for thinking that the music I'm making will be in some sense mine! Maybe I should go back to painting, where I'm making an object at least, and maybe not so delusional in the eyes of the GP, not just numbers? Not sure.
p.s. I want to put "my" music on Bandcamp. Jazz and latin stuff mostly. The Australian music licensing org APRA/AMCOS informs me for 3 or more songs, I should pay them a flat fee of $300 per year to cover the licence fees, then more if I sell more than a few hundred. Seems like a lot, to put songs I performed online, but maybe I can just tell them no, that asserting ownership over numbers is simply delusional, there's this guy on Hacker News..
Hmm come to think of it, money in a bank is just numbers..
Most creators of "intellectual property", or their mentors, grew up in a world where physical scarcity in distribution created artificial scarcity of information. Earning a living under that system makes people ascribe morality and self-evident "correctness" to those business models.
Scarcity of information is gone because information isn't tied to physical distribution anymore. Tomorrow's bits will be easier to copy than today's. Short of legislating away general purpose computers bits aren't ever going to get harder to copy. Staking your livelihood on a business model where bits get harder to copy is probably a bad business decision.
Will this mean the end of some types of for-profit artistic expressions? Yeah-- probably. If those types of expression are valuable to humanity creators will figure out how to get people to pay for them.
Will this be the end of all for-profit artistic expression? Not likely.
As per-copy-based business models dry up "intellectual property" creators will be forced to move to new business models or find other jobs. After awhile (maybe a generation or two) the new business models will seem as self-evidently "right" as those that came before.
The morality ascribed to old business models probably won't disappear until the people who grew up in earlier times die. (I am reminded of John Philip Sousa railing against sound recordings in a 1906 Congressional hearing). Hopefully the legal copyright regime will evolve as people coming of age under in a world of easy-to-copy bits take the reigns of power.
Alternatively I suppose we could end up in a dystopian "Right to Read"[0] world, with general purpose computers heavily regulated and old business models enforced by jack-booted thugs.
> The morality ascribed to old business models probably won't disappear until the people who grew up in earlier times die. (I am reminded of John Philip Sousa railing against sound recordings in a 1906 Congressional hearing).
To expand on the morality point here:
In most areas, we recognize that we need to be careful limiting innovation for the sake of existing markets. For example, we're not trying to ban electric vehicles just because it makes it harder for gas companies to make a profit. The existence of DVDs and CDs lessening profits of movie theaters and concert halls is not a good argument to make the technology illegal. We didn't ban typewriters because they put the illuminated manuscript writers out of business. We do regularly get the government to interfere in some cases where a regulation or restriction clearly helps the market, but we try to be kind of careful about how we do it, and we view it through that lens: as an artificial restriction that is justified because of its social benefit.
However, with copyright it's really difficult to make people even understand that the market and human rights are being restricted in the first place -- it has that moral quality for a lot of people. Part of it is the name: "copyright" implies a right, but it is not a natural right. There is no inherent property/personal right to an idea, there's no way to derive a natural property right that is a restriction over what other people are allowed to talk about or build. It is an extremely modern idea to believe that inventing an idea implies that you own the idea itself, or that inventing a story means that the story can't be morally retold without your permission. So copyright isn't a "right" in the traditional sense, it is a government restriction on an innovation (easy copying), that helps prevent that innovation from disrupting the existing market too much or putting people out of business.
That's not to say copyright is bad or that we should just drop it tomorrow, but we should be looking at it through this lens; copyright is a subversion of natural market forces and a restriction on the natural human right to communicate, copy, and build on information they see in the world. Copying is a fundamental part of culture and a fundamental part of what it means to be human.
As such, we should be highly skeptical of copyright expansion, and we should be constantly evaluating whether or not the market really needs copyright restrictions at their current level. We should be actively looking to evolve the market so we can weaken copyright, because copyright is an artificial restriction on natural human activity, and an artificial restriction on the free market itself.
When people talk about expanding copyright, the burden is on them to justify why it's worthwhile to restrict human rights. Just saying that some businesses will fail isn't good enough, copyright is an extreme measure we're collectively embracing so that we can prevent the collapse of the entire creative market. Unless we're talking on that scale, we probably should be weakening copyright over time, even if it means a few businesses fail or have to pivot. In general, it's OK for the market to evolve and for some old profit-generating ventures to become unprofitable. And many will evolve and transform into other markets -- we don't have illuminated manuscripts now, but we do have mass-produced beautifully illustrated books, so in general the printing press seems to have been a pretty good trade and enabled more markets than it destroyed.
All intellectual digital work boils down to discovering a number. A file in a computer. The path to this discovery is valuable labor. The number itself is not.
The only way you can own a number is to keep it to yourself. Like a private key in cryptography. Nobody can guess it. Nobody can discover it.
As soon as you publish it, there's nothing you can do anymore. It can be copied, transferred, modified, stored, used... You're not in control anymore. This will happen regardless of any rights you're entitled to.
It's the 21st century. People look up songs on YouTube. They upload it there if it's missing. There's no way to go back to the old record selling world.
> Maybe I should go back to painting, where I'm making an object at least, and maybe not so delusional in the eyes of the GP, not just numbers?
You're correct. Physical objects are naturally scarce and paintings in particular have properties that make them valuable beyond just the image projected. It's possible to make digital reproductions but those are generally worthless compared to the original work. As they should be.
I wasn't replying to you. You seem to think you have everything worked out. It's (just) your opinion; other people have other opinions, points of view. Claiming that people who don't share your opinion—which you are aggressively promoting here like it's objective truth—are simply deluded, doesn't come across as very nice! You are here to teach the Truth on this subject, not to listen or learn - to lecture, not discuss, it seems. Why would you, when you have it all worked out and others are just deluded.
I apologize. That reply was to a person who mentioned non-fungible tokens, a cryptocurrency thing I really don't like. It got me into an emotional state and I said something that in retrospect was excessive. For that I am sorry.
That's the only business model that makes sense. Once you record a song, it's trivially copied and distributed. The musicians remain scarce: there's only one of them.