[IndySun]

"Hi, we're Funkwhale. We use cool words like decentralized, self-hosted, music, server, and of course, funk & whale. If we named it more honestly, then our defunding of musicians and creatives that depended on sales wouldn't get any love (not publicly anyway), plus the ethically vacant developers would have to work on it secretly. And to be sure, we ourselves do not create or rely on income from artistic endeavours, we only make software to cut out the middle part."

I love coming here, lots of interesting articles, but the most fun is reading the twisted english as people convince themselves digital theft is somehow not to be equated to physical theft.

[aidenn0]

> ...as people convince themselves digital theft is somehow not to be equated to physical theft.

Do you honestly thing the two are in any way equivalent? If I steal a physical item from you, you no longer have that item. If I download a copyrighted item that I never would have purchased, and you are entitled to royalties from then you lose nothing. If I download 100 items and I otherwise would have bought 5% of them, then you lose 5% of it.

Note also that libraries work similarly. I have checked out many hundreds of books out from the public library and read them. That also cost authors money, but we do not equate that to stealing. I have bought 100s of used CDs. I saved a lot of money and the record companies and artists collected no money for that either.

I also object to the concept that a creator has any moral right to monopolize their creations. There is no such moral right. The US provides for granting such a monopoly for a limited time in order to encourage people to create things. This has somehow morphed into the belief that someone creating something intangible has an indefinite monopoly on its use.

Such policy is actively harmful to the arts to the point of being detrimental to creators! Disney's Sleeping Beauty was a delightful film, if not a box office hit, but it would never had happened if the copyright laws (that Disney lobbied for!) we have today existed then, because Tchaikovsky's ballet would still have been under copyright.

[IndySun]

Like many arguments defending wholesale sharing, they start at the end products and look forward, instead of being even a tiny bit cognisant of the process by which those items came to be.

The thinking is along the lines of, look at this car and look at this mp3, they're so different. But obviously they share important similarities, those being that both needed ingenious human thought plus plenty of physical objects for them to come into existence. True, how they are sold is another question. How they are received. How are they shared. How they function. What is their purpose?

Let's swap funkwhale to carwhale - yes, I can, because one day in the future, we will be able to push a button and have an exact copy of any car just by pointing a scanner at it. Suppose you worked on that car, all your life, in the hope others could enjoy it, and love it the way you have. And if you got it right, might be compensated for your time and efforts.

But no, this is not in the future because everything should be free. Everything? Or just the mp3s? Just digital? Who's going to make that music? Or that car? Or perform your heart op?

Most people, sadly here, are not respectful of creativity and its worth, I feel its more important than that car. And throughout history culture has been the most important aspect of any society; its strength and survival depend on it.

[aidenn0]

I certainly don't intend to devalue creativity. Like many (most?) on HN I have a career where I get paid for my creative work.

However, creative outputs are qualitatively (and legally) distinct from physical outputs and to pretend otherwise is only going to be a hindrance in properly creating a system to nurture cultural output.

Let's start with the car example. I can buy a car, modify it and resell it. I can buy a cassette, modify it and resell it. Legally I can't buy a digital download, remix it and resell it. There's already a difference here.

If I come up with an improvement to someone else's car design, am I allowed to print up one for myself on carwhale? Am I allowed to sell the new design? Am I allowed to describe my changes to someone else? Where do we draw the line? 100 years after the first car is printed from car-whale, does the estate of the person who designed the base model that the cars we are now printing hardly resembles still get royalties because the design before the design before ... the design before happened to use their car as a quickstart convenience?

With physical objects it's clear. The person who built the car gets paid once and we don't have to debate 100 years later over ship-of-theseus questions. With creative outputs its far less clear.

Just because we agree that it is a Good Thing for creators to be rewarded for their work doesn't mean that copying their work is equivalent with theft. It's its own unique thing and coming up with a framework to handle it correctly is quite challenging and to just say "digital theft is still theft" is a way to ignore those challenges rather than trying to meet those challenges.

[IndySun]

Ok, ignore the part about physical things being needed for creativity to happen.

I don't feel we're pulling in opposite directions. You make points I agree with. I definitely want to understand more.

Time limits, profits limits, distribution caps, all important and debatable facets.

All I ask is you really try to put yourself, and only you can do it, in the shoes of a someone who's very existence depends on what you are casually, or strongly, or passionately, advocating. Are you the person to decide what 'product' is more valuable, either in recompense or admiration?

[aidenn0]

We probably aren't pulling in very different directions at all.

As far as this:

> All I ask is you really try to put yourself, and only you can do it, in the shoes of a someone who's very existence depends on what you are casually, or strongly, or passionately, advocating. Are you the person to decide what 'product' is more valuable, either in recompense or admiration?

I think that all individuals have a responsibility to decide what is and isn't more valuable and align their actions accordingly. The fact that an action causes harm to someone else does not make it necessarily immoral though. I can afford to buy every book I want to read. Nevertheless, I still frequent my local public library. This causes quantifiable harm to authors, yet few would call it immoral.

I could probably come up with a dozen reasons why it's a good thing to frequent the library (libraries are awesome, and making them a ghetto of people too poor to afford to buy books would be to their detriment), but the simple fact is I don't want to spend $8 on a book I'm probably going to only read once when I can get it for free.

This is a selfish action with quantifiable harm that most people do not consider immoral. I can come up with many post-facto justifications for why libraries are good and piracy is bad, but IMO the real reason why society falls this way is one is an old and revered institution, while the other is something teenagers do to get access to media because they are time-rich and money-poor.

And at the end of all of this, I'm still not going to advocate for general piracy, but I will say that it's mostly two sides each inflating or deflating the actual harm done in order to justify a position they hold that was never grounded in any sort of utilitarianism in the first place.

[bronco21016]

I initially downvoted you but after finally getting the project site to load I changed my mind.

The project explicitly mentions many examples of sharing through federation and it seems to me they’re explicitly advocating for illegal sharing of music.

Now, I certainly have plenty of issues with copyright and I tend to lean more towards “piracy isn’t a huge deal since we all want convenient (not free) access to media.” However, this project seems to be positioning themselves as a free music sharing service. I can’t imagine this ends well for them.

Some may mention other means of sharing music such as Plex or Jellyfin. I think Plex etc are flirting with the edge a bit with their sharing features. However, their sharing features are meant to selectively share with say family members in your household. Funkwhale is positioning the hoster to share with anyone on the internet. Don’t be surprised to get a DMCA notice if you open up a music library to the whole internet.

It’s too bad because there definitely is a space for someone to create a really nice self-hosted music library. Plex and Plexamp work ok but still leave a lot to be desired in terms of discovery.

[glenstein]

>The project explicitly mentions many examples of sharing through federation and it seems to me they’re explicitly advocating for illegal sharing of music.

They're explicitly against that in their docs:

>If you are uploading content purchased from other platforms or stores, you should upload it in a private library

>As a rule of thumb, only use public and local libraries for content for which you own the copyright or for content you know you can share with a wider audience.

They also noted that they have made changes to funkwhale out of copyright concerns:

>Managing the library at instance was cumbersome and dangerous: sharing an instance library over federation would quickly pose copyright issues, as well as opening public instances. It also made it impossible to only share a subset of the music.

https://docs.funkwhale.audio/users/upload.html

https://docs.funkwhale.audio/admin/0.17.html

[StavrosK]

> people convince themselves digital theft is somehow not to be equated to physical theft.

It really isn't, though. If you steal my car, I won't have a car. If you copy my car, I'll have a car.

To claim that the two are equivalent is pretty indefensible, in my opinion.

[IndySun]

And where did the car come from?

The deal is, work is rewarded, not stealing work, or did I miss a meeting?

[StavrosK]

It congealed from an amorphous mass of nutrients in the bowels of the earth. What does it matter where it came from? Stealing deprives the owner of their good, copyright infringement does not, therefore they are not equal.

[IndySun]

Sure. Your remarks only prove my point. But I am a realist. And I wouldn't keep focusing on music. It's an easy target. Audio happens to be my thing but I'm concerned at the cavalier attitude and on a broader level.

Let's for one minute, expand the remit. It's not funkwhale, it's carwhale, foodwhale, healthwhale. Keep going. Keep thinking.

If all we're doing is not creating anew, but instead forging special keys that give you access to anything anyone that made the considerable effort to creative something new - then we treadwater, as a human race. And I see exactly this in so many aspects of human life already.

Not creating, not moving forward, not innovating, and only taking (in this case) other people's music AND then, here, loudly having the arrogance to declare that all music (or cars, or health, or food) should be free to buy once and you get the right to give it away.

Don't complain, like I have often read on these pages, how modern music (and cars, and food, and apps, and laptops) all look and sound the same when we have merrily sucked dry the very chances of anything new making its first steps.

[Lambdanaut]

> it's carwhale, foodwhale, healthwhale. Keep going. Keep thinking.

You're describing a post-scarcity utopia where we can spend our creative energy where we want and not be tied down to jobs that we hate in order to pay the bills.

Yes, I would very much like that for everyone. Thank you for bringing this topic up. Let it come.

[IndySun]

Haha. I've read that. Remind me, in this Utopia, who collects the trash?

[StavrosK]

You insist on reading my argument of "it's not the same as theft" to "therefore it's fine". I didn't say whether it's better or worse than theft. I just said it's not the same, in the same way that murder or jaywalking is not the same as theft.

[IndySun]

Not true, I'm not doing that, though you do seem to be reading parts of my remarks and not others. I shouldn't have replied specifically to you, I'm trying, and failing on deaf ears, to make a much broader point. I'll save it for the pub.

[magnostherobot]

There's a short sci-fi story (whose name escapes me, but is mentioned in Cory Doctorow's Information Doesn't Want to be Free) in which the human race is given matter duplicators that can perfectly copy an item, including the duplicators themselves. It's basically a more fully-explored version of the "what if I can copy a car" thought, in which I think the conclusion is that creativity would flourish because less effort is put into making many of the same item. It's quite a far-reaching hypothetical, but it has strong parallels with digital rights issues.

[StavrosK]

Printcrime: https://ipfs.eternum.io/ipfs/QmTZo9mVX6JwN4hgCF7Ers1jJ9AMQkY...

[adar]

You're aware that popular legal sites like BandCamp exist where musicians sell their albums in no-DRM mp3 format, right?

[laurowyn]

Whilst it's DRM free, it's still licensed copyrighted content that cannot be shared unless the license permits. BandCamp's terms of use state that they take non-exclusive rights to sell and distribute works on your behalf, but they do not grant those same rates to buyers.

DRM is not Licensing, but a mechanism to enforce a license.

I think OP is implying that the sharing provided in funkwhale is likely violating the typical license terms of any purchased music, therefore is preventing a musician from making money from streaming services which have appropriately licensed the music for streaming.

Buying a license doesn't mean that you own the work, just that you have the right to play it in specific circumstances (most of which nobody pays attention to anyway). I'm sure we've all played a song on a loud speaker for others to hear, but again that's against typical license terms.

[IndySun]

Note the word 'sell' in your remark.

[adar]

I noted it when I typed it.

[IndySun]

And?

So you are aware people sell things they make, to live? and they hope not to sell to just one person who's paying $1 to put it online for 100,000 people to have it not sold.

And that's ok with you because you don't, or don't need to, make a living creating music.

Try thinking about this from the perspective of whatever it is you do to make a living.

[adar]

You're right, I initially missed that it was for sharing music with others, not just organizing your own.

[Findeton]

Well I helped create the Spanish Pirate Party so I strongly believe Funkwhale is perfectly moral. If my idols want some money, I'll be happy to go to a concert or buy their music from their webpage (but I don't think Jimi Hendrix will complain much these days).

[IndySun]

Idols? Famous guitarists that have bubbled under your nose? What about new guitarists?

[nobody9999]

>Idols? Famous guitarists that have bubbled under your nose? What about new guitarists?

What about them?

If I purchase music, it's because I want to listen to that music.

Whether that's Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, Lari Basilio, Nick Johnston or anyone else, what business is it of yours (or anyone else, for that matter) how or where I listen to the music that I've purchased?

This is the first I'm hearing about Funk Whale and I fully intend to install it, as I've been looking for a decent self-hosted, streaming music server to listen to music owned by me.

It's likely that it won't meet my needs and I'll move on to something else.

I suppose that just about any music streaming server could be used to take food out of the mouths of the starving children of musicians.

Rather than assuming (as it appears you are doing) that everyone who uses a self-hosted streaming server is engaged in stealing from musicians, please let us (me, especially) know what platform you would recommend as a personal streaming server.

I'd really appreciate any suggestions. Thanks!

[IndySun]

Glad to hear it.

Absolutely not saying everyone will use it in a way that devalues creativity as a living, you rightly used the word 'seems'.

The interconnectedness of digital content ultimately stifles competition. It means less chance of you ever hearing the next Jimi Hendrix. Given there are about 7 billion people and there's only been one Jimi convinces me this is true. Of course there have been, and are, many Jimis, but you'll likely never get to appreciate them. Maybe you're ok with just Jimi and all the stuff already out there. If so, maybe music isn't so important to you.

You have the right attitude to the software. I don't want to suggest an alt here. I'm talking more broadly. I would ask you to think about this from the reverse perspective, and if it is whatever it is you do to make a living could be made once, and distributed for free to the effect you couldn't do it anymore - is the point.

[aidenn0]

New guitarists benefit the least from recording sales because they get such terrible contracts from labels. I've known many up-and-coming bands that pirate their own songs to try and get people to come to their concerts.

[Findeton]

Well if I am not listening to them why would they complain about me pirating their music?

[IndySun]

Is it because you're not interested in a cohesive society?

[Findeton]

What is it that I said that you're trying to guess the motivations for?

[ephaeton]

Speaking as a musician here, I align with the decentralized approach personally, and we've just uploaded our best album so far as CC-BY, using the gracious offer of the funkwhale guys to join their libre audio effort under https://open.audio/channels/wergiftfresch_music/ There's other ways for us to get paid if you insist on it. I'm sure we'll find a way. And if you don't want to pay us, well, just enjoy some positive music :)

[perpetualpatzer]

I agree with the concern. Tools like this (e.g. myTunes / ourTunes) tend to be used primarily to avoid paying for music that was produced to be sold. If you believe (as I do) that the supply of quality music creation / music discovery is elastic, that means it's a free rider problem for society to solve.

I do think, however that your comment might have been better-received if delivered with less snark.

[twostoned]

LOL Lars is that you?

[throwanem]

Home taping is killing music!

[IndySun]

Yes, this was first stated in the late 70s. Back then duping 10,000 cassettes took some backstreet criminal a fair amount of investment. Now we are all that backstreet crim.

[perakojotgenije]

relevant xkcd - steal this comic:

https://xkcd.com/488/