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Paul Graham has lost the plot

mishandrob.com

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Re: Paul Graham has lost the plot

#271

Post by oz »

I have always found it difficult to understand how people manage to convince themselves that the creator of a work does not have the right to charge for it. For

To those who make impassioned pleas that technology has made copyright obsolete, what if there were a technology that allowed the wholesale copying of your profitable Saas/PaaS from AWS? Sure, the code you wrote is still on the server, but is that something you would condone? All the months of hard work and crunch mode, being made to benefit another without your consent? Does that feel right?

Didn't think so.

Re: Paul Graham has lost the plot

#272

Post by dkersten »

andylei wrote: post #192
anonymoushn wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The OP strongly implies that "The presence of copyright" is the same as "The ability to charge money," and much of the discussion here also assumes that. It is simply not true, though. I would rather discuss what the OP is actually about than the thing that the OP would prefer to substitute for its subject matter to make its case seem better than it is.

my point is still the same. the question is not how people consume apps, its how many of those apps are produced.

There are lots of free apps and a lot of the nonfree apps dont make any money, but people still make new apps.

Re: Paul Graham has lost the plot

#273

Post by meow »

citricsquid wrote: post #259
vibrunazo wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People pirate music because it's free I do think that's incorrect, but there's a broader picture issue that makes this irrelevant: Why does it even matter? You're misunderstanding the original argument. Of course it's possible to make some money for selling something that is free. Specially if you convince people that it's not free, and that you'll go to jail if you do otherwise. But what they mean with "there's no…

So the billions of dollars that exist for developers because of the app store are not value to the economy? huh?

Piracy is a reality in app stores. But you don't see developers running around to sue people downloading pirated copies. That's because they acknowledged that these people won't pay them and focus their efforts on people who do pay them. Most of the apps even have free versions just so that users can sample they app and judge it for them selves before buying it. All these are adaptations to the environment in which they operate. Content industry on the other hand refuses to adapt.

Re: Paul Graham has lost the plot

#274

Post by meow »

zasz wrote: post #78
InclinedPlane wrote: post #27

I'll just cherry pick this gem here: "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." Spotted the massive, gaping flaw in the argument yet? It's 2012, if you make this argument then I am done with you. Linux is how old? How much of the internet runs on it? Done. Edit: Wow, really? Why is this still a necessary ar…

OP said that there would be less of it, not that it would be nonexistent. Linux is probably an exception, and not the rule, and it is such an exception that large companies are willing to subsidize it. I've been looking for some good sound editing software, and the only solution I could find that was good at altering tempo without creating weird artifacts was closed-source and proprietary. I've also rarely played any…

Exception ?

MongoDB, Wordpress (and all other blogging frameworks), MySQL, the list keeps going... they are out there for free because the creators figured out a way for it to be free why still getting paid (service contracts in most cases).. Being free didn't even reduce their quality (it probably enhanced it)...

Re: Paul Graham has lost the plot

#275

Post by earbitscom »

raganwald wrote: post #261
earbitscom wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are in the market of selling pictures of cars and you take a rare (in fact, entirely unique) photograph of a car, then someone else takes a picture of your picture and sets up shop next door to give them away for free, they have deprived you of your ability to earn money from distributing that which you invested in the creation of. Just like diluting your equity in a company, they have not taken your physical…

Or let's say that I am the brother of El Presidente, and I run the state monopoly on cigars, and farmers grow tobacco and sell cigars directly to tourists, they re depriving me of the value of my mnopoly. But they aren't depriving me of my tobacco. The two are different, which is why the morality of the two are different. Nobody denies that being able to get the police to enforce a monopoly has value, but it's not th…

You're comparing someone selling a similar product that they had to grow on their own land using their own resources to someone taking a product that is completely unique and cannot be found in nature, and diluting your value from it down significantly without any financial repercussions to themselves. Apples and oranges.

Re: Paul Graham has lost the plot

#276

Post by sophacles »

davidw wrote: post #177
sophacles wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you pay a door fee to see a show, you are paying for the content: a live band performing their songs. Also: some bands sell CDs, some give them away, lately fewer are selling, but instead are giving away passes at download sites. Even those that sell the CDs give away at least half if not more of them, because they would rather people listen to them and come back for the next show, and tell their friends, making…

No, you're not paying for the content itself, you're paying for the band's time, and the limited amount of space in the venue - like you said, the performance; but not the content. Those are both scarce resources, whereas the actual bits are not: you could stream that out on the internet to a virtually infinite number of people. Now, how about authors?

Actually, you are paying for the content too. The content is the driver for the scarce space in a venue. Ever been to a concert bar on nights without a show? They are dead, there is no reason to be there without the music. Similarly, most people don't say "will there be a band there tonight?", they say "which band will be there tonight?", implying the music is at least as important as the fact there is a band and a bar. Putting it on the internet doesn't actually matter, many venues do that, and are sold out anyway. Being on the scene is actually important to a lot of people.

As for authors, I wasn't talking about them, and I'm not going to play strawman games with you.

Re: Paul Graham has lost the plot

#277

Post by sophacles »

davidw wrote: post #242
lutorm wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Producing less of it, yeah, maybe. But people seem to be forgetting that producing content or enriching content creators is not the goal of copyright law. It's supposed to "further the progress of science and the useful arts", and there is clearly a tradeoff between allowing people to copy versus allowing creators to monetize their creations.

It's supposed to be a tradeoff, exactly. The reason why you want producers to get money is so that they can keep producing stuff you like.

So it is only a tradeoff when they get all the money they possibly can by making the stuff less useful to us? Sorry, that is absurd. No one is saying they shouldn't be paid, just paid with a different model, that the tech has changed, and the model should change with it. Preserving the status quo, against the changes wrought by technical progress (a useful art resulting from scientific progress) is sort of the opposite of "furthering the progress" of those things.

Re: Paul Graham has lost the plot

#278

Post by angersock »

drewcrawford wrote: post #266
angersock wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(that kind of comment saved HN bandwidth several dozen KB, I wager. But, have it your way.) Your argument about scarcity is akin to saying "Never mind that we have trees that drop fruit on the ground for everyone into perpetuity--when you consider that we collect some fruit, cart it off to town, polish it, and cart it back, and sell it, of course fruit is a scarce resource!" If the time/effort would've been expended…

> (that kind of comment saved HN bandwidth several dozen KB, I wager. But, have it your way.) Come on now, you've been here long enough to know that's not how HN works. It's about basic respect towards others--not just to the poster, but to all of us here on HN. As a developer (and someone who runs a development shop?) you know that developer time is important. A comment is 10 seconds to write but will be broadcast o…

You know, you raise a pretty good point. I screwed up in the heat of the moment.

I can go to great lengths to explain that the copyright/IP battle is uphill, and that every talking point parroted blindly and every baseless assertion made without logic is just more deadweight we have to work against, and that the (relative few) people trying to work for a better future can't afford to treat unsubstantiated remarks with anything less than full-on ridicule and insult. That's all well and good.

But, really, this is about respect, and regardless of how I feel on the topic, I crossed a line in what is otherwise a place of civil discourse (and the occasional lighthearted troll).

Thanks for calling me out on that.

Re: Paul Graham has lost the plot

#279

Post by superuser2 »

qdog wrote: post #21

I don't know why this is upvoted so much. PG's article seems pretty clear. The problem I have with this article is the association of investment with a 'right' to recoup that investment. There is no inherent right to recoup investment money of this type. NONE! It doesn't matter how hard something is to produce, there is no inherent right to make a profit based on that effort. People paint, write, sing and act all the…

If you believe people have no right to recoup the time you invest in writing code (or whatever it is you do for a living), then you would continue to show up for work every morning if your paycheck stopped?

Re: Paul Graham has lost the plot

#280

Post by andylei »

dkersten wrote: post #272
andylei wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

my point is still the same. the question is not how people consume apps, its how many of those apps are produced.

There are lots of free apps and a lot of the nonfree apps dont make any money, but people still make new apps.

again, what you are saying is true, but it doesn't have anything to do with the argument

no one thinks that not being able to charge money = no apps. the argument is over whether not being able to charge money = less apps.

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