Your entire argument boils down to the idea that musicians shouldn't own distribution rights to their work and that sass software licenses should be free. It's a stupid position to hold that falls apart immediately.
So yes, either you're under thirty and haven't thought it through or your ability to reason about this stuff is limited.
> Your entire argument boils down to the idea that musicians shouldn't own distribution rights to their work and that sass software licenses should be free.
Not really. It's about copying not being the same, in benefits and drawbacks, as stealing. If you want to engage in good faith debate, you should acknowledge the difference.
Copying datas/ideas is easy, beneficial to many and not at all clear to always be harmful to society.
I'm being pretty good faith about this, I just don't appreciate people who can't read.
The theoretical benefits to society from distributing people's IP for free is that people who otherwise couldn't afford the money for a book or song or piece of software are able to use it.
Of course, it becomes impossible to support yourself as an indie producer of (software/music/literature/etc) in a world where your work can be taken for free. That reduces the number of people who can participate in the creation of that sort of thing to hobbyists and large businesses that are capable of protecting their IP through other avenues.
Getting rid of intellectual property rights is a short sighted exercise and all you end up doing once you've run through the trove of contemporary and historical IP is impoverishing the world to a much greater degree by destroying incentives for creators to create new things.
The only solutions that I've heard defenders come up with is some version of <hand waving> "it doesn't matter, people will still produce art" Yeah, people will produce, but like 1/10th what they could if they can't make a living off it or aren't trust funders.
Current copyright is life of the author + 70, which is too long. Still, even in that situation, those who wouldn't otherwise have access to those books will eventually get it for free as works enter public domain. If you want to argue that we should drastically reduce the length of copyright, I'd agree with you. But pretending that IP theft doesn't matter is naive.
In your line of argumentation, if we enforced the ban on copying books, songs, movies perfectly, we would get much more of them.
Is this what we want though?
We are flooded with bad quality books, songs, movies, and it is hard to find something worth the time of a consumer who expects quality.
This flood of rubbish is apparently immensely profitable, even while all the copying is going on.
Why would high penalties for copying increase the average quality of production? There would be even more money in the business, attracting even more rubbish production.
If it's not possible to make a living at a vocation, all you will get is amateur participants. Even the most talented will have to find other things to do with their time in order to support themselves.
Contrary to the above sibling comment, amateurs do not often produce better art than professionals—promising amateurs learn their craft as professionals and tend to produce their best work mid-career. This conflicts with the lay understanding of creative endeavors, of course.
> If it's not possible to make a living at a vocation, all you will get is amateur participants.
Any examples? Do you believe the widespread availability of stuff on the internet makes it not possible to make a living writing software, books, TV show scripts or creating music?
> But pretending that IP theft doesn't matter is naive
I agree with you in the sense that distributing stuff on the Internet for free may cause lower revenue of the author than there would be without that. But the author and distributor should be aware of the Internet and its tendency to copy what is of interest and execute marketing/selling strategy to make it work anyway. Many do.
This is the "it's easy to steal so it's okay" argument, which I addressed up thread in a sibling comment about the dynamics of IP on the internet.
Yes, the conditions are as they are. Literature by dint of being pure text is probably in deep shit, but that's not what we're talking about—we're talking about whether the wide scale tragedy of the commons that is zero-friction IP theft is on balance, a bad thing.
No, it's the "internet is the platform for sharing" argument. Copying, sharing work of others is not, in essence, stealing that work. It is sharing that work, maybe illegaly, but then it is illegal sharing, not stealing.
