[api]

My opinion on the whole subject of piracy has changed really radically since I was younger. I'm not really a fan of it at all, even without making money, and with making money I think it's definitely not a good thing.

The thing that really changed my mind was realizing that the phrase "information wants to be free" just means "intellectual labor will be free." In other words a world where there is no copyright and piracy is standard would be one in which no form of intellectual labor can be compensated.

In an economy that is increasingly dematerialized, this is a recipe for extreme wealth disparity and a return to feudalism. Only the owners of physical property would have any ability to earn anything outside service labor. You'd have landlords, large capital-owning corporations, banks, and low-paid no-upward-mobility service jobs.

In other words I started to see piracy as an assault on the middle class, almost a tool to bust wages and disempower labor.

It also incentivizes locking everything up in the cloud. You can't pirate things if you never have them. Some of this may happen without piracy, but piracy makes it virtually impossible to run a business in any other way. It makes businesses that give you access to data or empower you to run your own software impossible.

P.S. The worst form of piracy is the kind that is perpetuated by gigantic corporations. IMHO a lot of the AI revolution is being powered by huge scale piracy. AI is cool but the people providing the training data need to be compensated, especially if their stuff is used to train models that are paywalled and never released. Don't misinterpret my defense of copyright and payment for intellectual labor as a blanket defense of the status quo. A big problem we have is that copyright law effectively no longer binds the largest players.

[MSFT_Edging]

I think the type of industry/market is a huge decider on what makes piracy moral. TV/Movies? hugely exploitative industry where you have nearly zero effect on the people who do a majority of the work. They've already been paid, the media most likely made the investment back(i know, exceptions), the rest is media landlording, owning the rights to a majority of the work's profit. Same thing with music. Musicians see almost nothing from their sales/streams. Most of the money made is to repay the labels costs, then once again, landlording by the label. Many musicians, especially indie musicians, will be pro-piracy if that means their fans can appreciate the work, since the label won't send them much anyway.

In the digital age, a majority of copyright is just digital landlord behavior. There's other things, like artist commissions, one-man dev shops(the software Transcribe! has a fair price, is fairly unique, stupid easy to crack, but why bother), and patreon feeds, which all actively fund the person doing the creative work and allows them to continue the work, without the feudal contingencies of traditional distribution.

That being said, taking someone's work and selling it for profit is basically the only scenario I think copyright law should apply to. No individual should ever be sent to prison or bankrupted for copying a file. The power imbalance is staggering for an overall anti-artist industry.

[internet101010]

I don't think it's that deep. I am in the Gabe Newell camp that believes making things difficult to access leads to increase in piracy. Nobody pirates music anymore because most of it is available on a couple of platforms and more importantly there is none of the exclusivity stuff that exists with VOD providers.

[crtasm]

There's some (e.g. Apple exclusives), and a lot of people seem to rip music from Youtube.

[ryandrake]

> media landlording

Wow, this is a great way to think about it, and helps describe how copyright is losing some legitimacy among the general public. Copyright is supposed to be about providing incentive and rewarding people who actually create things. But the way it's actually implemented is exactly media landlording where the lions share of reward is going to parasites whose only accomplishment is "owning IP".

I hope you don't mind if I pirate the term Media Landlording and use it myself. It perfectly describes the ugly world of intellectual property.

[Adverblessly]

> In other words I started to see piracy as an assault on the middle class, almost a tool to bust wages and disempower labor.

The middle class don't significantly own any intellectual property, it is owned by the huge corporations they may be working for.

It is also mostly the middle class that gets fleeced in schemes where they don't actually own the things they buy with their money due to copyright, from bought content disappearing to the ether, devices being illegal to repair or modify, devices spying on you etc.

This is why huge corporations are the ones bribing politicians^H^H lobbying for outrageous copyright laws and spreading pro-copyright propaganda^H ads and completely organic think-pieces in the media.

[jorvi]

> The middle class don't significantly own any intellectual property, it is owned by the huge corporations they may be working.

Reminds me of the "The Wire" chicken nugget scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbAbFF6Xc04

Wallace: Man, whoever invented these, yo, he off the hook.

Malik 'Poot' Carr: What?

Wallace: Mm. Muthafucka got the bone all the way out the damn chicken. 'Til he came along, niggas been chewin' on drumsticks and shit, gettin' they fingers all greasy. He said, " Later for the bone. Let's nugget that meat up and make some real money."

Malik 'Poot' Carr: You think the man got paid?

Wallace: Who?

Malik 'Poot' Carr: Man who invented these.

Wallace: Shit, he richer than a muthafucka.

D'Angelo Barksdale: Why? You think he get a percentage?

Wallace: Why not?

D'Angelo Barksdale: Nigga, please. The man who invented them things? Just some sad-ass down at the basement at McDonald's, thinkin' up some shit to make some money for the real players.

Malik 'Poot' Carr: Naw, man, that ain't right.

D'Angelo Barksdale: Fuck "right." It ain't about right, it's about money. Now you think Ronald McDonald gonna go down in that basement and say, "Hey, Mista Nugget, you the bomb. We sellin' chicken faster than you can tear the bone out. So I'm gonna write my clowny-ass name on this fat-ass check for you"?

Wallace: Shit.

D'Angelo Barksdale: Man, the nigga who invented them things still workin' in the basement for regular wage, thinkin' up some shit to make the fries taste better or some shit like that. Believe.

[1970-01-01]

>The thing that really changed my mind was realizing that the phrase "information wants to be free" just means "intellectual labor will be free."

That's one take. My alternative take is "humans will leak and speak of this knowledge (information) because it's interesting or important to them."

Your take implies free labor as a natural extension of this information liberty, but it does not need to be that way.

[xhkkffbf]

There are two parts to the quote and everyone always leaves off the second part: "Information wants to be free; information wants to be expensive."

[skydhash]

Copyright is a solution for generating value for creative labor. But we stopped at this and access problems are still unresolved (not always caused by the copyright holder). The market is still being defined by North America and West Europe in a lot of cases (content are gatekept and geo locked). I don’t know how we can solve this (without a lot of good faith involved) but piracy is the current solution to being (culture/information)-deprived.

[thomastjeffery]

That vulnerability is entirely the result of a failed system. If we truly valued human life, we wouldn't gatekeep it behind income.

It's not just artists who deserve to make a living. Everyone living deserves a living.

[api]

We are incredibly far from the kind of society you're imagining.

What I think you have to ask is: if we get rid of copyright now, today, in this economy and society, what will the result be?

The result would be large corporations that own channels like Amazon Prime, Netflix, YouTube, AI companies, etc. just strip mining everything and sell it back to people for subscription fees and paying creators $0. The end. (Yes this already happens, but it would happen a lot more and there would be no recourse.)

This is the same mistake college Marxists and libertarians make. You can't imagine some kind of idealized society, cherry pick principles and ideas from it, plop them into the real world, and then expect it to magically turn out the way you imagine. The result is almost never what you think.

[thomastjeffery]

How long must we wait?

Your argument hinges on the assertion that copyright is actually working. It isn't.

We aren't really that far away from a system that can support everyone. If we were, then all the starving artists would be dead.

[mschuster91]

> This is the same mistake college Marxists and libertarians make. You can't imagine some kind of idealized society, cherry pick principles and ideas from it, plop them into the real world, and then expect it to magically turn out the way you imagine. The result is almost never what you think.

Keeping everything as it is, never even imagining change, is just as bad though - because eventually change will come and then it will just steamroll over everything.

The current best example of such an outside change is AI technology - no matter its dubious origins (=widespread scraping of content), it is hugely disrupting already. And prior to that, we had Covid and the resultant drop in office rents that led to urban planners and CRE investors being in a really massive clusterfuck.

[mistrial9]

basically agree here in California -- the economics from the point of view of an author or artist, are often ignored in the enthusiasm for information access..

[crtasm]

However while Stadia shut down, GOG is still going.

[ecshafer]

> The thing that really changed my mind was realizing that the phrase "information wants to be free" just means "intellectual labor will be free." In other words a world where there is no copyright and piracy is standard would be one in which no form of intellectual labor can be compensated.

This phrase has its roots in anarcho-communism that was pretty widely spread in hacker communities back in the day I think. Which means that its not really surprising that intellectual labor will be free, all labor should be free under such an ideology. Not debating the merits or demerits of anarchism or its flavors, but I think your view is a bit more on the side of reality.

[mistrial9]

> all labor should be free under such an ideology

no, parties are free to negotiate between each other, for their own purposes.. as they see fit

[throwaway828]

> Has anyone asked information if it wants to be free?

Asked rhetorically. Of course information can't reply, right?

There's substantial context that this quote is often dislocated from of disempowered groups. Parties are unable to negotiate when power, power of self sovereignty or awareness of choice, rests with only one.

[mrguyorama]

You absolutely can ask information if it wants to be free. It is a fundamental fact of our universe that classical information is perfectly copyable and un-scarce. Information doesn't just "want" to be free, information MUST be free, and changing that reality takes EXTRA effort and work and artificial constraints.