[jMyles]

> * fully-generated content is public domain and copyright can not be applied to it.

Simpler yet - and inevitable, on sufficiently long time scales - is to dispense entirely with the notion of intellectual property and treat _all_ content this way.

[port11]

This would remove the incentive to generate content, no? Copyright duration could be much shorter, but I think artists, writers, etc. would prefer the continuing protection of their work. (And I'm pro-copyright reform.)

[jMyles]

I'm a full-time professional musician, and I don't know anybody (at least in bluegrass) who thinks that the system of IP is designed to protect us, or is in fact serving us in economic terms. It seems much more geared to protect spotify and apple than it does the musicians.

Last year, I cut Drowsy Maggie with David Grier (something about which I boast every chance I get :-) ), and part of our journey was listening to aging, nearly-forgotten versions to find melodic and harmonic ideas to harvest and revive. For this, we of course made heavy use of archive.org's Great 78 project - and at the very same time, the RIAA (who is supposed to represent us?!) was waging aggressive lawfare against the Great 78 project, to try to take it down.

It was just the height of absurdity.

Consider that since at least 2020, every grammy winner in both the bluegrass and americana categories (and almost no nominee) has been released DRM-free. And that many of the up-and-coming bluegrass and jam bands are now releasing all of their shows, directly off the board, licensed with creative commons-compatible licenses.

https://pickipedia.xyz/wiki/DRM-free

[AlienRobot]

I don't understand this opinion.

The only leverage you have to stop Spotify from taking your music and publishing it without your permission is your copyright of the music.

In fact, every time I see a complaint about copyright it's always "we tried to do something at small scale for some noble purpose and couldn't because of pesky copyright laws," and it completely ignores the massive scale of abuse for profit purpose that would occur if copyright didn't exist.

Think of how AI scraped everyone's books without permission using the flimsy excuse that it's transformative work, except they wouldn't even need that excuse or the transformation. Amazon could just take everyone's books and sell it on Kindle, then kick out all authors because they only need to buy 1 book to resell it as if they were the owner of the book.

[jMyles]

> The only leverage you have to stop Spotify from taking your music and publishing it without your permission is your copyright of the music.

There are a lot of challenges facing a band, including the frustrations of CDBaby and Distrokid. If you told me my music would just magically appear on Spotify without my having to lift a finger (and without having to implicitly endorse them by putting it there), that'd be a huge relief.

> it completely ignores the massive scale of abuse for profit purpose that would occur if copyright didn't exist.

"abuse"? If you can somehow make money by playing music that I've made, nothing will make me prouder. And whatever you're doing that's generating that profit, it will almost certainly increase the likelihood that I can plan a series of shows around it, which will in turn generate income for me. Who exactly is losing here? Where is the "abuse"?

> Think of how AI scraped everyone's books without permission using the flimsy excuse that it's transformative work, except they wouldn't even need that excuse or the transformation.

I'm already sold, you don't have to keep making it sound sweeter and sweeter.

[port11]

I find your arguments hard to relate to, given that I buy CDs/on Bandcamp because I want to pay musicians. I usually can't afford concerts, so I won't be there as a channel for merch. If you release all your work under permissive licenses, how do you expect to be supported?

[jMyles]

Yeah, awesome! I love bandcamp.

You can buy our stuff on bandcamp if you want:

https://justinholmes.bandcamp.com/

In my mental model, participating in bandcamp (and getting your supporter badge) is a sort of "merch". You aren't really buying the music - the music is something you hear as the result of a FLAC file being decoded, and that FLAC file can be endlessly and freely copied.

Even better than the bandcamp model, in my thinking, is for you to get the music via pirate channels like bit torrent or IPFS, listen to it, and if you want to, you can buy album-related merch on the ethereum blockchain. That's the long-term vision.

As far as affording concerts: on sufficiently long time scales, I'm wanting to make our shows free-to-enter, buy-a-ticket-stub-if-you-want. Sadly, a lot of great rooms around the country are locked behind contracts with Ticketmaster/AEG and are prohibited from hosting such a show.

> If you release all your work under permissive licenses, how do you expect to be supported?

I believe that a huge majority of our fans are like you: they _want_ to support us, and the spotify model doesn't really give them a channel for that. Permissive licenses don't prevent people from supporting us on bandcamp and similar models.

[AlienRobot]

I assume that this means you simply make all your work public domain, as you don't believe in copyright?

I don't believe that most creators would willingly let go of their right as you would.

[jMyles]

Indeed I do.

And it's far from a foregone conclusion that what you call "their right" is real - I don't believe I have a right to stop you from copying bytes on your device. That's insane.

And yes, I'm sure that the top .01% of pop musicians for whom the system is working well will hang on, and many more hoping to hit whatever lottery they've hit.

But as I pointed out above, some genres which are experiencing thunderous revivals right now are embracing DRM-free very hard, and even CC as well.

As John Perry Barlow said about his band, The Grateful Dead, when he found himself facing down record labels and movie studios as the only person on the stage who was actually in a band:

"We gave away our so-called intellectual property and became the most popular band performing band in the United States. and we're making one hell of a lot of money giving it away. It was not required that we be absolutely firm in our hold on this material because we recognize something important which is that in an information economy the normal sense of an economy based on scarcity is turned on its head. Value in an information economy is based on familiarity and attention. These are very different principles and and trying to optimize towards scarcity as you are by all of your methods is not going to be in the benefit of creation."

[atrus]

It's true, before copyright existed, no one made any art at all, and they certainly weren't paid for it. Thanks to copyright, the large majority of artists have been well and fairly compensated for their work.

[port11]

Okay, you're right. I mean, there was patronage for a long time, and then a good era of proper copyright protections. The modern system really does need a reform, I agree. But I don't think we should wholesale put everything in the public domain. I mean, AI scrapers already think that's the case, but…

[jMyles]

It's not just AI scrapers, it's the entire concept of the internet.

The internet _wants_ to copy bytes. That's what it does. Right now you're reading this because bytes were copied from my local machine to the HN server, and then to a cache, and then to your machine.

Copying bytes is, in some low-level sense, the entire function of interconnection in the human species.

The idea of trying to bolt-on little machines to restrict the flow of bytes at every vector of network connectivity, just to satisfy some abstract claim of "property" - it's completely nuts. It's never going to work. Tomorrow it will work worse than it does today, and every day going forward until states realize that the laws they want to enforce around this concept are simply not possible on the internet.

And you know who will celebrate that? Musicians like me. Nobody will be happier to see a lubricated copying machine become the human identity more than people who are trying to get their music out there, and trying to be inspired by the music of others.

[AlienRobot]

What prevents me from stealing your work and selling it? Including the source code you wrote?

[jMyles]

Well, what prevents you from doing that right now? The threat that I'll call the cops on you? Is that really how we want the internet to work? It's sure as hell not how I want my music to be perceived - I can't fathom wanting the state to intervene because some kid listened to something I made without permission.

You are welcome to "steal" anything I've ever made if it pleases you. And encourage your friends to steal it from you. If this process keeps repeating, look me up and let's book a show in your area, and we'll play our music _and_ demo our source code _and_ get you all dancin' and trippin' and having a merry old time.