Paul Graham has lost the plot

Although there was some to disagree with in Graham's essay, he had some interesting insight. The restaurant smells analogy is the least bad I've heard so far.

This response was flimsy.

    > This is a flawed analogy. Cooking smells are a
    > positive externality – they’re generated as a
    > by-product of providing a service to paying patrons.
    > But commercially released music is produced
    > specifically for the purpose of being heard, and
    > paid for (whether by the buyer, or by a royalty
    > from a radio station). 

So let's consider that you commercialised the sale of cooking smells. What would be the result? A bunch of providers would crop up dedicated to providing smells. They wouldn't bother with the food - they'd just sell the smells. And they'd talk about "smell innovation".

That's similar to the situation we have with commercial music venues. The government extends property rights to things that are both (1) not property and which (2) have a very different dynamic to property. And then dedicate operators set up to harvest that.

The people producing cooking smells wouldn't be restaurants producing food innovation. The restaurants themselves wouldn't have time to spend chasing after fiddly smell licensing arrangements, and paying up lawyers to go chasing after freeloaders. They're too busy running actual restaurants. Just as it is where the people producing music aren't themselves the music artists, and except for a tiny (although highly visible) fraction, music artists (even world class music artists) do not benefit from copyright protection.

The article goes on to claim that music costs money to produce - ludicrous. You can put a microphone under a jazz musician and then publish it on the internet and it's first class music. You can take a laptop into a symphone orchestra concert and record it. Recording and distributing things is so free of cost that the commercial music industry has to go out of its way to find mechanisms to shut down the people who do it, and to get the government to protect it.

I'm in the privacy of my room. Someone is broadcasting radio into my space. Why the hell shouldn't I flip some magnetic signals and bottle it, and give it to my friends if I want to? Or sell it? It's my damn room and media.

It significantly impedes our freedom. It makes us criminals in our own homes. And it doesn't delivery to the people whos interest it is justified by. It creates a sea of lobbyists who need to extend the policy further and further into our lives just so they can stay in the same place. It is indefensible, disgusting policy failure on a grand scale.

It's important to stress that intellectual property innovation occurs because people have a problem to solve. I wrote a franchise system for an events company because - surprise surprise - they had a franchise, and wanted software to better run it.

Mendellsohn wrote the Scottish symphony because he was inspired to do so. Orchestras perform works because people come to their concerts to experience the sound and atmosphere and variation, despite having high quality recordings at home. IBM funds linux because it wants an operating system capability for its servers.

However, the mamoth presence of things that leverage copyright in the market and in our lives distorts our perspective. Because of its legal advantages and the privilege it pushes focus away from artists, and leads to crazy circular logic of the sort shown in this article. You could simplify many of the points as, "The world is this way, therefore the world must be this way."

There was a time hundreds of years ago when the church had a monopoly on education. They would have tried to claim that without strong privilege, education would not happen. It's a lie.

IP law is holding us back, but you need to use your brain to see past the world we live in to the opportunities we're missing out of because of all these protected gangsters who dominate the channels.

Near the end I see bold text,

"What would happen if creators couldn’t charge for their creations?"

You can charge for your creation. Steam has mechanisms for getting people to buy from them, and to make it difficult for people to run steam software they haven't paid for. Good for them.

But you shouldn't have the right to get the government to annoint business models for you, or to be your enforcer. Copyright and patents are not property, and they should be described that way or treated that way in law.

Clearly he is talking about copies of software too. It's changing from Adobe PS type software to a subscription cloud based software. You can still certainly make money with software but your not gonna make as much selling just copies of software.

I personally think copyright can be a good thing. My beef is with the never ending length extensions and that everything including the piece of napkin I used to doodle on earlier is covered by it.

I think the solution is more to push for it to become registration based and offer companies a way to extend the copyright for a fee that increases exponentially with time. Lets say the first 10 years is free everything after starts to cost you more and more.

That way I feel that you let things like orphan works be preserved and used even if they are not longer worth enough money to keep under copyright and publish.

Also have the database of what is under copyright be available to everyone so that right holders can be located and licensing can be made easier. These records can be maintain with the money obtain from copyrighting fees.

And also, fix issues with fair use such as breaking DRM being made not illegal.

Linux is subsidized by large players who need an open platform on which to provide other services. This includes companies like Google who provide advertising based upon things that run on linux and companies like IBM who sell proprietary software that runs on Linux and support contracts for those products.

There are very few viable, large-scale open source projects that are run on developer free time alone.

> People paint, write, sing and act all the time without compensation of any kind.

Because they choose not to exercise their right to profit from it?