This is an awful, terrible take. We know that intellectual property is much more artificial than pretty much every other type of property right, but we still want governments to enforce copyright and other IP law because it's a good way to make sure that people have a financial incentive to be creative or do R&D.
Copyright needs reform (and many types of DRM need to be banned), but just because you'd gladly sacrifice thousands of industries (how many jobs is that? millions?) to have some ideological purity, it doesn't mean that such a decision would be broadly supported or even in the best interest of society as a whole.
Source: work in copyright, have seen firsthand how shitty IP protections can destroy businesses that produce excellent content.
I have to believe that there must be alternatives. We need better post-copyright business models. This artificial scarcity thing is simply not going to work anymore. At least not without sacrificing everything about computers that make them special.
Maybe crowdfunding where creation is treated as an investment. Maybe patronage where it's treated as a subscription. I really don't know for sure. I just know it can't go on like this.
I think you are headed down the wrong path here. You don’t need to eliminate intellectual property to preserve general purpose computing. You just have to change the guardrails on how IP enforcement works.
They’ve changed many times and they can change again. And it’s way more achievable than ripping copyright out of society entirely.
There is no value even with copyright. Its value is made up, created via artificial scarcity whose days became numbered the minute computers were invented. There's no point in perpetuating this system.
The true value is the labor of creators. Data is abundant. Creators are rare. They need to somehow get paid for the labor of creating rather than copies of the finished product.
> Creative works without legal protection are free and therefore cannot be investments or subscriptions.
We can invest in the creator. Paying them up front like investments, or continuously every month like patronage.
> You don’t need to eliminate intellectual property to preserve general purpose computing. You just have to change the guardrails on how IP enforcement works.
I'm not convinced the copyright industry will ever stop. The situation gets worse every year. How is this supposed to change with copyright holders still around? Their lobbying power is immense.
> They’ve changed many times and they can change again.
They've changed for the worse. How many times has copyright duration been extended? How many of our rights eroded? Fair use rights? Public domain rights? They mean nothing anymore. When was the last time some work entered the public domain?
Every move to make copyright more like property makes copyright less useful for its designated purposes, and more a drain on the public interest. But copyright holders are continually pressing courts and legislators to try make copyright law subservient to property law, and succeeding, incrementally, so case law on copyright has become hard to distinguish from property law. Nowadays copyright lawyers even call themselves "Intellectual Property" lawyers, deliberately trying to obscure the difference.
The consequence is that Copyright, which was once a benefit for the public interest, is now a benefit only for entrenched media companies. Eliminating it would once have been taking away from the public. Now, eliminating it would benefit the public. But, since copyright is now a matter of international treaty, we no longer have, even in principle, the power to eliminate it: treaties override the Constitution.
Frankly, your bias shows and you might have a case of EverythingLooksLikeANailitis. The copyright industry may be "protecting" jobs in some ways, but it's also destroying jobs in others. It's halting progress in so many cases.
You also need to look at who, in practice, is protected by copyright. The grand majority of the money being protected is that of big, rich industries. Even when the Little Guys are protected, it's usually by a bigger company that gets the way bigger cut from it (eg. stock photo and music artists).
A world without copyright is a different one. IP lawyers and copyright enforcers might be out of a job, but it doesn't mean it'd be one without music or art. We'd find a different way to make it work, hopefully a way that doesn't drive the next Aaron Swartz to suicide.
No, I have a case of "I'veSeenWhatHappensWhenCopyrightIsIgnoreditis." A blind man could see that copyright needs serious reforms, but it's absurd to pretend like other systems produce the diversity and scale of works that the current one does.
> You also need to look at who, in practice, is protected by copyright.
Believe it or not, I do every day.
It's crazy that your solution to "small creators get ripped off" is "make ripping them off legal." The actual solution is to reduce the cost of enforcing copyright - right now it takes a court case, which obviously is a nonstarter for anyone who isn't making bank off of their copyright.
> A world without copyright is a different one. IP lawyers and copyright enforcers might be out of a job, but it doesn't mean it'd be one without music or art.
As long as there are humans, there'll be art and music. What there won't be are people who make a living off of it, and we'll rewind to like 300 years ago when the only people who could afford to create art were born rich or willing to find a rich person who'd individually sponsor them. When people have more time to spend on art, they produce better art. I really hope that isn't controversial.
> We'd find a different way to make it work, hopefully a way that doesn't drive the next Aaron Swartz to suicide.
I'd really rather we didn't use a deeply individual instance of suicide as a political talking point. It's kind of tasteless and you can find plenty of examples of suicide for virtually any problem.
Making it easier will result in even worse systems than YouTube's insane extralegal "copystrike" process which enables such abuses as police playing copyrighted songs to prevent people from sharing videos of them.
The opposite should happen. It should be much harder to enforce, it should most definitely not be automatic, it should cost copyright holders huge amounts of money, it should require them to go to actual court, there should be severe penalties for fraudulent claims.
> we'll rewind to like 300 years ago when the only people who could afford to create art were born rich or willing to find a rich person who'd individually sponsor them
If we keep going like this we'll rewind about 100 years to the status quo before the invention of computers. We'll have them but they'll be restricted to the point they're equivalent to old mass media. Their potential squandered in the name of keeping old industries alive. Everything the internet was meant to be, destroyed due to the surveillance and control necessary to enforce copyright.
