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Chad.
But also PSA - remember to support (buy or donate) the artists & especially foss peeps when you can. I'm not sure how else can we start to change the mentality of the people.
this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2024
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Pirated many things when I was student. When I started earning a living I realized that the amount they ask for is really not excessive so started paying for several media, but they keep insisting on making sure that what you pay has less usage value than what you pirate. Stopped buying CD when one was designed to not play on my computer. Stopped paying for movies since they decide to tell you where and when you are supposed to watch them.
I gladly pay for books (which half of the time I then pirate to read on my eReader) and video games but the other digital media are trying to establish a toxic relationship and I'll have none of it.
It really sucked when I figured out that I don't own my Kindle library.
Or do I? 😇
I downloaded my library of Kindle books and ripped the DRM out of them just last month. Now they're safely tucked in my cloud drive as well as a physical drive.
This quote is just so powerful and it gets more powerful the more often I see it. It's like the number one reason why it shouldn't be frowned upon to play Magic the Gathering with proxies
It's mostly frowned upon because the people that do it, just want to copy decks to win. At least that was the primary reason back in the day when I still played it. Just play with the cards you have and enjoy it... it's just a game after all 🤷♂️
Edit: And just to add, buying cards to do the same was also frowned upon, more so than proxies even.
It's always a dialogue. If everyone's on board for playing power, go for it and don't hold back. If you're just playing casually in your friends group, obviously be careful with what cards you choose to play. It always comes down to overall expected power level in the pod you're playing in
It's an interesting open question what we would want to replace intellectual property with.
My brain is so used to capitalism that I would be inclined to preserve things like artists having a contractual obligation to turn their work into a finished product if they got paid for it by someone that wanted a finished product. But if you look at some of the great renaissance artists, many of them were infamous for just skipping town and leaving unfinished works left and right when they got bored of making them. So maybe it's better to just accept that many great works are never finished so that other, greater works can get made instead.
One thing that does seem very important is crediting the actual artists and people that made it possible. Not to deny the right to copy or distribute, but to make it so people just know who is responsible and who they want to support or praise or communicate with. You would need infrastructure for that to make it easy to check, to remove duplicates, and to make sure entries give credit correctly.
Another important thing is the location, maintenance, and integrity of physical pieces. Hoarding seems bad, especially behind closed doors and especially without the permission of the creator or their (cultural) descendants. Letting artpieces decay seems bad, especially if others would pay to maintain them. Defiling artpieces seems bad, perhaps even with the creator's consent. But how do we decide which measures, if any, are okay to address these issues? I honestly don't know.
I don't know if it's necessary to do anything beyond these two that is specific to art. As long as there is a digital currency and wealth is already fairly distributed, voluntary patronage and donations (using the crediting infrastructure to make sure it ends up at the right places) may just be the best system for deciding which artists get what budget and how much of the world's resources and labor go to art. If wealth weren't fairly distributed, poor people would have less say in what gets made than everyone else, but the solution to that is to redistribute the wealth, not to patch that up with special rules for art. If there is no digital currency, then it's inconvenient to pay artists remotely.
Porn is probably the most pirated visual work that I'm aware of and I've noticed that one of the responses by the people who make it is to move their business model away from restricting access indefinitely to producing custom/bespoke pieces at a relatively high one-off price to compensate for cases where it immediately gets proliferated without further gain for themselves. If someone pays them to make the clip and then shares it with others it's OK because the producer has been rewarded in full at the point of sale. This is roughly equivalent to a piece of art being bought or commissioned and paid for in full by a museum or gallery, who put it on public display and make digital copies available for people to make their own prints from.
From an artist's POV this is much simpler and more economical than trying to gather royalties on an ongoing basis and enforce copyright to create false scarcity.
In my solarpunk future though, I will be an artist whose basic needs are met by machines and nature and who receives a universal basic income which I can give away to other artisans as a way to say thanks and to encourage them.
@Churbleyimyam
Cory Doctorow calls it "The Bitchin' Society" and Ian M Banks calls it "The Culture". Maybe someday.
@Tiresia @solarpunk
I know some artists and it's quite rare to see them finish stuff on time. Many just don't finish stuff at all.
Fact is that clients feel entitled to results, so they create pressure, which is the most counter productive thing you can do for creativity, since it needs to be free and open. Add to that a splash of mental health issues and perfectionism and there you go.
Artists also tend to be good at a lot of stuff so they are constantly asked by people to do stuff. They're constantly busy solving other people's problems. They're valuable people in society but often are quite miserable from stress and poor.
There's more to it than that but it gives you an idea why artists hate clients.
I uploaded my own solarpunk novel to a solarpunk “Library.” Mostly care about spreading the ideas anyway.
Links to either, please?
Not that I would ever want this, necessarily, but the sheer quantity of good games that exist today is enough for several lifetimes. All video games could be free to download for the public.
Brazil go brr