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I cut a one-take version of Frog with some of my fav. musicians:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCuDk18gGRc


Notably, the US is on precisely the opposite side of the conflict in 2026 compared to 2006.

To put it differently: its stated allies are direct lineal political and military descendants of the parties who were ostensibly its enemies in 2006, including Al-Qaeda / Jabhat Al-Nusra.


That’s… hilariously not exactly new either. It can be said that our enemies and allies in 2006 were the almost exact opposite of the conflict in the 1980’s when we were funding the afghan mujahideen to fight the soviets.

So theoretically in another 20-30 years we can take a guess at who we’ll be fighting.


>So theoretically in another 20-30 years we can take a guess at who we’ll be fighting

Canada?



Seems exactly on the same side to me- Netanyahu was the one that pushed most for the US invasion of Iraq:

"Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel [...] also visited Washington in late 2002 to lobby for the invasion of Iraq.

Apparently referring to testimony on the Middle East that Mr. Netanyahu delivered to Congress on Sept. 12, 2002, when he was a private citizen, Mr. Kerry told the House Foreign Affairs Committee, “The prime minister, as you will recall, was profoundly forward-leaning and outspoken about the importance of invading Iraq under George W. Bush, and we all know what happened with that decision.”

Video of Mr. Netanyahu’s 2002 remarks — in which he said “I think the choice of Iraq is a good choice, it’s the right choice”

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/26/world/middleeast/kerry-re...


This is par for the course for US foreign policy in the region.

There's even (disputed) allegations that Bush Sr funneled money and weapons to bin Laden in opposition to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. If true, the big 2006 enemy was a 1986 ally.


Disputed by who?

“Operation Cyclone was one of the longest and most expensive covert CIA operations ever undertaken”[1]

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cyclone

I also recommend the book “The Great War for Civilisation” by Robert Fisk


> Disputed by who?

Yeah, I was gonna say, as conspiracy theories go, this one is pretty much in the books at this point. Fuck man, Tom Hanks stars in a movie about it; that's about as mainstream as it gets.


Have you never been at school?

It's time for copyright to end anyhow; that's what's gumming up the whole project in the first place.

I'd have a lot less of a problem with AI if everything that went into their training was public domain and made easily available to anyone for any use. It'd feel less like AI companies were just stealing the work of others and charging for it.

Seems like a reasonable norm:

* If you train AI on it, you have to afford public access to it.

* Nobody can exact violence against anybody else in response to that person providing public access to any data anymore (ie, all bytestrings are public domain).

That's the world I'd like to try in the coming years.


If humanity's "solution" to AI is to go to the government of all institutions - the very thing we have hoped for the internet to overcome, for a century before its invention - then we'll truly have fallen into a poetic trap.

I've never hoped for that. The opposite of the government owning the internet is cloudflare owning the internet.

The opposite of one large unaccountable entity owning the internet is not a different one doing so.

To suppose that this next phase of human evolution can be "owned" at all is a bit of a stretch. These behemoths can threaten us with violence, and carry out those threats, but they can't stop radio waves or the use of language as expression. They can't remove knowledge form the universe or change change the laws of mathematics.


It's bizarre that there isn't yet a total separation of certificate-and-state.

I think we'd all consider the tool to be of less value, and perhaps fundamentally flawed.

But I don't think it arises to an alignment issue; if I'm able to summon the model to harness my birthright of general-purpose computing without censorship, then we're aligned.


> We have safety systems in place to detect if people under 18 may be using Claude and we’ll disable accounts based on indicators of minor activity.

So... kids can't use Claude Code _even with adult supervision_?

I remember when I was around 8-12, starting to realize that ageism was all around me. School life dictated by bells and boxes, with teachers whose obvious misunderstandings of the world were unquestionable. Rules dictating where I was able to go and what I was able to spend my paper route money on. Wars fought in my name, and police patrolling my streets, with no opportunity to object to their authority, by voting or any other means.

But I do remember that when I first gained access to BBSs (I think I was 10), and then a year or so later, basic shell internet access, that the world suddenly seemed much more egalitarian and communal.

I was able to read updates about the war in the Persian Gulf at my own pace and discretion. I was able to ask questions on services like FIDOnet on any topic I could imagine, and get uncensored answers.

The internet was _unable_ to discriminate against me; my little shell invariably ran whatever command I typed, because it had no other way of functioning.

My kid is 11 now, and watching him navigate the world has made me realize that I wasn't imagining unfairness around me; it's real. A recent example: several times a year, he flies as an unaccompanied minor, and at 11 years of age, he's still treated like he's 4. He is required to stay with a airline representative at all times, who may not want to do the same things in the terminal that he wishes to do. He has to sit in the back of the plane. He has to deplane last. It's bizarre and infantilizing, and seems to be based on litigation aversion and not any actual safety impetus.

One of his favorite activities recently has been using LLM agents to mod classic video games, and he's gotten quite good at it. Are we about to force the internet to infantilize our children instead of acknowledging the information age as their birthright?


> not wearing pants and playing bagpipes on the bus

The problem for some of us here is that we're left without a viable transit option, as the yes-pants-no-bagpipes model of transit essentially has a state-sanctioned monopoly.

I suspect if market forces were allowed to operate in this area, we'd see fewer pants and more pipes.


Not everyone who isn't wearing pants is playing bagpipes, but almost everyone who is playing bagpipes isn't wearing pants.

What do you have against bagpipes?

no-true-Scotsman...

Indeed it needs to happen, and even here on HN, it can be difficult for some to admit and acknowledge.

It'd be great for this to be the first major relinquishment of nation-state power to happen without violence, without backroom deals, without wedge politics and flag waving.

Just... let it go.

It's beyond obvious that copyright is not going to exist in 1000 years. Every creature on earth - especially the internet - survives by copying information. It's the most basic life force in the universe.

Copyright is serving exactly nobody today. It's time. Are there elder stateswo/men in the room who can see the writing on the wall and act with grace?


> Copyright is serving exactly nobody today

Except for nearly everyone who writes anything (including software) or other artistic pursuits to make a living. This includes a majority of people here on HN.


Most hackers here are not relying on copyright to make their living. Either you work on open source but make your living off services on top of the code, or your code is a trade secret protected via contracts.

Not to mention that everyone using coding agents probably aren't even protected by copyright in the first place, at least in the US, since the courts are taking a pretty hard line on human authorship being required...


Free Software as a concept could not exist without copyright. Copyright is what allows the license to declare the terms under which a copy is permitted, including the provision that the source code ship with the binary form. (This is discussed in the commentary to the GPL.)

Despite the SaaS model under which many of us build, there is still a tremendous amount of packaged and distributed software that people use every day: your phone and its OS and apps, most computer OSes, databases, medical records, transportation, communications—the list goes on—that many of us work on to put food on the table.


Copyleft software couldn't exist. But all software would be free by default, because all source would be in the public domain, and all reverse compilation of binaries would produce public domain code.


Sure, but if all software is in the public domain, then the profit motive for developing software will be completely wiped out, and much less will be produced as a result. Software development be reduced to a hobby or developers will have to seek out patronage like artists did in the 1600s. That’s not a world that most of us want to return to.


Why do you think so much open source software is written, if you need a profit motive for software to be created?

Also, let's be real - human written (and therefore copyrightable) code is dying already. When the machines can write anything on demand, why do you need a profit motive?


> Why do you think so much open source software is written, if you need a profit motive for software to be created?

That's like asking why gardeners like to grow food and flowers in their backyards, or why hobbyists like to build furniture in their garages. Some people need a creative outlet. It doesn't mean that a lot of people won't grow food, flowers, or furniture for free, and that there's no demand for food, flowers, or furniture to be bought.

> When the machines can write anything on demand, why do you need a profit motive?

Machines still need humans to power them. They're like any other tools that need direction and guidance, by humans that possess the innate creativity.


Ok, but unlike hobby gardening, open source maintainers actually write the core software we all rely on. That's where the analogy falls over - the "hobbyists" are producing a sufficient bounty already, without a profit motive. A lot of them are paid employees of corporations, but those corporations often don't make profit on the open source software they contribute to either.

> Machines still need humans to power them. They're like any other tools that need direction and guidance, by humans that possess the innate creativity.

Yes but ideas are not copyrightable, only the fixed expression of those ideas in (in this case) written form. If the actual writing of the code is delegated entirely to machines, then software copyrights are dead.


Or have a universal income. Capitalism isn't inevitable. And it will end anyway, at it hits planetary limits. Better start thinking of alternatives before one of the worst ones gets imposed on us.


We had arts and sciences being funded long before copyright even existed. Your concern is not based in reality. If people want something to exist they will be willing to pay for its creation.

> But all software would be free by default, because all source would be in the public domain, and all reverse compilation of binaries would produce public domain code.

I am not aware of any open-source license which tries to approximate the "there is no copyright" situation:

- Such a license would not compulse you to publish the source code of any modification you make for it.

- Such a license would allow you to distribute compiled programs only.

- On the other hand, such a license must not restrict you to de-compile, modify or re-destribute any binaries built from the source code.

- But any such derivate of such a binary or source code would have to stay under the same license (this is a different kind of virality than "normal" viral licenses).


CC0 is an explicit attempt to emulate public domain in license form, isn't it?


> CC0 is an explicit attempt to emulate public domain in license form, isn't it?

Public domain is something different from an emulation of "there is no copyright":

You can take public domain material to build some program binary:

- In the current legal system, you can enforce restrictions on the usage of this binary, and can forbid redistribution, reverse-engineering, ...

- In a "no copyright world", you cannot enforce such restrictions.


> In the current legal system, you can enforce restrictions on the usage of this binary [from a public domain source], and can forbid redistribution, reverse-engineering

IAAL and am pretty familiar with U.S. copyright law, and am curious where support for this proposition in the law is found. Can you provide sources, please?


I don't know the US law (I live in Germany), but the intuition is clear:

1. Take some CC0/public domain source code.

2. Build a binary out of it and sell licenses for your software.

Case study: SQLite's source code is public domain. On the other hand, it is embedded in many commercial software products that are sold - and you are not allowed to reverse-engineer the software or redistribute binaries of it. This would be possible/allowed in a no-copyright world.


"your code is a trade secret protected via contracts" isn't enough to replace copyright because the contracts are only enforceable to the signing parties.

Let's say you write some software for your employer and they sell the product to several customers with a contract not to distribute it. However, the product appears on some pirate website anyway, and you can't identify who allowed the product to be leaked. Once it's there, your contracts are worthless as nobody who downloads it from the pirate site will be bound by your contract. You need copyright laws to prevent subsequent distribution.

Without copyright laws, you'd then end up in the situation where people who paid for the software then are bound by the contract and would have to keep paying, and those who just downloaded it from a pirate site would be completely fine legally and could use the software with impunity. That would create a disincentive for anybody agreeing to buy the software and entering into a contract in the first place, essentially killing the industry.

You might not see a problem with that if you believe in Open Source, but most licences require copyright laws to exist to protect the software freedoms so that people don't just take the software and close source it.


Yeah, I'm assuming most people here aren't selling proprietary code to customers directly. I assume most professionals here work somewhere that sells SaaS or uses the software they develop internally only.


If I recall correctly most software work goes to custom software. Note that in many, possibly most, cases, the (sole) customer retains the exclusive rights to the source code, making the software effectively Free per the FSF definition (because the user is free).

Almost my entire career was spent on such custom software. The rest was internal software. And even that one I was doing as a contractor, so in a way we could argue it was custom software even there.


Even if they don't sell the code to the customers directly (or even binaries, because that's what most customers actually care about), somebody in the chain is selling that software to the end customer and that money is going up the chain. It's kind of obvious really - if the work you're doing isn't creating saleable value, then your company won't be able to pay you.

But there is far, far more in the world that just SaaS or internal only software. Sure, companies are generally shifting towards SaaS (in part because it allows them another way to combat piracy, but also to extract recurring revenue rather than one off purchases), but there's still plenty of software you can go out to the shop and buy. Most of that wouldn't exist without copyright laws, because those developers would have found some other way of making a living instead.


> somebody in the chain is selling that software to the end customer

Not necessarily? Any infra software is invisible to the end consumer. It's bundled into the price the customer pays for what they see, but they themselves don't know or care about the former.

> there's still plenty of software you can go out to the shop and buy

... is there? I haven't bought software in a shop in 20 years at least. Outside of games, I don't really buy software digitally, even. It's either FOSS or it's a subscription.


From the top of my head, the easiest examples are games. Where I live at least, there are still physical stores in most malls with loads of disc-based games for sale. But also, for instance, I can go into my local computer store and pick up a boxed copy of Windows, so yes physical software sales is definitely still a thing. I personally haven't done it for a long time, but I know it exists.

But anyway, the method of software delivery is tangential to the main point. Plenty of software exists that runs locally, regardless of how is paid for - whether subscription or one-off purchases, if it runs on your computer it relies on copyright law to protect the revenue stream for the developers. Without copyright laws, if one physical sale could be freely copied with impunity, sales would be vastly diminished to the point that many developers would just not bother and find a different industry to work in to earn a salary.


That is a false assumption.


yeah I wouldn't be able to put food on the table if my employer didn't have exclusive license to the glue we use to stick together all that open source code we rely on. Which we now generate exclusively using AI, products of which are of unclear copyright status.

Modern IP law inhibits productivity more than it helps, imo. LLMs have fundamentally changed our line of work, and they have done so by completely ignoring the existing legal framework for IP. We should not defend the current implementation just because some people might suffer reduced earning potential.


Copyright was not designed to maximize productivity. It was designed to maximize creativity and inventiveness (or, as stated in the US Constitution, the progress of science and the useful arts).


> t was designed to maximize creativity and inventiveness

If you look at outcomes it has completely failed while making big corps very rich in the process


Unfortunately that will happen irrespective of the law.

If you want permissive rules then corporations will just resell your IP (like we see with SaaS). And if you want tighter rules then you just create a higher barrier for entry that benefits corporations rather than independent entities.

Either way, it’s easier to operate when you already have a leading position.


Then just outlaw big corps. Put a hard cap on company size or capital, possibly on a per-domain basis. Or just put what has to be big infrastructure under direct state control. Worked wonders in practice in France.

Oh, and also put a hard cap on individual wealth while we're at it. No one, no matter how hard working, deserves a billion dollars. And no one should be trusted with that much power, it's too goddamn dangerous.

(The caps should be indexed to stuff like median income or wealth. Wanna get richer? There's a way: help everyone get richer. That way we're actually in this together.)


Linux is a marvel of the world and a large amount of its contributions have been made by people being paid to do so for commercial purposes - and I am not sure that would be true without the GPL. Is there a convincing argument there?

And outside open source there has been a staggering amount of creative work at all quality levels done for commercial purposes under the protection of copyright. Is there a convincing argument that the last century of software and music and books and etc would have been just as staggering without copyright?

I would love to hear such an argument. In my youth I thought copyright was blatantly stupid and should be abolished. I still sorta think that but I don't have a convincing argument in the face of the absolutely massive amount of good work that has been produced under it.


> Is there a convincing argument that the last century of software and music and books and etc would have been just as staggering without copyright?

> I would love to hear such an argument.

Fortunately, one of the many tentacles of the octopus most obviously at the forefront of the zeitgeist of the freedom that arises from a culture of free information - The Grateful Dead - had the outcome of producing - in the form of gripping autobiography - an extremely compelling, and seemingly utterly true and beautiful and good, instrument to fulfill your request:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36750087-mother-american...

If you don't want to read a whole book and just want a stump speech which kicks ass in the department of argument you're requesting, it's here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLbqgG6o1n8


Nonsense. Thousands of new TV shows, songs, and apps that come out every year and put food on the table for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people that help produce them.

Yes, some people and companies benefit disproportionately, but those tend to be the ones who finance the process and bear the risk of loss due to failures and flops.


I’ve written software all my life, copyright has never been relevant to my earnings at all, trade secrets have been to some extent. Frankly copyright was meant to enable more sharing and benefiting the public domain, instead it’s become a cancer…


For every rule there is an exception.


I love the self contradiction in this one.

I'm guessing you didn't click my profile before writing this knee-jerk, but I'm a professional musician. And I've worked in software engineering, across a zillion different licenses, for many years.

I'm not just shooting from the hip here.


I'm a trained attorney who specialized in intellectual property law, and I happen to know a little about both the performing arts and software industries. It does serve people and power entire industries.

You wrote "copyright is serving exactly nobody today." If that's not what you meant, choose your words more carefully next time. This is a forum of writing, and, much like songwriting, the right words and nuance matter.


> I'm a trained attorney who specialized in intellectual property law, and I happen to know a little about both the performing arts and software industries.

To be frank, it sounds like you are part of the problem, and that your income may partly be derived from rent-seeking via the intellectual property regime. Is that correct?

> You wrote "copyright is serving exactly nobody today." If that's not what you meant, choose your words more carefully next time.

Well, I suppose it depends what sorts of engagement we can understand as "serving". By "serving", I do not mean merely enriching. Of course we all recognize that there are massive industries which are enriched by this system; where we may disagree is whether any actual services in rendered to the folks doing the writing and recording and touring in exchange for that enrichment.

At present, I think it's perfectly reasonable to observe that _musicians_ are not _served_ by this configuration. To the contrary, it has spawned a complicated system of publication, with many musicians facing the subpar customer service experience of services like distrokid and cdbaby facilitating distribution to services like spotify and apple music, while the RIAA and MPAA employ legal threats and harassment to the more musician-friendly DRM-free and direct-to-consumer counterparts.

I think it's also fair to say that, since the beginning of music, no musician ever has wanted a system whose function is to call the cops of their fans. And ultimately, that's what copyright is - it lets me send the cops in to fuck with fans who... try to share my music with their friends? It's awful from first principles, even if the implementation weren't as rotten as it is.

You said, "Except for nearly everyone who writes anything (including software) or other artistic pursuits to make a living" in response to this statement. So I think you have no leg to stand on in terms of demanding disambiguity; your statement is flatly and demonstrably false. Every musician I know (including, I'll bet, musicians you listen to) - and I'll bet, every one that you know too - has seething daily contempt for lawyers who make these asinine claims.


> To be frank, it sounds like you are part of the problem, and that your income may partly be derived from rent-seeking via the intellectual property regime. Is that correct?

That is not correct. My current role is a technical one, not a legal one.

> where we may disagree is whether any actual services in rendered to the folks doing the writing and recording and touring in exchange for that enrichment.

Besides studio time, connections to expert studio musicians, producers, engineers, advances and royalties? You may think the amount of support is insufficient, but that's different from claiming it's zero.

> no musician ever has wanted a system whose function is to call the cops of their fans

Have you ever heard of Metallica, Dr. Dre, or Slipknot? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallica_v._Napster,_Inc.) While they didn't call the cops on their fans, they fought hard against businesses who facilitated mass copyright infringement and made it known they were vehemently against piracy. They took a lot of heat for it from entitled children, but the vast majority of fellow artists quietly supported them.

> Every musician I know (including, I'll bet, musicians you listen to) - and I'll bet, every one that you know too - has seething daily contempt for lawyers who make these asinine claims.

Of course they do, but they sure as shit aren't giving up their advances and royalty checks that feed themselves and their families.

I would humbly suggest you spend some time among professionals in Hollywood (music, movies, and TV). You'll learn a lot. There are entire neighborhoods--not just posh ones in the hills--of people who earn their daily bread in the industry. I know; I grew up among them. Middle class, salt-of-the-earth folks.


> That is not correct. My current role is a technical one, not a legal one.

Well then I apologize for my presumption.

> Besides studio time, connections to expert studio musicians, producers, engineers, advances and royalties?

The first four of these have nothing to do with IP schemes and are widely available to those of us who grind not only our music but our social connections. I publish all of my music as CC0 or CC-BY-SA (and of course all DRM-free, as is nearly all bluegrass now), and I think my studio records and collaborations show quite clearly that I have not suffered from lack of access to top talent. If anything, the notoriety of my IP activism and development of p2p tools seems to have made me _more_ interesting to most of my favorite bluegrassers; I'm not sure I'd have been able to make either of my studio records without the good will that has come from this.

Royalties are obviously a complex topic with a strange history, but I see no reason to lose confidence that we can engineer a system by which funds flow form fans to musicians in a way that is at least as just (and is more direct) than royalties.

Advances are obviously an issue, I grant that. And it's not just the check getting cut, but the negotiating power from the label side to do the tour launch, get on the studio and mastering calendars, push to playlisters and radio stations, etc. - a lot of these activities are (in my opinion, cringely) crosswired with the systems of contracts and advances.

I have almost no familiarity with the motion picture industry, and only a passing connection to soundtrack musicians.

But I have repeatedly been shocked to find that even when one of my friends writes a big hit, they receive what seems to be a joke in terms of financial compensation.

Yes, of course Metallica made that fuss. But they didn't outwardly say, "we want our fans arrested" - they dressed up their complaint as a qualm toward an industry too tolerant to the presence of p2p file sharing (what today we might even call freedom of general purpose computing).

In other words, they kept the quiet part quiet. And in any case, if that's the closest thing we can picture to a band wanting to call the cops on their fans, I feel reasonably secure in my assessment.

Much of your comment seems designed to question why I want to take money out of the pockets of these entire neighborhoods of salt-of-the-earth folks. I don't. My contention - the obvious observation I believe - is that the framework of casting their work as intellectual property has impoverished rather than enriching them, and that a better way is coming.

If you stand on the east bank of the Cumberland and look west, I hope you notice that nearly all of the glitzy logos atop the high-rises are financial firms - Third Fifth, Wells Fargo - I can't immediately remember the rest. Obviously the batman building notwithstanding. :-)

The intensity of financial firms in and around downtown Nashville is a testament to how many billions have been diverted from their fan-=>artist path and have instead made their way into the pockets not only of studio execs, but their underwriters and insurers.

Since the internet seems wont to route around IP laws anyway, I feel strongly that we live at a moment of opportunity to right this wrong.


> the framework of casting their work as intellectual property has impoverished rather than enriching them

Some hit artists might disagree with you.

Besides, the ones who flopped don’t owe the rightsholders money from their own pockets. It’s not a “heads I win, tails you lose” situation for the artists. In some ways an advance is a better deal than a typical business loan. In fact, a business loan is a pretty good approximation of a typical early record deal. The challenge is that it’s often difficult to get artists to understand that.

> The intensity of financial firms in and around downtown Nashville is a testament to how many billions have been diverted from their fan-=>artist path and have instead made their way into the pockets not only of studio execs, but their underwriters and insurers.

Well, yeah. For every hit artist there are thousands of flops. Someone has to bear the risk of developing the artists, building repertoires, fronting the money to make first records, and marketing. It’s an axiom of capitalism that the party that takes the biggest financial risk gets the biggest share of the rewards.

I think what you’re really saying is that you think artists deserve a bigger share of the profits. That’s a fair position to hold, but it’s a rather differ one from the statements I was previously responding to.


People made a living juste fine before copyright stop spreading myths


>> Copyright is serving exactly nobody today.

Are you sure about that?

So just to be clear;

You're advocating for the end of software licensing? Ie the removal of GPL or Open Source licenses? A landscape where any source code (or binary) can be snapped up by say Amazon or Microsoft and run via a paid subscription?

You're advocating for a business model which removes your access to local code and only allows access via a terminal or browser?

Because removal of copyright doesn't mean corporations go away. Rather it incentivizes business models that protect their products in other ways.

In the 80's and 90's, pre-internet, binary programs were distributed on media. An arms race of copiers and copy protection ensued. The copiers won, and since copyright enforcement has always been weak, business changed to favoring remote access (with subscription) over running locally via purchase.

At the same time Open Source and Free Software have thrived. Copyright protects that software being used outside the terms of the license. Indeed there's even outrage when it's used within the terms of the license (by AWS etc.)

Of course OSS still thrives under a copyrightless environment. (Free Software less so). But equally it means AI can simply be trained on it (probably no great loss since it's likely most of OSS will be AI generated anyway.)

Business however will adapt. And the easiest way to prevent coping now is simply remote execution. With a suitable Terms Of Use declaration.

Outside of software it would destroy music, movies, books etc. Basically it becomes a race to the bottom in terms of production costs (think user-generated You-Tube as the high-water mark.) But I assume you meant in the context of software.

Yes, I agree, that in much less than 1000 years copyright is dead. Because by then so much is in the public domain it doesn't matter anyway. Also because by then the last human programmer is long dead. AI will write anything you want, only you won't even ask because computer interfaces and abilities will be long past where we are now. You would have no need to create software any more than you need to build a plane or car today.

And those industries have taken less than 150 years to invent, explode, consolidate and commoditize. Indeed most of the complexity disappears when we go EV.

In 1000 years copyright is gone. But today it serves a lot of people.


> Copyright is serving exactly nobody today.

As a budding wannabe fiction author, I certainly hope you are wrong.


> It'd be great for this to be the first major relinquishment of nation-state power

Intellectual property serves corporate interests and the idea of "nations" you are forced to have in your head are the exclusive servants the interests of capital. Ironically, tragically, that's what's holding us back from dismantling it in the first place, even a critic of it can't articulate it properly.

Sorry that will be undecipherable for HN. Let me try again: The defense you get in this pigstall is the individual that copyright is protecting. You just hate the small businesses and individual artists. Instead of the trillion dollar industry holding the copyrights and the practice of exploiting copyright on works by authors who died decades ago. The commodification of copyright of something produced by the lowest bidder, crappiest AI and cheapest third world labor you can get your literal bloody hands on. Or even a vaccine against the literal plague or cure for cancer protected by intellectual property.

To make something immaterial with no cost to reproduce, a commodity, to trade and invest and speculate in is the part to argue if you want to dismantle it, identify the rotten bits of the system even peasants can smell. If you are a billionaire or even trillionaire then just argue like everybody on HN always does, because it's identical.


Indeed. But when the rubber meets the road, even our community has trouble standing behind people taking direct action to disrupt ICE activities. eg: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48727750


Tech in general (including HN) skews right wing. The era of the countercultural social rebel is long over. Now it's largely just people who have the bag defending the status quo and a whole bunch more people who think they'll one day be holding the bag so are defending the status quo. Tech companies are now fundamentally just defense contractors.

There are an awful lot of people who don't hate opression. They simply hate being oppressed. And those are two very different things.

This claim probably upsets a bunch of people who don't want to think of themselves as right wing. They'll point to rainbow flags in their bios at the same time they're the most NIMBY people in the Bay Area and they basically want homeless people to just die.


This is perhaps one of the more disappointing aspects of the collapse of the 'old internet' and its replacement with the venture capital backed enshittification engine that it is now. Tech people used to be mostly people who were curious about things. That might not be a selector for 'good' person but it's at least a selector against the kind of brutally effective banal corporate evil that so dominates the space today.


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