Abolish copyright.
You can charge for material things - paper, ink, packaging material, the time of the workers to prepare it. You can even charge for bandwidth, server upkeep, and electricity. But information has no material cost and therefore cannot be sold.
Exercise civil disobedience: it's your obligiation as a good citizen to be a pirate. We can negotiate again when they change the law to make copyrighted works enter the public domain within our lifetimes.
Politics-adjacent (copyright)
@sir
> Abolish copyright.
Strong disagree (at least without many other changes)
I release all my software as #foss. I do so because that will let the most people use the code, and (so far) I've been able to make the financials work in a way that keep me writing code.
But I don't beleive anyone has a moral *obligation* to release code in the way that benefits the most people. It's how *I* live up to my values, but others can make there own choices.
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copyright
> it's your obligation as a good citizen to… pirate
Strong disagree. Respect others' choices.
I recently bought 4 of @mwlucas's books. Releasing those under a free license would've been great, but he chose not to; presumably, the financials for doing so don't work out (even with patreon/etc).
I'm glad those books exist; copyright allows them to. Huge social changes might get us those books without copyright, but right now "civil disobedience" would just mean doing without them
copyright
@codesections @mwlucas in response to your first post, I was going to ask you to respond on the same terms as I levelled my argument - on the intrinsic value of the work.
I would like to point out that there are many business models for which the financials don't work out. It's not always the role of law to step in and restrict the rights of private citizens to enable a certain business model to exist. We also need to improve social support systems so that getting a working business model is never in the way of getting food on your table or a roof over your head - so that you don't have to worry as much about finding a way to turn your passions into profits.
Have you asked @mwlucas if he has tried publishing books under creative commons (which - for the record - does not mean giving them away. You can sell people a CC e-Book or a CC print book) before resorting to copyright?
copyright
> [could you] respond on the same terms as I leveled my argument - on the intrinsic value of the work.
I didn't respond at that level because that level is, bluntly, a bit incoherent.
Items don't have "intrinsic value" —there is no fact about the *item* that determines its value.
There's just people, and what sort of use/enjoyment we get out of the item. SSH Mastery had value to *me*—more value that the $9.99 I paid.
We had this argument in the 1700s, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_value_(economics)
copyright
@codesections the intrinsic value comes from scarcity and labor. There is a finite amount of material, and you have to pay people to obtain the material, assemble it into a product, and deliver the product to you. The bottlenecks inhernt in this also introduce a scarcity on the product itself. Intellectual labor has value, but it's more subtle, because the result of that labor is information - which has no value.
copyright
> the intrinsic value comes from scarcity and labor.
Like I said, we had this debate in the 1700s; that's basically the Labor Theory of Value. But it doesn't work; I could spend a lot of labor turning scarce resources into crap no one wants, and that wouldn't make the crap have "high intrinsic value" (or, if it does, "intrinsic value" is pretty meaningless).
Producing crap with expensive materials and lots of labor just means I made some pretty poor choices
copyright
> Intellectual labor has value, but it's more subtle, because the result of that labor is information - which has no value.
Even under the idea that "intrinsic value comes from scarcity and labor" this doesn't follow and you've provided no evidence.
Information has tremendous value. When I read SSH Mastery, I learned something, and that learning was hugely valuable.
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copyright
Information has value. What it lacks is *exclusivity*: my learning about SSH didn't take knowledge away from Lucas.
That is tremendously powerful, and exciting: Lucas can figure something out, write a book, and make the world a better place–not just for one person, but for thousands.
That non-exclusivity is why FOSS is so powerfully good, and why I release my software under free licenses. But it is precisely because the information *does* have value that any of this works.
copyright
Information is valuable. The lack of exclusivity is what makes it immoral to sell. Trade is based on fair exchange. You can argue semantic nuances as much as you want, but that is how an average person sees it, and if you break the rules of exchange you are abusing that person.
