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Re:Piracy is not theft, Lost sales don't exist, says Minecra... by account42 on Friday March 05, 2021 @03:51AM (#26354516)
> Revenue go up? You pay your bills. You make more stuff people want. Everyone is better off. Good outcome. > > Revenue go down? You can't pay your bills. You make less stuff even though people want what you are making. Everyone is worse off. Bad outcome.

This is a very limited view of the of the effect of copyright. The goal is not to make sure any one specific person or organization has the funds to create but to encoourage the total sum of creations by anyone. As such, any analysis of the effectiveness of copyright will have to also consider the detrimental effects copyright has on other people creating things. And these detrimental effects are not at all theoretical. There is lots of imaginarity "property" that people are sitting on and doing nothing with the monopoly they have been granted as an incentive to produce more while still preventing anyone else from building on those works. Licensing something or heck, even figuring out who owns the rights, is prohibitive enough to outright kill many endeavours that would have enriched society. And that is before come to the hyper-inflated copyright lengths we have today where creators are incentivized to keep milking something they have made decades ago instead of being required to make something new if they want more profit.

I agree that DRM sucks, but that is not an argument for stronger copyright enforcement. DRM very much relies on copyright laws that make breaking it illegal in order to remain effective. And even then, it has only ever been effective in preventing the average user from circumventing it. If you could freely distribute DRM-defeating measures then publishers would be incentivized to remove it for everyone.

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