It's broken, but getting rid of it entirely doesn't fix the problem. It makes it worse.
I think my general point is this:
In a world where energy, food, and real estate are inflating and wages are flat or deflating, it behooves us to be incredibly skeptical of any agenda or meme that devalues or takes leverage away from labor. Ask yourself "cui bono?"
"Information wants to be free" is another way of saying "I don't want to pay people for knowledge work or art." Now who wouldn't want to do that? Maybe... oh... I don't know... multi-billion-dollar companies that make money by shoveling "content" out to consumers in exchange for being able to track their every move and sell it to advertisers? If they have to pay for content, that's just a cost to them. So it behooves those industries to promote the meme that piracy is great and information should be free, since it helps to devalue the "content" that they need to keep their surveillance based marketing machines running.
I'm starting to see the purveyors of aggressive industrial-scale piracy as being analogous to the brown shirt types that used to go out and bust kneecaps of union members to intimidate them into accepting concessions. Dropping the bottom out of higher-priced content models makes producers of content more willing to accept pennies on the dollar later.
I've been skeptical of free for a while, but believe it or not the Snowden revelations really pushed me over the edge. It made it very clear that free == surveillance is the business model, and it therefore got me really thinking skeptically about the concept of free (as in beer).
I don't think it's always bad. I work on open source software. But I think it must be the creator's choice.
I'm also not a fan of the DMCA as written -- it contains some nasty and odious terms that are ripe for abuse like the "anti-circumvention" clause -- but in this case I think it's being used in the right way to shut down something that's deliberately abusive.
> It's broken, but getting rid of it entirely doesn't fix the problem. It makes it worse.
I never suggested that getting rid of it entirely would fix the problem.
> "Information wants to be free" is another way of saying "I don't want to pay people for knowledge work or art."
I'm not a fan of the mantra "information wants to be free," but I also don't think that opposing strict IP laws is equivalent to not wanting people to pay for knowledge or art. It might be equivalent to opposing the viability of certain business plans for monetizing IP, but there are other business plans for monetizing IP that don't rely on being subsidized by draconian and borderline orwellian IP enforcement.
I don't really see the connection you're trying to make between pro-piracy groups and massive advertising corporations.
"I don't really see the connection you're trying to make between pro-piracy groups and massive advertising corporations."
It's simple cause and effect.
If pay-for-content business models like traditional record sales, movies, etc. are non-viable in the Internet age due to aggressive piracy, then the only viable business models are indirect monetization.
Indirect monetization means finding ways to monetize the consumer -- surveillance, manipulation, propaganda, etc.
Free (as in beer) leads directly to creepy business models. Instead of paying directly for music, movies, etc., you pay for them indirectly by allowing the distribution network to monitor everything you do and sell that information to advertisers and who knows who else.
There's a whole other level too when you get into the subject of jailed platforms and DRM -- piracy creates a powerful economic incentive to develop and aggressively deploy tools to restrict how you use your computer. Think the DMCA is draconian? Wait until your CPU will only execute code signed by a key embedded in the hardware. Abusing freedom to abuse others is one way to lose it, since after a while it leads to a perverse environment where good people who otherwise would support freedom start opposing it for legitimate reasons.
Edit:
Replying here since HN doesn't like deep discussions and limits them. "You're posting too frequently..."
I'm not making a boolean logic error because I am not engaging in boolean logic. I'm talking about the incentive structure of the market. It's analog logic-- not either-or but more-less. Does the market favor this business model more or less than that one? A market replete with piracy is one that is tilted far toward indirect business models almost to the exclusion of direct ones.
Your fallacy is very simple. You're saying that ¬A ⇒ B, and implying that it means that A ⇒ ¬B, with A=direct and B=indirect monetization.
The conclusion doesn't follow. There's no reason to believe that enforcing direct monetization will reduce indirect monetization, and history shows that creepy and manipulative is and was being used way before "home taping was killing music."
I think my general point is this:
In a world where energy, food, and real estate are inflating and wages are flat or deflating, it behooves us to be incredibly skeptical of any agenda or meme that devalues or takes leverage away from labor. Ask yourself "cui bono?"
"Information wants to be free" is another way of saying "I don't want to pay people for knowledge work or art." Now who wouldn't want to do that? Maybe... oh... I don't know... multi-billion-dollar companies that make money by shoveling "content" out to consumers in exchange for being able to track their every move and sell it to advertisers? If they have to pay for content, that's just a cost to them. So it behooves those industries to promote the meme that piracy is great and information should be free, since it helps to devalue the "content" that they need to keep their surveillance based marketing machines running.
I'm starting to see the purveyors of aggressive industrial-scale piracy as being analogous to the brown shirt types that used to go out and bust kneecaps of union members to intimidate them into accepting concessions. Dropping the bottom out of higher-priced content models makes producers of content more willing to accept pennies on the dollar later.
I've been skeptical of free for a while, but believe it or not the Snowden revelations really pushed me over the edge. It made it very clear that free == surveillance is the business model, and it therefore got me really thinking skeptically about the concept of free (as in beer).
I don't think it's always bad. I work on open source software. But I think it must be the creator's choice.
I'm also not a fan of the DMCA as written -- it contains some nasty and odious terms that are ripe for abuse like the "anti-circumvention" clause -- but in this case I think it's being used in the right way to shut down something that's deliberately abusive.