In capitalism, stuff only has value if it's scarce. We all constantly need oxygen to live, but because it's abundant, it's value is zero. Capitalism does not start valuing oxygen until there are situations where it starts becoming rare.

This works for the most part in our world because physical goods by and large are scarce, but in the situations where they aren't, capitalism doesn't work. It's the classic planned obscelesence lightbulb story, if you can make a dirt cheap light bulb that lasts forever, you'll go out of business because you've created so much abundance that after a bit of production, you're actually not needed at all anymore and raw market based capitalism has no mechanism to reward you long term.

The same is even more true for information. Unlike physical goods, information can flow and be copied freely at a fundamental physics level. To move a certain amount of physical matter a certain distance I need a certain amount of energy, and there are hard universal limits with energy density, but I can represent the number three using three galaxies, or three atoms. Information does not scale or behave the same, and is inherently abundant in the digital age.

Rather than develop a system that rewards digital artists based on how much something is used for free, we created copyright, which uses laws and DRM to create artificial scarcity for information, because then an author can be rewarded within capitalism since it's scarce.

[–] Chozo@fedia.io 0 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Unlike physical goods, information can flow and be copied freely at a fundamental physics level.

The electricity and silicon required to make this happen are not free, on a societal or physical level. There is a tangible cost to this transfer, even if you're ignoring the social construct of copyright.

I think this issue comes from a misunderstanding of "free", possibly conflating it for "trivially easy".

Rather than develop a system that rewards digital artists based on how much something is used for free

Feel free to come up with such a system. I think you'll find that a rather difficult task.

[–] masterspace@lemmy.ca 3 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

The electricity and silicon required to make this happen are not free, on a societal or physical level. There is a tangible cost to this transfer, even if you're ignoring the social construct of copyright.

Completely irrelevant.

If I already have a computer and an internet connection then I've already paid the costs, prior to initiating that particular request.

I think this issue comes from a misunderstanding of "free", possibly conflating it for "trivially easy".

In the context of pricing resources, those are the same thing.

Feel free to come up with such a system. I think you'll find that a rather difficult task.

The model is the same one used by streaming services. It's one of reward and attribution rather artificial scarcity. Rather than having streaming and advertising middlemen you have a public system that lets everyone access what they want and rewards creators based on usages. Youtube without Google's exorbitant profits.

Copyright has no basis in human culture or history. Our literal entire history is based on a tradition of free remixing and story telling, not copyright.

[–] Chozo@fedia.io 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Copyright has no basis in human culture or history.

It's exited before any of us currently alive, so that's a pretty absurd notion. Unless human culture and history ended ~300 years ago?

[–] masterspace@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

K, versus 2,750,000 years.

Here's 300 letter g's:

gggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggg
gggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggg
gggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggg
gggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggg
gggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggg
gggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggg
gggggggggggggggggggg

Here's 2.75 million letter h's

Oh wait, I can't paste that many because at 40 chars per line, it would be 68,000 lines long, or 1000x the Android clipboard's char limit.

You are literally describing a meaningless iota in the course of human history.

[–] Chozo@fedia.io 0 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I don't get your argument. So because it's "new" according to your grand cosmic scale, it doesn't exist at all?

You can say "I think intellectual property is a dumb idea" and I'd love to hear your arguments for that, but to act like it isn't real just because we came up with the idea relatively recently, is just asinine.

[–] masterspace@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

,You can say "I think intellectual property is a dumb idea" and I'd love to hear your arguments for that,

Read the above comments then.

but to act like it isn't real just because we came up with the idea relatively recently, is just asinine.

Again, read my comments. I didn't say it wasn't real, I said it has no basis in human culture or history.

[–] Chozo@fedia.io 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I said it has no basis in human culture or history.

Not only is this incorrect, it would be meaningless even if it was accurate. What point are you even trying to make with this claim?

[–] masterspace@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

It is 100% correct. There was no concept of owning a story or a song just because you told it first, throughout literally all of history until the copyright laws of the 20th century.

And my point is that the literal entirety of human culture is based on a tradition of storytelling, something copyright expressly forbids.

Copyright is not a system that aligns with our natural inclinations or the way we evolved. It's a crude, child like attempt to cram information into a capitalist mold that doesn't work.

[–] Chozo@fedia.io 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

There was no concept of owning a story or a song just because you told it first, throughout literally all of history until the copyright laws of the 20th century.

Brother, copyright has been around since at least the 1700s, you're literally just making things up right now. Read a book.

[–] masterspace@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 19 hours ago) (1 children)

Oh, wow. I'm so impressed.

It's existed since the time of the transatlantic slave trade.

Surely that makes it something human and good!

Totally compares to the previous 2.75 Million years of story telling culture and tradition. Totally not just an exploitative artifact of the corporate age. /S

And go ahead and cite your favourite book on copyright. Maybe I'll read it.

[–] Chozo@fedia.io 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Your argument so far has been "it's new (even though it's not) and I don't like it". If you wanna get extra pedantic, the idea of copyright has been floated since the 1500s, and the concept of owning art predates even that. It wasn't until the late 1700s that our current "modern" copyright system began taking form.

Regardless, none of that changes the fact that it's still a real part of our lives now. We don't live 2.75 million years in the past, we live now. Presumably, you wipe after defecating, don't you? Didn't you know that toilet paper is a modern invention that we didn't have a million years ago and only went to market 3 years before slavery was abolished in the US? It's bad and we shouldn't use it, right???

I still don't get what any of this has to do with anything we're talking about, though. I feel like maybe you've talked yourself into a corner by making up nonsense and then trying to defend it. This is dumb, just like every argument defending piracy; it uses sovereign citizen logic where you make up arbitrary rules and definitions that nobody else in society agrees with to justify bad behavior.

If you wanna pirate stuff, then pirate it. But just own it; don't make up silly defenses for why it's okay, because they don't hold up under scrutiny.

[–] masterspace@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

I've only been pointing out that copyright is dumb, not that piracy is wholly justified.

We got into this corner because you ignored the actual points I made about why copyright is dumb (read: a scarcity based system is not suitable for digital information since it is inherently unscarce) and focused on the age of copyright instead.

[–] Chozo@fedia.io 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Your other points amounted to little more than "I own my computer, therefore I'm entitled to your computer", and "free and not-free are the same thing", which are both equally absurd and not really worth dissecting further.

I thought perhaps you had an actual opinion on the matter that you've actually like... thought about, and not a reactionary one that seems like it was made up on the spot.

[–] masterspace@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

which are both equally absurd and not really worth dissecting further.

Try having a conversation without resorting to thought terminating cliches.

And if that's what you took out of it you missed the point. And given the number of dismissive thought terminating cliches you keep using it does not seem like you actually care to learn or are having a good faith discussion.

If you are, you've missed the point, which is that information, at a fundamental, physics level, does not behave the same way as energy and matter. Computers make it essentially free to replicate information infinitely. That is not true for any physical good. The differences therein mean that information should be abundant, except that copyright and DRM create artificial scarcity where there is no need for it.

[–] Chozo@fedia.io 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

information should be abundant

Perhaps so, but isn't that up to whoever creates the information? If you invent a story, why would you not be entitled to own it?

For much of human history, artistry of all sorts has been a profession, as much as a hobby. The idea of attribution and ownership over one's art has been a core part of why that has worked and allowed creators to thrive. I would argue that the alternative of having no such system at all would ultimately lead to less art and information being created and shared at all, if the creation process is unsustainable at an individual creator's level.

[–] masterspace@lemmy.ca 1 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago)

Perhaps so, but isn't that up to whoever creates the information?

No, what I'm saying is that at a fundamental physics level, information is inherently abundant in a way that nothing else made of matter or energy is. There is effectively zero cost to replicating it an infinite amount of times. That is fundamentally not true for anything made of energy or matter.

If you invent a story, why would you not be entitled to own it?

Why would you "own" it? If you tell a story what prevents me from also telling that story? The threat of you punching me if I tell my own copy when you're not around? That's not owning something that's unilaterally declaring that you own all copies of something and forever own all copies of it going forward. If I invent a white t shirt, should I be able to claim ownership of every white t-shirt that anyone makes forever? That's nonsense.

For much of human history, artistry of all sorts has been a profession, as much as a hobby. The idea of attribution and ownership over one's art has been a core part of why that has worked and allowed creators to thrive.

Completely and utterly wrong.

Because no, the idea of ownership of a song has virtually never been important to art. Professional artists, in the time periods where they have existed, have largely been able to because they would be constantly performing art in the era prior to recordings, and they would constantly be performing other people's songs that they did not write themselves or they would add their own twists to it.

A song like House of the Rising Sun can be traced all the way back to 16th century English hymns before eventually winding it's way through countless Appalachian and travelling singers, before being picked up by 50s era folk musicians, before being picked up by a British rock band called the Animals. This is how music has worked through literally all of human history until the abomination that is copyright.

Hell it wasn't until the classical music era, and the rise of sheet music that you actually started seeing real authorship granted to individual people, and even in that era you didn't own a song, if someone like Mozart could listen and transcribe it then they could also perform it themselves.

I would argue that the alternative of having no such system at all would ultimately lead to less art and information being created and shared at all, if the creation process is unsustainable at an individual creator's level.

Yeah, well it's a good thing there are lots of alternatives to copyright that aren't 'no system at all'.