[wfo]

You should try to present an argument against the position of your opponents in good faith, against the best version of their argument. Just because someone disagrees with you does not mean they are experiencing "cognitive dissonance". Armchair psychoanalyzing millions of people across the Internet and accusing them of some mental dysfunction because they dared to disagree with you does not paint your argument in a good light.

You seem so upset about entire industries being destroyed -- last I heard industries were fine. Movies are being made and are making money. Music is proliferating everywhere and people are managing to make money. Artists are being screwed out of their money as they have been since decades before the Internet existed. Games, one of the most pirated things in the world are a huge booming industry. Journalism is not dying because of piracy -- has anyone ever pirated a newspaper or magazine? Illegal torrents of copies of the New York Times? What? Histrionics and caps lock don't particularly help your case, explain what you are talking about.

It's certainly possible that the market is simply not an effective driver for artistic creation, especially in a world where art can be copy pasted trivially -- in the past, art has been mostly funded by the state or by wealthy individuals and patrons. Perhaps that model is better.

It's also possible that the "cure" of locking down the Internet, mass surveillance to identify pirates, designing DRM so that machines work against their owners' interests and no longer obey the user is worse than the "disease" of piracy.

[johnfn]

I think our first disagreement comes over the meaning of cognitive dissonance itself. I don't believe it to be a mental disorder- just that you're holding 2 conflicting ideas in your head at the same time. I'm well aware that I often do that, as so others. There's nothing horribly wrong with it, other than of course that you should realize you're doing it and stop.

Maybe you could turn your statements about good faith first on me and assume that I'm not accusing everyone who disagrees with me of having a mental disorder. That would be rather extreme. :)

In fact, it's rather surprising to me that you write about good faith but take my own argument in such poor faith!

As for dying industries, I was referring to journalism and you are the second person to miss that so I am willing to believe I did a poor job explaining. I think I clarified well here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14107993

[wfo]

The bad faith I was referring to was the multiple-paragraph long rant that takes place entirely in your perception of the internal thought process of the people that disagree with you. Let them speak for themselves, they're perfectly capable of it.

I agree journalism is dying and I agree it is relevant to this discussion tangentially: journalism is dying purely because capitalism cannot sustain it anymore. It needs to be propped up by government funding or charity or it will die.

The market is a horribly ineffective as a funding source for quality journalism.

The market is also a horribly ineffective as a funding source for any kind of art that isn't completely mainstream.

If you ask a Libertarian, that means that good journalism and art aren't worth anything and deserve to wither away.

In my view, they both need to be propped up by the government to survive. The record industry has found a way to get the government to force people to give them money with IP laws, etc. Journalism hasn't found a way to do that yet so it's just charity for now.

Government subsidies for art and journalism is probably where we should be heading, instead of a punishment regime that requires DRM and surveillance and ruins lives all to benefit the tiny group of ultrawealthy capitalist IP rightsholders who give crumbs to the people who create their content.

Everyone thinks content creators should get paid. It is so universally accepted that saying it is almost like saying nothing at all. But which content creators? How much? By what mechanism? What about the people who hold the copyrights, who are often not content creators at all? Under our current scheme, they are the ones who get paid, and content creators by default get nothing; content rightsholders get paid. It is a happy coincidence that sometimes rightsholders and creators coincide.