When I was younger, I also thought that way. I also felt that being artist has nothing to with money: a true artist will always create out of their internal need, not for money.

Then came the brutal reality: creating high-quality artwork needs time. Some can be created after work, but not that much. Some forms of art require expensive instruments. Some, like filmmaking, require collaboration and coordination of many people. So yes, I could do some forms of art part-time using the money from my day job, but I knew it was a far cry from what I could do when working on it full time. It's not capitalism, it's just reality.

The restrictions on creating art are the product of the society you live in, which means they are the product of capitalism if you live in a capitalist society. The way society is organised determines the cost of people's time, the cost of the tools, and the cost of the materials.

Yea I find when people say "ideas shouldn't be ownable" it's really the more general "deriving profit from private ownership was a mistake". Like you kinda point out, most of the reason I can think of that a person would want control of their intellectual property is to derive profit from it.

That reason has nothing to do with intellectual property or how it's created, it's a consequence of living in a capitalist society.

It's almost like "capitalism" isn't something that needs to be created and forced upon people, it's just the way a world where energy isn't free and can not be created from thin air works. Capitalism is just that, the realization that there's no free lunches and no UBIs are possible without some serious unintended consequences. I pirate everything I consume, but I would never be such an hypocrite to say that all copyright must be abolished.

That's one of the great victories of capitalism: somehow it has convinced people that a 300 year-old economic system originating in north-western Europe is as natural as the air we breathe, and as inevitable as gravity or any natural law.

You have to threaten to shoot people to get them to practice any other -ism.

So, yes, capitalism in the sense of the freedom to trade one's labor does appear to be naturally and universally emergent in advanced human societies, in the absence of violent interference.

Capitalism is certainly not characterized by the absence of violent interference.

Yes, it is. The violence comes in when you interfere with capitalism. It's not imposed upon you forcefully, you just aren't allowed to get in the way.

To the extent that certain aspects of capitalism lead to violence, those are elements that other parties -- generally corporations or governments rather than writers or philosophers -- added to the ideology.

People die trying to break out of non-capitalist countries, while they die trying to break in to capitalist ones. That's one possible way to tell the good guys from the bad guys.

> Yes, it is. The violence comes in when you interfere with capitalism.

Ahahah, I absolutely love this sentence. You might have said the quiet part out loud though.

“You gots to understand”, said Fat Tony, “I'm not a violent man. The violence simply comes in when you interfere with my business.”

(Shrug) Taking peoples' rights away, including their economic rights, is likely to get the hurt put on you. Ric Romero has more on this late-breaking story at 11.

It sounds funny but he may have a point. It's not a quality of capitalism per se, had it been communism instead then communism would have been the best system for the present moment.

But capitalism prevails and may be the best system there is for now because I cannot fathom a change in system overnight that would not result in mass suffering for (almost) everyone.

Capitalism has violent coercion at its core, in order to enforce its property rights. You simply think that that violence is legitimate and unproblematic because you believe the system it upholds is "natural" and legitimate, but at this point you're arguing in circles. But to say that capitalism is not violent is laughable.

Paying people to make art is older than “capitalism”. Capitalism is when you can own and trade capital, not when you pay people to do things.

What? No. Capitalism is a more specific system for organizing goods and services, wherein the means of production and distribution of those goods and services (buildings, land, machines and other tools, vehicles etc) are privately owned and operated by workers (who are paid a wage) for the profit of the owners. That's only been the norm for a few hundred years, and only in certain places. Also, capitalism is separate from copyright and other IP, though IP as currently implemented is pretty obviously a capitalist concept.

> That's only been the norm for a few hundred years, and only in certain places.

Can you point to a system that worked well before that you'd like to go back to?

At the moment I'd rather not get involved in an online argument about which economic systems are better than than which other ones... especially not on a forum run by a startup accelerator, with a constraint that my preferred system has to be more than 300 years old.

I just wanted to point out that capitalism is in fact a specific economic system. It's not a law of nature, or another word for "markets" or "freedom", or a realization that some other system doesn't work.

Your question assumes the only alternatives involve going back, not forwards. There are still many untried sociopolitical systems.

Yeah, if you want artists to be able to devote their lives to their craft and reach the highest possible levels, they have to get paid enough to do that.

If all artists are "weekend warriors", they will still produce a lot of art, and some of it will be the best in that world. But the quality will be far from what we enjoy today.

That said, there are of course other ways to pay artists than the capitalist way of having customers pay for what they like. But I think the track record firmly favors a capitalist system.

Perhaps no one wants "your art"? 99% of artists who produce something worthwhile very much care about money/copyright.

The there still is the question of attribution, which 100% of real artists care about.

So anybody who just wanted a thing to exist, and don't care who gets the credit, aren't "real artists"? You must not work on any large art projects that involve other people.

99%? You might have it in reverse because most art is not produced by "fulltime" artists. I would even go as far and say 99% of art is not produced to earn money.

You misunderstand me. I am strongly in favor of abolishing all intellectual property restrictions. Here is me arguing just that two days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33697341

But I am absolutely not in favor of keeping IP restrictions in place and then letting big corporations scoop up the works of small independent artists for their ML models.

Think of it in terms of software licenses. The people who write GPL protected software are leveraging existing copyright laws to enforce distribution of their code. They would probably be in favor of abolishing the entire IP rights system. But if a big corporation was copying a project from an independent creator that was GPL licensed, they’d sure as hell want to prosecute.

I believe strongly that IP restrictions are harmful. But keeping them in place while letting big corporations benefit from the work of independent artists who don’t want their work used in this way seems wrong to me. As long as artists wouldn’t expect anyone else to be able to copy their works, I’d like them to be able to consent to their work being used in these systems.

Ahh, I don't think that stance is evident from the GP but fair enough. I may even have a less fervent hate for IP protections than you do.

> But keeping them in place while letting big corporations benefit from the work of independent artists who don’t want their work used in this way seems wrong to me.

I see what you're saying here. My concern is that should copyright style protection be extended to the "vibe" or "style" of a painting it is going to be twisted in a way that ends up being used to silence/abuse artists in the same way that copyright strikes are already.

I think the idea that art is mostly individually creative vs mostly drawing upon the work of all the artists and art-appreciators around you and before you is already really problematic. The corrupting power of the idea is what I worry about. Similarly to crypto/NFTs, the idea that scarcity should exist in the digital world is the most dangerous thing, most of the other bad stems from that.

IMO the most important thing to work on is getting people to reject the idea itself as harmful.

I worry that any short term fix to try to prop up artists' rights in response to this changing landscape will become a long term anchor on our society's equity and cultural progress in the exact same way copyright is.