Profiting Without Copyright: JK Rowling scenario

Imagine someone like JK Rowling.

She writes a Harry Potter novel. She sells copies on her site and makes a bit of money, but then it gets popular so pirated copies start circulating too. She then becomes wildly popular, in part due to piracy. And probably 90% of the people who got bootleg copies would not have bought the book anyway. So she loses some sales, but now she is very popular.

So she has book 2 written. She posts a note on her site to her fans saying that she has book 2 ready to go, and she’ll release it as soon as she gets a million pre-orders for $5 each. In a month she has $5M in the bank and so she releases the book. And then she makes another couple million more, and then sales taper off because of piracy and normal attenuation. Then she repeats this with the next 5 books. Soon she is worth $100M.

Meanwhile three different movie studios begin making a movie version of her first novel–without her permission. She gets no payment but on the other hand this drives more sales of her earlier and upcoming books–it acts as advertising for her. But one of the three movie studios, realizing it has competition from the other two, seeks a way to distinguish its movie. It approaches Rowling and asks her to consult on the movie and to promote the movie as the “best” and “authorized” version. They pay her $1M plus 2% of box office receipts, and she consults, helps improve it, and makes sure they don’t adulterate her plot too much etc. Or maybe she helps with the screenplay. In any case the “authorized” movie does way better at the box office than the unauthorized versions–if you were a Harry Potter fan which of the 3 would you want to see? Maybe all 3. but if you could only see one…. the one the author authorized of course.

And let’s say all this was on a lower scale. The money might not be as much, … but maybe the author is famous enough to get a job offer teaching in an English literature department. Or writing or polishing screenplays. Or copyediting others’ draft novels for a fee.

Conversation with an author about copyright and publishing in a free society

Richard Stallman: Reject the propaganda terms that developer of proprietary software use to demonize cooperation and sharing. Terms like Pirate.

“And you should also reject the propaganda terms that the developer of proprietary software use to demonize cooperation and sharing. Terms like pirate.

Because what do they mean when they use it and apply it to people who share copies of things?
They’re trying to trick us into supposing without question, that helping your neighbour is the moral equivalent of attacking a ship. And nothing could be more wrong than that.
Because attacking ships is very bad and helping your neighbour is good.

… Don’t accept the enemy’s propaganda. Pirate is one example of a propaganda term. When they falsely label copyright infringement as theft, that is a propaganda term. Don’t fall into it. Complain. Criticize when someone makes that mistake.”

• Richard Stallman

Richard Stallman: You should refuse to accept programs that require you to betray your community

“If someone offers me a program, on the condition not to share it with you. Then no matter how useful or how convenient it is for me, I reject it. I will not accept a copy of that program.

I tell that person offering me that treacherous deal, Get out of here. Take your nasty evil program with you. And that’s what you should do too. You should refuse to accept programs that require you to betray your community.”

• Richard Stallman

Crosbie Fitch: Pay artists you like

Make copies of art, give them to friends, even sell them. Find art via @tpb, pay artists you like, make art yourself, but ignore #copyright.

• Crosbie Fitch

https://twitter.com/Crosbie/status/274075309219905536

House Republicans: Copyright Law Destroys Markets; It’s Time For Real Reform

1. That the purpose of copyright is to compensate the creator. No, it correctly notes, it’s about benefiting the public:

Thus, according to the Constitution, the overriding purpose of the copyright system is to “promote the progress of science and useful arts.” In today’s terminology we may say that the purpose is to lead to maximum productivity and innovation.

This is a major distinction, because most legislative discussions on this topic, particularly during the extension of the copyright term, are not premised upon what is in the public good or what will promote the most productivity and innovation, but rather what the content creators “deserve” or are “entitled to” by virtue of their creation. This lexicon is appropriate in the realm of taxation and sometimes in the realm of trade protection, but it is inappropriate in the realm of patents and copyrights.

2. That copyright is a representation of free market capitalization. The paper properly notes that the reality is the exact opposite:

Copyright violates nearly every tenet of laissez faire capitalism. Under the current system of copyright, producers of content are entitled to a guaranteed, government instituted, government subsidized content-monopoly.

3. That the current copyright regime leads to the greatest level of innovation and productivity. That makes no sense at all, the paper says:

Today’s legal regime of copyright law is seen by many as a form of corporate welfare that hurts innovation and hurts the consumer. It is a system that picks winners and losers, and the losers are new industries that could generate new wealth and added value. We frankly may have no idea how it actually hurts innovation, because we don’t know what isn’t able to be produced as a result of our current system.

“Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.”

• Alfred North Whitehead, Introduction to Mathematics (1911) —English mathematician & philosopher (1861 – 1947)

…. such as copying.
http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/30283.html

“Some men say the earth is flat.
Some men say the earth is round.
But if it is flat. Could Parliament make it round?
And if it round. Could the kings command flatten it?”

• St Thomas More, arguing as his own lawyer for alleged treason, for refusal to acknowledge Henry VIII as the head of the Roman Catholic Church of England. For that refusal he was beheaded.

When he was making his case to the jury, well of course the parliament or the king cannot make the round earth flat. Of course they cannot make a flat earth round. He is not only appealing to the common sense of his juries, he is appealing to their understanding of the natural law. Their understanding of the order of things, their understanding of the immutable laws that regulate and control even the king!

It is unfortunate that our present day kings, in their incredible arrogance, still seem to think that, they can make things in the world of ideas, behave in exactly the same way as things in the physical world.

Don’t you know that things in the world of ideas are non-scarce and non-rivalrous? They are what Ludwig von Mises calls “Free Goods”, because copies are potentially limitless. They “do not need to be economized.”

Our kings of today are in fact, playing God.

Isaac Morehouse: Intellectual Property Is Childish

When children play with Legos, violence sometimes ensues.

“He knocked down my tower!”

“Only because she built it to look exactly like the one I made, and that’s not fair. I made mine first!”

All the parents I’ve ever met handle this situation by pointing out to the aggressor that it is perfectly acceptable for other kids to build things that mimic his own creations; in fact, he should feel honored!

But let’s visit a household wherein the parents are strict advocates and respecters of intellectual property. In this house, children are punished for copying their siblings. Any new Lego ideas, whether actually built or not, are immediately filed with the parent, and every time Lego building takes place, the children must first check the files to make sure they aren’t about to build something that someone else had already thought of and filed. No imitation is allowed in this household.

This is, of course, an absurd environment, and the main source of learning for children, imitation, is being crushed while some of the most beastly childlike tendencies — spite and anger at others’ success and an overwhelmingly selfish desire for all the attention — are nurtured. This is also the environment faced by all inventors, entrepreneurs, creators and businesses in any legal structure that enforces IP laws.

Let’s fast-forward a few decades. The IP-conscious parent gets a call from their grown-up child complaining about how he designed and built a beautiful garden, but the neighbor loved it so much he put in an identical twin next door. The good parent would immediately sympathize with the victimized child and come over with some shovels and firearms and help his son destroy the thieving neighbors’ copycat garden, and demand some payment from the neighbor at gunpoint, to boot.

This is only fair, of course, because this gardening son built the garden for profit, not just pleasure. It was so grand that he planned to sell tickets to people who wished to walk through and enjoy its splendor. How could he do so when the neighbor’s identical garden could be walked through for free?

It seems easy to spot the ridiculous and childish nature of anti-copying arguments in these examples, but there is no significant difference in the real world of IP law. Ideas, unlike physical goods, are not scarce. The neighbor can build his garden without so much as a single fern being removed from the other.

Garden design is an idea. Some argue that it’s not the idea of garden itself that’s being stolen, but the value it could produce. Even in the case of physical goods, no one has a right to a certain market value. If I steal your car, your property rights are violated. If a manufacturer designs a slew of new cars that make yours far less valued in the market, your rights are not violated, because you never had a right to a given resale value.

Many people argue that the real need for IP law arises when we’re talking about companies making multibillion dollar investments in R&D, not merely five-figure gardens. What incentive is there to pursue such costly innovations with no promise of reward for the effort? There are several problems with this analysis. First, even with current IP laws, there is no guarantee of profit. How many billions of R&D dollars are spent on projects that end up yielding no return? Consumers are fickle, and IP doesn’t guarantee they’ll like your product, no matter how much you spend on research.

Second, the massive R&D sticker price is somewhat deceiving. Drug companies, for example, are not spending billions of dollars of the CEO’s money. Instead, they are spending billions of dollars of shareholder money. Most shareholders have shares amounting to thousands, and they have portfolios with money spread across many companies and industries. Even if a $1 billion R&D project is fruitless, the losses are actually not that acute.

But let’s say they are. Let’s pretend a single individual had a great idea and they could devote their entire life and livelihood to developing it. Surely, without the security of IP law, they would have no incentive to do so, right? How do you explain a fashion designer whose every energy goes into designs that can be immediately copied in the IP-free fashion industry? How do you explain football coaches who spend years developing and perfecting new schemes and plays only to have the best of them immediately adopted by inferior coaches across the league?

Do you think the NFL would be more dynamic and innovative if coaches could copyright their plays? What if no one were allowed to use the cover 2 defense except its creator? The spread offense? The I formation?

Thankfully, no such IP laws exist in football. Do you think we’re suffering a lack of innovation for it? Are there innovative coaches sitting on the sidelines with amazingly innovative plays, failing to use them for fear they won’t reap enough reward in a copycat league?

IP law is not necessary to incentivize innovation. There are no guarantees of success or uniqueness in the market, yet entrepreneurs and investors put significant resources into innovation every day, apparently willing to hazard the risk. IP law stifles, rather than encourages, innovation.

Not only is IP unnecessary, it is a holdover from our nursery days before we learned that it’s not OK to be possessive little tyrants who demand no one copy their babbling noises, Lego towers and Crayon scribbles. IP laws are childish and bring out the kind of nasty and immature backbiting that parents work so hard to correct in their kids. Let’s grow up and quit trying to hold back the beauty and dynamism of a world where ideas are free.

• Issac Morehouse

http://lfb.org/today/intellectual-property-is-childish/

Why The Music Industry Should Be Thanking Illegal…

Why The Music Industry Should Be Thanking Illegal Downloaders

Next month, people who download music illegally may start getting anti-piracy warnings from their Internet Service Providers. If recent research is any indication, maybe they should be getting “thank you” notes instead. 

Turns out that people who frequently download music without paying for it actually end up buying 30% more music than everybody else, according to a study from the National Assembly at Columbia University. This isn’t the first research that has shown file-sharing to be beneficial to artists, but this comprehensive study blows yet another good-sized hole in the conventional music industry wisdom. 

It makes sense, though.

That heavy-duty downloaders also pay for lots of music isn’t shocking, considering they’re likely to be much more passionate music fans than others. In Napster’s heyday, I must confess, I routinely queued up albums to download overnight, which I then burned onto CD-Rs before walking to high school in the morning (this was pre-iPod). I quickly grew accustomed to the immediacy of file-sharing and before I knew it, I had ripped the audio from all of my CDs so I could get rid of them once and for all. When Napster shut down, I switched to Soulseek and blog searches to find MP3s. 

See Also: Music Piracy Debate Reignites, Despite Evidence That Digital Distribution Pays

I still paid for some music, especially if it was recorded by a smaller, independent artist whose work I wanted to support. But of the several-hundred gigabytes of music I amassed in the early 2000s, the majority of it was pirated.

Over time, though, my music consumption habits – along with my disposable income – evolved. So did the digital music ecosystem. These days, I spend $10 per month on a premium Spotify subscription and on top of that, am known to eagerly drop at least another $30 on vinyl records per month, on average. Last month, when I set foot in San Francisco’s Ameoba Music for the first time, I may or may not have gone a little overboard. It makes sense to me that those of us who hopped onto peer-to-peer networks are also quick to throw down some actual money for music, even while others aren’t. 

That isn’t to say that file-sharing hasn’t done very real, palpable damage to the traditional business model of the music industry. It has. Put more accurately, the changes in music consumption and consumer expectations brought on by the advent of the Internet, have crippled the old model. 

On one hand, that’s hurt deep-pocketed gatekeepers who are widely perceived as having hampered innovation for years (instead opting to sue Internet companies and consumers alike). It’s hard to shed too many tears about that. On the other hand, the decline in album sales has also hurt what musician and piracy critic David Lowery calls the “middle class of the music industry.” Music might be easier than ever to create, disseminate and discover, but it’s still quite difficult to make a living creating it. 

As encouraging as the National Assembly numbers might seem, paying consumers like me are not enough to “save” the music industry, or at least the version of it that existed 15 years ago. It’s gone. But maybe that’s okay.

See Also: BitTorrent Downloads Booming – And Benefitting Musicians

Perhaps it’s time, as many have suggested, to stop thinking about recorded music as the cash cow it once was and instead treat it as a smaller revenue stream that has enormous promotional value to support an artist’s other work: touring, merchandise, licensing their music and selling it in deluxe package with extras that fans can’t download. 

It’s hard to picture overall music sales numbers climbing back up to their pre-digital heights anytime soon. Listeners are being conditioned to expect to find and listen to music instaneously, with or without shelling out money for it. That trend started with Napster and continues today with more legitimate services. Today’s teenagers instinctively search for new releases on Spotify. If they’re not there, they check YouTube or SoundCloud. Some might pay for a download from iTunes or Amazon, but with so many free and ad-supported options, why bother forking over actual dollars?

In 2005, authors David Kusek and Gerd Leonhard imagined a future in which everyone carries Internet-connected media players and subscribes to a massive library of music in the cloud. “Music like water,” they called it. That’s exactly where we’re headed with smartphones and services like Spotify and Rdio.

Early research conducted in Sweden suggests that subscription services help reduce piracy. Yes, the financial viability of the services model is still unknown, and many artists are nervous about the financial payoff. But there’s still hope that with enough scale, those services can help the music industry thrive in the 21st Century. Even if it looks very, very different than it once did.

A huge percentage of the 20th century’s most brilliant musical minds would have starved without a day job.

“Schoenberg, Webern, Berg, Ives, Boulez, Bartok, Varese, Messiaen, Nancarrow, Babbitt, Perle, Barraque…in fact, a huge percentage of the 20th century’s most brilliant musical minds would have starved without a day job.

Schoenberg taught composition, Webern made arrangements for night club bands, Ives sold insurance, Boulez worked as a conductor and so on. Their jobs were often related to music, but if they had depended on sales of sheet music or royalties from record sales they would have starved. Some of them came close to doing so anyway.

This is all quite true, but few here really seem to grasp the implications of it.
If you wanted to know, the so called ‘pirates’ are responsible for much of the modernity in communication that you see today. Everything from the printing press to the modern cinema was brought about by these so called ‘pirates’. Even Hollywood has pirate roots.

Gutenburg was a ‘Pirate’, as he printed copies of the Bible and gave it to people. The church labelled him a pirate and the idea of copyright was introduced then and there. It was made a full fledged law by Mary, Queen of the Scotts.

The internet as you see it today, with the ability to communicate and get content easily (yes even paid), was brought about by Napster, which brought about a revolution in music sharing, and which eventually gave birth to the idea that Apple had. Without piracy, no napster, without napster no iTunes and all the awesome sharing facilities and content you see today.”

More is available here:

History of Copyright, part 1: Black Death

thedude321 (22 hours ago) in reply to Anon
https://torrentfreak.com/too-legit-to-quit-124-2m-legal-bittorrent-music-downloads-in-2012-120922/

Boldrin and Levine: Being a monopolist is, apparently, akin to going on drugs or joining some strange religious sect.

“Being a monopolist” is, apparently, akin to going on drugs or joining some strange religious sect. It seems to lead to complete loss of any sense of what profitable opportunities are and of how free markets function. Monopolists, apparently, can conceive of only one way of making money, that is bullying consumers and competitors to put up or shut up. Furthermore, it also appears to mean that past mistakes have to be repeated at a larger, and ever more ridiculous, scale.

• Boldrin and Levine

http://mises.org/daily/5108/Ideas-Free-and-Unfree-A-Book-Commentary#part4

Eben Moglen: When you can provide to everybody everything that you value, at the cost of providing it to any ONE body, what is the morality of excluding people who cannot afford to pay?

The most important unchangeable reality about human societies heretofore is the every human society since the beginning, whenever that was, has wasted almost all the brains it possessed.
[Laughter]
It is, of course, something so natural to us that it strikes us as an odd aperçu when we meet it, but of course we know that it is true. We know that it is true, and that there wasn’t any way to prevent it from being true, even as we know that it’s an injustice. A deep injustice.
So let’s begin by recognizing, as Laura Nader was urging us to do, that one of the great problems about injustice is that, like power, it is most effective when it can succeed in remaining invisible. And one of the best ways of being invisible is to be something that everybody knows, but you can’t do anything about it, so you might as well forget. And so we forget – as we tend to forget every day when the newspaper isn’t headlined with the 50.000 children who starved to death yesterday – we forget that one of the fundamental characteristics of human societies heretofore has been their wastage of human brains. And I go around, and I say to people “How many of the Einsteins who ever existed were permitted to learn physics?”. And people think “Well, maybe one, maybe two – maybe Isaac Newton was another Einstein…” but of course the answer is “Almost none”; so few, in fact, that we know the names of them.
[Laughter]
Which, had we educated all the Einsteins in the world, in physics, since the beginning, we couldn’t do, because there would be so many of them. And what we think of as the extraordinary characteristics of genius are primarily merely the selection function applied to human diversity, through radical injustice in access to the ability to learn. Which means, of course, that we know that – smart guys as we all are – we are really only the fraction of the smart guys in the world who’ve been allowed to learn anything, in a world where there are six billion people, most of whom will never be able to go to school. And their brains will starve to death.

So the basic question – now that our attention is concentrated on one of those obvious things that we don’t think about very much – so the question now is “Can the network be used to change that, for the first time in the history of human societies, and if it were used to change that, what would it be like?”.

This is the introduction to the free software movement. This is the purpose of the free software movement. This is the aim not only of the free software movement, but of a large number of the other things we are doing that arise from the fact that the digital revolution means that knowledge no longer has a non-zero marginal cost, that when you have the first copy of any significant representation of knowledge – whatever the fixed cost of the production of that representation may have been – you have as many additional copies, everywhere, as you need, without any significant additional costs.

The non-zero marginal cost quality of all the things we digitize, which – in the society we are now building – is everything we value, because we digitize everything we can value, right down to how we fit in our jeans, right? In the world where we digitize everything of value and everything of value has been digitized, a moral question of significance arises: When you can provide to everybody everything that you value, at the cost of providing it to any one body, what is the morality of excluding people who cannot afford to pay?

If you could make as much bread, or have as many fishes, as you needed to feed everyone, at the cost of the first loaf and the first fish plus a button press, what would be the morality for charging more for loaves and fishes than the poorest person could afford to pay? It’s a difficult moral problem, explaining why you are excluding people from that which you yourself value highly and could provide to them for nothing.
The best way of solving this moral problem is not to acknowledge its existence, which is the current theory. [Laughter] Right? The current theory in force takes the view that industrial society lived in a world of non-zero marginal cost for information – information and the ability to learn had to be embedded in analog things: books, recordings, objects that cost non-zero amounts of money to make, move, and sell. Therefore, it was inevitable that representations of things we value would have significant marginal costs. And in economies operating efficiently and competitively, – or for that matter, efficiently and non-competitively – there would still be some cost that somebody has to pay at the other end to receive each copy of something of meaning or value, unless there is somebody available to provide a subsidy. And since that was the 20th century reality, it was appropriate to have moral theory which regarded exclusion as an inevitable necessity.

The discussion, of course, was about scale. “Ought we to find ways to subsidize more knowledge for more people?”, and the United States became not merely the wealthiest and most powerful country, after the second world war, not merely the indispensable or inevitable country, it became the intellectually most attractive country because it heavily subsidized the availability of sophisticated knowledge to people who could make use of it, even people who came elsewhere from poorer societies, or who had not the money to pay. And after the second world war, in the G.I. Bill, the United States took a unique approach to the age-old problem of how to reduce social disorder after war time through the demobilization of a large number of young men trained to the efficient use of collective violence – a thing which is always worrisome to societies, and which typically produces repression movements post-war, as the society as a whole tries to get back its leverage over those young men – the G.I. Bill was a radical, and indeed productive approach to the problem, namely send everybody to as much education as they want to have, at the expense of the state which is grateful to them for risking their lives in its defense. A splendid system; on the basis of that, and the provision of tertiary and quaternary education to the talented elite of the world, the United Stated government built a special place for its society in the world, as throwing away fewer brains than its power and importance would otherwise have tended to indicate it would do.

But we are no longer talking about whether we can save people, identified as the elite of other societies, from the ignorance to which they might otherwise fall prey, through enlightened federal spending. We are talking about eliminating ignorance. We’re talking about addressing the great deprivation of knowledge of everything of use and utility and beauty from everybody, by building out the network across humanity, and allowing everybody to have the knowledge and the culture that they wish to obtain. And we’re talking about doing that because the alternative to doing that is the persistence of an immoral condition.

Stephan Kinsella: the law tries to impose scarcity on knowledge, which is already non-scarce.

In human life, there are two aspects of successful action. That is the actor has to have knowledge. Knowledge that informs him into what ends are possible, and knowledge as to what causal laws there are in the world that lets him choose their means, scarce means, that will help them causally achieve the ends. You have to have means, you have to have actual physical control, causal control over these means in order to achieve what you want. And the scarce means of action, are scarce. There is only so much of them to go around. That’s the way the world is.

The free market heroically despite this, is always seeking to increase abundance. Even though we don’t have infinite abundance the free market is trying to increase abundance. Trying to alter means, find more efficient means of producing goods, lowering costs, increasing abundance. Basically, making things less scarce, even though we will never get away from that completely. So the market is trying to overcome this challenge that we have which is that there is scarcity in the physical world. There is lack of super-abundance but the free market tries to make things more abundant.

But, that’s one ingredient of action, that’s having available these things to achieve our ends. But the knowledge luckily is already non-scarce. Knowledge can be multiplied or copied infinitely. Everyone in the world can know how to bake a cake at the same time. That’s why we have an increasing body of knowledge every generation because the more things people learn, the more it is recorded and transmitted, and learnt by others down the ages. We have this almost infinite duplicable body of knowledge that we can dip into to use. And the more of it the better. So the free market tries to overcome the problem of scarcity in the physical world but the law, tries to impose scarcity on knowledge, which is already non-scarce. So it is kind of a complete perversion.

Cory Doctorow: Wait a second, you are doing crazy things to the people in my head!

So, If I infect your head with an imaginary person from my head, You should have some right to that person okay? I deliberately put a fake person in your head, You should have the right to tell the world what that fake person is doing in your head, just as much as I have the right to tell the world what that fake person is doing in mine. In fact if like, when people are done, those fake people don’t live on? Then, you haven’t really made them care about them as people, you haven’t really done your job in getting the person from your head into theirs. And so this is where I think fanfic comes from and I think this is where people who object to fanfic are coming from because like, “Wait a second, you are doing crazy things to the people in my head!”, and I think this is where the people who are writing fanfic are coming from, they say, “Wait a second, No. Those crazy people are in MY head, those people are in my head too!”

• Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow presents Pirate Cinema.
http://doctorow.onyour.tv/webcast?refresh=1

Rick Falkvinge: It’s Time To Debunk The Myth That Copyright Is Needed To Make Money – Or That It Even Makes Money

Myth: If you take away the copyright monopoly, there’s no way for artists to make money.

Fact: This is a very odd myth, given that the old gatekeeper system was the poster child of keeping skilled artists away from any form of income. Under the “sign-a-record-deal-or-remain-poor system”, 99% of artists didn’t get record deals with the abusive record industry – and out of those who did, 99.5% never saw a cent in royalties. Thus, we are moving away from a system that deliberately kept 99.995% of artists without any form of regular income for artistry.

Observing that, I find it preposterous to claim that any shift towards a more inclusive system without those gatekeepers will somehow “take away the possibility of making money for artists”, especially given that the now-obsolete gatekeepers took 93% of the cut, on average, for the 0.005% that did make money in this system. Eliminate those gatekeepers and those 93% of the money go to artists instead – or at least, a significantly larger portion of it.

Myth: The copyright monopoly is an essential source of income to artists today.

Fact: Out of the money spent on culture, a mere 2% (yes, two per cent) make it to individual artists through mechanisms of the copyright monopoly. This was studied in-depth in Sweden by Ulf Pettersson in 2006 (link to article, direct link to study, both in Swedish), who concluded that the vast majority of artists get their income from other means – everything from a day job to student loans.

Myth: The copyright industry is vital to the economy overall.

Fact: The “copyright industry” is deliberately measured in a thoroughly deceptive way that borders on ridicule. According to WIPO’s guidelines as to what should be included when calculating the size of the “copyright industry”, we find everything from paper pulp manufacturing, to kitchen appliance retail sales, to shoemaking (WIPO 2003, via Pettersson’s paper above). If you include practically every part of the economy in group X, and then claim that group X is a vital part of the economy, then it’s going to look like you’re right. Just don’t get caught looking silly when it turns out how you selected that X, and that there’s no correlation at all with what you’re really talking about – the industries benefiting from the copyright monopoly, which are about one-tenth the size of those being held back by it. Want to create jobs? Kill the monopoly.

Myth: With free sharing, nobody will spend money on entertainment.

Fact: The household expenditure on culture has increased, year by year, since the advent of large-scale file-sharing with Napster in 1999. (According to some reports, it’s constant – but none claim it’s falling.) It’s true, however, that record sales are slumping and falling through the floor. This fact is excellent news for musicians, who don’t need to rely on middlemen who take 93% of the cut, and have instead seen their own income rise by 114% in the same time period.

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

Fact: People create despite the copyright monopoly, not because of it. YouTube sees 72 hours of video uploaded every minute. Arguably, most of it will remain unseen, but there are certainly gems in there. Also, the argument is bunk from the simple observation that there is a vast oversupply of artists compared to what the market will hold: you can easily find a professional accountant who picks up an electric guitar in their spare time for a bit of relaxation, but show me one single professional guitarist who relaxes with a bit of bookkeeping in their spare time.

GNU/Linux and Wikipedia are two excellent counterpoints that shatters this weird myth. The dominant operating system and dominant encyclopedia was created by unpaid volunteers. (When I say that GNU/Linux is “dominant”, I include the Android derivative, just for the record.)

We have created since we learned to put red paint on the inside of cave walls, not because of the possibility of making money, but because of who we are, because of how we are wired. (Usually, people who are into life for the money don’t go into artistry in the first place. They go to law school or medical school. There’s a reason for the parents’ face of despair when their child says they’ve decided to be a poet for a living.)

The myth that the copyright monopoly is needed for any kind of artistry to make money, or even to happen in the first place, is an obscene myth perpetuated by those who have something to gain from skimming off 90% of the artists’ money by denying them an audience in an old-style racketeering.

Can we please move on now?

https://torrentfreak.com/its-time-to-debunk-the-myth-that-copyright-is-needed-to-make-money-or-that-it-even-makes-money-121007/

Jeffrey Tucker: I write a book and publish 1,000 copies. They are all mine. When I sell one, I now have 999 remaining.

The authors make a very important point with regard to ideas or information. If you have an idea, it is yours. You can do with it what you want. If you share it (sing, speak, broadcast, let others see the products of your ideas) or if you sell it, others then have copies of it. They are entitled to do with their copies of the idea precisely what you can do with your copy. They can use it how they want provided they don’t prevent others from doing with it what they want. This is a simple application of the nonaggression principle that governs a free society. Whether it is fashion, language, know-how, or whatever, people are free to copy once they have purchased it or it has been shared.

Ideas, then, are what Mises calls “free goods”: copies are potentially limitless. They “do not need to be economized.”

Intellectual property is the completely wrongheaded idea that, in the words of the authors, someone has the right “to monopolize an idea by telling other people how they may, or more often may not, use the copies they own.” This strikes at the heart of progress, because it means not improving what exists but rather prohibiting others from using and improving it.

Let’s say I write a book and publish 1,000 copies. They are all mine. When I sell one, I now have 999 remaining, and the new owner of the one book, in a free society, is free to do with his copy what he wants: use it as a placemat, throw it away, deface it, photocopy, and even republish it. You can even rerepublish it under your own name, though that would amount to the socially repudiated vice of plagiarism (vice, not crime). The new copies, which always involve some cost, compete with old copies.

• Jeffrey Tucker

Ideas, Free and Unfree: A Book Commentary
http://mises.org/daily/5108/Ideas-Free-and-Unfree-A-Book-Commentary#part9