Ah yes the infinitely reproducible digital content fallacy. If you watch a movie at the cinema, they still have the movie, do you expect that to be free too?

Products have more than just marginal production costs, especially true for digital ones.

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Telaneo 5 days ago | parent [-]

> do you expect that to be free too?

The seating and good screen and audio? No.

The digital file? I don't expect Disney to provide that free of charge, or at all for that matter, but I do believe it should be free. Copyright has gone way too far of one end of the scale, and I'd like to pull it as far as possible to the other side, then hopefully we can meet in the middle in a position we can both respect. The current position taken by Society™ is one I don't respect.

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whatevertrevor 5 days ago | parent [-]

I agree copyright goes too far, but that doesn't mean we should just delete everything. Creative content producers still need food to eat. We still need mechanisms to pay them for it, the more direct the better.

The value of digital content comes from more than just the final sequence of bytes.

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Telaneo 5 days ago | parent [-]

> but that doesn't mean we should just delete everything.

Where did this come from? This has nothing to do with anything.

> We still need mechanisms to pay them for it, the more direct the better.

Patreon is a good option, although I wish we had better ones. It's not like Youtube's paying any significant amount to any content creator other than maybe the top 0.01%. Anyone who's tried that has discovered that Youtube's payout is some extra pocket change rather than anything you can actually sustain a business with; hence why everybody who's on Youtube and does it as a business also has a Patreon or does sponsorships, or something else, as that's the only way to make ends meet.

> The value of digital content comes from more than just the final sequence of bytes.

I fail to see what else I would derive value from. I just want the damn file in most cases, with minimal interference., but Youtube seems to always want plop their schlong inbetween the content creator and their audience, to everyone's displeasure.

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Workaccount2 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

YouTube gives creators 55% of ad revenue once they get over 1k subscribers, it's pretty generous.

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Telaneo 4 days ago | parent [-]

55% of basically nothing is still basically nothing. It's something stupid low like 0.001 cents per ad viewed, all depending on audience. Hence the need to not be reliant on youtube. If you donate $1 to any given creator, you've given them more than Youtube will probably ever give them for all your views ever.

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Workaccount2 4 days ago | parent [-]

The numbers are readily available, you don't need to make them up other than to prop up a bad argument.

Youtube pays $5-$15 per 1000 views. Youtube premium gives a 55% cut of the monthly fee to creators. It's split among them based on who you watch and how long you watch them. If you watch one creator only, they will get the full 55% of your subscription cost. Creators readily acknowledge that yt premium viewers are by far the most valuable.

Generally less than 5% of viewers ever donate, and less than 1% ever give more then $5. It's not a viable income method.

I suggest following pitchfork mobs less, they are usually blind with rage and detached from reality, with a few kernels of truth in the middle.

	▲	Telaneo 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Given the reality of number of channels who prop up their Paterons and merch stores, and the slim to zero number of channels at any actual scale relying on Youtube, as well as and the constant cuts in ad revenue (how many Adpocalypses are we at now?), not to mention Youtube's hostility towards me as a user, I have no intention to throw Youtube even the smallest bone until they walk back most of the hostile changes they've made over the years. If Youtube was a platform that clearly cared about its creators, than a 55% split would be pretty fair. Youtube doesn't give a shit about most of them, and if they're just going to be a stupid bytepipe to the viewer, a hostile one at that, then them taking 45% is absurd.

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whatevertrevor 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> > but that doesn't mean we should just delete everything.

> Where did this come from? This has nothing to do with anything.

Poor wording on my part, because I was typing on my phone. "Everything" refers to everything related to copyright law. Your original comment implied that we should just burn it all down (going "as far as possible to the other side"), and I don't agree with that.

Copyright has been weaponized of course, but there are considerations worth keeping in mind about why it exists in the first place. The intent is to create mechanisms that incentivize creation of art, and allow creatives to distribute said art without other people getting automatic ownership of the fruits of their labor, just by virtue of having the file.

In a world where distribution of media is (relatively) cheap and easy, we need to think more about how we incentivize the creative process, instead of making it a wild west where anyone is allowed to distribute if they have the bits on them. In a world where everyone pirates, very little worth pirating remains.

EDIT: Forgot to respond to the rest.

I agree about patreon, but also:

> Youtube's paying any significant amount to any content creator other than maybe the top 0.01%.

That's not accurate. Of course if you have a couple hundred subscribers you get nothing from youtube, but neither does a random busker on the subway. Arts are just brutally competitive, and there's way more art being produced than people want to consume.

Youtube's partner programs are quite generous as other people have pointed out in sister comments. In addition, a good chunk of your premium subscription goes directly to the creators you're subscribed to.

> I fail to see what else I would derive value from. I just want the damn file in most cases, with minimal interference., but Youtube seems to always want plop their schlong inbetween the content creator and their audience, to everyone's displeasure.

This misses my point, but illustrates the weird thought process people go through when assigning value to digital media. When trying to value a desk we're willing to go through the whole shebang: cost of materials, quality of materials, quality of the craftsmanship and how much labour it would have required, the estimated cost of all the manufacturing processes involved, finishing labor costs etc.

But when the conversation is about paying for digital content we only focus on the direct value it provides to us, the consumer. The entire conversation about input value just gets lost.

Now input value is not always perfectly correlated with the output value (it's shaped differently for each customer), but the fact that the conversation simply shifts away as if creators and people building the platforms don't exist outside of the stream of bytes feels disingenuous.

	▲	Telaneo 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		> In a world where distribution of media is (relatively) cheap and easy, we need to think more about how we incentivize the creative process, instead of making it a wild west where anyone is allowed to distribute if they have the bits on them. In a world where everyone pirates, very little worth pirating remains. China seems to be doing that just fine when it comes to manufacturing. Everybody who's doing engineering or design work on products are talking to each other to figure out what works and does when making stuff, and nobody cares about keeping secrets about these things, since it isn't properly enforced anyway, and if you keep one secret and sit on it, without going out there to continue improving, you'll be outclassed by everybody else in a month or a year. Meanwhile, American companies are sitting on 80 years of IP and are unwilling to even consider sharing their hoard even if half of it is functionally useless, just because it might have some value. People are creative by nature. Nowadays they have a whole internet to take inspiration from, but most of it is locked behind bars for no good reason. If we want to incentivise creative work, then copyright is wholly counter-productive in a world where information can freely and rapidly flow. I'd rather see it burn and see what comes from the ashes than let it rot into nothingness. > That's not accurate. Of course if you have a couple hundred subscribers you get nothing from youtube, but neither does a random busker on the subway. Arts are just brutally competitive, and there's way more art being produced than people want to consume. Go ask anyone between 100k and 10m subs. I'm not talking about people who have anything less than that. > Youtube's partner programs are quite generous as other people have pointed out in sister comments. In addition, a good chunk of your premium subscription goes directly to the creators you're subscribed to. And I'd have to give more money to a platform that's hostile to me as a user. No thanks. > This misses my point, but illustrates the weird thought process people go through when assigning value to digital media. When trying to value a desk we're willing to go through the whole shebang: cost of materials, quality of materials, quality of the craftsmanship and how much labour it would have required, the estimated cost of all the manufacturing processes involved, finishing labor costs etc. When if you hollow out a tree to make a boat, it's value goes up. If you then add a hole to it, it's value goes down again. Work or value you put into a product is not directly correlated with the final value on the other side. I couldn't give a shit about how much money a video takes to make. That sounds like a them problem, not a me problem. If you're spending too much money to make something than you can make back on it, then don't do that. Do something else.