This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
If someone stops writing music/painting things/writing novels/invent anything because of the piracy - i think that's great. There's no intellectual property, there are thoughts, ideas, music and so on, but if its not an object it can't be property, it's silly.
The world is full of useless crap anyway, everything will be fine with less of that, in fact everyone will be much better. People will do art not because of money but because they love it, seems like a win-win. Good musicians will still live luxuries lifestyles because they'll earn tons of money on life concerts. There will be less crap to consume sitting on the sofa the whole day, great! A lot of people will lose their jobs - fine, it wasn't doing anything anyway.
It was my opinion at the start of internet and it didn't change since. The moral arguments against piracy are usually going in the way of "it's not fair" and then showcasing the case when some poor guy creates something genius and he is still poor and unknown, while some huge corporation makes billions out of his work. And i agree - it doesn't feel fair, that corporation which makes billions abusing intellectual property rights shouldn't exist at all.
Looking at the whole humans history there's plenty of various famous people in any type of human activity, despite the fact that there wasn't any intellectual property rights at that time. Somehow Mozart was rich and famous despite the fact that literally anybody can play his works without paying anything to him. No doubt there were plenty of people who died poor and miserable despite creating something great, but it's still the case now. Maybe Mozart could have been much richer with the intellectual property laws, sure, but why is it "more fair"? A random historical person who invented let's say cheddar cheese and couldn't patent it at that time - he surely has all the possibilities to benefit from his invention even without property rights. He probably wasn't a billionaire because of that automatically, so what, why is it fair for him to be one?
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 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.
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link