Debunk The Myth That Copyright Is Needed To Make Money

Imagine if, before intellectual property, you put 20 smart people in a room, and tell them to come up with solutions to add incentives for creative works. None of them would have come up with "Hey! Why don't we grant inventors monopolies over inventions! We could increase the ammount and quality of inventions by limiting what others can invent!". No one would ever think that's a good idea. It's completely backwards and counter intuitive. They would come up with things like y-combinator, angel funds, startup incubators. Or straight up government money investments. These are the obvious ideas that come up when you're trying to figure how to incentive ideas. You incentive ideas by investing in them, not by limiting them.<p>And of course, as most people here probably already know, that's not how IP was invented. It was not a conclusion from trying to come up to a solution for investing in ideas. No sane human being would have thought that was a solution. IP was invented as a monarchy monopoly to give power to the king. The "but it's good for innovation" meme was an excuse invented later when they figured they could actually make a lot of money from it, so those who were profiting off monopolies had to find an excuse to keep it.<p>It's so mind boggling to watch so many discussions where people ask "the ultimate hard question" of "but how else could be possibly incentive ideas without copyright???". C'mon, it's so straight-forward and we've been doing it for centuries. YC alone has done much more for promoting innovative creative works than copyright has done since it's invention. Do you really care about investing in ideas? Then put your money where your mouth is, become an angel investor, and stop pretending it's a hard problem to solve.

Personally I am torn on this topic.<p>We now have this thing "information" (software, music, books, whatever) that can be useful for us, and which has the property that it can be copied infinitely without cost; but then we turn around turn it back into something that behaves like a "physical thing" by means of copyright.<p>On the other hand, and contrary to the article, I think the current problem with the music industry is not due to copyright but due to financial monopolies (the labels) that are outmoded but hang on for dear live.<p>Copyright is interesting even if artists were to sell their own music independently of the labels. Indeed here copyright is what would protect the artist from a label to just copy the music and selling it for profit.<p>Also, interestingly, Open Source would not work without copyright. That's right. The GPL, (to some extend) the Apache License, and many other licenses only work <i>because</i> of copyright, which grants the owner the right to license software to you under a license.<p>(Note these comments are true to copyright, but not for patents, which is a completely different story)

Please ... this article is trolling copyright holders. Each point is weak, easy to dismantle, and unsubstantiated. I started to write a long response and decided perhaps this isn't the forum, but I am surprised to see this on the front of hacker news.

That 2% figure is quite interesting (and the study beautifully typeset), but I can't read Swedish. Can anyone find a translation anywhere?

How about a little full disclosure? The author of the cited article is Rick Falkvinge, founder of the Swedish Pirate Party, so not exactly an unbiased source.<p>Aside from that, this whole article is one strawman after another. I don't know anyone who supports copyright and believes it to be the <i>only</i> way for creative folks to make money.<p>The creative argument in favour of copyright is simply that more useful works get generated and distributed with it than without it.<p>The economic argument is also very simple: the people making those works need to put food on the table. Despite all the rhetoric, nothing is stopping them from doing that in other ways right now, yet relatively few people actually are.<p>Really, all the anti-copyright people have to do to make a rock solid argument for their case is show that industrial-scale creative work is more effective using alternative business models rather than relying on copyright. There's an entire world of creative industries and bazillions in cash going into those industries, so finding more than an occasional study and isolated success story shouldn't be that hard... <i>if</i> their position is actually correct.

So articles about creationists chairing major science committees in the US get killed for being politics, but an article FROM A POLITICIAN pushing his political agenda is fine???