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Free is a Lie

The RSA · Youtube · 3 HN points · 3 HN comments
HN Theater has aggregated all Hacker News stories and comments that mention The RSA's video "Free is a Lie".
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For more information about the event and to listen to the podcast go to the RSA event page: http://bit.ly/1iwgxav

Designer and social entrepreneur Aral Balkan believes it is time to build an alternate future where we own our own tools, services, and data. And to do this we must create a new category of design-led, experience-driven 'technology'.

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All the comments and stories posted to Hacker News that reference this video.
You're absolutely right. Right now, there is none, which sucks. As Aral Balkan says well and as I'm sure you know, free is a lie [1]. People should pay for services that they use, and services which get used should be paid. We'll get there. But to answer questions about pricing, it's free until we are comfortable enough to charge.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldhHkVjLe7A

dabeeeenster
Put that on your homepage then!
Worth checking out Aral Balkan's RSA video 'Free is a lie'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldhHkVjLe7A

pdkl95
https://projectbullrun.org/surveillance/2015/video-2015.html...

I recommend Balkan's more recent version of that talk, "You Are The Product". In particular, he has a much more in-depth analysis of the business model and startup culture ("digital imperialism").

(the talks by DJB and Appelbaum on that page are also very good)

edit:

look at all the downvotes. Does it make the cognitive dissonance go away?

bootload
"we're lookin' for a leader / with the great spirit on his side / someone walks among us / and I hope he hears the call"

down votes for me, signals I should re-read the post again :)

eggie
> look at all the downvotes. Does it make the cognitive dissonance go away?

There are some folks on here who don't like hearing this kind of stuff but can't (or can't be bothered to) articulate why.

Is the idea that your comment is off topic?

Jul 24, 2015 · 2 points, 0 comments · submitted by dsego
I generally agree, but I hate to be one of the only people on HN who ever brings this up:

If there is no way to restrict piracy, and if piracy is generally normalized and socially acceptable, then how on Earth to artists, musicians, journalists, authors, etc. ever get paid for anything?

This has some pretty severe and dystopian secondary consequences. It doesn't mean that nobody will pay to have information created. It just means that the customer will not be the reader/viewer/consumer of that information. Instead, the customer will be advertisers, propagandists, governments, religious factions, special interest groups, etc. Content will never be created for primary reasons ("for the art," journalistic integrity, etc.) but for secondary reasons (marketing, state propaganda).

This is really a variation of the whole "free is a lie" theme. I really encourage people to watch this talk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldhHkVjLe7A

If Facebook and Google being free means you are the product rather than the customer, then the same thing applies to books, movies, music, etc.

What I really keep trying to get people to grasp here is that piracy is disempowering. If you're not paying, you don't matter. Nothing will be made for you, with your interests or enjoyment in mind. Instead it will be made for whomever is paying, and will play to their interests, not yours.

Nothing is free. You either pay for things, or things pay for you.

On the hardware front, I fail to see how we can possibly create an alternative hardware/OS ecosystem that empowers the user if users are not willing to pay for it. Innovation, production, and capital follows the money. If users aren't willing to pay for a platform that empowers them, someone else will instead drive the future of computing by paying for a platform that disempowers the consumer. I think this is exactly what we're seeing.

pdkl95
> Nothing is free.

Did you not get the whole concept of "digital"? Information most certainly is free. It's getting someone to make the specific types of information you want that costs money.

Of course there are ways of restricting copyright infringement: laws respect for the legal system. A monopoly on the distribution is a powerful thing - it gives you a fairly easy civil case against anybody who violates that monopoly.

What it doesn't do is grant you free enforcement of that monopoly, nor does it guarantee that someone will actually buy your product. Just because you want to make some type of art doesn't mean others actually want it or that it is worth any amount of funding >0.

Also, you seem to be under the impression that money (profit motive) is the only way stuff gets created, which is patently incorrect.

"disempowering"?

Did you watch those talks? (mainly #2) This is about human rights that the arts should not trump just because they want to assert some new type of "property right" simply because they have devised some sort of technical trick to that tries to enforce some aspect of their monopoly.

To continue the example used by Doctorow, just because you have a copyright or patent on the software that runs a cochlear implant, you shouldn't be automatically able to extend those monopolies to override the wishes of the person who actually has the cochlear implant surgically inserted into their skull.

Restrictions - limiting someone's uses - are trivial to talk about when the copyright is on some movie that isn't really important, so some people have accepted the DRM argument for movies. The point of Doctorow's talk is that the concept of restrictions becomes VERY different when you're talking about repossessing someone's legs or hearing.

A lot of this issue comes down to the propaganda that has been used by the media industry over the last few decades. They created the incorrect term "Intellectual Property", when property rights are not what the government grants you when you get a copyright or patent. You get some legal rights, which is fine. You get an easy civil court case. The current effort is to try and extend that limited, specific purpose monopoly into other areas by claiming that your movie, book, song, or software is "property". Being "property" is important, because it is a lot easier to make a case that your property should be defended by force. We defend traditional property because it is finite (aka a "scarce resource"). Government granted fictions don't need such protection, as they already have it by definition!

Now, you're worried about how interesting art and such will be created, and the answer to that is simple: the same ways it has always been created, and if you're clever, some new ways. It is easy to use Kickstarter as an example of new ways to fund things, but the cool, really interesting ways haven't even been invented yet. I realize that this is probably a hard and risky business, but a copyright doesn't mean you should be able to remove that risk by break the general purpose computer. A copyright doesn't mean you should be able to get rights beyond the first sale and the ability to sue people that distribute your monopoly protected works, just because you found some technical trick (DRM) to make that distribution initially difficult. Being able to sue someone doesn't mean you're entitled to have the government any enforcement costs. Most importantly, that same copyright doesn't grant you a market or audience or any kind of guaranteed income, nor should it trump any *human rights".

It will be hard for a while, as new styles of funding are explored. Many musicians have already moved back to a live-performance model, with patronage being used in some areas. I suggest that anybody thinking that restrictions (DRM) are necessary instead focus their time and money on changing to a new funding model - or inventing one - instead of wasting that their time and money trying to prop up pre-general-purpose-computer business models.

api
Oh I get it. I just think it's not relevant to TPB at all, and that the linking of the two things is a giant exercise in changing-the-subject.

(1) Destroy old business model.

(2) ... hand wavey magic happens here ...

(3) Utopia!

I question #2 categorically. The magic never comes.

Historically people have to struggle to be compensated fairly for their work. It was true for labor in the late 19th century, it's true for Chinese sweatshop workers, and it's true for content creators. A rising tide does not automatically lift all boats, and models of fair labor compensation do not appear without a struggle.

Let's be totally clear here. I see the piracy issue as an issue of labor fairness vs. labor exploitation.

If programmers were the ones on the chopping block, none of you people would be talking like this. You'd all be up in arms and talking about what can be done. This is entitled elitism of the first order; only some professions are entitled to compensation or for their wishes about how their works are used to be respected.

Why is it that there are a million hackers working on new alternatives to The Pirate Bay, yet I see almost nobody working on new ways for authors, musicians, and artists to connect directly with their audiences?

TPB doesn't connect musician to audience -- it distances musician from audience even more than the record companies ever did! Piracy is the ultimate in passive consumerism. It's consumerism so passive there isn't even a twice-removed economic connection. There's no connection at all. You -- the viewer or listener -- might as well not even exist.

If the goal is to get the scummy record companies out of the loop, why aren't hackers working on that? Why doesn't somebody create a distributed, censorship-resistant medium for people to publish creative work that incorporates a transparent and direct-to-the-creator Bitcoin-based mechanism for payment? I'm not even talking about DRM, which I agree doesn't work. I'm talking about a simple mechanism. On TPB, Popcorn Time, and any number of these other things, I don't even see a way to pay the artists if I want to. There's not even a "tip" functionality. I think the intent is clear from the absence of anything like that in the design.

This is about free, not freedom. You're appropriating a bunch of high-minded rhetoric, but the reality is you're just cheapskates who want free labor.

I'll reserve my respect for people who actually make things of their own and put them out there to advance the cause of freedom-- people like Linus, or DJB, or pretty much every original OSS software author out there.

sounds
Why are we working on new distribution channels like The Pirate Bay?

Because we categorically reject the notion that corrupt, law-breaking middlemen who abuse the artist's right to be paid and abuse or refuse service to the customer -- I mean the MPAA, RIAA, etc. -- are a better alternative or economic model for a digital age than the free sharing of bits which is what the internet (and before that, usenet, and before that, sneakernet) has always been.

We categorically reject the notion that we need state-sponsored controlled locked-down DRM ecosystems where hackers are thrown in jail for sending an HTTP request to an open server and cell phone unlocking is illegal, just so that the MPAA can continue to exist.

The free as in zero dollars alternative _is_ what is happening to software: the price of an operating system is being driven to zero dollars.

We celebrate this as the liberation of technology from the monopolistic, predatory, illegal activities that happened 20 years ago.

We applaud the brilliant, profitable companies that are not hostile to free software (as in freedom).

We hope more companies will learn how to do something like Github, The Linux Foundation, or Amazon EC2.

Meanwhile, you can question the magic. It might not make sense to you, but it makes sense to John Perry Barlow:

https://projects.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html

Why aren't you championing Actors Guilds, Authors fighting against Amazon's policies and fees, or even the fight against DRM?

api
Edit: I deleted my original response because I figured out why we're arguing.

"Free" is really a punk idea. It's a counterculture idea. "Steal this book" and all that. But ideas like that undergo a strange transformation when the power dynamics invert.

Graffiti is also a counterculture thing, a rebellious thing. But what would happen if the police started doing it? Imagine you go outside and see a couple cops spray painting "just say no to drugs!" on the side of your house? You confront them and they start spewing stuff about how "there is no property man! I should be free to express myself!" (Great comedy skit right there...)

The trouble is that hackers aren't rebels anymore. They aren't a counterculture. They've won.

So stop talking like a rebel, because you aren't one. You are a member of a super-privileged super-empowered super-educated upper class with tremendous opportunity and unbelievable power. With your ideas and gravitas you can raise more capital than most people can save over a working lifetime, and if your "startup" is successful you could find yourself with four houses and a private jet. With somewhat less effort you can command incomes that are twice the national average for a whole family and still have enough energy left over to hack on things "in your spare time" and debate politics on sites like this. You can, with a few "hacks," crash whole corporate systems and cost people millions upon millions of dollars all by yourself. If you know a bit about networks you can probably pull it off without being caught, maybe deflect the blame toward a third world dictator and create an international incident that captures global headlines... FROM YOUR BEDROOM.

You are upper class. You are rich and powerful -- far more powerful than the clueless geezers at the MPAA. I mean look... TPB gets taken down and six copies pop up in 24 hours. You can run circles around those morons because you're smarter, faster, ...

YOU ARE THE F'ING MAN.

You're not desperately struggling against the MPAA and the RIAA. Don't you get it? They're the ones desperately struggling against you, and it's a total rout. You are beating the living hell out of them.

"Steal this book" is punk, but "steal all the books" is tyranny. In the hands of "the man," piracy becomes a tool for crushing and beggaring labor, disempowering the consumer, and creating a surveillance dystopia by baiting users into passive surveillance-based content aggregators. It's as ridiculous as graffiti in the hands of the police.

You say "we" a lot. Let me tell you this. History will judge us on what we do with the awesome power we have been given.

I'm not defending the old record companies. We could do better. We could create systems that allow artists to sell their works directly to their customers with almost zero percent overhead -- 100% to the artist! Not only that, but we could create in that transaction a direct personal social link between artist and fan, a real relationship. That's so much better than the old model for everyone.

But no, we're building The Pirate Bay again, and again, and again, because we're cheap and we want free stuff. It's not just tyrannical and infantile. It's lame. It's not even technically interesting.

Fargren
Woah. This is the best comment I've ever read anywhere in a long time. I'm not sure if I agree with it; it goes against a lot of things I believe. And yet I can find nothing wrong in your argument. Do you have any recommended readings on the subject or something?
api
No. I feel like a loner howling at the moon on this one.

I would look up a series of talks on YouTube called "free is a lie" by Aral Balkan. They deal more with the free service bait and switch than piracy, but I found them influential in getting me to question "free."

sounds
Free is not a lie, it's the simple physics of copying bits.

DRM and the old record companies are the lie you're selling. If they were fighting for their lives, they wouldn't have Washington DC, Apple, Google, Microsoft, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Sweden, the United Kingdom, ... in their pockets.

The 100%-to-the-artists stores exist. I love 'em.

I'm not the man, I'm just another guy looking for a job. The interview process for computer jobs should make it obvious that I'm not the super-elite like Chris Dodd.

I just don't think people will ever stop freely sharing culture... long after the MPAA, DMCA, RIAA, and all DRM schemes are forgotten.

api
Hardware isn't free. Code isn't free. Electricity isn't free.

The zero marginal cost of copying bits is only true if you look at the copying of bits in isolation. If you take a whole system view, it isn't free.

click170
Culture is free. Air is free (if not clean). Communicating with the people around me is free. My Open Source code is in fact free. The knowledge I have I am willing to freely share.

I think there's two sides to this, the people who want and think that everything has a price, and the people who recognize that the digital age brings with it advances that mean this idea no longer applies to everything the way it once did.

I'll end on a point I think we can agree on: duplicating a CD or CDs is not an indication that one has the financial means to buy it/them.

api
Culture is not free. It's hard work!

I guess if you want nothing but ad supported culture and skill-less rage comics and stupid blob cartoons maybe, but the kind of culture that really inspires, challenges, and uplifts takes real effort to create.

sounds
Now you're just insulting artists, of which I am one.

We create for many different reasons. Don't reduce us to just wage-slaves.

api
I was once a true believer in all this "free everything!" stuff too, but once I saw what it was really all about -- the sacrifice of the artist to the passive consumer and the content aggregators -- I couldn't un-see it. Now I'm an atheist at a tent revival. I've lost the faith.

That's never popular, but I really think I'm right about this and I think with time other people are going to see it too.

I'm not intending to insult artists, but I am insulting the Internet's popular trash culture of memes and throwaway junk. I see "free" as being partly responsible for that. There's no money in creating online culture, therefore nobody can spend any real time or effort on it. As a result you get a lot of totally disposable superficial noise and ad-driven marketing gimmickry.

I am supporting your right to have control over your work -- not only a right to earn something from it or to give it away if you so choose, but also to have some say over how it's used.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-26055297

If "information is free," what right would these guys have to protest their music being used in torture chambers? None, of course.

That's an extreme example but it illustrates my point. Copyrights aren't just about money. They're also about creators having some kind of say about what can be done with their work.

I believe that the creators of things should have more rights over their creations -- yes more -- than those that just "consume" them. Anything else strikes me as a grotesque value inversion. Disempowering the creator in favor of the consumer de-funds culture creation, impoverishes creators, and encourages a society of utterly passive consumption and triviality.

It's the ultimate in passive consumerism. Value flows one way -- downhill -- until the snow's all melted and the streams run dry.

That's not what free culture was supposed to do, either. Free culture was supposed to lead to a gift culture, not a culture of take-take-take. Part of why I've lost the faith is that the promised land hasn't come. Taking is all I see... take, take, take, gimme, gimme, gimme...

click170
I disagree that culture is hard work.

Culture is a byproduct of civilization, we produce culture merely by existing and interacting with each other. Music, media and cartoons are but one [current] aspect of our culture, they do not comprise all of it.

I would be quite interested in what a world would look like where artists created things for the sake of creation and innovation, instead of merely for a paycheck. That doesn't mean you couldn't get paid from producing hit music, it just means if you're not a popular artist you better have supplementary income.

Speaking only for myself, what I find inspiring is generally the work of other impassioned people working on topics I'm interested in. I like watching the videos that come out of DefCon for that reason, I find them inspiring. Those videos are feely available and IMO they're part of our culture too.

jdunck
I agree with the premise of judging based on both action and context, power and relationship. I agree that hackers aren't the nerd-revenge underdogs (if we ever really were). I agree that we have power to do good, and we mostly piss it away trying to impress each other.

But I disagree that RIAA and MPAA are totally losing - they still have direct lines to power through the government and its regulative and, ultimately, judicial and military power.

There are more than 2 sides. There is not "the man" vs. "the underdog". It's less chess and more hungry hippos. Yes, we should build something better (for the market, for the world, for the commons) than TPB. But the regulative status quo disallows those things. TPB is a mushroom colony. What you want is a tilled field.

The government does not serve RIAA well, but it also salts the earth where we might grow internet-aware markets. TPB is a compromise solution, and better than nothing.

What we build is not in a vacuum.

Let's get started cultivating the field, plowing under the existing regulation which is defunct and self-serving, erecting new fences where boundaries represent newly-reasonable compromises, advantages, and common sense.

karmacondon
Great comment. Fascinating thoughts, and well said. Can't upvote it enough.

> "Steal this book" is punk, but "steal all the books" is tyranny

Just wow. I'd like to add some thoughts so that my comment isn't just a well deserved kudos that adds nothing to the conversation:

Hackers and hacker culture aren't actually as all powerful as you make them out to be. Most of the people on hn don't have four houses and a private jet or the power to crash corporate systems single handedly. We do have disproportionately more power than we did 30 years ago and the imbalance is growing. But we still don't have the most important thing that any would be revolutionary can have: Public support.

I was watching a documentary on Che Guevara the other day and I noticed how well things went for him in Cuba contrasted with how poorly they went in Bolivia. The difference was that the people were behind him in the former and hunting him in the latter. If hackers make the MPAA out to be the enemy, geezers that we need to hack circles around, then they will never win. Most people aren't upset with the MPAA or the RIAA, they don't see them as villains to be defeated. Everyone likes to get free stuff, but not enough to stand up and fight. Most of the people I know happily pay whatever price itunes asks for music or movies or any digital content. Granted most of the people I know are professionals with enough disposable income to pay for an album or kindle book without a second thought. And until they get pissed off with something that the various entertainment industries do, there will be no support for the freedom of information cause. The revolution will not be televised, or downloaded, because it won't exist.

This is the general problem with the freedom of information movement, you can't rally people to fight against someone who isn't actually oppressing them. No one I know has a problem with even DRM, it generally never occurs to them to copy media and send it to someone else. Heck, most of them aren't even aware of TPB at all. It's always good to see people fighting for what they believe in, but unless the majority of people can be convinced to join the fight the battles will be long, hard and potentially pointless.

api
I was just arguing that hackers, hacker culture, and programmers/hackers as a socioeconomic class are far more powerful than artists as a socioeconomic class.

They're also arguably more powerful than the RIAA, MPAA, and even governments-- in this particular domain. Sure they can be arrested one by one and sites can be taken down one by one, but overall the hackers are winning and the old stalwarts are losing.

Look up the difference in average income between a musician and a programmer. Who's "punk" now?

I'd also like to point out that Apple is far more valuable than any record company, and Google is practically the gloved hand of the U.S. State Department. The technology industry -- which opposes strong copyrights for a number of reasons -- has far more political "juice" these days than ailing record companies.

gojomo
Category error. 'Hackers' are not a homogenous group; you and ~sounds are not the same 'we'. In particular, the ones who have 'won' are not necessarily the same as those still exploring the potential of a free-all-information world.

In the early 90s, both Bill Gates and Oracle Corporation expressed strong doubts or outright opposition to the idea of software patents. Later they 'won' and came to use software patents as competitive weapons.

Had 'hackers', at that point of the ascension of Microsoft and Oracle, 'won' – meaning the only gracious move would be to agree that the software-patent regime was good for them? No, the 'hacker' category had broadened, and many of the people doing the most interesting work still justifiably despised software patents.

Hackers and artists are creating systems for direct creative compensation, to replace the outdated idea of criminalizing digital reproduction.

Others, who are not necessarily the same people who could (technically or socially) sell out for the "four houses and a private jet" you dangle, still prefer to build other radically uncensorable systems. Don't adopt them into your royal "we".

goblin89
> But no, we're building The Pirate Bay again, and again, and again, because we're cheap and we want free stuff. It's not just tyrannical and infantile. It's lame. It's not even technically interesting.

Some of us build Bandcamps and Spotifys. Others have different beliefs and reasoning. I don’t think there’s some ultimately objective point of view that proves one group as right and another wrong.

sounds
Thanks for the thoughtful response. I disagree, which is why I picked other companies as my examples: companies for which you _are_ the customer.
jodrellblank
It's hard to accept that hackers are a tyrannical controller when they don't actually have any control over musicians and artists. It's less "this tyrant is forcing me to make stuff and then taking it from me, help, my human rights" and more "if I keep hitting myself in the face, maybe you'll learn! Ow! Ow!".

Everyone taking all the music they listen to for free hasn't, in reality, stopped new music creation. Therefore your argument must have some major flaws.

Perhaps artists don't unionise and go on strike, because they're afraid it would make clear the same thing the pirate bay makes clear - that the real market value of entertainment content is approximately $0.

Yeah "we want free stuff" ... but how have you managed to turn that into "people who want free stuff ... want to pay for stuff"?

sroerick
If I make you Public Domain or Creative Commons content, will you buy it from me?
e12e
There have been some non-trivial successes in this department, like "Pioneer One": http://vodo.net/joshbernhard/pioneerone/

How many great artist[1] make a lot of money from their work while they are alive? How many make a lot of money for their label (alone, or in aggregate)?

I'm not afraid of artists stopping to create, and I'm not too terrified of a future without projects like the Lord of the Rings-films (note that the books were a work of passion, and not a main source of income -- which might be considered a bad thing, but also illustrates that people will do what can -- as long as they have some free time at their disposal). Or without TV shows like "(American) Idol".

There's an aspect of being dependent on commercial success that tends to shape what art is made -- a sinister form of self censorship. So it is not just the business model that is under attack -- but also the constraints under which artists work. People will disagree if this is a good or bad thing -- but it should probably be a part of the debate (who should have the resources to create art, and what art should they be making? Do we really think the invisible hand is the best judge of what makes good visual art?).

[1] Great art and great artists is of course highly subjective. I'm thinking of people like Townes Van Zandt, Phil Ochs, or various blues/jazz legends -- people generally highly regarded in their field, but that in spite of having published through established channels have not had commercial "success".

sroerick
Thanks for Pioneer One. I really like Vodo a lot.

Nice point on commercial success driving a form of self censorship. I'm big on independant media, but I have a huge respect for those who run established brands and are able to turn a profit in media.

Some mainstream artists do a very good job rewarding those who are willing to delve deeply into music.

With any form of art, but especially music, I believe it's the artists job to take us from the familiar, to the unfamiliar, and back to the familiar. My ideal artform is a massively popular avant-garde movement, but that's more of a platonic ideal than anything else.

api
It's never been easy to make a living as an artist, and I agree that money isn't and probably shouldn't be the major motivator of good art.

But I fail to see how either of those things are really relevant to my argument.

Be clear: what I'm arguing against is the idea that industrial-scale mass piracy is actually a social good. I'm arguing against people like the "Pirate Party," etc. Conversely I am arguing that building a click mill "portal" on the backs of other peoples' work (like TPB) is at the very least a dick move even if it's not actually illegal.

Pulling more money out of the creative economy is only going to make things worse for artists.

I also disagree about the value of things like the LoTR films, etc. While these are to some extent purely profit-driven, they serve as vehicles of employment for vast numbers of creative professionals who use them to hone their craft. It's blockbusters like this that pay for the cool indie art flicks, and that create careers for the people who make such things "on the side." They also drive massive advancements in the technology and technique of film-making, and these make it easier and cheaper for indie art flicks to get made. I'd say the same thing about pop music-- it supports a vast technical infrastructure of music making, recording, editing, and distribution that indie acts can tap into and use. Without all that money going in at the top, you wouldn't have such a massive market for instruments, fuzz boxes, production software, synths, etc.

Freemium and "pay what you want" can work in some cases, and some artists have made it work, but my point is that it's the artist's choice what model they want to use. Making that choice for them and then preaching about how you've got the right to do so because your "free" views are morally superior is just assholery. If an artist doesn't want their work distributed in that way, doing so is saying you don't give a damn about them.

sroerick
I'm an artist who does not earn a living via art, but grew up pirating music and movies.

I grew up having access to the entire canon of film, books, comics, culture. That was a huge part of my formative experience. I want my kids to have that. I don't want my kids to be limited to what's on Netflix because of licensing agreements.

I am a big believer in Kopimi. I also love the idea of torrent nodes and bitcoin nodes and other P2P modes as a metaphor for holography and as a metaphor for knowledge as a whole -- each node contains within it an image of the whole swarm.The companies who make a profit from the works of artists and use legal means to restrict this model are shortsighted, stupid, and outright dangerous to soceity.

That said, I try to only consume works that are public domain and creative commons. It's not easy, and I frequently break this "soft boycott" not just out of lack of will, but also because fair use is my right and I intend on excercising it.

We've lost a majority of the early silent films produced in Hollywood. The myth of the internet as a permanent archive persists, and I can't figure out why. I believe that copyright activists and the Pirate Party are doing a net force for good in archiving our culture.

Without all that money going in at the top, people would be using free recording tools like Ardour.

My philosophy: Don't be a child. If an artist wants to restrict your consumption, it's not art, it's commerce. If you're old enough to have disposable income, you are old enough to support CC and PD works. Anything less, and you need to go listen to some more preaching.

JetSpiegel
> TPB doesn't connect musician to audience -- it distances musician from audience even more than the record companies ever did! Piracy is the ultimate in passive consumerism. It's consumerism so passive there isn't even a twice-removed economic connection. There's no connection at all. You -- the viewer or listener -- might as well not even exist.

The connection is the same as always have been, you view their film/listened to their music/etc, and hopefully liked it. By that metric, borrowing a book from a friend also doesn't count. This coupling of money and art is a disservice to both those things.

> On TPB, Popcorn Time, and any number of these other things, I don't even see a way to pay the artists if I want to.

This is so wrong. Things don't work like that. Say I watch the latest blockbuster, or the latest Game of Thrones episode. Who do I pay?

chc
Somebody to whom the artist has sold the rights to his creation for money based on the expectation that they will then get paid in his stead, and who might have an agreement with the artist to share part of the money you pay them.
avn2109
>> "how on Earth to artists, musicians, journalists, authors, etc. ever get paid for anything?"

There is exactly 0 danger of running out of creative people, regardless of whether or not they get paid. The creativity is built into the human psyche at a low level; it existed long before money, and it will exist long after our civilization has crumbled. In fact, we could totally ban music/painting/whatever, and creativity would still be extremely common.

Whether or not there exists an entertainment _business_ has nothing to do with promoting the creation of art. In fact, the industrial-entertainment complex is probably a net drag on creative expression via crowding-out effects.

api
"There is exactly 0 danger of running out of creative people, regardless of whether or not they get paid."

I consider this abusive, exploitative, and mean spirited in the extreme.

"Yeah, we enjoy their work and it enriches our lives, but no way we're going to even slightly inconvenience ourselves to support them. Let the artists starve... there'll always be more where those came from!"

You could say the same thing about underpaid Chinese sweatshop workers I guess... "there's always more where those came from!"

gtremper
Lots of people make music and art for fun, without any intention of profit. I don't think this applies Chinese sweatshops
logfromblammo
I am writing a novel. After more than two years of working on it intermittently, on nights and weekends, I consider it about 80% complete. (Naturally, it will probably take 2 years to finish the remaining 20%.)

I am not being paid to do it. I have no particular expectation that anyone will give me money for it after it is done. I also know that it is probably not as good as a novel written by any of my favorite professional authors.

To indulge this new hobby, I have something called "a day job". Other people who create artworks frequently have one. Only a select few have the independent means to create art full time, and some have acquired a large enough base of supporters to make a living at it.

We have a wealthy society. As such, we are capable of supporting a certain number of people as artists.

But the world does not owe you a living. Less popular and less prolific authors cannot expect to earn enough to write full time just because Stephen King can. A musical performer can't expect to buy a new car even once in his lifetime just because Taylor Swift can now afford one every year for the rest of her life. A painter can't expect to get out of community service because a Banksy can sell for thousands of dollars.

The plain fact of the matter is that there are more people who want to be professional artists than society is currently willing to support. Society likes some artists enough to make them rich, but you're not going to be one of them (unless you get really lucky or are terrifyingly talented). There are plenty more that society will support in a middle-class lifestyle. But for the most part, the aspiring artist's default assumption should be that society wouldn't give two steaming piles for a new work, and it should stay that way until well after the first check clears.

As for myself, I have no plans to quit my day job. Even if I think that my book is better than Twilight, the author of that... piece... actually has dollar-denominated approval from productive society to write books as her full-time profession.

Currently, my plans are to eliminate piracy by seeding the torrents myself, while also providing a painless way for readers to pay me what they want, even if it is just a compliment with no money attached. If I get even one penny, it will be more than what I expected in return for a work of art that no one but me ever asked for.

That is why there is no danger to artistic culture. Even if no one else cares for it, there is still a reward for the creators in their pride of craftsmanship, their knowledge that they created something unique, that did not exist until their will brought it into existence.

None
None
yen223
I've recently taken up cooking as a hobby. I've been making at least 2 meals a day, experimenting with a variety of cooking styles. I've invested my own money into equipment and food - most of it is not cheap. Like you, I supported my surprisingly expensive hobby with a day job.

That said, I would never ever for a moment think that line cooks don't deserved to get paid, just because I am not.

logfromblammo
But your analogy is flawed. When a line cook makes a meal, there is a physical good that can only be consumed once. What we are discussing here is whether the line cook should be paid for the recipe, any time anyone uses it, rather than just for the service of preparing the food.
api
Your assumption is that producing a recipe is easier than producing food. It's not.

Writing a novel is incredibly difficult. It often takes years of absolutely thankless work. Your friends and family think you've gone mad, or you're just wasting your time tooling away on "that book." (Eye roll.)

Music is the same: hard work, endless practice, stop energy. "When are you going to quit that band and get a real job?"

Culture is not free. It's created by the blood, sweat, and tears of people who are willing to stand up against their own doubts and the subtile discouragement of others to channel some intensely personal muse, refine the signal in thousands of hours of dull practice and repetitive revision, and finally deliver something that we can enjoy.

But hey, we're all entitled to their works for free because we're the all-important consumer!

The "information should be free" ideology elevates the passive consumer above the active producer both morally and economically. The consumer has all the freedom and all the benefit for none of the work. Once I saw the injustice in this, I could not un-see it.

Fundamentally I think it's a half-baked ideology that comes from people who are looking only at the Internet in isolation from the rest of the socioeconomic system. Most of these people are well-intentioned, but the ideology fails.

It might work if we lived in a post-scarcity society where income wasn't strictly necessary since the marginal cost of everything is approaching zero. But we're nowhere even close to that.

logfromblammo
Your post, whether you realize it or not, assumes that the labor theory of value is true.

The difficulty of producing the first copy is of almost no significance economically, in comparison to the marginal cost to produce one more copy than already exists.

The recipe may be difficult to create, but it is dead simple to copy. The song is difficult to compose, but easier to perform, easier still to play a recorded performance, and easiest of all to copy a recording. The book is hard to write, but easier to read, and easiest to copy.

We are not entitled to any work for free. But we have a reasonable economic expectation that what we pay to enjoy it will be close to what it costs to create an additional copy. If we elect to pay more, it will be because we wish to encourage the artist to create more works at a reasonable cost. Whether you believe that the artist is entitled to more, or not, depends in large part on whether you believe that culture should be an oligopoly good, or a commoditized good.

I happen to prefer the latter.

May 24, 2014 · 1 points, 0 comments · submitted by bbayer
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