> The ONLY reason to have any law prohibiting unlicensed copying of intangible property is to incentivize the creation of intangible property.
That was the original purpose. It has since been coopted by people and corporations whose incentives are to make as much money as possible by monopolizing valuable intangible "property" for as long as they can.
And the chief strategic move these people have made is to convince the average person that ideas are in fact property. That the first person to think something and write it down rightfully "owns" that thought, and that others who express it or share it are not merely infringing copyright, they are "stealing."
This plan has largely worked, and now the average person speaks and thinks in these terms, and feels it in their bones.
>the average person speaks and thinks in these terms,
(Trademarks aside) Even more surprising to me is how everyone seems concerned about the studios making enough money?! As if they should make any money at all. As if it is up to us to create a profitable game for them.
If they all go bankrupt today I won't lose any sleep over it.
People also try to make a living selling bananas and apples. Should we create an elaborate scheme for them to make sure they survive? Their product is actually important to have. Why can't they own the exclusive right to sell bananas similarly? If anyone can just sell apples it would hurt their profit.
It is long ago but that is how things use to work. We do still have taxi medallions in some places and all kinds of legalized monopolies like it.
Perhaps there is some sector where it makes sense but I can't think of it.
If you want to make a movie you can just do a crowd funder like Robbert space industry.
> Even more surprising to me is how everyone seems concerned about the studios making enough money?! As if they should make any money at all. As if it is up to us to create a profitable game for them.
Do you want more games (movies, books...)? Then you want studios to make money in that type of game. Because and if they make money they have incentive to do so. Now if you are happy with the number and quality of free games a few hard core people who will do it even if they make nothing then you don't care. However games generally take a lot of effort to create and so by paying people to make them we can ensure people who want to actually have the time - as opposed want to but instead have to spend hours in a field farming for their food.
Now it is true that games often do look alike and many are not worth making and such. However if you want more you need to ensure they make money so it is worth investing.
We can debate how much they should make and how long copyright should be for. However you want them to make money so they make more.
Games:
> "On platforms like Steam, indie games constitute the vast majority of new titles. For instance, in 2021, approximately 98% of the 11,700 games released on Steam were from indie developers. This trend has continued, with indie games accounting for 99% of releases on gaming platforms between 2018 and 2023."
Written content:
> "Every year, traditional publishers release around half a million to a million new books in the U.S., but that number is dwarfed by the scale of independent writing online: WordPress users alone publish over 70 million blog posts per month, Amazon sees over 1.7 million self-published books annually, and platforms like Medium, Substack, and countless personal websites generate millions more articles and essays. While the average quality of traditional publishing remains high due to strict editorial standards, consumer behavior has shifted dramatically—people now spend far more time reading informal, self-published content online, from niche newsletters to Reddit posts, often favoring relevance, speed, and authenticity over polish. This shift has made the internet the dominant source of written content by volume and a major player in shaping public discourse."
Video content:
> "Today, the overwhelming majority of video content is produced not by Hollywood or television studios, but by individuals on the internet. YouTube alone sees over 500 hours of video uploaded every minute—more than 260 million hours per year—vastly outpacing the combined annual output of all major film studios and TV networks, which together produce only a fraction of that volume. Despite questions about quality, consumer habits have shifted dramatically: people now watch over 1 billion hours of YouTube content per day, and platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and Twitch are growing rapidly, especially among younger audiences. While Hollywood still commands attention with high-budget blockbusters and prestige series, user-generated content dominates the daily media diet in both time spent and engagement."
You know what dominates though: the big budget games/books/videos. Indie is sometimes really good, but a lot of it is horrible.
That's because the big budget creators are very good at business, which has four parts[1]: not just the product, but also the revenue model, the market, and distribution.
Big budget studios are AMAZING at distribution. They blow indie devs out of the water, who focus almost all their effort on just product.
Do big budget studios often make great games? Yes! But they often produce total garbage, too, just like indie devs. I think the biggest difference between them is distribution.
[1] https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-to-brainstorm-great-bu...
How has IH been going post-split from Stripe? I have not visited in a while but I'm curious on your thoughts. Also, if you are in or hosting any NYC-related events, I would love to join.
It's been going well! Not profitable yet, but spending more time on it in 2025, so it will be soon I think.
I'll actually be in NYC visiting Channing this coming week, perhaps we'll do an impromptu event for IHers in the area
> Do you want more games (movies, books...)?
Not really. We already have multiple lifetimes of them to enjoy.
But if I do I'm happy to pay for the work in advance. No need to go full Spanish inquisition on my sock drawer.
It's been a US-led project for the benefit of American corporations.
If I was running the trade emergency room in any European state right now, I'd have "stop enforcing US copyright" up there next to "reciprocal tarrifs".
Unfortunately we have a bunch of copyright-friendly groups in EU, so this would only work in the "stop enforcing US copyright in retaliation" sense, but not likely in the "stop enforcing copyright because on the net, it's a scam" sense.
Worked for china
In the context of when they want to borrow others' stuff. But then Chinese companies are _more_ than happy to take advantage of Western laws to defend their own IP. It's hypocrisy.
It's business or it's incentives make more sense.
Hypocrisy is a foolishly judgemental word, and it is anthropomorphising a jurisdiction. Western civ has advantages we don't decry - should we just cherrypick the things we don't like?
The main issue is Western laws are created by Western jurisdictions and if we don't like how the laws are used then the laws should be "fixed" (although maybe a bit better than the current attempt at a fix!)
I would point out that using laws you are subject to too is not hypocrisy. Even if you do not want the same laws in your own country or if you lobby against those laws simultaneously.
Your comment inspires me to write an essay titled "What's wrong with hypocrisy?" because it seems like no-one really cares about it anymore. It's like the concept itself has lost meaning. Hypocrisy a big, abstract word that has the audacity to refer to other big abstract words like "character" and "virtue" and "fairness". Now many people accused of hypocrisy say "so what?". What's going on there? It has the feel of a situation where someone says your software has memory leaks, and you say "so?" not knowing what that even means. "Hypocrisy" and "memory leaks" share the notion of a characterization of a set of flaws that can and will show themselves in many disparate ways. Powerful signals to a specialist, and noise for a generalist. And not just noise, but a signal against the critic as an elitist snob that uses words and concepts no-one understands.
The worst part about this trend toward hypocrisy acceptance is that nobody cares when you point it out. This empowers the hypocrite to answer with "So what?" because they know they will face absolutely no consequences. In politics, business, and even personal life, most people have everything to gain and very little to lose*. And our current hyper-individualistic society has only exacerbated the issue. "Who cares if the people around me don't trust me? I'll just get what I need from some faceless computer system."
* You actually have a lot to lose, but it's not tangible or very directly measurable, and the effects compile over a long time, so the results are not easy to see.
Yes, a lack of disincentive to hypocrisy and, in fact, considerable disincentive to pointing it out, seems to be the case. Why? From a utilitarian perspective, at the societal level hypocrisy undermines the "cooperate" Nash equilibrium; at the individual level, it undermines "conscience". The question we might ask is how did we lose conscience? If psychological egoism is the default "philsophy" of humans (and I think that it is, just as "autocracy" is the default governing system), then the better question is how did we get it and maintain it in the first place? In an ideal world you get to do tests, where one group's values are tested against another group with different values to see which group is stronger. An example of this is with war - WWII was liberalism vs fascism, and the Cold War was liberalism vs communism. We won both. So what happened? Could it be that liberalism collapses on its own when it's not measured against an alternative?
I too had been thinking of such a similar blog post, of why hyprocrisy even matters. In most of human history, might had essentially made right (or rather, power did not care whether it were hypocritical or not). However, we did indeed cooperate before modern liberalism as well, so it's hard to say exactly what effect this modern-day obsession being non-hypocritical creates.
A lot of “hypocracy” is nothing of the sort. Selectively using the rules that are derived from a moral concern is not hypocracy, unless they argued for those rules on those moral grounds. Chinese companies aren't known for their fervant declarations of support for american values, and so it is entirely fair that they play according to the rules-as-written. Now, if they're espousing communist ideals for all people, _then_ there would be a valid claim of hypocracy, but the arguments I see are basically never this nuanced.
Which is not to say that there is no hypocracy these days, just that the word is so frequently misapplied that its use is little more than a signal of emotional valence.
We were close to your viewpoint being the popular one, but sadly many (most?) independent content creators are so overtaken by fear of AI that they've done a 180. The same people who learned by tracing references to sell fanart of a copyrighted franchise (not complaining, I spend thousands on such things) accuse AI of stealing when it glances at their own work. We're entering a new golden age of creative opportunity and they respond by switching sides to the philosophy of intellectual property championed by Disney and Oracle (except for those companies' ironic use of AI themselves..).
We would prefer a world where we can use the skills we have spent a lifetime honing without having to compete with some asshole taking everything we’ve shared and stuffing it into a machine that spits out soulless clones of our work without any acknowledgment of our existence.
This could a be verbatim quote from a seamstress talking about looms.
Yes. The Luddites had some pretty good ideas about resisting the centralization of profits into the hands of the people who owned the machines who took over their jobs, really. So did the French Revolution.
Not really, the machines these days are owned by everyone, the type of labor is not the same as it was, as anyone can own a laptop as a means of production. As an aside, I have seen your comments quite a bit on AI art related threads over the past few years, especially while I see close to none on ones related to AI code related ones, and I always thought there was some hypocrisy there, which actually led me to the theory that it is not the tech that threatens people so, but the economic incentives behind them, as you state in this comment.
That is why I would advocate for people to support open source AI that at least does not drive profits to any one entity, but people have been so knee-jerk reactive to anything AI over the years that they do not understand that more regulation only means that big tech, with the means to buy licenses to content, would essentially be the arbiters to new popular culture, ironically screwing creators even more in the process; think Disney, but 10x more powerful.
I'm an artist, not a programmer. I'm not gonna be trying to use AI to code anything. I don't see any hypocrisy here.
I do however greatly enjoy pointing and laughing when I see programmers expressing unhappiness with the prospect of their life shifting from "actually programming" to "endless review of AI slopcode". Does that sound like fun? Is that related in any way to the joy of creation that made you decide to be a programmer? Probably not! But you'll be so productive! You'll be able to work four times harder in the same time, for the same pay! Or less, since obviously the real work is being done by the AI now. Does that possibility make you feel unhappy and sad? Good. Now you know how I feel.
Open-source AI isn't gonna do shit to keep from devaluing my craft. It'll just make it worse. I am no fan of the Mouse but if I can get them to fight all these motherfuckers with a ton of VC investment who want to eliminate every creative job and leave me with no way to scrape out a living then I'm cheering for Disney.
> we were close
Maybe. In my microcosm even before big AI, 100% of my tech acquaintances were against IP laws, 0% of my art acquaintances were, and authors I know had varied opinions based on their other backgrounds.
Artists do seem to have had a mindset shift. Previously they supported IP protection because it was "right" (or they'd at least concede that in practice it's not helping them personally), but with the AI boom most of them are pro-IP laws because of more visceral livelihood fears.
There's also a moral issue at play: To safeguard the interests of a few publishers (sometimes the creators, but they can easily end up with a shitty deal) you remove freedoms to the entire population to copy the same idea.
You need a central structure funded by everyone's taxes which enforce a contract almost nobody of the infringers has signed.
That's appaling, I hope with this AI wave we'll get rid of copyright all together.