I had nothing to say to that. I agree with it.

One paragraph discusses action, the other discusses philosophy. I only took issue with your regressive philosophy. I’m open to correcting misunderstandings, elaborate if you feel I continue to miss something.

It’s a quote of an opinion, so in general I ignore them. I’m usually more interested in distilling ideas constructed with some line of reasoning.

But I guess we can look at this one. Find it’s essence. Tho it doesn’t seem very deep…

“Societies with rule of law are dictatorships. How leaders are selected and the existence of fundamental Constitutional rights is not a factor.”

So in short.

Having laws at all is a dictatorship.

Yeah, that is one of the opinions I’d ignore. It’s easy to have that opinion inside the walls of a lawed society.

Luckily it is valid to respond to an opinion with an opinion, and mine is that I imagine everyone (except the strongest with the most resources) would abandon that perspective as soon as they lived in a world with no laws.

you can still be an asshole, and have sympathy for the loss of accessible educational material strictly for the purposes of monetization. Unless you are one of these publishing companies, in which case you probably won’t be on the internet for very long.

But you should know who you could grow to be.

It wasn’t just “the corpos”, you can basically tie changes to the copyright system back to Disney trying to maintain a strangle hold on their fucking mouse.

https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/mickey/

Yeah, even the big names tend to not care much as long as nobody else is profiting off of their work. Agents and publishers, they tend to get right snippy about piracy lol.

Mind you, there is a segment of working authors that do suffer in their ability to go from a part time, almost hobbyist situation into a proper career of it. They tend to see the lack of sales as more of a problem, but they tend to be younger and didn’t ever see how impossible breaking in to traditional publishing was. It’s easy to look at your self published income and think “oh, if people had to buy these, I’d be making a living at this instead of it being barely enough to cover expenses for writing”. But, most of the time, back before self publishing was actually a valid and useful route, they wouldn’t have been selling anything, they’d be hoping for an agent to get their first sale for them.

And I’ll never tell anyone that they can’t profit from their own ideas and labor, and expect anyone consuming it to pay up. Authors that object, that’s fine by me (and I actually don’t pirate their stuff). But like you said, most writers would rather someone read and enjoy for free rather than not read at all.

You misunderstand me. When I say, “copyright is bullshit” I don’t mean that I don’t like it, or that it doesn’t work. I mean it’s bullshit in the same way that the crystal healing or mushroom cancer therapy is bullshit.

You cannot steal an idea, it’s impossible. So creating laws that punish people for doing things like copying a digital file doesn’t make sense. Copyright supposedly was created to create an incentive for artists and inventors to make cool and enriching stuff.

But what it actually does is protects business savvy people and allows them to game the system, get first mover advantage over all others, and then punish any potential competitors in that space.

As if nobody was creating artwork or inventing useful devices before copyright law came into being.

Just because something is useful doesn’t make it good, atomic bombs are useful, factory farming is useful.

I think the only thing people should be protected from as a creator is fraud. You can copy a person’s works and modify or distribute them in any manner you see fit, as long as it’s clear that you are not the original creator. You cannot claim to be them or to be affiliated with them unless you actually are.

That is what the principle of copyleft is all about. If copyright worked in principle, then you should see millions of individual creators enriched and protected by it.

But you don’t see that, instead, a few giant mega corps and super wealthy tycoons own and control enormous swaths of “intellectual property” and small time creators struggle to make ends meet and are sued into oblivion by the same powerful groups.

Sure it’s great for boosting wealth and GDP, but that boost does not apply to most of the population, it applies to the tiny elite that has now captures enormous segments of the market and fight tooth and nail to keep it that way.

Copyright is structurally flawed, it doesn’t work because it cannot work. It’s fundamentally based on a the nonsensical concept of “intellectual property” which as I said at the beginning, is bullshit.

Exactly. Copyright used to last 14 years and required an application for a one-time extension. Let’s go back to that.