Summations Only

So, in other words you're not going to pay for music under any circumstances.So why do we care what you do? No amount of copyright law is going to force you to patronize the artists you enjoy. Trying to capture your uncapturable revenue just makes things harder for me when I decide to patronize the artists I enjoy. How much sense does that make?

No, I'm not. Creators can and do benefit from their work without the need to punish consumers. Copyright laws and DRM do nothing to protect content in any meaningful way, piracy is still rampant, and legitimate consumers are the only ones who are actually subject to the obstacles put in their way by rightsholders. Here you seem to admit that the purpose of "copyright" is to be a kind of mind control, that the real problem is a generation of consumers who believe they have a right to access their own culture instead of demurely accepting the dictate of content authorities. Why will they, when they can just use the force of law to change the business models of their competitors?

I don't like the use of "download" as a proxy for "violating copyright", because it implies a world where it's somehow morally wrong to transfer media digitally.It's important to understand how language is used to alter our normal moral intuitions about accessing our own culture. When you begin to think of the ideas in your head as things you possess, and not merely things you rent from someone else, then all this hyperbole about "stealing" and "piracy" falls away.Even those who set their minds to it can't actually explain how it's a form of theft. At best, you can produce Kant's argument against plagiarism but, of course, nobody's passing around Lethal Weapon 18 and saying "look at this awesome movie I made with the corpses of Danny Glover and Mel Gibson."There's no evidence that rightsholders lose out when they create something that can't be copyrighted. Cookbooks are still a multi-million-dollar business despite the fact that you can't even copyright a recipe.

But if the value of art were in its scarcity, we would execute rightsholders, not grant them monopolies. Sure. It, in fact, approaches the free market equilibrium price of the marginal cost of production, which in the case of a digital file, is zero. You're simply describing what happens when a monopoly is loosened. But that's irrelevant; we all know what happens when a monopoly is opened up. The question is whether we should use the force of government power, which traditionally is understood as having the purpose of breaking monopolies, to actually shore up content monopolies.I don't think we should, or that we need to. It's hardly necessary to mine asteroids; every time we open an Earthbound gold mine, the price of gold plummets. Gold has only ever lost value in the long-term (sad news to goldbugs, I know.)

Right. And as you dishonestly omitted by again quoting me out of context, the point is that the RIAA doesn't have the power they claim to immunize you from criminal prosecution.

No, people go to the movies because they want to see movies. But again, in a world where you're under no obligation to support an artist's work unless you enjoy it, why would anyone pay for a movie unless they wanted to support the artist? Why wouldn't you just go to the free theaters, if patronizing an artist was meaningless to you?

And that's fine. Why should you be forced to?The obligation I was speaking of was an ethical one, not a legal one. If you don't feel it, then you don't feel it. But the abundant evidence is that a lot of people feel it in respects that have nothing to do with the law. Louis CK, etc. I'm not under any obligation to convince you of anything. You're the one under the obligation to explain why people don't want to patronize artists, when we can look around the world as it exists now and see that, given the ease of piracy now, payments by audiences to artists are overwhelmingly a voluntary expression of support and patronage.There's nothing hypothetical about what people would do in a world of easy piracy because we live in a world of easy piracy, and artists get paid. Good artists get paid quite a bit. And where the rights-restrictive "pay-for-play" model doesn't really work - painting, sculpture, etc - there's public funding of the arts.

I don't find this reply responsive. If you're just going to ignore points, we're done here.

Well put, Huntard, and I would only add that this is another example of people wanting to patronize artists they enjoy; Tim Schafer's name is one to conjure with among a lot of gamer communities.

What's puzzling about how you've repeated it is that nobody in the thread has asserted the opposite. It's a complete non sequitur.

So what? Why shouldn't the person that risked the capital and made the investment of time be the one who reaps the benefit?You somehow take it as given that society benefits, somehow, when the Winklevoss Twins can come in after years of work have already been done and assert a copyright claim to the profits. But that's stupid. Anybody can have an idea (and how, exactly, do you "steal" an idea?) Making it work is the hard part. Why shouldn't that be where the rewards, if any, lie?

I'm sorry? Did somebody assert that Kickstarter couldn't exist in a world with copyright?Can you find that post?

Surely you realize how absurd that is? The world where you can't make something at all because somebody else says they had the idea first and now they've legally enjoined anybody else from producing a competing product - even if they never actually release their own - is the world where it's harder and harder for anyone to create something. Your motivation is that it's your idea and if you don't do the work, nobody else will and your idea will never come to fruition. In other words your motivation is the same motivation that has always motivated artists - making something new.It makes zero sense to say that you have less motivation in a world where you're free to make whatever you can imagine than you do in our world, where you can bust your ass to make something truly original, and then Activision comes in, asserts a spurious patent claim on your work that you're too poor to answer in court, and takes your profits (and control of your creation) right out of your hands.Copyright is what stifles innovation, by taking away people's control over their own culture and ideas. To assert that the lack of copyright "stifles innovation" is both nonsensical and ahistorical, in that it overlooks how the world's most enduring artistic achievements occurred in societies that gave approximately zero copyright protection to anybody.

Agreed, it's the world every business wants.

You could sell it anyway, provided you don't tell them what it is until you get paid.But, look, if you're willing to blab it, I don't see why you should get paid at all. You shouldn't be able to control an idea like that, and our society is measurably worse off because of the mistaken notion that you can.