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| ▲ | the_af 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > Call it what you want. If it’s not theft then it’s not theft. But the gravity of the moral infraction is equivalent to theft so I don’t see the point of the word play here. No. As I said, we had this debate decades ago and your side lost. This is settled ground; you can shout into the void but you already lost. You might pirate because you're a "cheap ass" (your words, not mine), but many others don't. They've explained their reasons. You don't like those reasons? Fine. But don't go around accusing others of your own sin. Most people just want to watch and play stuff in the most convenient, non-intrusive, frictionless way possible. It just happens that this is often best achieved through piracy, because most legally available platforms suck in some way or the other (or content is not available). (Before you accuse me of anything: I don't pirate games like you, I have a huge library of Steam, GOG and Humble Bundle games. I also subscribe to Netflix, Disney, HBO Max, Apple, and a couple more I forget. And I pay for YouTube premium. And Spotify -- which removed vast swathes of music I listened to because why not. The streaming platforms mostly suck and so I must occasionally resort to piracy because it's goddamn more convenient!) | | |
| ▲ | ninetyninenine 5 days ago | parent [-] | | If you pirate you used someone’s work without their permission and you caused them to foot the bill for the creation of your product. That is fundamentally immoral. It is logistically impossible to support any industry with your logic here. That is why axiomatically your justifications are wrong. It’s just not sustainable. On the other hand the owner of a certain IP can make his product as inaccessible as possible and EVEN then if he gets money and the infrastructure is sustainable then the system works and that’s what points to a system that is not morally ambiguous. I’m capable of admitting my own faults and seeing my own immoral tendencies. Unlike you. I think in your eyes you must be morally perfect because even piracy isn’t wrong to you. Why the fuck are you so afraid of being accused of pirating? Why do you have to justify to yourself by buying games and then pirating occasionally? I pirate every fucking IP I own. I don’t give a shit. Call me what you want but I’m also not blind to what I do. People like You pay for all my games and movies. Thank you. If you feel piracy is moral then what I do is moral to you. Thanks for paying for my shit. I don’t think you’re making a smart move for doing that but to each their own… if you think it’s moral it’s not my problem. Does that make your blood boil? That geniuses like you pay for me to enjoy all my entertainment for free because it’s moral? Then maybe pirates like me should be arrested. Or maybe pirating should only be legal for people who do it if it’s convenient and illegal for me. Piracy is legal when convenient! Well it’s convenient for me to live a life where you pay for my shit. So why arrest me? We need to define convenient. Or maybe it’s just wrong all together? How about that? What do you think makes the most sense? Obviously all rhetorical questions. | | |
| ▲ | the_af 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > Why the fuck are you so afraid of being accused of pirating? Why do you have to justify to yourself by buying games and then pirating occasionally? I pirate every fucking IP I own. I don’t give a shit. Call me what you want but I’m also not blind to what I do. Did you bother reading what I wrote? I'm not afraid of anything. I'm explaining why I think you're wrong even though I think people are justified in pirating because available platforms mostly suck and are anticonsumer. I will summarize it for you again, then proceed to ignore you: A- You lost this debate decades ago. We already had it, your side lost. Piracy is NOT the same as theft, either morally or legally. B- You are the pirate here, not me (well, I do occasionally pirate as I argued elsewhere). Look at yourself in the mirror and answer your own questions about why you do it. Don't assume the rest are the same as you, or that they are cheap ass thieves like you (your own words). C- It's a quality of service thing for most people. > Does that make your blood boil? That geniuses like you pay for me to enjoy all my entertainment for free because it’s moral? No, it doesn't upset me at all. Any other things you want to argue? > So why arrest me? I don't think you should be arrested. I suggest you take a deep breath and think who you're arguing with and what the actual arguments are. | |
| ▲ | matheusmoreira 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > someone’s work We don't recognize ownership of ideas as a legitimate concept. Intellectual property is logically reducible to ownership of numbers. All information is a sequence of bits, and all sequences of bits are numbers. All numbers already exist. Humans performing intellectual work are merely discovering those numbers. The entire set of laws supporting intellectual property boils down to making knowledge and transmission of certain numbers illegal. It's illegal for me to write certain numbers on a piece of paper and give the paper to you. That's just absurd and unacceptable. > It is logistically impossible to support any industry with your logic here. Not at all. Plenty of creators enjoy sizeable patreon followings. They get paid for their labor, not for the finished product. Also, physical goods are naturally scarce. Therefore industries producing physical goods are easily supported. Your claim that "any" industry cannot be supported is trivially falsifiable if taken literally. > On the other hand the owner of a certain IP can make his product as inaccessible as possible Complete illusion. Only a single copy need ever be produced and sold. Once that copy is available, it can be trivially and infinitely duplicated. If I have a file on my computer, say a book, duplicating it is as easy as holding down Ctrl-V. By doing that I can literally exhaust my computer's memory by filling it up with copies of the book. There are no limits to copying other than the physical limits of the computers performing the copying. Contrast that to the age of the printing presses. Sure, you could copy books by hand but that imposes hard limits to the scale of your operation. Printing presses gave you the power to infringe copyright at scale but you had to be a major industry player to even have one. It is now the 21st century. Everyone on Earth has globally networked computers in their pockets. The costs of planetary scale copying and distribution of information are measured in cents. There's actually so much information being copied and distributed that determining what's true or false is actually becoming a problem unto itself. Intellectual property is nothing but an unacceptable restraining bolt on our amazing computer systems, stopping them from realizing their full potential. > Why the fuck are you so afraid of being accused of pirating? No one's "afraid" of anything. We've simply taken it much further than you did. You "pirate" because it's convenient. We "pirate" because we believe computers are world changing technology that should not be limited in any way whatsoever just because of utter legacy nonsense such as copyright. Computers are obscenely subversive. They democratized copying, thereby nearly wiping out entire sections of the economy off the face of this earth. They democratized encryption and privacy, thereby allowing normal people to defeat militaries, spies, governments, police, judges. Computers are far too important to be allowed to be controlled, least of all for completely idiotic reasons such as preserving the failing business models of last century's entertainment industries. Let Hollywood and the games industry get fully wiped out if they can't adapt. For the enforcement of copyright requires that they own your computer, and that is unacceptable tyranny which must be resisted at all costs. > Why do you have to justify to yourself by buying games and then pirating occasionally? No one "needs" to justify anything. Copyright infringement is natural. People do it without even realizing it. There is no need to justify natural processes. We consciously choose to justify it, because we believe there are higher reasons for doing it. > I pirate every fucking IP I own. I don’t give a shit. Unlike you, we actually do give a shit. That's why we spend time thinking about it and debating the issue. > People like You pay for all my games and movies. Thank you. > If you feel piracy is moral then what I do is moral to you. Thanks for paying for my shit. You're welcome. Make no mistake, though. Our reasons for paying for games are probably not what you think. I usually don't pay for the games themselves. I pay for Steam's excellent service. I guess I'm old enough to remember the time where people had to manually download and apply half a dozen incremental patches to their games in order to get the latest version and play online. Many times I licensed games I already had on Steam just to avoid that. Battlefield 2 is my goto example. I still have the boxes. Steam was the first ever Windows package manager. Licensing games through it has always been worth it for that fact alone. Anything else just sucks. Gabe Newell is right: it's always been a service problem. My Steam account contains many games which simply cannot be licensed anymore for any amount of money. Usually because other game companies are trying to push their shitty copies of Steam, just like Hollywood studios keep creating their own shitty streaming services. There's nothing wrong with competition. The problem is they're competing for the wrong reasons. They don't actually want to create a superior Steam, they want to leverage their copyright monopolies in order to more efficiently rent seek. They create their own stores, then they pull their games from Steam and offer them exclusively on their shitty platforms that nobody actually wants to use. They force people to use their shitty services in order to get access to the games instead of just offering them on Steam. Well if it's not on Steam, I won't pay even one cent for it. It's quite literally that simple. > Does that make your blood boil? That geniuses like you pay for me to enjoy all my entertainment for free because it’s moral? Not at all. Your enjoyment in no way deprives me of mine, nor does it offend me on any level whatsoever. Had you asked for it, I would have simply given you a copy myself. > Then maybe pirates like me should be arrested. Absolutely not. "Piracy" should not even exist as a crime. If it does, it should not cause anyone to be deprived of their freedom. The truth is in the name chosen by the monopolists: "piracy". Copying is a crime so victimless, they have to compare it to high seas piracy in order to get people to give a shit. It's just asinine. > Well it’s convenient for me to live a life where you pay for my shit. Relax. Copying is literally victimless. There is no "your shit", it's all just files in a computer. The ownership notions of the physical world do not really exist in this realm. The scarcity is completely artificial. It's not real. | | |
| ▲ | ninetyninenine 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | >We don't recognize ownership of ideas as a legitimate concept. Who is this "we" you're referring to? As far as I know it's you and your 2 or 3 online pen pals because the rest of the world recognizes it as a legitimate concept such that it's been encoded into law and billions and billions have been invested into said said ideas on the assumption that those laws will provide the idea creators with "ownership" of said ideas. | | |
| ▲ | the_af 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | You have it backwards. It's a relative minority that recognizes it as a legitimate concept. It's just that this minority lobbied for the laws. (As a curiosity, these same minorities lobby for the opposite, or turn a blind eye, when it's contrary to their interests. See the current LLM craze, and also... did you know Hollywood was founded on copyright infringement, and that its location was chosen to enable this? Put that in your pipe and smoke it). (Or also: many AAA game developers played pirated games in their youth. It was part of their formative years. ) Most people don't believe in the concept. You don't either, regardless of your protests here: you admitted you pirate everything. If you believed this was deeply immortal and harmful you wouldn't. Your actions speak louder than your words. | | |
| ▲ | matheusmoreira 4 days ago | parent [-] | | > As a curiosity, these same minorities lobby for the opposite, or turn a blind eye, when it's contrary to their interests. > See the current LLM craze Excellent point. Watching the corporations engage in AI washing of massive scale copyright infringement was extremely disgusting. I don't even fault them for doing it, technology should not be held back due to intellectual property nonsense. It's the "rules for thee but not for me" nonsense that's offensive. > did you know Hollywood was founded on copyright infringement, and that its location was chosen to enable this? Plenty of industries were. Samuel Slater, the so called father of the american industrial revolution, memorized british designs before immigrating to the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Slater I used to have a small collection of examples just like this. If I remember correctly, some drug companies chose specific European countries due to their stance on intellectual property. Infringement is only inconvenient when others do it to them, never when they do it to others. Every monopolist was once an infringer. They always climb the ladder and try to kick it out so the next guy can't touch them. |
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| ▲ | matheusmoreira 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Copyright abolitionists. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_abolition I have no "pen pals" from this site. Anyone replying to you is doing so independently. Recognition of intellectual property is just an illusion. They have vested interests, of course they're going to recognize it. Doesn't change the underlying absurdity of the system. Doesn't change the fact they constantly run smack into reality on a daily basis. "Their" works are mercilessly copied, "their" inventions are reverse engineered, AIs are trained on "their" creations, generic versions of "their" drugs are made... It's a constant unceasing fight against reality, completely senseless, and they still can't stop any of it. Because it's not actually real. | | |
| ▲ | ninetyninenine 3 days ago | parent [-] | | The idea of exchanging paper for material goods is also absurd. There are also vested interests that rely on maintaining this illusion. They want people to believe that something like a tesla can actually be exchanged for worthless paper. None of this is real so there's endless fights against people who try to make illegal copies of the paper. It's an endless fight, because it's not actually real. The entire economy is an illusion. But it works because most people buy into the hallucination. IP is much of the same thing. If there's only a few people creating IP laws it doesn't mean anything. It only works because the majority of people respect said IP laws. IP exists because the majority hallucinates it into reality. Even the concept of "laws" are illusions. They are total fabrications created by mankind. Your entire life is built upon thousands of fabricated concepts and illusions that are in many ways incompatible with your ancient genetic biology. So saying that IP isn't "natural" is meaningless. | | |
| ▲ | matheusmoreira 2 days ago | parent [-] | | I don't even disagree with you there. Pretty much every human concept is made up by our own minds. The economy as a whole is an especially hilarious case since fiat money is backed by literally nothing since 1971. However, I do draw a distinction between reasonable enforceable laws and schizophrenic unenforceable laws. Most laws are pretty reasonable. The vast majority of people are peaceful. Relatively few people commit cold blooded murder. When one does happen, criminals are caught and imprisoned so that they are no longer part of society. It's a manageable problem. Intellectual property is not like that. Infringement is as easy and normal as breathing. It happens every day at massive scales. It happens every time you download a nice photo from some website and send it to a friend. There are so many infringements taking place you cannot hope to ever punish them all. Often you cannot even catch perpetrators. The law is essentially unenforceable against the common man. There is no point. In my country I've seen copyright infringement figures at over 80%. As in, 8 out every 10 people has infringed copyright at least once in their lifetimes. People talk about downloading music like it's nothing. Copy shops get set up literally next door to universities to help students copy entire books and course materials. Video game consoles are bought already modchipped straight from the stores. Every town has an informal market where copied media is sold cheaply, there's one less than 10 minutes away from me. Is this really a crime? Maybe it's actually a custom, already part of our culture. Intellectual property is quite useful when used by corporations to attack other corporations. Companies are juicy targets for lawsuits. There are also less of them, their numbers are manageable. Leveraging intellectual property against normal folk though? That fight is unwinnable and I really wish they'd stop trying. |
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| ▲ | keeda 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > The entire set of laws supporting intellectual property boils down to making knowledge and transmission of certain numbers illegal. It's illegal for me to write certain numbers on a piece of paper and give the paper to you. That's just absurd and unacceptable. Your bank account credentials are a bunch of numbers, would you be willing to share those? Surely you wouldn't bother changing them after the fact, I mean, literally victimless if someone copies them for their own use right? ;-) | | |
| ▲ | matheusmoreira 5 days ago | parent [-] | | That argument is completely unpersuasive. These are not the same things at all. In multiple ways. First, there is no way do duplicate bank account contents. Bank transfers are transactions: adding to your account subtracts from mine. The bitcoin ledger is infinitely copyable but doing that gives no one extra bitcoins. Contrast that with intellectual property which is the complete opposite: information can be losslessly duplicated infinitely at no cost whatsoever to either party. Second, bank credentials are secrets. The information is not actually meant to be widely distributed, it's meant to be known by as few people as possible, ideally one person. The secrecy exists precisely because once information is out there there is no way to control what will be done with it. Contrast that with copyright: the monopolists want to distribute the information world wide and simultaneously fully control what people do with it. The tyranny necessary to enforce such corporate control is utterly unacceptable. So your bank account argument in fact supports my world view by exposing how utterly schizophrenic the copyright monopolists are. They actually think they can control public information that has been disseminated far and wide. It's so out of touch with the reality of things they might as well be put out of their misery. Just abolish copyright straight up. | | |
| ▲ | ninetyninenine 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | >The secrecy exists precisely because once information is out there there is no way to control what will be done with it. Contrast that with copyright: the monopolists want to distribute the information world wide and simultaneously fully control what people do with it. The tyranny necessary to enforce such corporate control is utterly unacceptable. The idea wouldn't exist if such tyranny didn't exist in the first place. What causes a drug company to invest billions into creating life saving drugs? If all ideas are open source then there's NO incentive for ANYONE to invest billions into ideas. That's why copyrights and patent laws exist. To function as incentive in the creation of new ideas. Pick and choose: Either you can only interact with the idea under monopolist rules. Or the idea doesn't exist period. Overall, humanity (aka the actual "we") has picked the former over the later. | | |
| ▲ | matheusmoreira 4 days ago | parent [-] | | > Overall, humanity (aka the actual "we") has picked the former over the later. Did humanity really pick that? I doubt it. Copyright infringement happens too often and too normally for me to believe people care about copyrights. Politicians bought and paid for by lobbyists picked that. Anyway, I'll go ahead and expicitly pick the latter over the former. I would rather have the nonexistence of ideas over infinite monopolist control. Let the entire copyright industry go bankrupt if necessary. Mercifully, it will not actually be necessary. Platforms like Patreon and GitHub Sponsors are the future. They work independently of copyrights. They are how creators should be funded for their valuable work. As a society, we need to figure out how to normalize and increase their use as much as possible. Also, nonexistence of ideas is incompatible with human nature. People will create, profit or not. They must. The creative output will significantly decrease but it will not be wiped out. As a free software developer, I am living proof. > What causes a drug company to invest billions into creating life saving drugs? Patents. I am not as strongly opposed to patents as I am to copyright. Unlike copyrights, patents actually expire in reasonable timeframes. Patents have none of this lifetime plus a trillion years nonsense. They also typically apply to physical goods and inventions. So even though I believe all intellectual property is fundamentally absurd, I would compromise at patents. They are absurd monopolies, but they are tolerable. Their absurdity will end well within my lifetime. The ideas will be freed. Generic versions of the drugs will be made. Copyright in its current form has none of the above properties. Nintendo selling people the exact same Mario ROMs half a century after the fact is nothing but pure unadulterated rent seeking. They have already made their fortunes several times over. Let the works enter the public domain. They should have to continuously create new works if they want to keep making money, not strike gold once and live off the rent for all eternity. | | |
| ▲ | ninetyninenine 4 days ago | parent [-] | | >Did humanity really pick that? I doubt it. Copyright infringement happens too often and too normally for me to believe people care about copyrights. Politicians bought and paid for by lobbyists picked that. Let's focus on the overall idea. IP. not the instantiations of the idea like patents and copyright. You're against the very idea of ideas as property. And YES humanity chose the concept of IP. It's encoded into the laws of government which people trust. Additionally entire businesses and corporations building civilization changing technologies ONLY exist because of IP. >Also, nonexistence of ideas is incompatible with human nature. People will create, profit or not. They must. The creative output will significantly decrease but it will not be wiped out. As a free software developer, I am living proof. Human nature is prehistoric instincts for hunter gatherers. Capital, profit, business and centralization of power is responsible for the ideas responsible for human civilization as we know it. How do you mobilize thousands of humans to create a boeing 747 which is unionization of multitudes of people crystallizing ideas and focusing human effort to creating a feat of an idea that no single human can create? Capital and centralization of power. You need to pay people, you need to take advantage of their need to survive and get a living wage to motivate such endeavors. You need the incentive to make them rich to have a person coordinate others into creating things like spaceX or google or openAI. Obviously I am talking about the non-existance of MANY ideas. Not all ideas. And those "many" ideas make up almost all of human civilization itself. You are a free software developer. You live off of charity. You're fringe. You're a side effect. Business engines drive profit and people get paid and that excess money is charitably given to you. If the business engines didn't exist you wouldn't. You are the exception to the rule. A massive exception, don't get me wrong, but still an exception. Open source would not exist were it not for closed source. >I am not as strongly opposed to patents as I am to copyright. Unlike copyrights, patents actually expire in reasonable timeframes. Patents have none of this lifetime plus a trillion years nonsense. They also typically apply to physical goods and inventions. In principle they are the same. Medicine that saves lives wouldn't exist if it wasn't for patents. You tolerate patents but the essence is you think it's wrong, that is the issue I am addressing. If patents didn't exist most big pharma medicines wouldn't exist. Do you tolerate the non-existence of life saving technologies created by big pharma in order to satisfy their own human greed? Covid for example. Think about the thing that drove big pharma to create these vaccines. 80 to 90 billion in profit is what drove these companies to develop these things at a speed and scale that won't exist without closed source. What mobilized the smartest minds to work together in such synchrony to produce the vaccines? You think patreon could do it? You think a future surviving off of donations from patreon would motivate all the smartest minds to spend years on training to develop the expertise necessary to stop the pandemic and then finally come together for patreon? lol. | | |
| ▲ | the_af 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > Human nature is prehistoric instincts for hunter gatherers. Capital, profit, business and centralization of power is responsible for the ideas responsible for human civilization as we know it. You state this as fact, but the anthropological consensus doesn't agree with this. Early hunter gatherer societies are thought to have been communal, with no notion of property. It's not "human nature". > How do you mobilize thousands of humans to create a boeing 747 which is unionization of multitudes of people crystallizing ideas and focusing human effort to creating a feat of an idea that no single human can create? Capital and centralization of power. This is an ideological argument, which is fine, but nothing anywhere close to "the truth", and especially, not the only or best way to organize things. You want to have this argument, fine, but you'll have to step down from the teaching desk and accept your belief is not universal. | | |
| ▲ | ninetyninenine 3 days ago | parent [-] | | >You state this as fact, but the anthropological consensus doesn't agree with this. Yes it does. This is anthropology 101. In hunter gatherer societies wealth doesn't really exist. People eat and get resources off the land without ever really accumulating wealth. For civilization to form, first wealth must evolve into a form where it is abundant, identical and useable like coins. So like grain when extremely abundant naturally maps into something like coins where people instead of bartering can "pay" others with grain and save up on grain. If humans begin farming and then grain becomes very abundant in society, something changes. It then becomes possible for the accumulation of resources by a central source as in one person owns more grain than another person. Wealth inequality so to say. When one person is much more wealthy than another, this allows him to gain a sort of artificial power over others by employing others and paying them a salary. This CAN only exist if some static countable resource exists that can function in place of a monetary denomination. This is ultimately what causes people to coordinate. No amount of leadership or charisma is going to herd humans into a organized team of hundreds to build projects as complex as a boeing 747. You HAVE to pay people for this to happen. You have to offer them something that benefits them that's more then just your charisma. These are the projects that define civilization. This is IN FACT the anthropological consensus on how civilization forms in academia. I'm not making this up. Go read up on it, this is how they believe advanced civilization formed in some places and didn't in others. So places that are really tropical tend not to form advance civilization because things like grain rot. This prevents anyone from accumulating resources which prevents wealth inequality which prevents a single individual coordinating other individuals to create the public works that define modern civilization as we know it. >Early hunter gatherer societies are thought to have been communal, with no notion of property. It's not "human nature". You're describing tribes and hunter and gatherers. I'm describing civilization. The next step. Mesopotamia. The progression from tribes and cavemen to civilization involves the steps I describe above. Also I'm not calling "civilization" natural. Nothing of the sort. The times we live in are not natural at all. Modern civilization is NOT natural. But. Capitalism, wealth inequality and business DOES form the basis of civilization as we know it. In short, IP is fundamental to civilization, but it is not necessarily natural. I am more appealing to whether you value the idea of civilization itself, and less to whether something is compatible to human nature in its earliest form as these are two orthogonal concepts. >This is an ideological argument, which is fine, but nothing anywhere close to "the truth", and especially, not the only or best way to organize things. Ideological my ass, there's barely any evidence of complex projects forming out of pure communal goodwill. The only time I've seen people do something like this of equal complexity out in the wild is Linux. And it only happened because Linux is uniquely a software project which is very cheap to develop for. And EVEN then open source developers for linux need corporate jobs in order to get paid a living wage so that they can afford to have spare time working on a charity project like Linux. Linux exists because developer time working on Linux is paid for by FOR-profit corporations. >You want to have this argument, fine, but you'll have to step down from the teaching desk and accept your belief is not universal. It's not a belief. That's what you're missing. The logic composes into a singular conclusion. I'm right. You may not agree with me now and that's just part of human nature. Maybe think about it for a couple months and eventually you may hit the realization that your idea of how the world works was a little off. Yeah I know I'm an asshole for sort of bluntly burying everyone I see with the brutal truth, but think about it for a bit. |
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| ▲ | matheusmoreira 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > You're against the very idea of ideas as property. And YES humanity chose the concept of IP. Humanity chose the fruits of intellectual property. More books. More movies. More music. More art. More inventions. More technology. More everything. Humanity chose wealth. Time limited monopolies were merely the means to bring about such wealth creation. Monopolies are universally understood to be a bad sign in every economic sector. They were grudgingly implemented in this specific area only because nobody managed to come up with a better idea. Even then, laws were made so as to contain the damage as much as possible by limiting the duration of the monopolies. It was absurd but it was the only way. People took care to ensure the nonsense did not last even a day longer than necessary. It is now the 21st century. Humanity must evolve past this. > It's encoded into the laws of government which people trust. Laws that were pretty much written by industry lobbyists. Anyone who trusts that is foolish. Intellectual property is supposed to be a time limited monopoly, yet copyright is functionally infinite in duration because the industry kept lobbying for extensions. The people were systematically robbed of their public domain rights. Seriously doubt the people chose that. > How do you mobilize thousands of humans to create a boeing 747 By actually manufacturing and selling aircrafts to airlines? 747s are not infinitely copyable. Discussion has now shifted from ideas to tangible objects. > You are a free software developer. You live off of charity. I don't work in the software industry. My aversion to intellectual property and licensing is a big reason why. > You think patreon could do it? Remains to be seen. There should be no functional difference between raising hundreds of millions from venture capitalists or crowdfunding. We just need to find ways to raise these platforms to the billion dollar scale. | | |
| ▲ | ninetyninenine 3 days ago | parent [-] | | >By actually manufacturing and selling aircrafts to airlines? 747s are not infinitely copyable. Discussion has now shifted from ideas to tangible objects. The raw materials used to create a boeing 747 are not rare at all. They are easily accessible. The aggregate value of material cost of a 747 is significantly less than the actual value of the 747 itself meaning that much of the worth of the 747 is in the crystallization of the idea of what a 747 is. The 747 is at it's core an idea, that's what separates it from just being a just a mishmash of random materials. It is at it's core an IP. Yes it's not infinitely copyable so it doesn't suffer from the ill effects of software. But they are one in the same, it's just that the 747 has additional protections of the "idea" being encrypted into the plane itself and the people who make the plane. Software the idea is fully crystallized into a single place: the source code and it suffers from being easily copied. This is where IP law comes from. The idea of a 747 is by nature not easily copied, so people didn't need to instantiate the concept of IP because by default it's just harder to copy. IP was invented because of the distinction between ideas that are easily copied and not easily copied. People wanted to bring the properties of the 747 to software. >Remains to be seen. There should be no functional difference between raising hundreds of millions from venture capitalists or crowdfunding. We just need to find ways to raise these platforms to the billion dollar scale. I think we're in agreement. We agree on the benefits and downsides of IP. You just think that altruism could function just as well as the incentives created by IP and it seems you're clear that there is currently no evidence to support your hypothesis other than a smattering of freak anomalies like Linux. Whether that evidence will materialize in the future remains to be seen. | | |
| ▲ | matheusmoreira 2 days ago | parent [-] | | > You just think that altruism could function just as well Not at all. I'm no proponent of altruism. I proposed crowdfunding as the alternative. As in, entire nations worth of people investing money to make something happen. Decentralized investors. Once intellectual work is done, the value of the intangible product trends towards zero. Selling things that have infinite supply makes no economic sense. Society needs to find a way to pay creators before the work is done. Creations must be treated as investments rather than products. |
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| ▲ | keeda 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | So now we have established that not all numbers are "just numbers" that can be copied victimlessly. Consider that maybe it is because some numbers represent something more than just numeric values. Maybe they represent economic value. Said economic value having been generated by your hard work. Now maybe you can see how that line of thought leads to the concept of intellectual property. Information covered by IP is "public" simply because there is no effective way to keep it secret, precisely because it is so easy to copy. However, as the bank account example shows, ease of copying "just numbers" has nothing to do with the effort invested into creating the value represented by those numbers. And IP laws exist precisely to account for that. | | |
| ▲ | matheusmoreira 4 days ago | parent [-] | | We've established nothing of the sort. Secrets can be copied just as trivially as any other information. That's why numerous measures are taken to avoid their revelation. If I tell people my bank credentials, I have nobody but myself to blame when money is transferred out of my accounts. If I upload my secret encryption keys to some cloud service, I have nobody but myself to blame when others gain the ability to decrypt my data. Yet I'm expected to feel sorry for would be monopolists who publish works and expect to dictate what you do with them? No. The effort invested into creation of value is often completely irrelevant, even in copyright law. Many countries do not subscribe to the "sweat of the brow" doctrine, USA included. The ones that do seem to reserve its application for specific contexts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow Originality is the key factor in copyrightability, not the effort required to generate the content. The number must be unique and not derived from other numbers. | | |
| ▲ | keeda 4 days ago | parent [-] | | >We've established nothing of the sort. Oh no we have. Your original these was based on the premise that "just copying numbers" is not "victimless". So now why is there even a concern that money is being transferred out of bank accounts or data being decrypted without consent? Aren't they "just numbers"? >The effort invested into creation of value is often completely irrelevant, even in copyright law. Many countries do not subscribe to the "sweat of the brow" doctrine, USA included. The ones that do seem to reserve its application for specific contexts. I know. But even if you had inherited the money in your bank account through no effort of your own, you would prefer to not share your credentials. So maybe you want to think about why you're OK with others' "numbers" being copied around but why you're so concerned about your numbers being copied around. I mean, "just numbers," right? :-) You also seem to be misunderstanding what "publish" means. I hate that it has come down to dictionary meanings, but here's what https://www.dictionary.com/browse/publish says: "1. to issue (printed or otherwise reproduced textual or graphic material, computer software, etc.) for sale or distribution to the public." Note the bit about "for sale". Just because it's made available does not mean it's available for free. | | |
| ▲ | matheusmoreira 3 days ago | parent [-] | | There are no contradictions. I don't think of passwords as my personal private property. They are merely secrets that I keep. I don't have a monopoly on them. Any number of people could have the same password as I do and I wouldn't even know or care. They are just random numbers of no particular value whatsoever. The copying of passwords does not cause direct harm. If it did, then the publishing of common password lists would be harmful and criminal. The real crime is the act of breaking into someone's bank accounts and draining their money which actually deprives them of real scarce resources. In other words, theft. The copying of a password alone is likely insufficient to cause real harm due to numerous layers of security such as multifactor authentication. The usage of passwords is well aligned with reality. People don't deliberately publish their passwords and then act surprised when others use them. That pathology is exclusive to copyright monopolists. Exercising control over cryptographic keys is realistic. Ideally, only a single copy will ever exist in the entire universe. I have purpose built cryptoprocessors which help ensure that. In the event they are leaked, they are merely discarded and new ones are issued. Cryptography is fundamentally built on math. At no point do they deny reality. Cryptographers know that numbers are trivially copied, that's why keys are supposed to be kept secret, not published far and wide. They don't impose laws prohibiting others from copying or deriving the numbers, they know such things are unenforceable. Instead, they design their systems so that such things are not an issue. The whole point of cryptographic keys is that they are secret and cosmologically impossible to brute force. They went beyond making it illegal, they made it mathematically impossible. Meanwhile, exercising control over copyrighted works requires that corporations control every single one of our computers, lest some user order them to make unauthorized copies. In the event that even a single copy escapes their closed system, there's no stopping it anymore and it's all over for them. They still try to stop it by doubling down on monopolies, passing unenforceable laws, trying to usurp control of our computers and generally increasing the overall tyranny of our society. A heavy cost, and they still fail due to the basic fact that they are trying to control public information. So even after careful consideration I conclude these things are not even remotely analogous to each other at all. | | |
| ▲ | keeda 2 days ago | parent [-] | | > The copying of passwords does not cause direct harm. If it did, then the publishing of common password lists would be harmful and criminal. The real crime is the act of breaking into someone's bank accounts and draining their money which actually deprives them of real scarce resources. In other words, theft. 1. So now passwords (just numbers) and 2FA (just numbers) are "protecting" money (even more just numbers in a database) or your private data (yet more just numbers), the loss of control over which you clearly consider harmful. 2. When a bank account is drained, no "tangible good" is being "taken" but somehow NOW it is theft? ;-) I think the key disagreement is the unwillingness to accept that numbers can have economic value because that undermines the premise that "just numbers being copied is victimless". Without that there will never be a resolution to this thread ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ |
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| ▲ | matheusmoreira 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Who the fuck pays for a triple A video game if it’s morally right to pirate things? Yours truly. I have been a proud Steam customer for over 20 years. I have licensed over 200 games on Steam alone. I own multiple video game consoles from multiple generations and have quite the collection of titles for them. Not a single person can accuse me of not supporting creators. > The fact of the matter is your “morality” here cannot sustain the industry. The fact of the matter is the industry shouldn't be sustained. It is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to create a product whose price trends toward zero due to infinite availability. When that obviously fails, they get upset and invoke copyright in order to distort reality until they're profitable. The simple fact is creators need a new business model. And that business model is patronage. It's the labor of creation that's scarce and valuable, not the finished product. Therefore creators should be paid continuously for the act of creating itself, not the finished product. Macaulay’s 1841 address is the most vigorous defense of copyright I've ever read: https://www.thepublicdomain.org/2014/07/24/macaulay-on-copyr... And even he realized that copyright was a monopoly, tolerated only due to the fruits it bears. He rejected alternatives such as patronage due to fear of suppression. Rich patrons would of course decline to fund works that they didn't like. That concern no longer exists. We now have technology in the form of platforms like kickstarter and patreon which democratize funding and patronage, greatly reducing or eliminating the risk of suppression. There is no longer any need for copyright. | | |
| ▲ | ninetyninenine 5 days ago | parent [-] | | >Yours truly. What is this? Did you drop the mic? Think about what you just admitted. It's morally right to pirate. So instead of doing the moral thing, you pay extra money for No fucking reason. Congratulations. >Not a single person can accuse me of not supporting creators. But people still can accuse you of being stupid. Not saying that you are stupid, but it's open season in this area. Make sure your arguments are legit. >The fact of the matter is the industry shouldn't be sustained. It is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to create a product whose price trends toward zero due to infinite availability. When that obviously fails, they get upset and invoke copyright in order to distort reality until they're profitable. So get rid of the entire movie industry and gaming industry? Makes sense. How many billions of dollars and jobs just went down the drain? >The simple fact is creators need a new business model. And that business model is patronage. It's the labor of creation that's scarce and valuable, not the finished product. Therefore creators should be paid continuously for the act of creating itself, not the finished product. Holy shit. This makes total sense. But then why stop at creators? Why not make the entire economy based off of patronage? Right? If it makes sense for "creators" well everyone in the economy creates shit, so let's do it for everything. You work for a company? Why is that company paying you? Your work should be OPEN source and free! You program right? So all you're doing is creating ideas. The company shouldn't pay you fuck shit, and the only people who can pay you are people who sign up as patrons. Here's a genius idea. If you stand by your ideas so much, why don't you start executing on them right now! Go tell your boss, "Hey my work is public domain! you don't need to pay me a dime! but if you want to support me here's my patreon link! Thanks bud!" Look. Honestly if you don't see how what I suggested makes zero sense and how what I just said completely applies to ALL creators then you're out of touch with reality and human psychology. | | |
| ▲ | matheusmoreira 4 days ago | parent [-] | | > So instead of doing the moral thing, you pay extra money for No fucking reason. "No fucking reason" is false. I wrote about the reasons why I pay for games on Steam. > But people still can accuse you of being stupid. I'm okay with that. > Make sure your arguments are legit. Testing my world views is the reason why I come here. > How many billions of dollars and jobs just went down the drain? Not a factor. Jobs that depend on intolerable monopolies shouldn't exist in the first place. Society will adapt. It must. > But then why stop at creators? Why not make the entire economy based off of patronage? Because we're talking about artificial scarcity of ideas, not tangible goods which follow natural economic principles. None of this applies to car manufacturing or food production. > Your work should be OPEN source and free! You program right? So all you're doing is creating ideas. I don't even disagree with you. That's why I barely even bother with licensing. I just pick AGPLv3 to maximize freedom and leverage. I'm more radical than Stallman in this area. Stallman believes in and relies on copyright. I don't. > The company shouldn't pay you fuck shit, and the only people who can pay you are people who sign up as patrons. It's not that easy. I work on my own projects because I personally care about them. They are rarely aligned with and might even be opposed to company interests. I get to do whatever I want, however I want, whenever I want. I also get to walk away at any point for any reason, including no reason. I'm not an employee. I have no boss. I have no deadlines. I have no obligations to anyone, least of all corporations. If companies want developers to work on their stuff on a regular basis, they have to pay for it. Why would anyone care otherwise? > Here's a genius idea. If you stand by your ideas so much, why don't you start executing on them right now! I don't work in the software industry. My aversion to intellectual property is one of the reasons why. I do have a GitHub Sponsors. For about a year, I had exactly one sponsor. Now I have zero. I am also opposed to advertising in general. I try very hard not to talk about my own projects unless it is socially acceptable to do so. Others have independently submitted my work here and on other sites. I was also invited to post about one of them on reddit once. | | |
| ▲ | ninetyninenine 4 days ago | parent [-] | | Well you’re an outlier. Your refusal to participate in society makes almost everyone on earth disagree with you. You’re suffering from the blowback of your own choices. If society adopted your philosophies, then society would be the one suffering. | | |
| ▲ | matheusmoreira 4 days ago | parent [-] | | I didn't refuse to participate in society. I refused to participate in activities I personally believe are wrong. I don't really plan to take advantage of monopolies if I can avoid it. Whatever privileges I have that allow me to make this choice, I hope I can maintain them indefinitely. I'm suffering nothing. There is no "blowback". I'm merely explaining to you why I don't believe in intellectual property. Because you asked. | | |
| ▲ | ninetyninenine 4 days ago | parent [-] | | >I didn't refuse to participate in society. I refused to participate in activities I personally believe are wrong. I don't really plan to take advantage of monopolies if I can avoid it. Whatever privileges I have that allow me to make this choice, I hope I can maintain them indefinitely. If you refuse to participate in activities that you personally believe are wrong then based off of what you told me, you in actuality refuse to participate in society from an OVERALL perspective. >I'm suffering nothing. There is no "blowback". I'm merely explaining to you why I don't believe in intellectual property. Because you asked. This is the blowback: >I do have a GitHub Sponsors. For about a year, I had exactly one sponsor. Now I have zero. Negligible economic gain for your open source work. You may choose to personally not classify that as blowback, but my language is not referencing your personal opinion. You can think of it as saying: separate from your own opinion, basically everyone on the face of the earth things you suffer from "blowback". Not that it means anything of course. Only your opinion really matters. I'm just communicating my thoughts. Like you. | | |
| ▲ | matheusmoreira 2 days ago | parent [-] | | I don't think my lack of sponsorships are at all attributable to my personal views on intellectual property. I think it's far more likely it's because I'm unknown, because my projects are unfinished, because my projects are bad or any number of other possible reasons. |
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