Paul Graham has lost the plot • Hacker News Board

Re: Paul Graham has lost the plot

#11

Post by rdw » Wed, Mar 21, 2012, 6:14 PM UTC

It bugs me that we haven't moved past "What would happen if creators couldn’t charge for their creations" in these discussions. It's an extreme strawman. No one -- not Graham, not Richard Stallman, not Julian Assange -- is interested in making it impossible to make money from creating stuff.

Copyright is simply one means of accomplishing the end goal of paying creators, and certainly not the only one. I'd like to hear an argument in favor of copyright-exactly-as-it-is that doesn't involve this logical fallacy.

Re: Paul Graham has lost the plot

#12

Post by barrkel » Wed, Mar 21, 2012, 6:14 PM UTC

As Bruce Waria says in a comment on his own Music Think Tank piece, by Graham’s logic he should force all the companies he invests in to open source the code which he funded, or allow anyone to embed their technology without compensation or conditions attached.

This wouldn't actually follow PG's logic. Using code does not necessarily require the end user copying it, especially for web-based software which is mostly run remotely. Consuming media necessarily requires copying it to somewhere - to your nerve endings, at the very least.

Re: Paul Graham has lost the plot

#13

Post by jjcm » Wed, Mar 21, 2012, 6:17 PM UTC

Your analogy is flawed. Air doesn't cost anything, but sound waves dont cost anything either. The data that's embeded in it (whether it's a smell or a song) has a cost to produce. It costs money and experience to cook the food. It costs money and experience to produce the songs.

Re: Paul Graham has lost the plot

#14

Post by kirinan » Wed, Mar 21, 2012, 6:17 PM UTC

I disagree with the point of the blog post. While it doesn't make sense that we people would charge for air pipes to be dragged to earth from the moon in order to use the smells produced (because of legislation), it is perfectly analogous to what the RIAA and MPAA do when they try to influence legislation to stop pirating. Instead of targeting the root cause of the problem (cost and quality), they chose to legislate away rights (SOPA) on the internet. This is similar to the smells example because instead of allowing you to breath the free air, we are going to make you breath our air because we feel its better. This makes no sense, and is hazardous to not only open enterprise but the freedoms that we have.

Re: Paul Graham has lost the plot

#15

Post by FrojoS » Wed, Mar 21, 2012, 6:17 PM UTC

'When you're abusing the legal system by trying to use mass lawsuits against randomly chosen people as a form of exemplary punishment, or lobbying for laws that would break the Internet if they passed, that's ipso facto evidence you're using a definition of property that doesn't work.' - PG

Brilliant. I was expecting something controversial. But, I assume, that at least within this community what PG says here, is the opinion of the majority.

Re: Paul Graham has lost the plot

#16

Post by rdtsc » Wed, Mar 21, 2012, 6:18 PM UTC

There is a difference between a prescriptive argument and descriptive (and I just made these up on the spot). A prescriptive argument admonishes others to do something. So for example he would admonish people to pirate because information is like smells. A descriptive argument describes what the situation is without necessarily telling others what to do. This is the argument that I see pg making. Basically the idea that information is easily distributed, and that it will be distributed. Trying to contain it with more antiquated laws is like trying to plug all the holes in a sieve. In other words the future is looking this way whether recording companies want it to or not. And then he proposes thinking about a different way of distributing music.

Re: Paul Graham has lost the plot

#17

Post by ef4 » Wed, Mar 21, 2012, 6:20 PM UTC

laglad wrote: post #7

Doesn't it cost money to produce the smell? As pg mentioned, if on the moon, they charged for smells because they had a delivery mechanism to ration the smell to you, wouldn't that be accounted for in their value offering? The reason that point is important is because regardless of the value derived by the end user, it is the ability to extract value that counts for the producer. And when smell cannot be rationed, or…

> Doesn't it cost money to produce the smell?

The author's point on this is that there's already a paying customer who covers the cost of producing the smell (by buying the meal).

Which just goes to show you can't push a metaphor too far. I still agree more with PG's conclusion. It really is a strawman to claim that copyright is the only way to pay creators.

Re: Paul Graham has lost the plot

#18

Post by J3L2404 » Wed, Mar 21, 2012, 6:20 PM UTC

timmm wrote: post #8

I haven't heard anyone articulate the problem better than PG. The analogy isn't perfect but it's sufficient. The point, Paul Graham says, is that in our history we've limited what we sell to what makes sense to sell. Land used to make no sense to sell. Shit changes it now makes sense. Copies of music doesn't really make sense anymore either.

What about copies of software?

Hype (which is great) for example. Can he really tell his investors that people downloading it from TPB is no problem? In theory his thesis is fine, in reality not so much.

Re: Paul Graham has lost the plot

#19

Post by kijin » Wed, Mar 21, 2012, 6:25 PM UTC

> Cooking smells are a positive externality ...[snip]... But commercially released music is produced specifically for the purpose of being heard, and paid for ...[snip]... The true equivalent would be someone standing outside the fence of a music festival, enjoying the sounds without having paid.

It depends on what you mean by "being heard". Some people think the only acceptable business model for music is for musicians to perform live. If we were to follow this line of thought, what's the difference between listening to music outside the concert grounds and listening to music stored on a digital device? In neither case are you participating in the live performance. In neither case have you reduced the artist's net worth by a single penny, provided that you never intended to attend the live performance anyway.

> What would happen if creators couldn’t charge for their creations? The same as if you couldn’t charge for lines of computer code: there’d be less of it.

And maybe that would be a good thing, as some other commenters have already suggested. Maybe it's not a morally acceptable business model to charge money for making copies of existing code. More companies should be charging money for the value-added services they offer, like making it easier for us to access music and apps, and offering subscriptions. If you don't want people to copy your code without paying, don't release it publicly in the first place, and only release it to people who sign NDAs. That's how business secrets work, right?

I'm not sure if I want to agree 100% with these lines of thought, but it's an interesting thought experiment.

Edit: Added paragraph.

Re: Paul Graham has lost the plot

#20

Post by rlpb » Wed, Mar 21, 2012, 6:25 PM UTC

Music existed before copyright did. I remain unconvinced that music costs money to produce. Art gets produced for the sake of art, not for compensation. Specific forms of art (say for example big budget movies) may be an exception, but then the argument needs to shift accordingly.