Justice at Spotify

dear Breck, I've been appreciating your posts on IP, and your campaigning for this cause overall.

I'm wondering if you knew that Karl Marx summed up the desire of communists in one sentence [in The Communist Manifesto]?

"...the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property." [1]

That's it.

That's what all the fuss is about. It was a revelation to me because it seemed too simple at first, yet that's all that communists desire to bring about. This desire includes abolishing 'intellectual property' (trade secrets, copyrighted material, patented processes etc.). As you rightly described, any human knowledge originates socially to start with: “We are all putting grains of sand on mountains built by our ancestors”. This inheritance is what we aim to communize. Even though the communist manifesto is over 170 years old, Marx' critique remains as relevant as relevant as ever: capitalist firms caused the opioid crisis in the US; all over the world there's a landlord crisis - with many suffering homelessness (despite there being vacant buildings) [2]; capitalists have moved much of the industrial production to the global south - e.g. clothes are produced in sweatshops in China/Bangladesh/Eritrea; Playstations are causing wars in Congo [3]; our smartphones are made with conflict resources [4]; and we have a toxic e-waste crisis that is blocking us from re-using black-boxed hardware/components (as well as trade secrets and patents stopping many from being able to learn about technology and science in the first place - artificial scarcity of expertise created by capitalists) - as well as well as this e-waste leaching chemicals and poisoning the land, predominantly in the global south [5].

With 'abolishing private property' we don't mean that we want to get rid of the idea of all property systems. We want to get rid of today's bourgeois property system, as it has allowed a small minority to exclude others and plunder the commons [6], resulting in the division of labor and alienation. It's not about having a big or small capitalist government (capitalist governments are the ones who grant monopolies in the first place). We want full democracy in the workplace. That is what we call socialism, communism, or a communist production system. We also believe that this system, communism, is humanity's true nature.

The reason we have been persecuted is because many capitalists are very happy with their 'haul' (and the power-over others domination that comes with it), and because we communists want to continually ask the question: "how we can constantly expand who benefits from new science and technology?" (which we refer to as communizing/socializing the means of production).

I'm a bit scared this might be something you already know, so please do let me know if I've overstepped. My yearning by writing this is to meet my needs for connection, clarity and cooperation, yet this might not be the best strategy.

I also want to share with you this awesome video I watched a few days ago, in case it interests you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--TsGaNyr0U

[1] The Communist Manifesto (chapter 2), https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-m...

[2] Push (2019) - a short new documentary about venture capital and the financialization of housing. Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2iLWpuZrd-I, full: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWSVG9nsRa4 (you can easily download with yt1s.com if you're not currently in the US/Canada, if it's geo-blocked)

[3] Inside Africa's 'PlayStation War', https://www.wired.com/2008/07/the-playstation-2/, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2J7efsz_Y-c

[4] Blood in the Mobile, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tv-hE4Yx0LU

[5] Agbobloshie, Ghana https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mleQVO1Vd1I

[6] Professor Guy Standing on 'rentier capitalism', https://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-08-03/book-day-corru...

Copyrights and patents are the opposite of property. The term "intellectual property" is a complete lie. You could probably make a strong case that it is proof there is such a thing as a "Big Lie".

If you have copyrights and patents, you do not have property rights. Once you implement those, you then remove the rights people have over their atomic property, like computers and paper and printers et cetera.

You cannot have a logical conversation with anyone who uses the term "intellectual property", because at that point it would be like trying to talk to someone about "fire water". There is no such thing.

The reason why that term became so big is that because during the Cold War capitalism and property rights were all the rage, so the proponents of copyrights and patents jumped on the bandwagon and rebranded their issues to be about property rights, even though they were the opposite. It was a very shrewd move, and I'm amazed at how effective it was. It would be like the cigarette industry was able to convince people that cigarettes were actually "health sticks".

That is why you will never see me ever ever use that term, and instead I will refer to them as "Imaginary Property" rights, and encourage everyone else to do so (I read the "Imaginary Property" term for the first time right here on HN).

So all that said, I am a strong believer in property rights. I believe Marx was wrong, and that property rights are an engineering solution to the problem of "how do we assign decision making power over scarce atoms in an efficient way".

I believe the real problem is copyrights and parents. Abolish those and you will eventually unchain the minds of billions of people, and we will be living in a lot more intelligent and prosperous world.

It very well may not be sustainable. But I guess my point is that Spotify's business model might turn out to not be sustainable if artists decide it's not worth it to have their music on it.

If they don't decide that, then of course, maybe you just can't make a living selling music through Spotify.

You could probably make a living as a musician in other ways, though.

Netflix understands this as they have become content creators.

Do you know you have to pay the distributors to upload? Its not like YouTube. From the getgo you are paying someone.