this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2025
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Yes, which is a distinctly different concept from stealing. It's copyright. Note how copyright violation isn't in the Bible. Note how the Bible itself would never have existed if copyright existed at the time given that it is a collection of passed down stories.
Copyright is a dumb as fuck concept. Its a scarcity based system, for stuff that is not scarce.
In what way?
Capitalism itself is a scarcity based system, and it falls apart somewhat when there's abundance.
In capitalism, stuff only has value if it's scarce. We all constantly need oxygen to live, but because it's abundant, it's value is zero. Capitalism does not start valuing oxygen until there are situations where it starts becoming rare.
This works for the most part in our world because physical goods by and large are scarce, but in the situations where they aren't, capitalism doesn't work. It's the classic planned obscelesence lightbulb story, if you can make a dirt cheap light bulb that lasts forever, you'll go out of business because you've created so much abundance that after a bit of production, you're actually not needed at all anymore and raw market based capitalism has no mechanism to reward you long term.
The same is even more true for information. Unlike physical goods, information can flow and be copied freely at a fundamental physics level. To move a certain amount of physical matter a certain distance I need a certain amount of energy, and there are hard universal limits with energy density, but I can represent the number three using three galaxies, or three atoms. Information does not scale or behave the same, and is inherently abundant in the digital age.
Rather than develop a system that rewards digital artists based on how much something is used for free, we created copyright, which uses laws and DRM to create artificial scarcity for information, because then an author can be rewarded within capitalism since it's scarce.
The electricity and silicon required to make this happen are not free, on a societal or physical level. There is a tangible cost to this transfer, even if you're ignoring the social construct of copyright.
I think this issue comes from a misunderstanding of "free", possibly conflating it for "trivially easy".
Feel free to come up with such a system. I think you'll find that a rather difficult task.
Completely irrelevant.
If I already have a computer and an internet connection then I've already paid the costs, prior to initiating that particular request.
In the context of pricing resources, those are the same thing.
The model is the same one used by streaming services. It's one of reward and attribution rather artificial scarcity. Rather than having streaming and advertising middlemen you have a public system that lets everyone access what they want and rewards creators based on usages. Youtube without Google's exorbitant profits.
Copyright has no basis in human culture or history. Our literal entire history is based on a tradition of free remixing and story telling, not copyright.
It's exited before any of us currently alive, so that's a pretty absurd notion. Unless human culture and history ended ~300 years ago?
K, versus 2,750,000 years.
Here's 300 letter g's:
Here's 2.75 million letter h's
Oh wait, I can't paste that many because at 40 chars per line, it would be 68,000 lines long, or 1000x the Android clipboard's char limit.
You are literally describing a meaningless iota in the course of human history.
I don't get your argument. So because it's "new" according to your grand cosmic scale, it doesn't exist at all?
You can say "I think intellectual property is a dumb idea" and I'd love to hear your arguments for that, but to act like it isn't real just because we came up with the idea relatively recently, is just asinine.
Read the above comments then.
Again, read my comments. I didn't say it wasn't real, I said it has no basis in human culture or history.
Not only is this incorrect, it would be meaningless even if it was accurate. What point are you even trying to make with this claim?