exporectomy

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

Have you somehow modelled how the global economy would change if copyright was 10 years and fiat currency didn't exist and people used gold instead? Without that, you're living in fantasy land. You can make any idea seem better if you just make up the consequences in a way that favors your idea.

exporectomy

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

You can create your own notes and coins but it's illegal because they want to maintain the artificial scarcity. The whole idea of fiat currency depends on people trusting that artificial scarcity will be maintained by the government.

exporectomy

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

Regarding indigenous culture, I'm talking about how natives claim ownership of art styles because their ancestors created them and they use social pressure to stop others from copying them. See https://medium.com/the-omnivore/the-cultural-awareness-requi... for example.

For patents, it's important to ensure that ideas become available for everyone else to enjoy despite giving a monopoly to the inventor. That's because an invention may be the best way to do something and we would be worse off if we couldn't use it. Copyright, on the other hand, doesn't protect anything fundamentally important. It's just individual products of human creativity. If you want a cartoon animal, you can always create your own without having to build on Mickey Mouse. The protected ones don't really matter except that they've been pushed into popular culture and people have lapped them up. We could do our culture in a way that doesn't suck at the teat of industrial culture-generation factories like Disney if we didn't want the impediment of copyright.

So I don't think your argument about give and take is really convincing. We could even have infinite copyright and the world would get along fine. If some obnoxious copyright owner enforced their rights to strongly, somebody else could create an equivalent work that was just as good to replace it.

I don't think they'd do it without copyright though, as evidenced by the fact that almost nobody does. Even open source developers still use copyright to restrict distribution (GPL) and amature artists demand credit (CC-BY).

exporectomy

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

Just because it's artificial scarcity doesn't mean it's not useful. Money also has artificial scarcity and that's a pretty good invention.

My point is that copyright is to incentivize authors to produce work but if it's limited by the author's lifetime, then older people will be incentivized less than younger people because they won't be able to sell the rights for as much money because they'll expire sooner. We don't particularly need work created by young people more than old people, so why incentivize it that way?

exporectomy

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

That stuff is only culture because Disney/etc. paid to entice us to watch it. If people don't want their culture to be owned by someone else, they shouldn't rent it from someone else.

exporectomy

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

All the responses seem to be a bit off-target. I'm specifically talking about copyright being linked to the lifespan of the author. It's arbitrary and unfair on authors. I'm not saying we need long copyright terms. I don't know what the optimum would be - maybe 10 years, maybe forever (like indigenous culture).

exporectomy

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

This argument that dead people's work shouldn't be protected because they can't be encouraged to make more is wrong, even where copyright gets extended afterwards. Predicting future value allows others to pay for it while they're alive, possibly by speculating on future enhanced copyright law.

Corporations can persist beyond the life of any humans within them for a good reason. It enables longer term investment and decision making to achieve things that can't be done in a single lifespan. Why should human lifespan be some essential time limit on property rights?

It also has the ethical problem that old or unhealthy people's work would be worth less than young healthy people's.

exporectomy

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

Oh, and I thought it was the child porn in the middle of the article.

exporectomy

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

Bogus reason. Plastic melt is also a non-Newtonian fluid and yet plastic parts production is thoroughly automated.

exporectomy

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

Historically, most people were farmers. That got automated, and yea, I guess the non-ruling classes were eradicated in the sense that we stopped having serfs and slaves and everyone became more powerful, could own land, etc. It was good news, not bad.

exporectomy

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

Complaints that there aren't enough workers in the labor market are equivalent to complaints that wages are too high. Your proposed solution is really just a restatement of the problem.

exporectomy

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

Not the same programmers though nor the same job though. The job of programmer-by-plugging-in-wires was still eliminated.

exporectomy

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

Hard but not impossible. Einstein achieved that, as did the other Jewish emigrants from 1930's Germany.

exporectomy

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

> Nearly everyone else pays their fair share of taxes.

It seems the whole point of these Roth IRA is so people don't have to pay their fair share of taxes. I'd blame the government for creating that.

exporectomy

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

It may have to do with the appearance of arrogance in incorrectly using a term they don't understand instead of a simpler term they do.

exporectomy

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

It's not as simple as UTC everywhere. If you're representing a fixed point in time, independent of any local time, then yes. But sometimes, a date/time is relative to the local time zone and in those cases, the local time zone is the correct one to store it in. For example, scheduled times for future events in the real world such as appointments. You can't store it as UTC because you can't know what the time zone offset will be in the future since that's a political decision.

exporectomy

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

What's this inconvenience you're talking about? I often don't even realize when daylight savings changes because everything is automatic. My alarm wakes me up at the new correct time, the clocks on my phone and computer have adjusted themselves. Sometimes I wonder why the clock on the oven is wrong and then Google to find out that daylight savings just happened. Maybe some people have more dependence on non-internet-connected clocks or work through the night on Sunday?

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