<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>snowwrestler</author><text>Large-scale distribution is expensive and complicated. Companies don’t need to control copyright to make money doing it. In fact digital distribution companies make way more money today than copyright holders. Look how much Google, Apple, Amazon, etc are worth, compared to the labels. Spotify alone has more annual revenue than all the big music labels combined. Copyright is the legal lever that allows labels and artists to make a claim on some of that distribution revenue.&lt;p&gt;This is in fact the origin of the legal concept of copyright: established printers who had more money and equipment than authors would print up copies of popular written works, distribute and sell them, and return nothing to the author.</text><parent_chain><item><author>naasking</author><text>&amp;gt; But it&amp;#x27;s important to remember that no copyright at all would hurt small and medium creators immensely. Big corps could just pick things that are trending up, rip them off instantly and scale their ripoff much better thanks to their great workforce and marketing reach&lt;p&gt;The big assumption in this argument is that large corporations that depend on copyright would still exist, but it seems pretty clear that they would not. If copyright didn&amp;#x27;t exist, then there would be nothing for them to monetize. The first broadcast, distribution or performance of a work could recorded&amp;#x2F;copied and redistributed with no penalty, so large corporations are just as disadvantaged as small players. How do you see large corporations forming and perpetuating themselves in order to exploit these smaller players?</text></item><item><author>loupol</author><text>Agreed on all points, the tweet feels like an allergic reaction to what copyright has morphed into, which is a tool for big corporations to extract money from existing IP for an insanely long duration.&lt;p&gt;But it&amp;#x27;s important to remember that no copyright at all would hurt small and medium creators immensely. Big corps could just pick things that are trending up, rip them off instantly and scale their ripoff much better thanks to their great workforce and marketing reach. That would create a big disincentive for independent creation of IP.&lt;p&gt;Like you, I would just prefer if copyright was kept in place but its duration decreased drastically compared to now. It doesn&amp;#x27;t seem likely given the lobbying strength of the corporations that benefit from the current situation sadly.</text></item><item><author>LocalH</author><text>Copyright was a way to give rightsholders incentive to do what they do, while still ensuring that the work enters the &lt;i&gt;public domain&lt;/i&gt;, which is and always has been the absolute endgame of copyright.&lt;p&gt;Today&amp;#x27;s copyright is much different, due to massive lobbying efforts by those who would benefit most. Authors life + what, 100 years or so, is way too long (and that&amp;#x27;s completely discounting those who would want copyright to be &lt;i&gt;perpetual&lt;/i&gt;). So you have a situation where a person creates a work, a large rights owner buys it up, and then they get to milk all the benefits while preventing the public from having their rightful free access.&lt;p&gt;Restore copyright to 14+14 years (with a single exception, the original artist and &lt;i&gt;only&lt;/i&gt; the original artist gets 28+14, if they sell their rights to the work then the recipient only gets 14+14). Destroy the DMCA. Those are the two most important things to restore copyright to a proper moral standing. Otherwise, copyright as it stands right now is immoral and unjust, and thus (some of) those who pirate are doing so for fully ethical reasons, and are on the better side of history in the long run.&lt;p&gt;Of course, some people just want free shit. However, those people will &lt;i&gt;always&lt;/i&gt; exist no matter how reasonable copyright is. Hell, I don&amp;#x27;t mind getting free shit when I pirate something, even if I&amp;#x27;m doing it for moral reasons.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Copyright is not a moral right, it&apos;s a monetization strategy</title><url>https://twitter.com/Plinz/status/1740597001652461895</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>sensanaty</author><text>Maybe if we lived in a world that never had copyright law to begin with, but we don&amp;#x27;t. We live in a world where trillion dollar entities like Microsoft &amp;amp; Disney exist. Even if you abolished the concept of Copyright, Patents and all the rest of it &lt;i&gt;now&lt;/i&gt; at this very moment, these companies would still have trillions in their coffers with which they could do plenty of harm to smaller entities. You think Microsoft, who already have a habit of harvesting as many things as they can en-masse, isn&amp;#x27;t gonna be able to do anything to harm the smaller players? You think Disney isn&amp;#x27;t just gonna go out and straight up hoover up every single byte of music &amp;amp; video in existence that they can get their hands on and start reselling it?&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; ...then there would be nothing for them to monetize...&lt;p&gt;... other than the works of every single person they could possibly get their hands on, as is happening with the AI companies.</text><parent_chain><item><author>naasking</author><text>&amp;gt; But it&amp;#x27;s important to remember that no copyright at all would hurt small and medium creators immensely. Big corps could just pick things that are trending up, rip them off instantly and scale their ripoff much better thanks to their great workforce and marketing reach&lt;p&gt;The big assumption in this argument is that large corporations that depend on copyright would still exist, but it seems pretty clear that they would not. If copyright didn&amp;#x27;t exist, then there would be nothing for them to monetize. The first broadcast, distribution or performance of a work could recorded&amp;#x2F;copied and redistributed with no penalty, so large corporations are just as disadvantaged as small players. How do you see large corporations forming and perpetuating themselves in order to exploit these smaller players?</text></item><item><author>loupol</author><text>Agreed on all points, the tweet feels like an allergic reaction to what copyright has morphed into, which is a tool for big corporations to extract money from existing IP for an insanely long duration.&lt;p&gt;But it&amp;#x27;s important to remember that no copyright at all would hurt small and medium creators immensely. Big corps could just pick things that are trending up, rip them off instantly and scale their ripoff much better thanks to their great workforce and marketing reach. That would create a big disincentive for independent creation of IP.&lt;p&gt;Like you, I would just prefer if copyright was kept in place but its duration decreased drastically compared to now. It doesn&amp;#x27;t seem likely given the lobbying strength of the corporations that benefit from the current situation sadly.</text></item><item><author>LocalH</author><text>Copyright was a way to give rightsholders incentive to do what they do, while still ensuring that the work enters the &lt;i&gt;public domain&lt;/i&gt;, which is and always has been the absolute endgame of copyright.&lt;p&gt;Today&amp;#x27;s copyright is much different, due to massive lobbying efforts by those who would benefit most. Authors life + what, 100 years or so, is way too long (and that&amp;#x27;s completely discounting those who would want copyright to be &lt;i&gt;perpetual&lt;/i&gt;). So you have a situation where a person creates a work, a large rights owner buys it up, and then they get to milk all the benefits while preventing the public from having their rightful free access.&lt;p&gt;Restore copyright to 14+14 years (with a single exception, the original artist and &lt;i&gt;only&lt;/i&gt; the original artist gets 28+14, if they sell their rights to the work then the recipient only gets 14+14). Destroy the DMCA. Those are the two most important things to restore copyright to a proper moral standing. Otherwise, copyright as it stands right now is immoral and unjust, and thus (some of) those who pirate are doing so for fully ethical reasons, and are on the better side of history in the long run.&lt;p&gt;Of course, some people just want free shit. However, those people will &lt;i&gt;always&lt;/i&gt; exist no matter how reasonable copyright is. Hell, I don&amp;#x27;t mind getting free shit when I pirate something, even if I&amp;#x27;m doing it for moral reasons.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Copyright is not a moral right, it&apos;s a monetization strategy</title><url>https://twitter.com/Plinz/status/1740597001652461895</url></story>