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Re:Piracy is not theft, Lost sales don't exist, says Minecra... by simonh on Wednesday March 03, 2021 @05:40PM (#26335823)
People can give away stuff for free right now if they want, so I don’t see what you mean by the “if not more” comment. I don’t mean that in a snarky way, I joust wonder what you mean.

A lot of content, and software, takes a huge capital investment to create. Blockbuster movies can cost hundreds of millions of dollars to produce, AAA games can certainly cost tens of millions. This is also why open source and and Libre software never took over the world the way many of its proponents assumed it would back in the 90s. Many applications take more than just coding chops to create, it takes QA engineers, artists, designers, project managers, market research and domain experts dependent on the market segment (medical experts, radio engineers, etc). It can take a huge capital investment to put all that together and that money needs to be made back somehow.

Even music takes recording studios, sound engineers, session and backing musicians, artists for the album covers and posters, music video production teams, etc, etc. It’s a serious business. A committed artist in their bedroom can work wonders, but not all music and associated material can be produced in a bedroom.

Re:Piracy is not theft, Lost sales don't exist, says Minecra... by csallen on Thursday March 04, 2021 @06:50AM (#26341271)
The world we have today is built around the laws we have today. People sink many tens or hundreds of millions into copyable content in part because they know the laws guarantee they'll be able to make a profit doing that. But if those laws didn't exist, we'd simply have a world where resources are allocated differently, and it's really quite impossible to say that world would be a worse one.

You can imagine a world in which we have laws allowing broad recipes to be patented. For example, some restaurant chain might register the patent for spaghetti, and you could only ever eat spaghetti at their chain. 100 years from now, we'd likely have some MegaBlockbusterRestaurant chains that spend ridiculous amounts of money on developing new and unique recipes they can monopolize. And someone from that era might say, "What if we stopped allowing this?" And someone could reply, "But tens of millions of dollars are spent on this. It's big business!"

And they would be right ofc. It's a factually true statement. But… so what? I don't mind living in a world where everyone can remix everyone else's recipes, even if it means we don't end up with MegaBlockbusterRestaurant chains.

Perhaps a world with no/weaker copyright laws might be one where money flows toward live performances over recorded experiences. Not necessarily worse imo.

Re:Piracy is not theft, Lost sales don't exist, says Minecra... by account42 on Friday March 05, 2021 @04:24AM (#26354788)
> Perhaps a world with no/weaker copyright laws might be one where money flows toward live performances over recorded experiences.

Or even towards patronage. Crowdfunding is already a thing. Government grants are already a thing.