If you think this is subjective, let me ask you think: you have a popular YouTube channel, your content requires paying writers, actors, VFX teams and editors. Bunch of other people copy your content freely and legally and get most of the ad revenue.
You protest: you made this content, you paid for it. Please just link to me, not the copycats. Response "we can just as easily assert that you'd continue making videos anyway with or without other people copying you."
Kind of tonedeaf isn't it?
Look, eventually all our jobs will be producing IP. We'll have IP schematics to prints 3D printers which prints other 3D printers, which print robots which do all the work. I'm simplifying but basically that's the future of jobs. No one cares about your muscles, they only care about your brain. So, to say IP deserves no rights in the long-term means basically no one has jobs, and we have no economy.
3D printers is a bad example by the way, as one of the most successful 3D printing companies works completely opensource: https://github.com/prusa3d
Why do people still pay them a large sum for their printer when they can build one themselves or buy a cheap clone off of Aliexpress?
Why would YouTube pay ad revenue to a "bunch of other people" in a hypothetical world where YouTube could freely and legally host a copy of the content themselves, and take all the ad revenue for themselves?
They have an incentive to pay something the creator (if they think that doing so would motivate them to create more content, and hence lead to more ad revenue in the future), but certainly not to a bunch of random people uploading the same content.
You do realize if YouTube alone protected copyright, we'd have a NotYouTube clone setup within minutes where the copies and ads will go to, or not?
We have governments for this stuff, so we don't have to play whack-a-mole with copycats all over the internet and the world.
2. No that argument is still silly. It does not work for the same reason: it assumes no agency on part of economic actors. The only way your hypothetical "NotYouTube" could stay in business vs. YouTube is by adding enough value that they actually get ad revenue. If people decide to advertise on "NotYouTube", to the extent that it is profitable to run "NotYouTube", then "NotYouTube" will have the exact same incentive to motivate content creators by sharing part of their ad revenue with them. The argument is precisely that these copycats are a net positive: coordinating against them (playing whack-a-mole) is a net negative, with or without governments.
Well, they have the same content as YouTube for starters. So all they need is a slightly sexier or faster app, and they're done.
> "NotYouTube" will have the exact same incentive to motivate content creators by sharing part of their ad revenue with them.
"NotYouTube" doesn't have content creators. Why would they. They have YouTube's content.
See, the part you keep missing in your analysis is that without IP rights, NotYoutube doesn't need original content, full stop. It just needs to copy/paste YouTube's content. They don't have to share ad revenue with anyone.
You really need to think through the entire chain of events that'll unfold if we had no IP rights. Creators will no longer be someone you need to deal with. They're just the gullible idiots who made something on their own, for others to just take it and profit from it.
In a world without IP rights, content is worthless. So who would bother producing it? Let's figure that out. The only way for content producers to profit would be product placement deals. However the product placement should be inseparable from the content, because in a world without IP rights, anyone can just cut out the ads and sponsored messages from your content.
So what's the conclusion here? All content will be just... ads. Not videos WITH ads. But the videos themselves will be ads. Ads for products you can sell, as those are the only thing you can sell for money in a world without IP rights. Probably also political propaganda, as politicians can pay for that as well, and then embezzle it from the budget. That's going to be all of it. Wow, I just got sad imagining that.
YouTube is not just an app, it's a network that can distribute content along the lines of "200 million videos watched, 65k new videos uploaded per day", it's also the people who moderate it, it's also the people who market it, uptime and reliability, etc. And you'd have to beat YouTube on every single one of these to get at even a substantial fragment of those precious ad dollars.
Notice that your hypothetical "NotYouTube" does not have _any_ advantage over actual-YouTube in a world without IP. It's in the business of connecting advertisers to potential customers, just like YouTube, and to be able to do that, they need content that people watch. And hence, it has an incentive to support the creation of such content. Especially so if it becomes the market leader (by having a slightly sexier app, or larger reach, or less obtrusive ads, or better recommendations, or a nicer privacy policy, some other appeal^1): with that advantage, more people will watch the new content on their website than elsewhere, so it will be able to get more ad revenue from hosting it than its competitors.
There might be
> You really need to think through the entire chain of events that'll unfold if we had no IP rights.
Agreed. We should be especially careful not to: 1. assume that Econ 101 would also cease to apply, and that anyone would be able to make money by spinning up YouTube clones. If your dystopian vision was correct, Wikipedia would have been outcompeted by one of its ad-supported mirrors long ago.
^1 Note: All of these are QoL improvements for the users of the services. As long as there are many more content consumers than content creators (and there is overlap between the two categories), this may constitute a further argument against IP rights.
Original content is an incentive because only the producer can host it. That's enforced by RIGHTS.
Without rights, if YouTube produces it, it ends up on NotYouTube. If NotYouTube produces, it ends up on YouTube. No rights, no original content. There's no incentive. You keep saying the incentive is so people go to the site to watch a particular video. But nothing keeps that video on that one site. IP rights do that currently.
If what you say is right, how far has ThePirateBay gone to produce original content? Oh that's right, they just take Hollywood content and ads flow just fine. That's the future you're fighting for.
No, that's not what I'm saying, and I don't know what gave you that idea. The phrase "original content" never even appeared in my comments!
People visit to online video platforms to watch videos. If there are no interesting videos, people don't visit online video platforms: they go and do something else with their time. And if people don't visit your online video platform, operators of online video platforms lose money, and go out of business. Consequently, operators of online video platforms have an incentive to ensure that interesting videos get made. This is true even when all videos are available on all the platforms. Same principle: one of my siblings operates a rural hotel, and regularly contributes to a fund promoting tourism in the region. Doing this is a net positive for her revenue, even though some (most!) of the tourists will not stay in that specific hotel when they visit the region, and some might stay in hotels that did not contribute to any such fund.
> If what you say is right, how far has ThePirateBay gone to produce original content?
TPB has to operate illegally, has an order of magnitude fewer visitors, and two orders of magnitude smaller revenue. They are not in the position to fund substantial original content, and those who accepted their money would risk prosecution. Despite all of that, TPB did fund a limited number of art projects in the past [1].
> Oh that's right, they just take Hollywood content and ads flow just fine. That's the future you're fighting for.
Heartbreaking injustice. No comment.
Your hypothetical scenarios rely on perpetuating the current ways to monetize but again, that isn't the goal. New ways would surface. The world would certainly be different but nothing about your arguments convince the reader that the world would be worse.
You have to actually prove that research would slow down but your hypothetical scenarios are not proof.
I can just as easily assert that investment and research would happen with or without temporary exclusive legal rights as. Market forces still push for improvement even without exclusivity.