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This all falls apart rapidly on works that require actual spending to make. Good luck funding the millions of dollars it takes to produce a AAA video game without the possibility of ROI. Not everything can be a one man operation that can afford to live lean.
It's totally alright even if there won't be any AAA video games anymore, people were playing pacmans and supermarios with no less pleasure than AAA games. Humans are made the way that the amount of pleasure is always scaled up or down to some more or less constant level. Hoop rolling is an amazing game if it's the only game you know. And if you have 100 AAA games a year it just deflates the amount of pleasure you'll have from each one, to the point when you're just bored of all of them. It's programmed in human nervous system. The same for everything else. People before computer games weren't any less happy just because they couldn't play them.
Besides, there's always a crowdfunding which as practice shows can support anything - from couple of developers for the whole life(Dwarf Fortress) to half a billion of dollars for promising a dream(Star Citizen).
I find it hard to view a world with less and lower quality art/media but all of it is free as better than a world with higher quality art/media but only most of it is free and what isn't is easily affordable to someone with a very achievable income.
The former seems clearly better to me. Profit motive is very poorly aligned with what we admire in artistic expression.
Then feel free to exclusively consume art created by anti-capitalists who distribute their works for free. You'll have much more than in the past. What right do you have to the works of people who have specifically decided not to go with this model? Why do you think you're entitled to free ride off of those of us who support greater works?
I personally find that the framework of some kind of "rights" you guys like to use is full of nonsense, to the point when i'm not really sure why do you like to use it.
But if you want i can tell you which right - i fully support the right of private property, when if you bought something - it's yours. Like fully yours, not asterisk yours, you know what i mean? So if someone bought the game let's say and wants to share it with anyone he wants - he can do it. And i can download it from him and someone else can download it from me. I'm fully aware that some(SOME!) artists and much bigger cohort of businessman don't like that simple copyable nature of digital media and they don't see it as fair, but you know what - tough luck.
I understand that it leads the world towards the model of "you're not buying it but renting, it's not fully yours, you just bought the right to play it for your eyes only" and i applaud it, that would be a hilariously amazing dystopia when the common sense is completely forsaken in favor of Moloch.
The system we have is set out to solve a very difficult problem. There is substantial upfront cost to produce some information and in order to incentivize that production of data the prospective producers need some way to capture some of the value produced by the upfront investment otherwise there would be no upfront investment. Those options are as follows:
government sponsored investment(A.K.A. everyone is forced to pay whether they want to or not)
intellectual property rights to the fruits of the investment
some scheme where people who want something to be produced pool their money and are just fine with the free riders
the information is simply not produced
There is no secret extra option where there is upfront investment but nobody needs to pay. You can't have people do #2 and then decide that you're going to pretend they did #3 because you still want to be a free rider.
And it's all fine and good to scoff at like pop media or whatever but this problem becomes very real when the thing the upfront investment is in is some cancer cure that you're going to die without. You very very much do not want that to end up in the #4 trap and that the only place it can end up with your beliefs.
I mean, I have no qualms about biting the bullet with #4 and I am someone who would almost certainly be dead of a childhood illness in that world. Humanity does not deserve those things that would not have been produced without the current legal incentive structure.
I find this belief very strange. What do we get out of biting this bullet? The internet and copying mechanisms are a result of huge international schemes and standards. None of this is natural and none of it is beyond social convention. The internet started as a government program, there isn't and never was some kind of anarchic internet. Don't get me wrong, I am consistently an advocate of liberty but we're talking about something that only exists under several abstractions of major organizations and the thing you're giving up is the engine producing more content than has ever existed before every year, the vast majority of which is even already free. You're going to collapse the whole thing on what is honestly a pretty dubious principle in a context that has no precedent? Yes, the metaphors to physical goods aren't perfect because it's an entirely new sector, and as many are lamenting in this thread you don't have the next generation on your side.
So what does your plan actually boil down to? you save a couple grand across your entire life to, if your position is wide spread enough to not be a footnote in history, get vastly interior content? Which you would have gotten for free anyways under the status quo? I can't even tell what principal this is supposed to be on behalf of, you all know that private property itself is a social concept right?
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I'm not sure how it's my problem. My rights are not up for debate and i have right to do anything i want with my private property. And frankly if you're shifting the whole debate into removing my right to private property or diluting it with asterisks and "subscription model" contractual obligations - it's you who's being unethical, not me. Whether you're doing it for your own benefit or for poorly understood "common good" doesn't matter.
I'm not advocating for #2 at all, so i'm not sure how it's relevant.
There's plenty of ways to extort money from me which sound like they're for the greater good, it's still extortion though.
No, the history shows that its not how it ends with my beliefs, you're not saying that "the information was simply not produced" before the intellectual property rights were a thing, are you?
Look, I'm partial to these libertarian "I'm free to do whatever I want" arguments but you've not actually solved the problem here. How precisely do we solve this commons problem without the concept of intellectual property? Just poofing the idea of intellectual property has tremendous cost you seem completely unwilling to contemplate. And because what? some juvenile trantrum that you are being told that defecting on the intellectual property system is unethical? It's not very impressive. And yes, it will end up in subscription models and DRM because that's the economic reality you seem totally unwilling to actually confront.
Offering you an informational good that you can absolutely refuse is not extortion. What an absurd idea.
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The world with "lower quality art/media" is basically the whole planet Earth before the second half of 20th century, roughly. The claim that we're now living in a high quality art time comparing to any previous times isn't obvious to me. There's definitely more art, but not better. The effect of "more art" on people is the subject of severe diminishing returns i would say.
The fact that the intellectual property system incentivizes people financially to create "art" purely to sell, and not when you're passionate about that so you CAN'T NOT write/paint/sing/etc leads to various things like producer projects(99% of modern movies/AAA games, which don't have anything to do with creating art, just with pleasuring proles after careful testing/probing whether it'll be successfull or not). It's not exactly art.
You are perfectly capable of living in the old way, simply only use and consume the free stuff. You want to have your cake and eat it too, an understandable desire but not an ethical one. Artists have gotten together and said they are willing to create larger works of art on the condition that you pay them for it. You are reneging on their condition and worse, you're sneering at them for having the gall to even try.
That's nice. Have I agreed to that? I don't think I have. If I have not, then regardless of whether or not they make those works, I am not bound by that condition.
Someone who purchased the content and then copied it has violated the agreement, you are an accessory to the violation of the compact. And you know damn well when you do it that you're participating in violating this compact. People who knowingly fence stolen goods are behaving unethically.
So? I'm not a party to this compact. No privity of contract here.
This is begging the question, since you have not established that "copied without permission" is equivalent to "stolen".
Do you agree that the original copier is behaving unethically?
it's the equivalent of a violation of a contract. I work in a sector where I have nonpublic information that it would be a crime for me to trade off of, it is also a crime for me to inform anyone of this public information and a crime for them to trade off of it despite them having no hand in the contract. We have laws and rules, these laws and rules are broadly there to solve the problem of producing information to have substantial upfront cost and near zero copying costs. I'm not saying these laws couldn't be better but defecting on them without another solution is unethical because you're free riding and expecting everyone else to cover your share, and if everyone were to do this we would get far less informational goods.
You and your fellows in this thread have no propose alternatives to the regime in place, you're just willing to defect on it because it's easy and that's the totality of your argument. I am unimpressed.
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No, the current system doesn't seem good or fair to me so i want it to change. You sound like the only "ethical" thing to do in the world is following contractual obligations no matter what they are, "well, if you don't like it - don't participate in it". No, it's not so simple, the alternative is not always unethical and it's not how it works in practice, luckily.
Then advocate for artists to freely give away their content, a model like patreon where you support artists and get minor perks seems viable. But you have no right to the works of people who are not operating on that model. They have produced their works on the condition that you pay for them and do not copy them, breaking that condition is unethical.
I've already answered that. And no, thanks, i'll do it differently to your proposal.
unethically.
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Some artists have. Other artists have demonstrated that people will willingly give them money for things they make even if they don't require it, merely out of admiration of the work and admiration of the artist. Others will pay them up-front because they're a good investment. I observe that most of the artists I admire and care about are in this later set, and a lot of the artists in the former range from terminally boring to actively toxic.
The arrangement you describe isn't a moral fact of the universe, but rather a social construction. As with most social constructions, it exists while people agree to maintain it. If people don't want to maintain it any more, it goes away, and the people who benefited from it are out of luck. Copyright protections are of immediate advantage to artists, but deriving advantage from something is not the same as having a right to that thing. I would derive great advantage from everyone paying me significant sums of money in exchange for my assessment of their individual moral character. I do not have a right to such payment, do I?
Cool, consume their art and let the rest of us plebeians pay for art.
A social construct indeed and even more than that a contract, an agreement between people that you advocate for wantonly violating. Other neat social constructs we have are the ones where you have to pay at the store before leaving with goods, not committing random acts of violence and not cheating on medical board exams.
you would have a right to one if I had an agreement with you that I'd pay you for such an assessment. But we don't, and as such you can either give it to me for free or keep it to yourself. Someone in the chain of piracy has violated such an agreement.
If we just ignore all the obscurantism this is a very simple system:
someone produces something and is willing to let you have a copy of it on the condition that you don't copy it
You want this copy
you or somebody else breaks the compact and copies it anyways
I cannot fathom how you have convinced yourself that this is ethical.
Yeah, that happens with social contracts sometimes. They're based on popular consent, and that consent can be withdrawn. If it is, they go away, and the people who relied on them have no real recourse. This is typically most unfortunate for those people, but that's just... reality. I don't value the social contract you're appealing to, and I don't particularly value the goods it delivers, so I see no practical purpose in upholding it.
Yes, and I agree that those should be upheld, because they and the results they produce seem valuable to me, not because vague, informal social contracts should be upheld at all costs.
Suppose I argued that we have a "social contract" that you have to make such an agreement with me. Suppose it's even true, we pass a law and everything! Would you still argue that you're morally required to pay? There's nothing innately preventing a social contract from being stupid or evil. We make rules because we think they lead to good outcomes, not for the love of rule-making and -following.
This is bad if demanding people not copy things is a reasonable thing to do. It's not, though. The right to copy data and ideas is much, much more valuable than all data and ideas that have ever existed, and trading the former for the latter is such a bad deal that attempting to enforce it is fundamentally repugnant. Copyright was maybe a good idea when and how it was originally implemented. Its current application as the cornerstone of immortal socially-toxic megacorporations is absurd and awful. I have the power to withdraw my consent, and so I do.
By the belief that law and morality do not perfectly overlap. Sometimes laws, customs and norms are wrong, and should be pulled down.
Not a social contract, an actual contract. As in you're either violating a contract or knowingly benefiting from someone who did.
Then don't consume them. How is this that difficult? There are producers and consumers that have created an ecosystem you claim to not want anything to do with. They have created laws to make sure the ecosystem works that cost you nothing if you don't intrude. Why is this offensive to you? Unless you actually want the produce of that ecosystem, which you claim to not want. So what, exactly, is the problem here? If you simply don't interact with that ecosystem it's like you're living in the world you claim to want to live in.
I would simply go without your content as was always an option. not sure why you're ignoring that I already addressed this. There are zero laws saying you have to buy Disney movies unless you specifically want to watch Disney movies.
You are totally free to operate entirely in a FOSS environment and only interact with other people who agree that the information they put out is free to be copied. No one is threatening such a right. Others however have opted into a system where they are able to be paid for their intellectual output. And you have zero right to the fruits of that system.
My grandfather was saved from colon cancer by a new cancer drug that would not exist if the pharmaceutical company could not raise capital on the basis that their drug patent would be able to recoup the R&D costs. In your proposed system please explain how my grandfather would not be dead.
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