The real spirit of IP law is "art, music, and creative professions should be viable professions for which people can actually get paid."
Whether it accomplishes that is debatable at times, and it's certainly misused, but that's why it exists.
"Information wants to be free" is a terrible argument from the naturalistic fallacy. Cars want to break down, your body wants to get cancer, and ebola wants to spread.
The question is whether information having to be free is good for us. If your profession is at all related to the production of information -- art, code, anything -- then you should be very skeptical of this meme. If all information is free, your salary is $0 unless you are making content for indirect monetization -- which means propaganda, surveillance based marketing, etc. A world where information is free is a world where only content with an indirect manipulative agenda gets financed and where the value of intellectual labor is subject to extreme downward pressure.
Piracy isn't a liberal, liberating thing... it's akin to union-busting and other forms of aggressive labor devaluation. It benefits ultra-capitalists who own large channels of communication and want to be able to monetize content and user behavior without paying for its creation.
"Information wants to be free" is a terrible argument from the naturalistic fallacy. Cars want to break down, your body wants to get cancer, and ebola wants to spread.
I agree.
The question is whether information having to be free is good for us.
Eliminating copyright doesn't the information has to be free. As a producer of copyrighted works which are freely distributable, my paycheck is an example of that.
If all information is free, your salary is $0 unless you are making content for indirect monetization -- which means propaganda, surveillance based marketing, etc. A world where information is free is a world where only content with an indirect manipulative agenda gets financed
After the Sony rootkits, I don't know how anyone can still claim with a straight face that paying protects you from that.
Content producers have introduced propaganda and manipulative advertising decades before widespread copyright infringement was even possible. From Donald Duck campaigning for WWII involvement, trials with subliminal ads, decades of product placement, really, it's everywhere.
And why shouldn't it be? Why would we expect the major studios and labels who end up owning most distribution rights to forgo those extra sources of income? "Our customers pay, we're morally bound to treat them well"? Yeah, right.
It benefits ultra-capitalists who own large channels of communication
Unlike the previous model? Yeah, no capitalists in the MPAA and RIAA!
"As a producer of copyrighted works which are freely distributable, my paycheck is an example of that."
So if I pull your OSS archive and take it closed and found a new company based on it, you're totally okay with that?
I work on OSS too, but that's a choice. If I don't choose to release something OSS and you make a tool designed to rip me off, that's the same thing as taking your OSS project and stripping your name off and taking it closed. If I did that I'd be violating your terms and generally abusing you, which is what Popcorn Time is explicitly created to do to movie makers. It says "we don't care what you think about how you want your work to be used... we get to decide that for you."
Edit:
... and the RIAA is essentially a union. They look like buffoons because historically their understanding of technology is awful, but their stated purpose in life is to protect the income of working professionals in the recording industry. That includes but is not limited to musicians, since it takes a lot more than musicians to make a good album. Like most unions they are paranoid and reactionary, seeing any change as an attempt to devalue the labor of their members, but that's sort of what trade unions do. I know it's become fashionable to hate on unions, but look at what it's doing to the wealth distribution in this country. I think that's something that needs to be reconsidered. If the RIAA/MPAA are morons and reactionaries, then the tech industry could have stepped up and suggested a better alternative. "We ain't gonna pay you sheeeit" is not a good alternative.
Yeah, music and movie studios can be jerks, but at least they paid the artists something. The new model is to pay the artist nothing (or close to it) and monetize their work indirectly via advertising and customer surveillance.
The general attitude of tech people toward artists is disturbing. If you can program, you can fall out of bed and into a job making more than the vast majority of musicians can ever dream of making. I mean... six figure salaries are the stuff of fever dreams to most artists. They will never make what a low-skill JavaScript hacker makes right out of college. Benefits? What are those? Then you go and use your free personal time to build tools to yank the bottom out from under that industry even further? It just makes us look like a bunch of entitled, spoiled brats that get our kicks from rubbing our comparative privilege in everyone else's face.
EDIT: I have no idea what is this new model that you're talking about, or why do you assume I support it. If anything, it's you who are taking the side of the tech giants, since they're all reliant on copyright and patents too.
EDIT2: I make $15k/year. And I don't really care what artists think of the "tech industry". That's mostly an US thing.
It's broken, but getting rid of it entirely doesn't fix the problem. It makes it worse.
I think my general point is this:
In a world where energy, food, and real estate are inflating and wages are flat or deflating, it behooves us to be incredibly skeptical of any agenda or meme that devalues or takes leverage away from labor. Ask yourself "cui bono?"
"Information wants to be free" is another way of saying "I don't want to pay people for knowledge work or art." Now who wouldn't want to do that? Maybe... oh... I don't know... multi-billion-dollar companies that make money by shoveling "content" out to consumers in exchange for being able to track their every move and sell it to advertisers? If they have to pay for content, that's just a cost to them. So it behooves those industries to promote the meme that piracy is great and information should be free, since it helps to devalue the "content" that they need to keep their surveillance based marketing machines running.
I'm starting to see the purveyors of aggressive industrial-scale piracy as being analogous to the brown shirt types that used to go out and bust kneecaps of union members to intimidate them into accepting concessions. Dropping the bottom out of higher-priced content models makes producers of content more willing to accept pennies on the dollar later.
I've been skeptical of free for a while, but believe it or not the Snowden revelations really pushed me over the edge. It made it very clear that free == surveillance is the business model, and it therefore got me really thinking skeptically about the concept of free (as in beer).
I don't think it's always bad. I work on open source software. But I think it must be the creator's choice.
I'm also not a fan of the DMCA as written -- it contains some nasty and odious terms that are ripe for abuse like the "anti-circumvention" clause -- but in this case I think it's being used in the right way to shut down something that's deliberately abusive.
> It's broken, but getting rid of it entirely doesn't fix the problem. It makes it worse.
I never suggested that getting rid of it entirely would fix the problem.
> "Information wants to be free" is another way of saying "I don't want to pay people for knowledge work or art."
I'm not a fan of the mantra "information wants to be free," but I also don't think that opposing strict IP laws is equivalent to not wanting people to pay for knowledge or art. It might be equivalent to opposing the viability of certain business plans for monetizing IP, but there are other business plans for monetizing IP that don't rely on being subsidized by draconian and borderline orwellian IP enforcement.
I don't really see the connection you're trying to make between pro-piracy groups and massive advertising corporations.
"I don't really see the connection you're trying to make between pro-piracy groups and massive advertising corporations."
It's simple cause and effect.
If pay-for-content business models like traditional record sales, movies, etc. are non-viable in the Internet age due to aggressive piracy, then the only viable business models are indirect monetization.
Indirect monetization means finding ways to monetize the consumer -- surveillance, manipulation, propaganda, etc.
Free (as in beer) leads directly to creepy business models. Instead of paying directly for music, movies, etc., you pay for them indirectly by allowing the distribution network to monitor everything you do and sell that information to advertisers and who knows who else.
There's a whole other level too when you get into the subject of jailed platforms and DRM -- piracy creates a powerful economic incentive to develop and aggressively deploy tools to restrict how you use your computer. Think the DMCA is draconian? Wait until your CPU will only execute code signed by a key embedded in the hardware. Abusing freedom to abuse others is one way to lose it, since after a while it leads to a perverse environment where good people who otherwise would support freedom start opposing it for legitimate reasons.
Edit:
Replying here since HN doesn't like deep discussions and limits them. "You're posting too frequently..."
I'm not making a boolean logic error because I am not engaging in boolean logic. I'm talking about the incentive structure of the market. It's analog logic-- not either-or but more-less. Does the market favor this business model more or less than that one? A market replete with piracy is one that is tilted far toward indirect business models almost to the exclusion of direct ones.
Your fallacy is very simple. You're saying that ¬A ⇒ B, and implying that it means that A ⇒ ¬B, with A=direct and B=indirect monetization.
The conclusion doesn't follow. There's no reason to believe that enforcing direct monetization will reduce indirect monetization, and history shows that creepy and manipulative is and was being used way before "home taping was killing music."
Whether it accomplishes that is debatable at times, and it's certainly misused, but that's why it exists.
"Information wants to be free" is a terrible argument from the naturalistic fallacy. Cars want to break down, your body wants to get cancer, and ebola wants to spread.
The question is whether information having to be free is good for us. If your profession is at all related to the production of information -- art, code, anything -- then you should be very skeptical of this meme. If all information is free, your salary is $0 unless you are making content for indirect monetization -- which means propaganda, surveillance based marketing, etc. A world where information is free is a world where only content with an indirect manipulative agenda gets financed and where the value of intellectual labor is subject to extreme downward pressure.
Piracy isn't a liberal, liberating thing... it's akin to union-busting and other forms of aggressive labor devaluation. It benefits ultra-capitalists who own large channels of communication and want to be able to monetize content and user behavior without paying for its creation.