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fiddlerwoaroof | on: The Internet Archive has lost its appeal in Hachette vs. Internet Archive
The idea that copyright is necessary for this is ridiculous: copyright is necessary so that publishers and other middlemen can sell copies of their catalog, often with no more than a pittance to the artist. I’ve talked to a bunch of published authors who spent years of hard work on their books who receive no money at all, or an insignificant amount, from ongoing sales.
api | parent
What happens without copyright is that hustlers trawl new releases, steal them, rebadge them and maybe run them through a light edit pass using AI, republish them, and take credit and all revenue. A version of that is already happening via AI assisted piracy but without copyright it gets easier because you can steal whole coherent works.

That is until the bottom drops out of even that.

Writing is tough to make a living in because it’s over saturated with content. This makes it worse by taking price to zero. Instead of too many artists chasing too few dollars you have too many artists chasing zero dollars.

This is how you get a future where novels are full of product placements because ads are the last way for artists to eat. I imagine this is what novels would be like in the Idiocracy world, which I realized a while back is not a film covertly about eugenics. It thinks it is but it’s really about the dark side of the Information Age.

For God’s sake look at what happened to the open web where everything was free and copyright was ignored. That would happen to literature.

TeMPOraL | root | parent
> This is how you get a future where novels are full of product placements because ads are the last way for artists to eat.

That's a problem with ads. Advertising as it is today needs to be banned. It's a cancer that corrupts every medium of communications.

> Instead of too many artists chasing too few dollars you have too many artists chasing zero dollars.

Taking the advertising cancer out of consideration, the bottom will drop out of that, and you'll have much fewer writers, and much better writing.

The Information Age killed the business model based on selling copies of creative works. Copyright is a desperate attempt at saving those business models, by legally constraining digital data to behave like physical objects. This is just fighting against the nature of digital data as a medium. It ultimately cannot succeed, it's increasingly costly to maintain, and the side effects are only getting worse.

> For God’s sake look at what happened to the open web where everything was free and copyright was ignored. That would happen to literature.

Yes, it flourished and reached amazing quality levels and very good SNR - that is, until marketing people went on-line too, which is when it all went to shit.