this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2024
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It's fine to pirate every piece of media. From books, to movies, to music, to textbooks, to newspapers, to my own comments online.
Information and art is meant to be shared and enjoyed. Pay walling a distraction from reality does nothing but make reality worse.
What about people who need money to not only survive but to continue making art? What separates art from, say, coding, as a form of labor that is not worth compensation? Is an artist’s work not worthy of adequate compensation?
This is why concepts like UBI would be so transformative to society.
Imagine a world where no one had to choose between creating and surviving. Where writers and artists and coders and musicians could just make beautiful things and give them to the world for nothing.
Coding isn't always compensated. Open source projects thrive because of the work of developers that don't get paid in most cases. That doesn't stop them (although it's probably because they do other work and can spare time and money).
My point is that both, art and coding, don't require compensation. Many people do both for the sake of it.
That doesn't mean they don't deserve compensation (in the form of donations). They do, most than any other.
I'm fine with compensation, I'm not fine with the whole work once and siphon off the labor of others into eternity.
Something interesting I'd like to point out, the videogame Mindustry is open source and copyleft (I think either GPL or AGPL). You can get a build off GitHub or FlatHub completely for free. However there is a Steam version with Steam multiplayer and achievements as well which is $9.99 USD on Steam, estimated ownership is around 846.7k [1], the price hasn't always been $9.99, but assuming that isn't the case the game has made around $8 million, I haven't taken out Valve's cut and I don't know how much tax they're paying but that's pretty good. It could be a lot higher if all of the FlatHub and GitHub users paid for their copy. I initially discovered the game on FlatHub, loved it and now have it on Steam. I wouldn't have bought the game if I hadn't tried it for free.
It feels counterintuitive that freeloaders can help with sales, but consider a physical artwork like a painting. People don't tend to buy these things without seeing them first, and seeing it is experiencing, so there's very little benefit to buying it, but people do anyway to support the artist, because they want more.
[1] https://steamdb.info/app/1127400/charts/
What if code should also be shared freely?
You mean like GitHub and source forge?
People who can't pay experiencing their creative work doesn't take anything away from them. Complain about the lack of funding for art instead
It is a statistical fact that people who pirate things tend to buy more things than people who never pirate anything. Furthermore, people who exclusively pirate are a minority. It is also a fact that the majority of pirates would rather pay for things if the service provided is a superior experience to that of piracy.
Gabe Newell said "Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem."
Soooo people shouldn't get paid for taking time to create books, movies, music, textbooks, newspapers?
There should be means that would allow fans and appreciators donate money to creators. And it looks like we already have a lot of those.
Also, culture and art should be promoted by governments. Therefore taxes could go that way too.
Anyway, it's not like people say it's fine for everyone to not pay. But at least we know it's fine for many to pay much less than the rest, see regional pricing and discounts. Creators are totally fine with those. Nothing prevents it from being extended further to people who have a hard time trying to become potential customers.
I think a good compromise is to allow for sale for a period of years, and then when it's no longer making as much profits, for a creator to give permission for it to be ok to be pirated, which basically means that they've sorta kinda maybe ceded legal consequences to pirating their work.
What of there were a model for video games where the games themselves were free to download and play, but things like cosmetics, weapons, stat boosts, and character unlocks were sold piecemeal to those willing to pay?
That model certainly wouldn't become a cancer on the entire industry and ruin online gaming, making us beg for the days when you could just buy a fucking game and play it.
Why the fuck do they make money 15 years after doing the work though? Build a house, you get paid for the house. Write a song? Infinite money.
15 years? What about 80 years? There are movies from the 40s that are still under copyright.
Copyright is generally a good idea. There has to be some level of restriction, otherwise infinite copies of your art immediately show up and you cant make a living.
On the flipside, it harms the industry at large if the copyright is too long. There is no reason why a corporate entity should be making royalties on something long after it's creator has died.
So, where is the middle point? What is a good length of time to let an artist exclusively sell their art without fear of someone undercutting them as soon as they make something? Personally, i think the US figured out the sweet spot before all the changes. 14 years, plus a single 14 year extension you have to register. 28 years is enough time that you can make a career, but also not long enough to harm the creative process or prevent art from reaching the masses while its relevant.
Consider the following:
One day we manage to reach the pinnacle of invention - we create the replicator from Star Trek. We can suddenly bring immense amounts of anything we want for everyone in the world, for very little energy (caveat: I don't know enough about Star Trek lore to know this to be true).
Now, this machine would certainly make a whole lot of business models redundant - farming, factory work, you name it - they would all no longer be able to make a living doing what they did before this invention existed.
Now for the moral question - should the fact that this invention will harm certain groups' way of life be considered enough of a motivation to prohibit the use of this invention? Despite the immense wealth we could bring upon the world?
Take a pause to form an opinion on the subject.
Now that you've formed an opinion on the replicator - consider that we already have replicators for all types of digital media. It can be infinitely replicated for trivial amounts of energy. Access to the library of all cataloged information in the world is merely a matter of bandwidth.
Now, should the fact that groups relying on copyright protection for their way of life be considered reason enough to prohibit the use of the information replicator?
To me, the answer is clear. The problem of artists, authors, actors, programmers and so on not being able to make money as easily without copyright protection does not warrant depriving the people of the world from access to the information replicator. What we should focus on is to find another model under which someone creating information can sustain themselves.
That's exactly the problem.
Under the current system, people that produce creative works as their job are forced to monetize them. Until we live in a post-scarcity world where everyone's needs are met, like Star Trek, we have to deal with capitalist problems. To say otherwise is to ensure a system where artists and authors are unable to survive. Currently, the copyright system is good enough™ that creating art can be profitable enough that they are not destitute.
Simply because the technology exists to endlessly replicate and distribute art, regardless of the wishes of the artist (for which it is already frequently used, if you look at piracy channels) does not mean that it should be used with reckless abandon.
the good thing about copyright is that it's the only thing that might protect an individual against a giant company to steal someone's work and drown it with an insanely more marketed version to make money off of someone else's work without compensating them. i mean they already do that as best they can but it would be worse without copyright protections.
on the other hand i would severely limit copyrights in general, and even more for publishers and companies. I'd much rather individuals retain rights to IP than companies.
i realize there are some problems that might arise from such a system but it would be much less significant than the BS we have today.
but wait, oh no, that means Sony shouldn't have exclusive rights to churn out another vaguely spider-man-related shit stain! how will our culture survive this?
it'll be fine.
It’s not always that simple. If I write a song, then I don’t want my song to be used in a big budget Hollywood production without me getting a dime.
Hey, what's up with the big bold blue letters?
Eh, there's a difference between compensation for work and using laws and legislation to sew up something tighter than a cats arse for personal exploitation
I would argue that someone saying “every piece of media” doesn’t care about that distinction.
That's a completely different statement
Artists and creators need and want to be paid. It’s fulfilling for some of them to have a monetary success associated with their work, and for others they need those funds to survive. We should pay artists and creators, I don’t care if people pirate. Pay the goddamn creators you like so they keep making more cool stuff!
I find this opinion hard to reconcile with Lemmy users' general stance that Reddit/Google are in the wrong for using comments to train AI without asking permission.
What job do you do? I take it you do it for free yourself since that's what you are advocating for
To be fair, it would be based if everyone did their job for free.
Money sucks. Everything should be free.