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yoyohello13 5 days ago

This has to be bait.

How can you possibly justify this? Do you propose professional artists/authors/musicians just shouldn't exist?

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EvanAnderson 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

They wouldn't exist in the way they do now. It would be different. They existed before intellectual property. There are other models.

You've been conditioned to believe the current model is the only one that works. I'd argue that this is, in large part, because a bunch of interests who aren't "creators" profit from this current regime.

	▲	voidhorse 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		I fully agree, but the vision is not practical unless you want to change the entire economy around the shift. Yes, artists existed before IP but they also existed before the internet and digital works. Prior to the internet, creative works met real material limits and real scarcity due to the limitations of physical media. In the digital age, these limits are obliterated. You then have two options: 1. You instate something like IP to make digital markets roughly (and admittedly arbitrarily) like real material markets. 2. You establish no such system. No property rights exist in digital space. I am a major fan of (2) myself, but history gave us (1). At this stage, too many people make a living off digital markets for us to just impose a radical shift—you're taking about reworking the entire global economy here. Without concomitant shifts toward socialism globally this would probably just result in digital space becoming sparse and people adopting "analog only" release models to try and sustain incomes off of creative work. If you want to abolish IP, go the full mile and abolish the principle of property period. The distinction between IP and physical goods is just an accidental feature of digital technology. If you are against the idea of IP you are against property. Period. And I'm in full agreement, but I also don't think it's easy to achieve this at this historical juncture. Go read Proudhon.

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6510 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They will exist regardless. The profit motive makes inferior art. Nothing of value is lost if one has to dance for the sake of dancing.

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constantcrying 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

>This has to be bait.

Everything in my post is true. And I do not intend to be inflammatory.

>How can you possibly justify this?

Easy. I buy the books from authors I respect. Books are mostly passion projects anyway and most of the ones I read are from authors who absolutely do not make a living from them or are dead.

The other category of books are scientific publishers I hate all of them and they do not deserve a single cent from me. I would feel bad giving them any money at all. I also am already paying their authors with my taxes.

For shows. I hate most of them anyway and I wouldn't mind if corporate entertainment were gone.

For musicians. I see it the same as with books. I support the artists I like and I give them money for products they put out.

Nobody owes an artist his existence. Especially since most artists are commercial failures any way and somehow that does not threaten the art itself.

Also consider YouTube. Do you think YouTubers would care about IP laws being abolished? Their products are available for free anyways and they commercialize themselves in many different ways.

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voidhorse 5 days ago | parent [-]

You aren't thinking far along enough in your arguments.

If you abolish IP youtubers will not be able to make money because if I rip someone's monetized video and host my own ad-free copy, people will prefer to watch that and seeing as there is no legal claim over their IP, the youtuber has no recourse to get me to take down the video. There you go, I just divested a youtuber of a potential revenue stream.

This is why people who favor IP argue that it stimulates the creation of creative works. Look, whether we like it or not, everyone needs to earn wages in our system. If you can earn wages solely on creative works, you are empowered to spend more time and energy on those works because they give you a direct return. If the return on creative works becomes effectively zero modulo charity of consumers, you will have way less resources to devote since now you need to spend them making wages in other ways.

I am all for an IP free world, but I think it requires a fundamentally different economic reality from the one we currently have.

	▲	constantcrying 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		>If you abolish IP youtubers will not be able to make money because if I rip someone's monetized video and host my own ad-free copy, people will prefer to watch that and seeing as there is no legal claim over their IP, the youtuber has no recourse to get me to take down the video. There you go, I just divested a youtuber of a potential revenue stream. Haha. Do you think that isn't happen right now? Anyways it is irrelevant to the YouTuber, ad revenue is just a small part of it. As blockers are widely in use and YouTubers still exist. YouTube ad revenue is low anyways. YouTubers make money through merchandise and sponsorships. Merchandise can not be replicated as people buy it to support the YouTuber (selling merchandise while lying that it is to support the creator is fraud, even without IP) and for sponsorships it is irrelevant who also watches the video. If anything the YouTuber should upload to the ad free site himself to get more reach.