masterspace

Clickbait article. This is nothing.

Perhaps so, but isn't that up to whoever creates the information?

No, what I'm saying is that at a fundamental physics level, information is inherently abundant in a way that nothing else made of matter or energy is. There is effectively zero cost to replicating it an infinite amount of times. That is fundamentally not true for anything made of energy or matter.

If you invent a story, why would you not be entitled to own it?

Why would you "own" it? If you tell a story what prevents me from also telling that story? The threat of you punching me if I tell my own copy when you're not around? That's not owning something that's unilaterally declaring that you own all copies of something and forever own all copies of it going forward. If I invent a white t shirt, should I be able to claim ownership of every white t-shirt that anyone makes forever? That's nonsense.

For much of human history, artistry of all sorts has been a profession, as much as a hobby. The idea of attribution and ownership over one's art has been a core part of why that has worked and allowed creators to thrive.

Completely and utterly wrong.

Because no, the idea of ownership of a song has virtually never been important to art. Professional artists, in the time periods where they have existed, have largely been able to because they would be constantly performing art in the era prior to recordings, and they would constantly be performing other people's songs that they did not write themselves or they would add their own twists to it.

A song like House of the Rising Sun can be traced all the way back to 16th century English hymns before eventually winding it's way through countless Appalachian and travelling singers, before being picked up by 50s era folk musicians, before being picked up by a British rock band called the Animals. This is how music has worked through literally all of human history until the abomination that is copyright.

Hell it wasn't until the classical music era, and the rise of sheet music that you actually started seeing real authorship granted to individual people, and even in that era you didn't own a song, if someone like Mozart could listen and transcribe it then they could also perform it themselves.

I would argue that the alternative of having no such system at all would ultimately lead to less art and information being created and shared at all, if the creation process is unsustainable at an individual creator's level.

Yeah, well it's a good thing there are lots of alternatives to copyright that aren't 'no system at all'.

which are both equally absurd and not really worth dissecting further.

Try having a conversation without resorting to thought terminating cliches.

And if that's what you took out of it you missed the point. And given the number of dismissive thought terminating cliches you keep using it does not seem like you actually care to learn or are having a good faith discussion.

If you are, you've missed the point, which is that information, at a fundamental, physics level, does not behave the same way as energy and matter. Computers make it essentially free to replicate information infinitely. That is not true for any physical good. The differences therein mean that information should be abundant, except that copyright and DRM create artificial scarcity where there is no need for it.

I've only been pointing out that copyright is dumb, not that piracy is wholly justified.

We got into this corner because you ignored the actual points I made about why copyright is dumb (read: a scarcity based system is not suitable for digital information since it is inherently unscarce) and focused on the age of copyright instead.

Oh, wow. I'm so impressed.

It's existed since the time of the transatlantic slave trade.

Surely that makes it something human and good!

Totally compares to the previous 2.75 Million years of story telling culture and tradition. Totally not just an exploitative artifact of the corporate age. /S

And go ahead and cite your favourite book on copyright. Maybe I'll read it.

It is 100% correct. There was no concept of owning a story or a song just because you told it first, throughout literally all of history until the copyright laws of the 20th century.

And my point is that the literal entirety of human culture is based on a tradition of storytelling, something copyright expressly forbids.

Copyright is not a system that aligns with our natural inclinations or the way we evolved. It's a crude, child like attempt to cram information into a capitalist mold that doesn't work.

,You can say "I think intellectual property is a dumb idea" and I'd love to hear your arguments for that,

Read the above comments then.

but to act like it isn't real just because we came up with the idea relatively recently, is just asinine.

Again, read my comments. I didn't say it wasn't real, I said it has no basis in human culture or history.

Is the 30B calculated before or after Oracle arbitrarily increases their pricing for no reason?

K, versus 2,750,000 years.

Here's 300 letter g's:

gggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggg
gggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggg
gggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggg
gggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggg
gggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggg
gggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggg
gggggggggggggggggggg

Here's 2.75 million letter h's

Oh wait, I can't paste that many because at 40 chars per line, it would be 68,000 lines long, or 1000x the Android clipboard's char limit.

You are literally describing a meaningless iota in the course of human history.

The electricity and silicon required to make this happen are not free, on a societal or physical level. There is a tangible cost to this transfer, even if you're ignoring the social construct of copyright.

Completely irrelevant.

If I already have a computer and an internet connection then I've already paid the costs, prior to initiating that particular request.

I think this issue comes from a misunderstanding of "free", possibly conflating it for "trivially easy".

In the context of pricing resources, those are the same thing.

Feel free to come up with such a system. I think you'll find that a rather difficult task.

The model is the same one used by streaming services. It's one of reward and attribution rather artificial scarcity. Rather than having streaming and advertising middlemen you have a public system that lets everyone access what they want and rewards creators based on usages. Youtube without Google's exorbitant profits.

Copyright has no basis in human culture or history. Our literal entire history is based on a tradition of free remixing and story telling, not copyright.

Capitalism itself is a scarcity based system, and it falls apart somewhat when there's abundance.

In capitalism, stuff only has value if it's scarce. We all constantly need oxygen to live, but because it's abundant, it's value is zero. Capitalism does not start valuing oxygen until there are situations where it starts becoming rare.

This works for the most part in our world because physical goods by and large are scarce, but in the situations where they aren't, capitalism doesn't work. It's the classic planned obscelesence lightbulb story, if you can make a dirt cheap light bulb that lasts forever, you'll go out of business because you've created so much abundance that after a bit of production, you're actually not needed at all anymore and raw market based capitalism has no mechanism to reward you long term.

The same is even more true for information. Unlike physical goods, information can flow and be copied freely at a fundamental physics level. To move a certain amount of physical matter a certain distance I need a certain amount of energy, and there are hard universal limits with energy density, but I can represent the number three using three galaxies, or three atoms. Information does not scale or behave the same, and is inherently abundant in the digital age.

Rather than develop a system that rewards digital artists based on how much something is used for free, we created copyright, which uses laws and DRM to create artificial scarcity for information, because then an author can be rewarded within capitalism since it's scarce.

Yes, which is a distinctly different concept from stealing. It's copyright. Note how copyright violation isn't in the Bible. Note how the Bible itself would never have existed if copyright existed at the time given that it is a collection of passed down stories.

Copyright is a dumb as fuck concept. Its a scarcity based system, for stuff that is not scarce.