Debunk The Myth That Copyright Is Needed To Make Money

Source bias is a concern when the source is supplying unverifiable facts. When a source is supplying reasoning, it can be evaluated for consistency and validity independent of the source and attacking the source is just the ad hominem fallacy.

Incidentally, who do you think would be making anti-copyright arguments, Christopher Dodd?

>Aside from that, this whole article is one strawman after another.

A strawman is when you take a weak argument that opponents never made and proceed to knock it down, then use the failure of the weak argument to argue that a stronger argument is also wrong. In this case, the positions being attacked are ones that have actually been taken by industry supporters at various points during lobbying efforts to pass copyright legislation. Perhaps there are stronger arguments in favor of copyright than the ones the industry has been putting forward, but then let's hear those in the halls of Congress and stop hearing the ones that are so ridiculous that you think they're strawman arguments.

>Really, all the anti-copyright people have to do to make a rock solid argument for their case is show that industrial-scale creative work is more effective using alternative business models rather than relying on copyright.

The only real way to actually test the hypothesis that creativity would thrive in today's economy in the absence of copyright is to have the absence of copyright for a while and see what happens. For example, how else can you tell what derivative works would be created if permission was not required to produce them for commercial gain? (And hey, if we try not having copyright for a decade or two and it turns out badly, we can always put it back.)

And to be frank, I'm unlikely to be swayed by the kinds of pages you linked to indirectly in your reply, either, because they appear to repeat the same poorly thought out arguments as everyone else.

Sure, performing musicians can make money playing live. Shame if you're a composer or lyricist or a technician in the recording studio, I guess.

Sure, people can make low budget computer games and sell them for a nominal amount to an audience of geeks sympathetic to their pricing model. Shame if you want to play a AAA grade game with realistic graphics, professional quality character designs, professional quality voice acting, professional quality orchestral score, well-balanced gameplay, non-repetitive level designs, and an AI smarter than a snail, I guess.

Sure, we can find plenty of pulp fiction quality self-published stories on-line for free. Shame if you need a well-structured, professionally edited textbook for your kid's math class complete with a full set of exercises, I guess.

The same pattern comes up time and again in the cheap shots against copyright. Usually, the argument is either some variation of "plenty of work gets made anyway" but looking only at quantity and not quality, or some variation of "the artists can earn money by {some other model}" but without taking into account all the people who genuinely contribute to producing good work but aren't the immediate performer.

And then someone comes along and points out the isolated exceptions: a handful of big name FOSS products (invariably in fields that are widely applicable and attractive to a lot of geeks, which is a tiny part of the overall software landscape, and invariably ignoring any role copyright played in the development model of those products), a couple of performers who've made money with a high profile online experiment (usually people who were already well known thanks to their earlier work funded by more traditional models), and so on.

One of these days, I'd like to start a page with all the eternally repeated examples in this context and try to figure out how many of them there really are and what proportion of their overall industries they actually represent. Alas, since no-one is going to pay me for that work, I had better go back to building my copyright-protected company where the revenues do go straight to the handful of people who are putting in huge amounts of hard work to do things no-one has ever done before, which apparently doesn't exist in Falkvinge's mind because we're all under 40.

> Myth: Without the incentive of possibly getting money, nobody will go into artistry and create.

That isn't even close to the same thing, and neither was your second example. Like Falkvinge, you have turned a relative position (without copyright, less of X would be made) into an absolute (without copyright, none of X would be made). I have never seen anyone, not even the most corrupt media industry lobbyist or the most position-distorting, bought-and-paid-for politician, argue complete absolutes like that.

More importantly, I have certainly never seen anyone genuinely interested in changing copyright law for the better promoting such a position. There are alternatives to the mess that is today's implementation of copyright that don't involve killing the entire principle.

Why is free-riding bad unless it reduces the incentive for innovation? If half the world can free-ride on something with no marginal cost that will be produced regardless of the free-riding, the result is greater economic efficiency.

>You think any sensible VC would have invested in Microsoft if there was nothing preventing Tandy, etc, from buying a single IBM machine, copying the OS off the disks, and selling as many machines with Windows loaded as they wanted without paying any licensing fees to Microsoft?

I don't think anyone is suggesting that Microsoft would be able to survive with the same business model in the absence of copyright. But the real question is, would there still be operating systems? And obviously there would be -- at the very least BSD and GNU/Linux and the like.

>Also, let's not rewrite history here. Intellectual proponents of copyright and patent law include people like Thomas Jefferson, who none would accuse of being a monarchist.

The text below was written by Thomas Jefferson -- it isn't exactly a ringing endorsement:

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody. Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices.

"You think any sensible VC would have invested in Microsoft if..." What you mean is, "Do you think Microsoft would have had the same business model if...", No I don't think they would have. Would billions still have been made on the PC market? Of fucking course.

The rest of your comment is pretty ranty and without a concrete argument.