abraxas @ abraxas @lemmy.ml

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2 yr. ago

Copyright though also protects creators and deems their work valuable. For what reasons might someone write a book or a song if it were of no value?

People did it all the time, and there seems to be no correlation with improvements or motivation with the protection of modern copyright laws. The opposite side of the coin is that emlpoyees voluntarily invent content all the time (above their job description) that is immediately the property of their employer. The people who are going to be inventers STRIVE to innovate, regardless of money or lack thereof. A weaker Copyright model would not stifle innovation, but might even bolster it. At least actual inventors would likely have more opportunity to gain from their inventions.

The average salary for a Script Writer is $64,000/yr. If you're simply looking at the value they produce, that's bloody peanuts.

And you say they're replacable, but you could say the same thing about electricians, and they have a union and strike. Of course, the Electrician produces less value but makes on average $10,000 more than the average Script Writer ($75,000).

I'd also like to remind you to separate the end product from the quality of the Script Writer. They do a skilled job and work hard, and they are only one cog in a machine. I have had this exact conversation with managers and execs in my own field who wanted to hold individual contributors accountable for things that simply were not their fault.

As someone who grew up in the "golden age of piracy" who remembers those stupid FBI warnings on VHS tapes, I've never been able to wrap my head around that point of view. To me, it's always been propaganda that creates this so-called anti-piracy morality.

The idea that piracy is stealing is so foreign to me. Stealing/theft is a very specific behavior. Nobody called it Theft when competitors followed around Shakespeare and made copycat plays. Nobody STILL calls it theft when we see stupid copycat movies come out. Nobody called it theft if you got a "copy painting, signed by actual painter" before modern copyright law. Now they call it things (not usually quite theft).

To me, piracy just lacks all the hallmarks of stealing. Hell, I've been in lawsuits. In every other realm, the Law draws some very clear lines between real damages and potential ones, and in many cases if I have to sue somebody, the law might even PREVENT me from seeking the latter. So what's so special about piracy that so many people's headspace have this attitude the "how the world works" goes out the window and it's really stealing?

To me, it's always going to be a matter of propaganda. Very successful propaganda. And I think your last sentence backs that. The big media IP owners started pushing the bubble of "it's stealing" to libraries as well, and only backed off when it didn't work. They were somewhat more successful with "used games" and have largely succeeded in killing the used game market off in some domains. I consider it stealing if a game company locks a physical product behind a single-use code so that they can seize part or all of the product if you purchase it used.

But here's my counterpoint to all of the befuddlement. The companies don't call these things products anymore, but licenses (so they can seize them at will from people who paid for them). How can you steal something that you can't own in the first place?

If I would buy it, I consider it unethical to download it to save the money. If I wouldn't, my Utilitarianism side is kicking in and it's actually MORE ethical to pirate than not. I also see no ethical problem with trialing something even if it's indie.

I something is "I don't like enough to buy, but would play if it was freeware", that's the grey area for me. My Utilitarianism side says pirating it is the correct decision, but there's a part of me that doesn't agree.

I'm iffy on those, though. They were both availableish in my day. Hexchat looks like a port of Xchat. The other was an old kde chat client. I've used both. Didn't love either. But obviously that's just me personally

I didn't know blahaj was LGBTQ-related. That's so fucking cool!

I love IKEA.

Holy shit. Me, too. Yes, nothing quite so sad as Bowling For Diplomas.

This, here. Reddit is going the way of Digg, but trying to be more savvy about it. THey don't care that the specific group that's leaving are the content creators because they intend to charge content creators (paid API) who expect to profit from the traffic. They don't care that it's lower quality content creators. They want the money both ways, and don't care what percent of their "high quality" traffic disappears for it.

Since they're bigger than digg, they still have some high quality traffic. There's never a 100% protest with something as big as reddit. It's win/win/win for them.

I'd love that, but as I said elsewhere I have communities I run and a post history. Are we talking about me just making myself a mod elsewhere and cutting all my post histories? I mean, it's not the end of the world, but it'd be nice to keep my post histories coherent.

Instrance transfer would be wonderful.

Yeah, as someone who merely visited I got enough eyefulls and earfulls to know you don't want the Chinese government to know you exist for any reason.

I swear some of these people have never even been to China. I've had the opportunity, and had a lot of Chinese expat friends. I will say THEY believe the same as rest of the world does on a lot of these issues. I was told in no uncertain terms by my tour guide not to say anything about "things you might have heard" when I went to Tienanmen Square. And trust me, the soldiers everywhere with automatic weapons were enough to dissuade me from THINKING about it.

There are a lot of differences that can be passed off as unpleasant cultural differences (like the one guy was a second class citizen and couldn't get a city passport because he was from a village... the other guy had a full country Visa with zero effort because he grew up in Beijing), but other things "yeah, we'd look up the truth on all that stuff, but we had to work hard to get around the censors and some of our friends got in caught and got in trouble for doing it".

These tankies never seem to cover the part where the Chinese government is ACTIVELY suppressing this stuff in China. I could walk up to the site of the Bonus Army massacre and LOUDLY announce "I can't believe the US government opened fired on American troops here over a peaceful protest" and not so much as draw police attention.

Is there a way to jump instances and bring all your content/moderation with you? I really didn't sign up for tankie voat, but I have growing communities in this instance.

They're saying if Communists do it, it's not Imperialism even if it looks exactly the same.

They are willfully committing an equivocation fallacy, using their definition of "Imperialism" as being necessarily related to Capitalism. The textbook definition of Imperialism does NOT necessarily relate to capitalism, so you are indeed in the right.

a policy of extending a country's power and influence through diplomacy or military force. -Imperialism

A non-capitalist country most certainly can do that definition. And Russian and China have both done that quite unambiguously.

So you're in the right. But you'll never win an argument against them because lies are truth.

I really wish Lemmy supported defederation of instances by individual users (so I'd auto-block anything that came from lemmygrad or its users for any reason). I have been threatened with death by communists enough and just want to be left alone to my far-left-but-not-communist devices.

Not entirely inaccurate. There was always an undercurrent of us treating Native Americans as sub-human. We would ally with them to get what we need, then break our side of bargains because they were not entirely seen as deserving of them. We saw a few small parts of this behavior in 2016-2020, but we were doing it to countries and agreements who do just fine without us. When the deal is "we will guarantee you safety, but you can't keep this land" and "we will guarantee you safety" falls away, then it is basically genocide.

I think it was unforgivable, but it certainly means the US doesn't have some special moral highground.

So you're saying the CCP was a fascist party? I'm not sure how someone could respond to you when your response to sources was just rejecting them. I can show you non-Wikipedia sources, but I can only imagine college history curriculum would cause you to respond with accusations of propaganda.

I can find it reasonable for a person looking at the available evidence to conclude that some communist regimes have committed massive atrocities. You might disagree, but how is that not (similar to your take on the other guy) soft holocaust denial?

Communism as policy platform generally involves a window of authoritarian rule that is sometimes a bit difficult to distinguish from fascism (yes, there's some big ones if you know what to look for). And no Communism has ever reached such a late stage they were able to lighten up on the authoritarian side. So yeah, despite being further left than everyone around me, I still see red flags in communism.

Really? I thought we progressives and light-socialists (demsoc or socdem) were really just alt-right and going up against the wall with the rest of them...

(yeah, sarcasm, but those are things people have literally said to my face)

Oh god you're making me feel old. I can't see the "at that time" context because lemmy.ml is screwing up backlinks for me right now, but I'm assuming it's either when I got into the net (early 90's) or when I was all-in on IRC (late 90's). This wil be a bit of a cluster of answers to both :)

Back when I got into IRC, there was quite a bit. It's hard to keep track of exactly what I started using when. Back in the early 90's, those of us online ended up on IRC or places like Delphi Forums. I lived on Delphi and it reminded me back then of Lemmy now. Arguably, the biggest problem with back then is that either a group had some technical following, or you just didn't see much about it. Interested in some fringe philosophy? If you just looked at numbers I swear you'd think Discordianism or the Church of Subgenious were the world' majority religion back then.

Otherwise, there were lots of Bulletin Boards forums. Google may be advanced, but it also spiders orders of magnitude more pages than existed back then. Yahoo was surprisingly good for the smaller web. Otherwise, honestly, things felt very similar to me.

Everything was simple, though. Had to be. 56k modems were real, really did make that crazy noise, and downloading a movie was genuinely an investment of time and effort. Everyone knew somebody who would sell them something like "Everything Metallica" on CD for $5, usually to pay for pot money or whatever. Why? Because even if you had access to everything metallica online, it would take you days to download it and clean that shit up.

Ironically, I think messengers were more used/useful back then. Perhaps because there were fewer, so you could talk to all your messenger-using friends by just running 2 or 3 on your computer? I STILL remember my old IQC number, and was always proud it was only 6 digits! I never got into AOL, but I had AIM for one or two friends, Y! for one or two friends, and IQC for 20-30 friends. Most of them were people I never met or would meet (super nerd). But it was great because you'd get to KNOW the people you got to know. I had a buddy in Norway who had so little in common with me, but we hit it off so good he ended up getting me into Melodic Death Metal and one of my still-favorite bands Theatre of Tragedy. Early side of that window, about 20% of IRC rooms were something between piracy, sex chats, or RPGs. The rest was a random mishmash. Later on, I swear there were more RPG chats.

I could probably talk for weeks on it. There's a few products that came and went that I swear should have been the "next big thing" but failed due to bad business. There was a community game engine I worked on a game for called BYOND that still runs with a couple thousand players. It would've ended up on a front page if the founders either had more business savvy or just open-sourced it. Then there's Digg. Talk about a mirror image of the reddit bullshit, but Digg was smaller AND fucked up bigger than redit did. None of us were happy to go to reddit, but digg turned to shit. We knew reddit was crap (nobody ever thought their leadership was ok) when we went there, but there were no other options anyone took seriously.

That about gets us to the end of "the good old days".

Is it really still the best IRC client in the world? I stopped IRCing 15 years ago but nobody came close back then.

Fun Fact. I'm fucking old. Every time someone says something like this, it's like "aw shit. I was on IRC when this person was in diapers"