Let's take a second to remember that copyright is the reason ~every child doesn't have access to ~every book ever written.
While it might be too disruptive to eliminate copyright overnight, we should remember that our world will be much better and improve much faster to the extent we can reduce copyright's impact.
And we should cheer it on when it happens. A majority of the world's population in 2023 has a smartphone. Imagine a world where a majority of the world had access to every book ever digitized, and could raise their children on these books!
This is emotionally manipulative speech that provides no value to HN and only serves the purpose of bypassing peoples' logical reasoning circuits.
> ~every child doesn't have access to ~every book ever written
More manipulation - "think of the children!"
Copyright exists because people who produce content with low distribution costs (e.g. books) need some protection for their work being taken without compensation.
Fundamentally, you are never entitled to someone else's work.
There's already tens (hundreds?) of thousands of books in the public domain, and tens of thousands more under Creative Commons licenses (where the author explicitly released their work for free distribution). There's lectures on YouTube and MIT OpenCourseWare. There's full K-12 textbooks on OpenStax and Wikibooks. There's Wikipedia, Stack Exchange, the Internet Archive, and millions of small blogs and websites hosting content that is completely free.
There is no need for "a majority of the world had access to every book ever digitized" - and it's deeply morally wrong (theft-adjacent) to take someone else's work without compensating them on their terms.
> and it's deeply morally wrong (theft-adjacent) to take someone else's work without compensating them on their terms.
But I'm willing to bet that you don't believe this consistently across domains, and the domains in which you do believe it have been selected rather arbitrarily, not by you but rather by industry lobbying pressure.
Copyright doesn't exist for mathematics, jokes, fashion designs, architectural styles, recipes, and many other areas of human work. All of these represent similar creative work to the work done by musicians and writers. But we don't force comedians to license each others' jokes, or sue bars for letting people tell unlicensed jokes in public. And almost all of us wear clothing by uncompensated designers. And of course it would be unfathomably destructive to allow something analogous to copyright for a mathematical idea.
We also set limits on how long heirs can inherit copyright, which we don't do for other kinds of property, and we don't have any moral issues with that.
So it's important to remember that our moral intuitions about work and material products don't really translate to information and that we are truly making all of this up as we go along, under the intense corrupting pressure of a few very sophisticated industry lobbies.
Copyright is a system meant to ensure creators get compensated proportionally to the value they add to society
It is a bad system though. It restrains the society from benefitting from said work unless they meet certain terms (usually, payments). It's often times unrealistic to pay for all you'd like to consume. Especially that access to their work is usually badly quantised
(For example, I may want to search Sarah Silverman's book for a keyword, once. That'll cost me the same amount as someone reading the book from start to end. [please take this as an illustrative example and don't jump literally on ways to solve this exact problem])
I don't have a better solution yet, but I think we should definitely open up this discussion: can you come up with a system which compensates those who add value to society without restraining access to their products?
I'll go even further to say this is the fundamental issue in our society, way beyond copyright. That is, to find a way to compensate people for the value they add while eliminating the incentive to artificially limit access to resources needed by others
I'll be more concrete with another example. Take a limited resource: housing. In a society where you don't need to gain more because you're already justly compensated maximally for what you're worth, you don't need to own more than the house you live in. In other words, I'm advocating for a society where ownership is limited to what can be possibly consumed. Importantly, limited to no longer mean a way to extract value from artificially creating scarcity for others
I think this website has the best candidates capable of devising such a system. But we need to start by having conversations about the requirements for a better society
It will further need approval from society at large even if it's well defined, so the road is long. But we need to start somewhere, and that's requirements
Sorry I derailed a bit, but I think all this ties closely to the debate: 'is copyright a good system?' rephrased as 'if we want to achieve a goal, is limiting knowledge the best way to go?'. Which can be extrapolated to 'is artificially limiting access the best way to ensure those who produce value are equitably compensated for it?'
> Copyright is a system meant to ensure creators get compensated proportionally to the value they add to society
Compensation to the creators was merely a means to an end. Furthering progress was the goal:
> Article I, Section 8, Clause 8: Patent and Copyright Clause of the Constitution. [The Congress shall have power] “To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.”
Sure! Yes! I agree! 100 years is way too long. 20 years is much more reasonable. But the comment that I was responding to (and many others in this thread) are advocating for the complete removal of copyright, and that's what I'm responding to.
I was not advocating for the immediate complete removal; I acknowledged that this may be too disruptive.
I was simply reminding people what direction we should go in, and what the stakes are. Reducing copyright terms is a great solution, and yes something between 2 and 12 years is probably the right number to aim for as a first step. I agree with the above commenter that 20 is far too long, because 20-year-old material is slipping into irrelevance in many cases.
It's also good to remember that the only reason we have copyright (in the US, where "moral rights" are not a thing) is to stimulate the creation of more work. So we need to think about what configuration of copyright law actually stimulates more work, and we need to be willing to experiment.
For the life of a human, yes, for the life of a corporation, it's long but not too long. Specially for corporations such as Disney which are sure to last for quite a while.
Not saying this is a justificable position. I'm actually in favour of drastically reducing copyright (I believe 7 to 15 years might be a sweetspot). But a lot of laws are not made for regular human people any longer.
> Fundamentally, you are never entitled to someone else's work.
This is fair but incomplete, you are not entitled to compel someone to work.
But copyright is more, it controls what is done with the work after the author freely produces it and gives it to another. It is an artificial construct that we have created for good reason.
> it controls what is done with the work after the author freely produces it and gives it to another
No, not "gives" - sells. There's a transaction involved - and part of copyright law is preserving that transactional nature, such that person A doesn't sell their work exactly once to person B who proceeds to give it away for free to every other person on the planet.
The fact that the creator of a work sells it to one person does not give that person license to pirate it.
And most of which, when in copyright, paid their authors quite handsomely in terms of royalties.
If you believe that books should exist without copyright, then one has to ask --- how many books have you written which you have explicitly placed in the public domain? Or, how many authors have you patronized so as to fund their writing so that they can publish their works freely? Or, if neither of these applies, how do you propose to compensate authors for the efforts and labours of writing?
People keep forgetting the purpose of copyright. It’s easy to find, it’s in the Constitution!
“To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.”
If the current copyright scheme does not promote the progress of science and useful arts, it is not performing as intended. All these copyright extensions do little to promote progress!
> If the current copyright scheme does not promote the progress of science and useful arts, it is not performing as intended. All these copyright extensions do little to promote progress!
This is a strawman argument - the parent poster that you're replying to is defending copyright as a concept, while the one that they're replying to is attacking it - you're instead making an argument about specific lengths that hasn't come up yet, and nobody is defending.
Very few people (and I am not one of them) think that the "Mickey Mouse curve" style of copyright extension is genuinely useful to anyone except Disney, but holmesworcester is arguing that copyright should be abolished entirely, which contradicts the section of the Constitution that you quoted.
The good public domain books are typically outdated in both content and language. This makes it hard for those with less resources to stay competitive and makes the task of understanding unnecessarily hard.
The link you posted that you say used public works to form a “basis for an education” uses Aristotle as an author for example, and seem to be taught in the context of an instructor-led class (where an expert can discriminate what’s still relevant today and help decipher the language)
The notion that you need cutting edge books to educate yourself is poorly informed.
There are countless well written resources for every aspect of a good education available for free online. They are often not as easy to find as their well-advertised modern equivalents.
Saying there aren’t good free textbooks is like saying there aren’t good free classics on Project Gutenberg. It’s ignorant.
The problem with your reasoning is similar to coming with the highest possible number. When you figure out a number, someone will say "that plus one!".
Whatever standard of free service you establish, someone with resources can surpass, but needs to be motivated to do it by the perspective of a return of the resources spent.
So either hinder development by forbidding the commercial stuff altogether, or tax all people and then finance authors from public money, but hopefully I don't have to explain how wherever this model is tested, the society degrades towards famine.
The benefit of the existing scheme is that new works get created, and some of them are even copy-edited and published.
How many texts are created which are explicitly placed in the public domain and from which the authors have made a conscious decision not to profit thereby?
Books and libraries have existed for thousands of years. It’s copyright that is the young intruder.
Most people who write non-fiction books do it because they want to contribute to human knowledge and be recognized as an expert in a particular field, not because they think that writing a differential geometry textbook is their path to riches. With the internet, more and more text books are made freely available by their authors - the reason this didn’t happen in the past is because there was no other way to pass knowledge around than teaming up with a publisher who is able to put your knowledge on to dead trees. It’s fair game to put older books on the internet, so that the whole world can benefit, not just rich people in rich countries.
And books and libraries existed under a system of patronage and royal imprimatur which severely restricted access, even beyond the expenses of copying a book by hand or physically printing a copy using metal type.
The problems with authors making texts available directly are:
- no gate-keeping, so it's hard to find what is worth reading and what isn't
- no proofreading --- it kills me that errors in books are so casually accepted these days
- few authors have the skills to draw illustrations so as to have a meaningful and clear presentation
I've worked with raw author manuscripts --- in most instances they're not something anyone would choose to read given any other option.
Yet not as young as some people are inclined to think. For example, Charles Dickens was known for pushing for international copyright [1] (domestic copyright was already well established). I acknowledge that he wrote fiction, while you're primarily talking about non-fiction, but the point that it's not recent recent still stands
Also you've said yourself that many people can and are offering their work for free. Awesome. So I would prefer not to force others to (though I would certainly be up to consider repealing many of the posthumous copyright extensions that are fairly recent)
Since you mentioned textbooks on differential geometry, I can recommend anyone interested Sigmundur Gudmundsson's lecture notes in introductory differential geometry as well as Riemannian geometry. You can find them freely available on his personal academic page.
> The benefit of the existing scheme is that new works get created, and some of them are even copy-edited and published.
How do you know that this benefit wouldn't exist in other schemes? Look at permissive open source software which is essentially public domain + shield from liability. No copyright does not mean no compensation. It just means different compensation that doesn't deprave other people of their right to share information.
Unlike GP, I support the complete abolishment of Copyright. Society needs to find another scheme to reward work. Perhaps kickstarter-style firms that direct oversight over funded projects or some other scheme that doesn't cause so much harm.
> Look at permissive open source software ... No copyright does not mean no compensation
From everything I've heard it kinda does. If you're writing something valuable then maybe a company will employ you to keep working on it, and the portfolio can certainly help in interviews (to write other software), but getting non-negligible compensation for the use of the software itself is rare. Even those projects that are well funded, like the Linux kernel, are done so not out of goodness of heart, but due to companies realising it's in their rational interest to have a common standard base of sorts
In terms of written works, the best comparison we have is Wikipedia, and while the foundation does receive funding from companies who realise how useful of an integration it can be for their products, the writers themselves do not get paid afaik (and when they do, it's rarely a good thing). But if you just wrote an open source textbook, I doubt you'll manage to make much money off it, and the prospects for fiction look even worse
> Perhaps kickstarter-style firms that direct oversight over funded projects
Sounds like a return to rich patrons and needing to flatter them to get grants. Luckily with the modern internet we do now have democratised layman patronage, but why the need to force everyone into that model? Also note that almost all successful Patreon artists do have perks for paying, even if it's just early access, and afaik make a lot of their money off commissions. Those who just post art for free, with no paid comms, and just have a "tip jar" make relatively little from what I hear
> From everything I've heard it kinda does. If you're writing something valuable then maybe a company will employ you to keep working on it, and the portfolio can certainly help in interviews (to write other software), but getting non-negligible compensation for the use of the software itself is rare. Even those projects that are well funded, like the Linux kernel, are done so not out of goodness of heart, but due to companies realizing it's in their rational interest to have a common standard base of sorts.
Successfully creating a permissive open source project expecting it to be magically funded by benevolent parties is just exceedingly rare. Usually the funding starts first, or effort proceeds in lock-step with funding.
There's a bit of a cart-and-horse here though. Non-permissive licenses like AGPL are often not the result of a single author hoping they might be able to negotiate some licensing deal in the future - it is the result of a commercial enterprise trying to be restrictive in the ability for people to use their source without compensating them.
Same with what is normally considered a more open license, than AGPL, the GPL - where MySQL was reported as going after others for using independent database drivers without buying a commercial license, saying use of the MySQL network protocol made the application using the driver a "derivative work" under the GPL.
Linux is a special case because there are a large number of commercial entities which realize contributing to Linux is way cheaper and faster than writing their own kernel and porting user land software to it.
Apache HTTPD, on the other hand, is an example of an application where corporations DID find the motivation to write their own alternative funded with a commercial model, such as NGINX.
There's a huge vendor community around Kubernetes, which is open source and permissively licensed to boot. If you write something complex that basically works you'll be able to develop defensible IP around management.
p.s., I'm sure many of those vendors are not making money yet but they all aim to.
And for folks who want to create such works, they are welcome to --- as noted else thread, I've put a fair bit of effort into permissively licensed texts --- but I haven't seen a workable method put forth, nor a rational justification for destroying the value of works recently created under the current system.
I still don't see how a person having copyright over the work which they have created and the ability to license it to their best profit is a harm.
The benefit of automobiles is that people move across vast distances.
Wrong. People used to move across vast distances before, using horses. Yes, automobiles are better and now traveling is easier. But we have no ability to figure out how many people would travel on horses if there wasn't a better alternative. It's even possible, that banning cars could eventually lead to an even better method of transportation (escaping a local minimum kind of a thing).
Authors who write books have tools to protect their interests, so they do so. Without these tools perhaps there would be less authors. Or maybe there would be more authors: I think Windows and Photoshop are so popular because they were pirated a lot; returning to the context of books, less and less people read them, but maybe if books (attractive books, not old books in public domain) were free, then the trend would reverse, books would popularize, people would start enjoying deeper entertainment, get smarter, transform the society for the better, and support authors on e.g. Patreon… Or maybe not, I'm just mentioning some nuance.
>If you believe that books should exist without copyright, then one has to ask --- how many books have you written which you have explicitly placed in the public domain? Or, how many authors have you patronized so as to fund their writing so that they can publish their works freely?
Lol
Edit: I should probably clarify here. While I can’t speak for OP, I can say that, for some reason, I am sure there are people who have done both lol
The Venn diagram of folks who don't believe in copyright and those who have actually produced something other folks want to read is quite sparse, excepting the odd manifesto.
Second-order effects matter, though: If everyone is allowed to steal books, what's the incentive for experts to write new ones, and for the publishers to reward them for it?
This typical semantic-pedantry line from piracy apologists misses the point - piracy is theft-adjacent even if you get to pick your use of "theft". Incidentally, my definition of "theft", and that of most content creators, includes the act of consuming something without compensating the creator on their terms - which includes piracy.
A fundamental property of theft is that the action deprives someone of something they had. Piracy is not theft-adjacent. It has nothing do to with theft. It's a completely different concept.
That's an interesting thought. So when I overhear a conversation which was not aimed at me I am stealing. Quite an interesting definition with widereaching implication
As a book author, I can say that, "Yes, something was stolen. My opportunity to earn a living taking care of readers."
Now you may believe the incredibly self-serving baloney from big companies like Google. You may want to pretend that infringement isn't theft. To you, I hope that some homeless kid breaks into your home, starts squatting, and says that, "Hey, this isn't theft. Nothing has been destroyed."
Actually very much the revenue for each purchase that didn't happen this way was stolen. I'm not a pitacy Hardliner and don't see an issue with someone in a bad financial spot pirating things but this is bullshit.
That's not really the same, you could have a copy of my credit card, but you using it to make purchases would become an issue. Regardless, that quickly steps out of the domain of intellectual property.
If I use your copied credit card to buy software, all that happens is (a) some bits get written to my computer's hard disk and (b) some bits get written to a Visa or Mastercard server's hard disk. Why would you get upset about that?
EDIT: ok, it's fun playing obtuse, but more seriously it is also very obtuse to pretend that intellectual property is not property. I think you have to be pretty stupid to not understand why an author who spends a decade painstakingly creating a work of literature is entitled to ownership of reproductions of that work.
But this is clearly not "everyone". This is just one/two readers. Not even copiers, as the network does not "remember" the content of the book, at least not better than a casual reader. Infringement in this case is more like standing in a book shop reading the book for free, or loaning one in a library for a day, not actually copying for keeps.
The comment they replied to literally said "Let's take a second to remember that copyright is the reason ~every child doesn't have access to ~every book ever written."
books hardly make money, so book sales is not the top incentive for most writers. i would be willing to bet that most books pay less than minimum wage, when considering the labor hours it takes to write the book and how much a writer is ultimately paid out. if not less than minimum wage, then certainly less than the expert's typical hourly rate.
I think that would wholly destroy the ability of writers to actually make a living writing novels. The fact that the living isn't great now does not justify this.
People write for reasons other than money from the sales of the book. This accounts for most authors, who aren't famous enough to negotiate a great deal with a publisher.
And we don't need to abolish copyright outright. Just require that it is continually published at a steady or decreasing price, or it becomes public domain. And put works in the public domain a little sooner.
And now wealthy aristocrats have been replaced by staggeringly wealthy megacorporations like Disney and WB.
Its disgustingly dishonest to appeal for "poor" authors where casual glance immediately proves that modern IP law exceedingly profits only a few massive corporations and their shareholders.
> People did write before copyright. Copyright was established to make it more likely.
No, it was established to make investing in printing presses more profitable, which is why the rights initially attached to printers. Authors as the locus of rights were a later change.
Yeah, these were rich people like Jane Austen and Mrs. Percy Bythe Shelley. Copyright makes it possible for the non-rich to create these works and make a living from a willing audience.
The average full time author in the UK earn below minimum wage, and most authors are not full time.
While removing copyright without some form of mechanism to replace it would be problematic, and I do agree there are second order effects to consider, at least for books the effect may well be less than you'd think.
It would look largely identical to ours, I think. It's pretty trivial to get access to many, if not most, e-books.
Any public-domain work is available on Project Gutenberg [0]. Copyrighted works can be accessed for free using tools of various legality: Libby [1] is likely sponsored by your local library and gives free access to e-books and audiobooks. Library Genesis [2] has a questionable legal status but has a huge quantity of e-books, journal articles, and more.
It’s important to note that only some copyrighted works can be accessed for free using the legal options, I’m a member of probably a dozen overdrive supporting libraries and still frequently find titles unavailable for loan of any kind.
I’d love to see an analysis of what % of books are available via libraries around the globe.
Also, the whole DRM thing is a massive pain, audiobooks especially are terrible at allowing side-loading onto a consumer friendly device (such as an MP3 player).
Exactly. The original copyright term was 14 years. Now Disney and the Intellectual Monopoly cartel have extended it 120 years, and convinced an unthinking population that anything less is "stealing."
Then most people stop writing books because they can't get paid for their time/effort and ~every child will be stuck with outdated knowledge within a decade.
There are already many writers making thousands of dollars a month by publishing free serialized web novels, via Patreon. Some are using their own websites, but most are on Royal Road (or scribblehub, webnovel, wattpad, AO3).
A random example from Royal Road[1], the author makes $12065/month. Mind you, the text is not gated, it's free to read, the patreon only offers early access...
What do you think authors feel about this? Despite many people on this site thinking we're the first generation with new technology, the issue of copyright, and technolgie's impact on it, has been discussed for centuries.
The "patronage" model is great (and I personally am a Patreon supporter of lots of creatives). But it also has a lot of flaws in it, both for the author and the public. Most authors will be happy to tell you both the good and bad of the model, in my experience.
The biggest flaw for the public, btw, is that this model only supports art that "rich people" find worth supporting. This is bad, both because sometimes art isn't "deemed worthy" immediately, and because art for non-"rich" people is also very valuable.
Patronage was art for rich people in pre-internet days. Now we can make it easy for anyone to contribute a dollar to an artist they like.
As for art that isn't "deemed worthy immediately," that doesn't immediately make money in today's system either. If the art can be freely distributed, it's more likely to find its audience.
Contributing a dollar to an artist they like is beyond the ability of many people in the world. Both in technical terms (actually being able to reliably send someone a dollar), and monetarily.
And very few artists are out there surviving on patrons giving them a dollar a month, I imagine. Most of them survive on larger pledges, and as far as I know, very few of them reach anywhere near the amount of money traditionally-published authors can make.
> As for art that isn't "deemed worthy immediately," that doesn't immediately make money in today's system either. If the art can be freely distributed, it's more likely to find its audience.
Yes, it doesn't make money immediately in today's system. But many authors collect a back-catalogue of works, which might pay out only a bit of money at a time, but over a career can be enough. If I publish a novel every year for 20 years, even if every novel only brings in a sprinkling of money per year, by year 20 I'm getting 20 sprinkling of money, which could be enough to sustain me.
Very few of these "middle of the road" authors are popular enough to survive on patronage alone, I believe.
---
At the end of the day, you think that "the internet" somehow made possible something that wasn't technically possible before. I think that's mostly not true - the technology was never the problem. That's why copyright exists in the first place - to make sure that, despite books being almost-zero-cost to reproduce, we put an actual limit on it in order for more books to be published.
If you want a different system, that's your prerogative. But you have to grapple with the tradeoffs here. If less money flows to authors - which would happen if you abandon copyright - then there will be less books. That's almost a law of economics. If you think that somehow you can make something like patreon scale up to the same amount of money that exists in "the system" today, then a) I disagree, and b) you'd still have to content with the issues I mentioned.
Exactly. Take music, for example. Increased capitalist exploitation [1] is what allowed people to spread their creativity far and wide, rather ironically for genres like punk. There's still nothing stopping people from giving away stuff for free, and indeed I do that myself with both FOSS code and CC-BY media (not music), but I'm under no illusions that I'll ever make more than beer money from it, and I do not fault anyone else for going the all rights reserved route
[1] I use that term in the neutral, economic sense
This model is clearly not viable for any sort of economy at scale. Far fewer people can make a living wage under patronage models than traditional models because people simply pay less (far less) for things where they're not compelled to than for things where they are.
420 thousand people work in the US film industry alone[1]. I doubt that there's that same number of people making ~living wage across every online patronage site in the United States (excluding advertisement-driven ventures, of course).
Your "random" example is currently the #2 ongoing fiction on there, and was #1 until a couple days ago when the guy who wrote Mother of Learning released his new fiction.
It was random in the sense I clicked on trending and then clicked on the first thing I saw. Sure, the amount is an outlier, but there are more that are making over 500 or 1000/month, that's not unusual. Most authors are not making any money, of course, just like in the current system.
Is this some kind of pwn? Stephen King makes millions, JK Rowling likely a billionaire, Grisham, Patterson, Joan Collins, the list is endless. Didn't the 50 Shades of Grey author initially start with free fan fiction? Do you think these people are going to take a pay cut? And if your "random" author gets noticed by a publisher and is offered a book deal, do you think it will continue to be free?
The government charges a tax on everyone. Revenue is handed to authors based on how many times the work is used.
There are some questions around how to weigh things like societal importance of the work.
(“Not melting down nuclear reactors for dummies” seems like it should get more money per view than “poodles in outer space vol XXXII”, despite likely having lower readership)
Isn't this the opposite of what the people against copyright are seeking? They want more art to be unprotected, instead, in the public domain, free to use for all. You're making things even more restrictive financially by attaching a tax to all books/songs/movies etc, plus creating a government-controlled, universal monitoring and enforcement system.
This makes even less sense than the previous guy. When you've figured out how the world will work without people incentivized by money and power, get back to the rest of us
Suing people for reading a book is one of the ways the poor are kept poor.
The world will work just fine without ceding control to people who seek money and power, because most people aren't like that. The question is how to prevent the few who are from oppressing the rest of us.
That is quite a challenge, but haven't you ever created something just for the fun of it?
> Suing people for reading a book is one of the ways the poor are kept poor.
Please cite a single lawsuit.
> The world will work just fine without ceding control to people who seek money and power, because most people aren't like that.
Virtually everybody is "like that." The world works well because tons of people are working hard, toiling in difficult, dirty, boring, frustrating, or tedious jobs (or all of the above) behind the scenes to make it so. What are municipal waste workers seeking, if not money? Bus drivers? Construction workers? Police officers?
> That is quite a challenge, but haven't you ever created something just for the fun of it?
Any author or songwriter or photographer can proclaim his work to be freely copyable, just like programmers release code under MIT licenses. The fact that so few actually do, should clue you in on their incentives.
> Suing people for reading a book is one of the ways the poor are kept poor.
Who is suing anyone for reading a book?
> The world will work just fine without ceding control to people who seek money and power, because most people aren't like that. The question is how to prevent the few who are from oppressing the rest of us.
Please get me in contact with your dealer because apparently the “legal” stuff I’ve been getting is not as potent as I thought.
> That is quite a challenge, but haven't you ever created something just for the fun of it?
Sure I’ve painted things that are on my wall and created lots of utility apps that I use personally but I keep them to myself. If I thought they were something that could get me some extra pocket money or better then I would be looking for ways to monetize. I have zero interest in sharing my potential intellectual property for free.
How does the digital age change things? Copyright was invented when copying became easy, and hence arrived due to the printing press. A book is no different to a digital download in that the cost to produce it is tiny, and you're paying for the intellectual property, not the physical production of it
> The economic argument goes like this: “I want to get rich (usually described inaccurately as ‘making a living’), and if you don't allow me to get rich by programming, then I won't program. Everyone else is like me, so nobody will ever program. And then you'll be stuck with no programs at all!” This threat is usually veiled as friendly advice from the wise.
> I'll explain later why this threat is a bluff. First I want to address an implicit assumption that is more visible in another formulation of the argument.
> This formulation starts by comparing the social utility of a proprietary program with that of no program, and then concludes that proprietary software development is, on the whole, beneficial, and should be encouraged. The fallacy here is in comparing only two outcomes—proprietary software versus no software—and assuming there are no other possibilities.
I personally feel our copyright laws are too rigid, but that doesn't mean copyright shouldn't exist.
After x years, any book should be free to read, after y years, it should be free to be incorporated into AI models, after z years it should be in the public domain.
Because it's not. It is trivial to buy a book on the Kindle store, and while it may be trivial to us here to go and pirate a azw3 and transfer it, it's not to most people
People always forget the pareto principle when it comes to anti-piracy. No, they don't stop everyone, but a minor hurdle stops a hell of a lot of "ordinary" people
annas-archive.org, search and download, open it on your computer. functionally as trivial as purchasing a book on amazon. reading on a kindle is a niche case.
What an absolute pile of nonsense. People who author creative works deserve to have control of them and make some money - otherwise you'll soon find we have far fewer great authors, artists, etc.
This is essentially the same as saying builders charging for houses is the problem with the housing market, so we're going to phase out paying builders.
> otherwise you'll soon find we have far fewer great authors, artists, etc.
It's been long understood that this idea isn't based on any real evidence. Creators create because they like to create things. Adding money to the mix tends to ruin most creative endeavours. Look up beautification or note how Googles only good search results involve the keyword Reddit.
Theres "creators create because they like to create things" and "creators create things because they want to make a living off of what they create". If artists/authors/musicians/etc aren't going to be paid for what they create, they can't make a living doing it. If they can't make a living doing it, that severely limits their opportunity and time available for creating things since they could only do it as a hobby (unless we bring back royal patronage or something). Many of the best artistic works we have came from people who were able to commit 100% to the creative process. That's gonna be real hard to do if you can't pay for food and housing.
People are regularly paying creators directly to create through patreon, super chats, advertising, early access, subscriptions, etc.
The idea that you need copyright to protect you is just not based in reality.
Get rid of copyright, creators will find a way to monetize it if they want to make a living doing it.
It's not society's job to protect your ability to get paid for your hobby. There are no original ideas, just people that write them down. You don't own them, you extracted these ideas from society, the least you can do is give them back.
> Let's take a second to remember that copyright is the reason ~every child doesn't have access to ~every book ever written.
No, copyright is the reason that authors all over the world are working very hard to make new books for my kids and everyone else's kids, despite never having met me. Copyright is the reason so many brilliant things are actually created that otherwise would never be.
Of course I'd prefer to live in a world in which I get all the media I want, for free. But I have no idea how to make such a world happen, and neither does anyone else, and humanity has been discussing this for a few centuries.
>>copyright is the reason ~every child doesn't have access to ~every book ever written
Copyright is ALSO the reason that many books can be written in the first place.
Obviously, Copyright is abused and the continual extensions of copyright into near-perpetuity by corporations is basically absurd. And they are abused by music publishers etc. to rip-off artists.
But to claim that it should not exist, when it is utterly trivially simple for anyone to copy stuff to the web is to argue that no one should create or release any creative works, or to argue for drastic DRM measures.
Perhaps you DGAF about your written or artistic works because you do not or can not make a living off them, but I guarantee that for those creatives and artists who can and/or do make a living off of it, they do care, and rightly so.
A company that believes in strong intellectual property rights protection is using resources that blatantly ignore intellectual property rights to get access to the content for free.
I agree with you, however, that it's an argument in favor of abolishing strong intellectual property rights. At least for OpenAI's products.
I'm all for abolishing copyright, but how is this relevant to megacorporations ignoring copyright when it suits them while still expecting us to follow it when that suits them?
It's straight-up manipulative. I downvote and flag whenever I see it, because it actively contributes to the decline of HN, and is absolutely not appropriate content for here.
I’m imagining a world that looks just about the same as this one does. A larger book library doesn’t automatically make that medium more appealing to kids than what Mr Beast, Unspeakable, and the other crap kids love are doing.
It just seems like a super jaded "kids these days" thing to hate on them for consuming easily accessed, free content- and acting like the global literacy and intellectual capital would remain unaffected.
Shitty internet videos exist and are what kids want all over the world. At some point you are going to have to face it that reading lost the battle for people’s eyes to video. I was an avid reader for most of my childhood and young adult life but now in my 40s I have accepted that I’d just rather watch from the deluge of visual media available vs reading.
Piracy also exists for books so copyright doesn’t seem to be that big a deal. In fact if I look at the top pirated books currently I’m going to run across more junk books like “Make Money Faster” and “Give her orgasms in under 30 seconds” than anything you might find intellectually stimulating.
Also, piracy exists and is perfectly reasonable for an individual, especially when they are not able to afford the book, to use to get access to a book.
I think the point here is that while children can be denied access to copyrighted works without paying the owners, but openAI and Meta can do as they please. I don't disagree that the current copyright system needs improvement, but what I really really don't like are seeing rich and powerful people breaking laws with impunity over and over and over again.
> copyright is the reason ~every child doesn't have access to ~every book ever written.
And? Is there some reason anybody, child or adult, deserves access to "every" anything? Should children have access to every video game ever made, every Matchbox car, every Lego set?
Yes? I can't see any reason "you can't have that Lego set because the giant corporation behind it stopped selling it, refuses to let anyone else make it, and resale is all horribly expensive from collectors" is something we should have to tell our kids.
I really hope my children will have access to a higher tech version of something like the (discontinued?) toy where you could melt old crayons into toy car bodies. 3D printing is almost there, but ideally the end product of a Lego set could be recycled into new blocks easily and quickly.
GP makes no remark on the morality/practicality of copyright. Also, having people sue big companies for copyright might lead to more of what you're arguing for, in a show them the taste of their own medicine way
> Second-order effects are real - removing copyright would hurt authors.
Aiding authors is an instrumental, not fundamental, purpose of copyright in the US; the fundamental purpose to which any instrumental purposes are subordinate is “to promote the progress of science and useful arts”.
That is, while copyrights are a form of property, they are not something that is seen as natural property, but instead property explicitly granted as a means of achieving a public policy goal, and therefore limitations (or even elimination) harming the owners of that property is not the kind of dispositive argument against a policy that would be with the kinds of property seen as natural property.
To make this more explicit, the argument is that removing copyright hurts authors, meaning that fewer people become authors in the future, meaning that the progress of the useful arts is hurt.
I would be much more sympathetic to this stance if you weren’t implicitly endorsing the rights of companies like Meta/Alphabet/OpenAI to profit from the disruption of copyright law. If we’re talking ordinary people being able to breach copyright, then yeah seems potentially interesting. But let’s remember that these companies aren’t acting altruistically. They’re not giving away Silverman’s work - they’re repackaging it for their own profit. That’s not fair to the artist and in fact does not help the children.
I'm a fan of copyrights. While I think that the USA's implementation of copyrights has a few glaring flaws (namely, the duration of copyright is far too long). I firmly believe that the elimination, or effective elimination of copyrights is massively detrimental to our culture.
A fair middle ground would be for copyrights to last for 20 or so years. That's plenty of time to profit from a work while allowing people to preserve and distribute older works.
While it might be too disruptive to eliminate copyright overnight, we should remember that our world will be much better and improve much faster to the extent we can reduce copyright's impact.
And we should cheer it on when it happens. A majority of the world's population in 2023 has a smartphone. Imagine a world where a majority of the world had access to every book ever digitized, and could raise their children on these books!