this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2023
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If there was no intellectual property, what would prevent a company like Amazon to simply sell any work every published in their best monopoly marketplace without ever giving a cent to the creators? How would, for instance, the author if a novel make money?
Donations and crowdfunds are the most common suggestions.
Or to come at it from another angle - 38% of the USA's GDP comes from IP, and its primary beneficiaries are wealthy. If we paid towards a UBI instead of copyright holders, then many people would just make these things for free, with total creative freedom. The messages in our art and direction of our technology would radically change.
Canada had a system where we charged a levy on things like blank media, then distributed that levy to right holders. I don’t think it was a very good system, but maybe something that could have been improved upon.
Did they just give an equal payout to each artist, or did they pay out proportional to existing revenue? That is to say, did Disney get more of this money than some novelist in a cabin?
I think it was based on things like radio play time, ratings, sales, etc.. So Disney and other big names would have got a proportially bigger cut than smaller artists.
That's not far off from what Amazon currently does.
Amazon would not be able to monopolize the sale of ebooks if it was legal to distribute them for free, people would just go download the free versions elsewhere. This is already more or less reality; you can easily go download most any book for free, and have effectively no risk of getting in trouble for it, yet somehow most people do not do this.
I think that if an author provides a way that people can pay them directly for having written a book, social convention could take care of the rest, many people will give them money voluntarily, just like they currently do, because they want to. There's lots of platforms now that operate on the principle that people will just choose to give money to creators even when they don't have to and it isn't a purchase of anything tangible.
I assume UBI. Already quality of product is not cultivated by the current publishing system. People who get their books published do so by affording a good agent with connections, which rules out the black kid using a manual typewriter her brother rebuilt.
What would prevent us from copying their stuff? They copy ours we copy theirs. We copy and distribute verything and in the end all are happy lol
Individuals and small companies would never be able to compete with the resources of someone like Amazon
This is the decision of the consumers. If we as a society do not want the big corporations to become too powerful, we should not give them any money. Most people will have to learn the hard way when their own ideas are sold cheaper elsewhere until they understand that it is better to support the original and the actual creator. But anything else is pure paternalism, which I cannot support. I am of course aware that there will always be people who will take advantage of this situation. But everyone must decide for themselves whether it is worth it. Otherwise, the product may no longer exist.
As I said: In a free market, supply can be determined by demand. So if most people stopped ordering shit on amazon every day, we wouldn't be where we are now. First of all, everyone can take a look at their own nose and not blame everything on daddy state. As if that would help you in any way.
People already don't do most of that stuff, what changes when there's no IP?
The free market is bullshit, it's constantly manipulated by people looking to make money. The invisible hand is dead and long gone.
The one with more money will most likely win. They have better marketing, lawers, and ereryting else to outcompete every upcoming buissnes. The moment the small competetor has a real chnce they wave with enough money to make you quit. And why wouldn't you? You work for moneyafter all. How can you determine the actuall demand if you don't have the numbers with no way to get them?
There is no free market and there has never been one.
And that is exactly what is happening today. Do you think IP is not exploited by the big rich companies in such a way that it helps them? A small author won't have the same opportunities as a big publisher, who will exploit him to the hilt. But the problem is that now the publisher gets the lion's share of the licensing costs for the duration of the IP licence and the author can't sell it anywhere else because he is bound.
So you're just going to ignore reality in favor of what you think "should" be happening.
If someone like you was in charge, we'd swiftly find ourselves living in company towns and working 18 hour days on assembly lines, only to be swiftly culled the instant some form of automation made us redundant.
You say you're aware that there will always be people to take advantage of a situation where there is absolutely no protections for the consumer, but you are woefully ignorant of the scale to which advantage would be taken.
As a libertarian, I don't want anyone to decide about anyone. And that's the line I'm working towards, refining and testing in discussions like this one. But I see that you are definitely a greater realist, because you know from the beginning what the right way is.
We already know what happens when regulations are eased. People die, profits soar, workers are abused. It isn't some philosophical theory, it's what happens. It's what has always happened throughout history.
That's why there are regulations in the first place. Because horrible things kept happening to people and we collectively decided that it would be better if that didn't continue. Shitty things happened and as a result, regulations were put into place. That's what happened and that's the reality we live in. To suggest otherwise is to live in a fantasy land.
Just like today: People die, profits soar, workers are exploited. IP won't chamge anything aslong as we the people don't change. Regulations are mostly favour the rich as they can afford to find loopholes in them, the weak must suffer under them.
Most people are exploited and can't afford to make purchasing decisions on sentiment. And guess what? Your "free market" causes that quite directly. And blaming the actions of sociopathic CEOs on the consumers (who can't actually afford a choice) will never change anything.
So your answer will result in creators having to compete with people who dont create, but market better. This will discourage creators and the result will be less non corporate content will be created for us, everything will be bland crap made for mass consumption.
There is no discouraging creators. Art exists without consumerism. Art doesn't need consumerism.
People need to eat and they can’t make art if they can’t eat
The singer from the band Thursday never got to quit his day job.
Then you can start doing meaningful stuff for yourself, your friends, interested people who are willing to pay for the orginality and not some soulless copycat.
Or they won't learn because the number of people who create the type of media that a corporation would want to steal is ultimately very few and those people can merely be talked over. There is absolutely no reason to believe that information is both available and timely.
The current system we have is harmful to small creators. I release a lot of music under a pay-whatever model (almost all of it actually), but I would hate to be forced to do that. Five or ten years is reasonable, and there should be no such thing as "criminal" copyright infringement -- it should be a tort only. I think that's a fairly reasonable, even libertarian, compromise that doesn't head too far into idealism. I really need to be paid for my work, y'see. Or paid for no reason, that's fine too.
Personally, I think there should be a stronger separation between commercial, non-commercial, and personal use. Friends sharing/copying some media isn’t a big deal to me, but someone making copies and undercutting the original artist should be subject to some pretty strict consequences.
I also think there should be some protections put in place to protect the actual content creators, because most people’s issue with copyright isn’t usually with the people actually creating things. The issue is corporations that insinuate themselves between the creators and consumers, funneling all the profits for themselves. It’s a pretty shitty system where artists make covers of their own albums so they can get a reasonable cut of the proceeds.