There is a certain irony in people providing copyrighted works for free justifying profiting from these copyrights on the basis that providing the works to others isn’t free.
I'd have a lot more sympathy if the music industry didn't try all of the worst available options to handle piracy for years and years.
They had many opportunities to get out ahead of it, and they squandered it trying to cling to album sales where 11/13 tracks were trash. They are in a bed of their own making.
“I only pirate because evil corporations make it too hard to pay for my favorite content” is a multi-decade ever-shifting goalpost. Some people just like to steal shit and will justify it to themselves on the thinnest of pretenses.
It is factually true though, music piracy DID drop once ad supported music streaming became available, the opposite is also true, video/movie piracy is now on the rise due to the amount of streaming subscriptions one has to juggle and their rising prices. Ofcourse there will always be those who yearn for the pirates life, but the vast majority just do it for convenience.
I don't even know the last time I pirated music. Gotta be at least 10 years.
Meanwhile, I pirate movies/TV on a regular basis for the reasons you gave. At one point, I was subbed to 5 services, and decided enough was enough. Cancelled all but Netflix and went back to torrenting anything they didn't have.
And Netflix’s profits have been on the rise for over a decade. I retired my plex server over six years ago. It just wasn’t worth the hassle of finding decent quality torrents. Everything ends up on streaming anyway.
Is that still the case? The option to do that quietly disappeared from Amazon Music a couple of months ago, for example, and they were one of the last few holdouts where you still could. It might be only Apple now?
Your link doesn’t work. But I assume you are talking about this label? I looked at the first artist and I found the artist’s music on iTunes. Everything that Apple sells on the iTunes Music Store has been DRM free AAC or ALAC (Apple lossless) since 2009.
I remember trying to use music I had bought in a slideshow that year and finding out that I couldn’t load tracks with DRM into the editor I was using; it was very frustrating.
If the source and target are both lossless, then yes. ALAC was available in iTunes since 2004 AFAIK.
Caveat: CDs were 44.1/16 so if the original files had more bit depth, they would require downsampling. Technically lossy, but not "compression" per se. But AFAIK, iTunes was also 44.1/16.
Cost recovery isn’t profit. Copyright is just a shared delusion, like most laws. They’re just bits on a disk we’re told are special for ~100 years (or whatever the copyright lockup length is in your jurisdiction), after which they’re no longer special (having entered the public domain).
I think what is more ironic is we somehow were comfortable being collectively conditioned (manufactured consent?) with the idea that you could lock up culture for 100 years or more just to enable maximum economic extraction from the concept of “intellectual property” and that to evade such insanity is wrong in some way. “You can just do things” after all.
> Your savings account is just bits on a disk, yet presumably it represents value that you worked for and which belongs to you to do with what you wish.
That's another example of the shared delusion, since yes, we tell eachother it represents labor and resources, and the market engages in allocation somewhat efficiently, and so the money is a pretty accurate representation of the value of labor and the value of resources.
In reality, that's not true, because the most highly compensated jobs are some of the least valuable, such as investment bankers, landlords, or being born rich (which isn't even a job, but is compensated anyway). Rent seeking is one of the most highly compensated things you can do under this system, but also one of the most parasitic and least valuable things.
Your savings account's number is totally detached from accurately representing value. It's mostly a representation of where you were born.
Value is subjective. Ownership is not. You're attempting to perform a sleight of hand by conflating the two.
It doesn't matter whether you personally find some creative material to be worthless, or you personally think someone doesn't generate sufficient value to deserve their bank balance. The reason it doesn't matter is that societies cannot run on an individual's opinion about whether other people deserve ownership over what they legally own. Because if it did, that society would quickly disintegrate into anarchy.
Speaking personally, as someone who once was on course to make 9 figures and now makes a low 6, I think it's sort of a pathology to spend your time worrying about how much less you have than other people. What matters is whether you can be recognized for your work and earn from it. I don't care that some people just inherited what they have, while I had to struggle as a taxi driver and waiter and minimum wage intern. That's annoying, but it's not as bad as living in a society where I can't capture the value of what I produce creatively. Having ownership of my work is far more important to me than money. But I have a right to expect that e.g. code I develop in my toolkit will remain my own to provide me an income.
Sort of? The contract doesn't mention that "value" and "price" are just as often negatively correlated as positively so, though, and claims the opposite (always positive correlation), hence where the shared delusion comes in.
> Someone can work very hard and save their earnings, only to have the value diluted in the future. Isn't that also a delusion?
Yes, it is.
It's one of my pet peeves about the cryptocurrency movement vs neoliberal institutional types. "Bitcoin is juts bits on a disk!" is always answered with "well, dollars is too!" To which the institutionalist can only say, "no, that's different." But really, it isn't.
What the cryptocurrency people get wrong is that replacing one shared delusion with another isn't a useful path to go down.
Unless you do substinence farming, you would not last a month without "shared delusions" in place to make sure farmers supply you with food, getting nothing in return except a promise that they can go somewhere to pick up something someone else than you made in the future.
Money isn't "only bits" it is also an encoding of social contracts
You use the word delusion like it also includes a) things everyone fully agree only exists in people's mind as intersubjective reality (no deceit going on really) and b) things you depend on for your survival.
You talk like getting rid of "delusions", as you call them, is a goal in itself. Why? It is part of human technology. (Just like math, which also only exist in people's minds.) Humans have had contracts since we were hunter gatherers in groups...
I would recommend Yuval Harari's "Sapiens" for you, you would probably like it. It talks about the history of "shared delusions" as you call them, as a critical piece for development of society.
> would recommend Yuval Harari's "Sapiens" for you, you would probably like it. It talks about the history of "shared delusions" as you call them, as a critical piece for development of society.
Already read it. Counter: read "Debt, the first 5000 years" by Graeber for, finally, a non- "Chicago school of economics" take on the history of trade amongst humans.
Just to be clear, I agree the money abstraction is not working particularly well. And that in the age of computers something that is more directly linked to the underlying economy could have worked better. But what needs to replace it is a better and improved "delusion", not a lack of it.
But, why? Regarding your farmer example, there are examples throughout history of farming that fed many without the involvement of currency or the paying off of debt. Take a look into syndicalized Spain if you ever get a chance (~1936-1939). Farms were collectivized and worked on by volunteers, distributions done by need with some bookkeeping to track how many people were in certain regions. Worked pretty well until the communists decided it needed to be centrally controlled and kicked out the anarchists!
Everyone always starts every future speculation assuming capitalism, or at least, currency. Isn't it worth challenging these core baseline assumptions? At the very least, the other ground is well covered, so we might come up with a little more interesting.
Currency (or IOU's, handshakes, pieces of green paper, bits on a disc, etc) is just an abstraction allows one to have choice.
The political systems that get built on top of that are just a downstream effect of the incentives that arise. Communisim thinking it would be good to centralize the control, capitalism thinking it would be good allow the incentives to rule, marxism thinking the labor rules, etc.
What I do for work is SO far away from any sort of tangible production, it makes sense to have a way to just straight from Work -> Food, rather than 50-100 trades so I can eat everyday. Again, the choice to to have to trade at all, or to trade exactly what I want, when I want, is enable by currency.
You can make the argument things shouldn't be so easy, that I shouldn't be able to choose to go to play pinball and drink a vanilla milkshake at 11am, but if that's possible, currency (in whatever form you want) has to exist.
> that to evade such insanity is wrong in some way.
There’s a commons problem at play here. Most habitual pirates couldn’t pay for what they are pirating even if they wanted to, so restricting their access just makes the world worse-off; but who is going to finance the creation of new content if everything is just reliant on completely optional donations?
The 100 year period is absurd and does nothing to incentivize art, but there are costs involved in production of these works. People are always going to make music and write books regardless of the economic outcome; far fewer are going to write technical manuals or act as qualified reporters without being compensated.
> Most habitual pirates couldn’t pay for what they are pirating
Seems questionable. You can cover almost everything with a handful of monthly subscriptions these days. In fact I often pirate things that I otherwise have access to via e.g. Amazon Prime.
> but who is going to finance the creation of new content if everything is just reliant on completely optional donations?
Well this is an appeal to consequences, right? It's probably true that increased protectable output is a positive of IP law, but that doesn't mean it's an optimal overall state, given the (massive) negatives. It's a local maxima, or so I would argue.
Plus it's a bit of a strange argument. It seems to claim that we must protect Disney from e.g. 'knock offs', and somehow if we didn't, nobody would be motivated to create things. But then who would be making the knock-offs and what would be motivating them?
> You can cover almost everything with a handful of monthly subscriptions these days.
The majority of people on earth cannot afford more than two or three of these subscriptions.
> But then who would be making the knock-offs and what would be motivating them?
Ten years ago there was a popular blog that got posted on /r/anarcho_capitalism with some frequency. IP was a contentious topic among the then-technologically literate userbase. At some point, a spammer began copying articles from the blog and posting them to /r/anarcho_capitalism himself. This caught the attention of some users and the spammer was eventually banned. A few days later, I followed a link back to his site and found all the articles he had stolen now linked back to a page featuring the cease and desist letter he had received from the original blog, the URL being something like: “f*-statists-and-such-and-such.”
Without any* copyright law, any content that is generated effectively gets arbitraged out to the most efficient hosts and promoters. This might be a win for readers in the short term, but long-term tends towards commodification that simply won’t sustain specialized subject matter in the absence of a patronage model. YouTube and the wave of Short Form Video Content are the two most obvious case studies, though it happens on every social platform that moves faster than infringement notices can be sent.
> The majority of people on earth cannot afford more than two or three of these subscriptions.
I would guess the majority of people on earth don't even have good enough internet to pirate HD video, nor the technical skills to do it, so we're not really talking about global averages here.
> Without any* copyright law, any content that is generated effectively gets arbitraged out to the most efficient hosts and promoters. This might be a win for readers in the short term, but long-term tends towards commodification that simply won’t sustain specialized subject matter in the absence of a patronage model.
I don't think you understand my argument. I don't deny that this may be true. I deny that it is ipso facto the best outcome to have high-quality creator content, or whatever we are talking about here, at the cost of the massive benefits of free use. You might as well tell me New Jersey gas pumping laws lead to nicer service experiences, and getting rid of them would ruin that.
We can arbitrarily prop up any industry to make it cushy and a 'nice experience'. That doesn't make doing so the greatest overall good.
I would argue that even if all that we achieved with the abolition of IP law was the provision of cheap generic drugs, long out of research, it'd be worth far more than the YouTube creator economy.
> I would guess the majority of people on earth don't even have good enough internet to pirate HD video
Why is that the qualification you’re using? There are plenty of people in the developing world who have benefitted from access to e.g. LibGen who would never be able to afford to legally access the materials hosted there.
My point is that under the abolitionist model there is no financial incentive to create anything because the profits get arbitraged away by the most efficient copy services. This wouldn’t be relevant for saturated mediums like music or literature, but it does create a free rider problem in scenarios where the intellectual property has a high cost of production and not many people qualified to produce it (e.g. technical manuals, pharmaceutical research, well-produced films, etc.)
Pirates effectively have their usage subsidized by those who actually pay for the content. A huge amount of human potential is unlocked when works are freely available through legitimate platforms; neither of us are disputing this. The reason I can’t get on board with copyright abolitionism over copyright term reduction is because I don’t see how certain works will be produced at all under an abolitionist model that can only sustain itself via voluntary donations.
The worldwide median internet download bandwidth is about 100 Mbps, which is far enough for HD or bluray video. The technical barrier can be as low as 'click to search, click to download' in some user-friendly BT clients. That being said, the price of these subscriptions is a problem that actually needs to be solved.
Anyone is free to release under free use in our current system. You already can live with the benefits of no IP law by just limiting yourself to those people that chose to to release this way.
Are you an artist? Have you ever created a piece of work that has a copyright attached? You might be anti-establishment but ultimately you are anti-creation. Artists are finding it harder and harder to live and create, artists are vital proponents and voices in changing culture - for you to take away their ability to live in a financially viable way says more about you and how you have conflated big business and an artist who is trying to make art and live.
I am. Copyright is fucking cancer and is one of the worst things if not the worst things that exists to make creating new things harder.
Making bits available isn't "taking artists ability to live in a financially viable way" any more than radio, LPs and player pianos was. If you are an artist who is trying to make art and live do more of that and don't waste peoples time arguing for copyright restricting other people's activity on websites like this one.
Sure. But in addition to copyright you might add the concept of money, or the concept of any property rights and ownership of physical things, and...
Calling such things "shared delusions" is missing the point...it's not that it's wrong, but it is not a very useful way to look at it.
There is such a thing as intersubjective (as opposed to objective) reality. Physically it exists as a shared pattern in the brains of humans, but that is seldom useful to reflect on. Language wise much more convenient and useful to talk about copyright as something, you know, existing.
Everyone knows these are just human agreements... it is not exactly deep thinking to point it out.
You may not agree to some laws. You can then seek to have the laws overturned (I agree patents and copyright are... counterproductive, at this point). Luckily many parts of the world have democracy to decide what laws to force on people, as opposed to a dictator.
Everyone is doing it, who Cates anymore. Genie's out of the bottle, we could've tried to solve this for decades and yet we didn't so now we reap what we sowed. Happens, move on.
I don’t think any of them are breaking even when you consider the maintenance costs, I just thought it was kind of funny considering the nature of the line of work they are in.
This was a different group of people but when some of the old LibGen domains got seized the FBI uploaded photos of the owners and the things they had spent their money on; a crappy old boat, what looked like a trailer in rural Siberia, and a vacation somewhere in the Mediterranean. It honestly read like sketch comedy, because the purchases didn’t appear remotely ostentatious.
Z-library also supposedly caps downloads at 5 per day and offers more and faster downloads to paying subscribers.
There is a certain irony in people providing copyrighted works for free justifying profiting from these copyrights on the basis that providing the works to others isn’t free.