> And how should the people who take the time to create that 'information' be compensated?

Why should they be compensated? Putting in effort does not equate "getting compensated" and it should not.

If they can't find a way to be compensated, they should find other work to do. Just as if I can disrupt an industry with some new cool gimmick, and thus put potentially thousands, if not millions of people out of work, why shouldn't I? Why should we play protectionism?

Why should we try to build things like DRM just to protect something which itself has little to no intristic value? As if we acknowledged that yes -- "the industry is vulnerable in this new world we live in, but actually adapting to the reality would mean billions, if not trillions of lost revenue, we should rather fight tooth and nail to protect it." I see no sense in this.

Yes, it is a race to the bottom. In the end it just means that goods and monetary compensation gets distributed differently. Obviously, those who right now benefit from the said compensation fight tooth and nail to keep their position, but as I do not -- and I say this as a person who spends considerable amount of money on actual physical CDs (along with misc. merchandise) still, most of which I do download illegally before bying and will keep doing so -- I see this as counterproductive.

I suppose some people see this first and foremost as an argument about whether or not one should get compensated for the work they do or not. And that's greatly, greatly oversimplifying the matter of immaterial property and copyright laws and wars.

>Why should they be compensated?

I watch plenty of stuff without paying for it so I don't want to pretend that I am on some high moral horse here, but i don't get this mindset.

Of course just putting in effort doesn't give me the right to compensation. If so, I could just start digging holes and ask the world for payment. However, if I made something and you want to see it, I think I am in my good right to set a price. If you don't like that price, you are free to move along. There are plenty of files on my laptop that I created that I don't want to show anyone. They are going to stay there and nobody has the right to see them other than me. And if I decided to show one of them to a someone who gave me money in return, that still doesn't give anybody who didn't pay me or anyone else for that matter, any right to access that file, no matter how little "intrinsic value" it represents.

If someone invented a teleport that allowed people to beam to whereever and back, that would cause a rise in theft of tangible goods all over the world. But this would not mean that because the old systems of doors and locks were now inefficient, people should not be allowed to claim ownership of property anymore.

> And if I decided to show one of them to a someone who gave me money in return, that still doesn't give anybody who didn't pay me or anyone else for that matter, any right to access that file, no matter how little "intrinsic value" it represents.

Sure, this is unconditionally right if we go by the book and agree with the law. No argument here. Though, by going by the said law... The full albums, songs, movies, movie clips, whatever unauthorized there is in YouTube for example for billions of people to see every day creates a huge problem.

For example here in Finland, any person listening to an unauthorized upload of an album on YouTube breaks the law. Practically a huge majority of the youth are criminals as they do this on a daily basis, and take it for granted. Obviously it is utterly senseless to go after these people for what they are doing.

> If someone invented a teleport that allowed people to beam to whereever and back, that would cause a rise in theft of tangible goods all over the world. But this would not mean that because the old systems of doors and locks were now inefficient, people should not be allowed to claim ownership of property anymore.

But this, of course, is a flawed analogy. A better one would be with an ability to clone material for free. Say, if we were able to build a car, and then clone it for free for everyone. Why wouldn't we? For many goods we could just come up with better and better ones again and again, and people would immediately clone them for themselves and be happy. Sounds good, no?

In the end the main reason I oppose the copyright mafia bullshit is the tendency to limit my ability to use computers as computers. They want to tell me which bit patterns are illegal on my mass storage device or RAM. They want to tell me what CPU instructions I am not allowed to inspect or run. They want to tell me what network data I am allowed to capture and inspect. In essence, they want to own my general purpose computer and make it some form of "special purpose machine" with certain set of bits or instructions, or pixels on the screen. Cory Doctorow gave a great talk about this subject in 28C3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg

And boy, if someone breaks these rules. Your 9-year-old daughter downloads an album on her laptop, and the police storms in after you refuse to sign NDA and pay a fine from an anti-piracy group which is 30 times higher than the value of the album in question. And I am not bullshitting you -- this really happened two years ago in Finland. See: https://torrentfreak.com/police-raid-9-year-old-pirate-bay-g...

HN submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4818159

For me personally, whether you, or someone get your living from whatever you do which people may pirate is completely irrelevant in grand scheme of things. The much larger picture is these completely messed up laws with these mafia-like anti-piarcy groups such as MPAA or RIAA, and many domestic ones in almost every country. The issue is way, way much more than just whether something is right or wrong. I see this whole issue very central on a societal level as well as from the point of view of something I'd call "computer/computing culture". I see it as something we as hackers should be very aware and vocal about. See SOPA and PIPA as examples as to why.

Well, I get paid to create that information and help use it. Others get paid to distribute it personally, usually in a stage. Others yet simply get money from public grants or private donations.

There are really too many ways to list here.

How are the people who created Facebook compensated?

I see no reason why ad-based free distribution couldn't be used for e.g. music and movies. People want convenience more than they want free - nobody uses Diaspora, everybody uses Facebook.

Also, there is a lot of money to be earned by selling concerts, cinema performances, memorabilia... (I also wouldn't oppose some reasonably short copyright term, e.g. from a few months to a few years, that would allow authors to more effectively monetize e.g. cinema.)

My problem with that is that we have the internet - a system that lets us, the people who derive benefit from the content to compensate the people who created it directly. You want to add middle men that don't need to be there. When it comes to profiting from other things (performance etc.) you are forcing people to do something they may not want to do. What if I create a great album of music but don't fancy uprooting my life, travelling the world on a tiny budget, and leaving behind my family for 10 months of the year? With the internet I could have charged a fair amount direct to the consumer but you decided information should be free.

> I see no reason why ad-based free distribution couldn't be used for e.g. music and movies.

It could be; whether it's ideal or not is another question:

* It likely wouldn't make as much money as having people pay for it.

* Imagine how much product placement there would be. If you think it's bad enough now...

You can't have everything be ad-based, in the end someone has to actually sell something to make money that pays for the ads. I always felt that this is a flaw in the ad-based model, you try to compensate for you own product not having any value by pushing other peoples products.

Anyway, if we're purely taking music, downloading it of TPB or listing to it on Spotify more or less makes the artist the same amount of money.

Software and books are different, because you can't really compensate for lose of sales with performances. Movies I'm unsure of, cinema could make the money needed to cover the prodution cost, but I don't know if that's viable.

Do you believe that content creators should have some say in how their work is distributed?

Should they be able to choose whatever monetization system they feel is most appropriate for their work?

You can choose not to sell a thing, or you can choose to sell it. You can even offer it via a contract where people are permitted to do some things with it and not others. But what is really poisonous is the government-prohibited-by-default position of copyright, where people who come into possession of e.g. old, out-of-print books are forbidden from copying them even if noone knows who would or could "own the rights".

If you want to keep a work to yourself, trade secret protection is adequate. If you want something that behaves like modern copyright, then you can sell copies of your work with appropriate contracts. But it should be your responsibility to track violators, just like if you sold me some land with a proviso that I had to maintain the orchard on it. Copying should not be guilty-until-proven-innocent the way it currently is.

Creators should have complete say in how their work is to be distributed and monetized, within the confines of the law.

That doesn't tell us what the law should be, though.

"Their work" presumes ownership. Information does not have inherent ownership, unlike physical objects which can only be controlled one / a few people at a time.

Yes, it does presume ownership.

As owners of creative products, the content producers can do as they feel with them. They can choose which characters die, how the story is told, and how the content is presented. That is because it is "their" work, it is not just information.

Freedom of information is a great concept, and one which I support. Tax payers should be able to find out how much organization x donated to politician y. But a movie, a creative work, is more than information. It is a product, an investment, and requires a substantial effort from many people.

Please let me know if I am misrepresenting your argument, but it seems that you are using this notion of freedom of information to blanket, what I view as, theft. Just because no one was strong armed for a loaf of bread does not mean that a theft did not occur. No one may have been deprived of physical property, but we do not live an entirely physical world. Piracy deprives content creators of opportunity: the opportunity to distribute their products in the way that they see fit. Perhaps this means that they give all of their work away for free through the channels of their choosing. Perhaps they sell it. Perhaps they don't sell it to people who live in certain regions.

As a content creator, shouldn't I have the opportunity to give away my products (or sell them) in a way that I see fit?

>That is because it is "their" work, it is not just information.

How do they own it if they make a copy and hand over that copy in its entirety to someone else? How do they not relinquish control of that copy?

>what I view as, theft But nobody is deprived of something when it gets copied. You can still modify your original and I can do as I please with mine.

This is how folk tales and our legends and everything propagates through society. Information, including creative work, flows freely.

>As a content creator, shouldn't I have the opportunity to give away my products (or sell them) in a way that I see fit?

Sure, that's at your discretion. But once you have given them away I don't see any natural reason why you should have any influence over what others do with a thing you have given away.

If you are a wood-carver and make an ornamental table for me, should I not be free to chop it up for firewood if I don't like it anymore just because you think it would be a violation of your work?