[harperlee]

That is a ridiculous argument. The more content we produce, the more quality and diversity you can get in the corpus that you will read; the more choices that you can make. There might be infinite insight in the contemplation of cat pictures. :)

Or from another angle: why don't we destroy half of the content of the world? Surely we have enough with the remainings. If we were to find tomorrow another intelligent species, would you be interested in their culture? Or won't you have time to read it?

[lelandbatey]

What you said is hypothetical, but the question we face today is "should we put limits on our ability to transmit and receive information in the name of incentivizing content creators to create when we already have many lifetimes worth of content?"

Right now there are limits on what we can communicate, limits placed in the name of "protecting content creators." These limits are a kluge. For example, what if I where to take a song, compress it a ton, then read out loud the base64 representation to a friend who is transcribing it.

Have I infringed the copyright of that song? Or was I simply describing it so precisely that I allowed my friend to reproduce it flawlessly? If I sing the lyrics to my friend and he learns that, are we breaking a law? And more importantly, should we be breaking the law when we do this?

Why can't we communicate whatever we want? Why haven't we accepted that the progress of technology will slowly make all things a matter of "communication"?

I think that part of the answer to that question is a deep anxiety over such a profound shift in the "business" of our society. It would mean much would have to change, and while I'd argue that change would be for the better, I understand that anxiety.

[elwin]

Yes, more content adds more value. But past a certain point of saturation, it no longer adds enough additional value to compensate its creators. My argument is that we are long past that point.

Which would be more valuable, doubling the world's content, or doubling the amount of time and money to spend on it?

[squidfood]

You're solving the wrong problem here.

Let's say we cut "literary production" in half somehow. Is it better if everyone writes a little bit, or if we all pay someone who's really good at it to do it? I'd rather read a professional writer than my own ramblings, which means I'd rather a subset of good writers were able to earn a living off it.

[TeMPOraL]

> The more content we produce, the more quality and diversity you can get in the corpus that you will read; the more choices that you can make.

If so, then we should just spend all day reading /dev/urandom. Infinite content there.

> Or from another angle: why don't we destroy half of the content of the world? Surely we have enough with the remainings.

If we destroyed the half that is advertisement in disguise, the world would be much better off.

> If we were to find tomorrow another intelligent species, would you be interested in their culture? Or won't you have time to read it?

I would, but I'd happily limit my time spent on analyzing ways members of that culture abuse one another and look for something interesting to learn from them.