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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.
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.
I can see the argument that you and I can make a straightforward contract of you giving me X and me giving you Y. I am much more skeptical of a contract that is supposed to constrain my actions in perpetuity, which prohibits me from trading with anyone who does not likewise agree to have their actions constrained in perpetuity, and so on over infinite recursions. It seems to me that such recursive, unlimited constraint creates little positive and much negative, and I'm not inclined to support its propagation. I feel similarly about contracts placing one in perpetual slavery, and other abrogations of what I perceive to be basic rights. The everlasting, infinite strength of contracts is not the foundation of my moral universe, and I am entirely willing to trade them off against other values.
Declining to watch Disney movies does not allow me to live in a world where the Disney Corporation has no perceptible impact on my life and the environment I live in. Further, if I claim that the Disney corporation is a net-negative, that doesn't mean that some of the things they produce aren't positive when consumed for free. I'm happy to forgo Disney products in exchange for Disney not existing, but not in exchange for voluntarily cooperating with the maintenance of Disney's existence. I see no contradiction here, only a question of practicalities.
True, and my attempt to argue otherwise was malformed. Still, it remains true that there's very nearly zero reason to obey the law that says you have to buy Disney movies to watch them. That's the core problem we keep circling back to: you can't enforce your ideological preferences, so you're dependent on the willing consent of others, and that consent can be withdrawn when the negative results of your ideological preferences manifest. Disney can't make money if they don't show people their data, and data is so trivial to copy and distribute that keeping it locked down is basically impossible.
As it happens, I'm free to copy things also because I see no reason to refrain from doing so and because you don't have the power to stop me. If you could prevent me from doing so by force, that would be one thing, and if you could persuade me that doing so was a bad idea, that would be another thing, but the first appears prohibitively difficult, and the second doesn't seem much easier.
I have every right to ideas, to data, to knowledge of reality and to imagination, to anything I can fit into my brain or the various brain-prostheses I possess. If you show me a picture, I own the sensory impressions it leaves in my mind. I reject the concept that any of these things can belong exclusively to any one individual in any fundamental sense. No one can own words, or language, or colors, names, plots, settings, dramatic motifs, or any of the rest of it. None of these things are worth anything unless they are shared, and neither you nor anyone else has a moral right to universal, perpetual control over how they're shared from now to the end of time. If you want such control, you have to negotiate for it, and if those negotiations fail, both sides revert to BATNA from their own perspective. BATNA from my perspective is I copy, remix, fold, spindle and mutilate the absolute hell out of anything I please, for any purpose I please, and thumb my nose at anyone who disapproves. If BATNA from your perspective is you secretly burn your Great American Novel rather than release it to those unwilling to pay you for the pleasure, I'm okay with that.
Delaying your grandfather's inevitable death is not a terminal value for me either; death is inevitable for all of us, and should not be greatly feared. I've already stated my view that the right to copy data is more valuable than all data that has ever existed; I'm pretty sure all the data that's ever existed is more valuable than one life by any reasonable standard.
Honestly, you know that private property itself is a social concept itself right? Adding an extra dimension onto that shouldn't be that unbelievable.
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