The title is excellent as summing up the long road that led us to where we're now, and I think it's a really good point in general:
> businesses that once relied on the scarcity of information found themselves leaning on courtrooms to protect their bottom line.
We'll always have a ton of laws passed because an industry had enough money to lawyer up its survival despite the technical advancements working against it.
On one side we'll have luddites who rightfully try to keep humans out of harm, and on the other whole industries which can only brake progress to stay mainstream. While I used to think that it was a lost cause for them, here we are in 2024 still dealing with call centers and getting snail mail spam.
It feels like some industries just found a position where nothing short of a country uprising will displace them, whatever technical advancements we see.
> We'll always have a ton of laws passed because an industry had enough money to lawyer up its survival despite the technical advancements working against it.
That's not what lawyers do. It's what lobbyists do. Lawyers argue it out in court afterward.
The tyranny of metrics arose with the industrial revolution, not capitalism. It is obviously easier to measure many things by proxy with money in a capitalist society, but Robespierre and Stalin were no strangers to optimizing society around metrics.
If you have enough people who will do what you say it doesn't matter how many pennies you have.
Mao was right (analogously to how Machiavelli was "right", not in the moral sense of "right" where, as Socrates says [paraphrased] "it would be better to be the one man unjustly put to death for doing what is right than the man who comes to power doing what is unjust").
And, I think your parent's point is that money is not merely a proxy for measuring things in a capitalist society. It has become the only thing; which, in turn, creates distortions.
And my point is that the existence of a metric and optimizing for it are not the same thing. Money is definitionally quantifiable and, in a capitalist society, very visible. Optimizing for it, just as optimizing for units produced by a factory, or counterrevolutionaries successfully reeducated, or prisoners incarcerated, or graduation rate, or billable hours, etc. is a choice and not inherent to capitalism or socialism or really any other economic system, except insofar as they are all downstream of the industrial revolution and its emphasis on quantity and repeatability.
Drug companies measure themselves, not by number of lives saved or patients helped, but by profit or its close-cousin EPS. And, in this and many cases, money is actually a poor proxy for anything but money.
It's called "capitalism". That's what's definitional here. Profit (return on capital/money) and profit-growth are recognized as ultimate end goals. So, of course we measure it and clearly pursue it for its own sake. VCs aren't interested in raw unit production if those units can't be sold at a profit. And, in simple terms, the company can't yield ROI to the investor if it is unprofitable. That's why we measure money instead of unit production. It's not because money is "a convenient proxy, something-something Industrial Revolution".
But, all of this is self-evident, so makes for boring discussion. What's interesting is considering how this emphasis on money distorts and underserves society.
Whether we optimize for widgets per hour or dollars per hour, we end up at the same place: a ravenous, soul-crushing machine consuming blood and sweat to produce a bigger number. This is the result the industrial revolution has wrought.
>Whether we optimize for widgets per hour or dollars per hour, we end up at the same place
That might be true, but was not your original assertion.
Your earlier comment stated that the type of economy didn't matter: socialism, capitalism, etc. weren't the problem; only the Industrial Revolution.
Socialists agreed with you about the Industrial Revolution crushing souls. They also believed capitalism was to blame (specifically, laissez-faire capitalism).
We don't measure widgets. We measure money. That has everything to do with capitalism, and little to do with the Industrial Revolution.
These are my definitions: capitalism is private ownership of capital; socialism is public ownership of capital; and the industrial revolution is the discovery and proliferation of processes and mechanisms for the exploitation of capital consistently and efficiently at scale.
Though I have attempted to explain my point, I have not altered it.
I share all of the concerns with rampant capitalism that many do, but I actually don't think capitalism is the root cause here.
I think the fundamental cause is societal complexity and the principle-agent problem. One of the most amazing things about the modern world is how we are effectively able to combine the efforts of millions of people across the world to solve problems and build large things. Even something as simple as a banana split is a marvel, with bananas from South America, milk from English cows turned into ice cream in Europe, flavored with vanilla from Madascar, drizzled with chocolate from Africa.
That action at a distance is why our quality is life is orders of magnitude better than humans had a few generations ago.
But as in software, the cost of abstraction and information hiding is that sometimes information that is important gets obscured. In software, this can mean that an abstraction gets in the way of optimizing for performance metrics you may care about.
In society, the abstraction can mean there are externalities to your choices that you are unaware of and wouldn't deliberately opt in to otherwise. But the trade-off, knowing every single externality of every single product you directly or indirectly use, simply doesn't scale.
Capitalism exacerbates this because it's a really good mechanism for building complex social interaction structures and automatically routing away from "inefficient" solutions (i.e. ones that do present the consumer with the externalities). But I don't think it's fundamental to capitalism. If we had some other post-capitalistic way to organize human effort at scale, I suspect it will still be susceptible to these problems.
What we probably need most is systems intertwined with capitalism that provide the transparency and regulation needed to avoid negative externalities.
> It's not a capitalist thing specifically, it's a power thing.
I'm rabidly pro capitalist, but can acknowledge that copyright is a property rights thing, which is very much a capitalist thing, but that capitalism plus legal coercion is frequently a toxic combination. As with the other isms.
Generally ownership of a physical item confers a monopoly on its distribution and sale. Those rights are common parts of the property rights bundle that we call ownership. Whether they're a good policy or not copyrights share those features with other property rights.
I agree that ownership of a physical item general confers both a monopoly on it's distribution and sale. But the inverse (selling or distribution something confers ownership) is not true, see for example selling something on consignment.
It's definitely not true for copyrighted works. Copyright, in the US at least, is pretty explicit about it not providing ownership of the thing to the rights holder. It provides the holder with a legal monopoly over the copying, distribution, and (broadly) displaying or building off of it. It does not state that the holder owns the creative work, much less any specific instantiation of it.
It isn't clear which bundle of property rights constitute ownership. For instance there are many many restrictions on distributing and selling things that we are said to own. Some say that means we don't own those things, but I think it's more clear to say that ownership is ambiguous and contingent.
Yes there are restrictions (e.g. ITAR restrictions on certain goods, or on selling raw milk products) on selling certain goods (or how they must be sold) but that's a very different situation than the one we find ourselves in with how copyright is treated for digital goods.
But treating copyright as ownership leads to restrictions not just on distribution and selling, but also on their use. There isn't a Banana Millennium Copyright Act that makes it illegal for me to remove the Dole sticker from one I purchased, but the DMCA exists.
I'd argue any restriction on free flow of information is anti-capitalist. Copyright is actually antithetical to property rights, in that it restricts what a person can do with physical goods that they own:
I buy paper and toner. Now you're telling me that restricting what configurations of that toner and paper are allowed is pro-property rights? Do I really own the paper and toner if I can't configure them in any way I wish?
Agreed, certainly from the perspective of free market limited government intervention capitalism, government enforced restrictions on imaginary property are inconsistent.
I'd agree that on the colloquial use of capitalism to mean more just naked profit seeking, I think it is consistent to want the government to lend you it's police etc for free to protect profits and prevent competition.
It seems like a big coincidence that 1660 is usually considered when England ceased to be a feudal state and became a capitalist state (Tenures Abolition Act 1660), and 1662 is when copyright was first invented.
Truly curious but in which form of society that has existed since the invention of money has money not been power? My read of the major types of societal power structures money has always had a large seat at the power table.
Until the industrial revolution, land was power far more than money. Wealthy merchants may have lived well, but it was the aristocrats who owned the land who really ran things. And that land wasn't purchased but inherited.
Money can buy some power, but power is power. Power can create money, destroy money, redistribute money, etc. Even in a capitalist society, money is weaker than other forms of power, it's just easy to measure.
Arguing that something is inherent to human nature (which power is) is a very reasonable counterargument to someone blaming capitalism. Even if they didn't use the word "specific"! It's not a moot point.
> Nothing on the GP's comment is about capitalism.
Companies and/or industries deciding that some element of technological and/or societal progress is limiting or threatens to reduce their profits, and that it's less expensive and/or more effective to fight that progress than to adapt to a changing market, is 100% about capitalism.
One thing that sticks out to me on the subject of copier wars was the copy protection measures that were implemented on small booklet walk-throughs for adventure games.
Usually there were red marks over the text that I presumed prevent photo-copying, and a red film you would look through to read the booklet. At some point there was no use as these things would be posted on BBS sites and you could simply print them out.
Somewhat related...I've read about "copy shops" in medieval Paris. Since most university students couldn't afford to buy whole books of their own, professors would deposit books at one of these shops along with a reading list of passages. Students would then buy scribal copies as "course packets". This is a really, really old phenomenon.
They discuss a printer, suing the Catholic Church, but, if I remember, the Catholics had an issue with this Gutenberg guy, for coming up with a printing press, and thus, the ability to print lots of bibles.
Catholics didn't have any issue with Gutenberg. In fact it was exactly the opposite. Please check a letter from Enea Silvio Piccolomini (future Pope Pius II) where he expressed his feelings on how great Gutenberg invention was, how clean was the print, etc. - https://www.bavarikon.de/object/bav:BSB-CMS-0000000000004546...
OP may be thinking of Tyndale. He printed the Bible in English for the first time, making it accessible to a much broader range of people. (Gutenberg's was in Latin). That together with the fact that he was executed for heresy leads to an often repeated "Catholic Church didn't like printing press" narrative, but it's oversimplified and unfair. Tyndall was in the thick of the Protestant Reformation, and his execution had to do with his unwillingness to recant certain theological positions and apparently not much to do with the printing.
It remains an excellent example of free information causing chaos in society. The cost of transitioning Europe away from Catholic hegemony - in which widely available English Bibles was certainly a major force - was at least a few centuries of conflict and war, some of which still isn't entirely settled after 500 years. Power transitions, historically speaking, tend to be messy and involve wars. Our own information revolution is not less disruptive than the printing press - I would say maybe more so. So it shouldn't surprise us if we're in for troubled times while things shake out. It is easy to accuse old power of refusing to give it up, and that isn't wrong, but also sometimes that old power was the only thing doing the job of keeping chaos at bay.
Interestingly, the first printed German bible translation appeared in 1466 by Mentelin[1,2], only 11 years after Gutenberg's Latin bible. Luther's[3] and Tyndale's[4] influential translations only happened 50-60 years after that.
For some time after Gutenberg, wealthy book buyers continued to prefer hand-copied books. The new tech was seen as an inferior product. Of course, it didn't take a real long time for the press to win out.
Except of course for all of the things that had never been scribed before at scale, such as maps, timetables, dictionaries, sales catalogues, political pamphlets, and numeric tables / explanatory diagrams. Especially for the latter, printing massively reduced transcription errors, which was a game changer for 'technical' content. We tend to take for granted the radical shifts that printing enabled.
Early printshops were the equivalent of disruptive tech startups, with a mix of tech innovation, capital investment, marketing and sweatshop compared with the old scribe-based printing environments.
I didn't say they were an inferior product. Or that there were no advantages. I'm just saying a bias persisted in a portion of the book market for some time.
A student buys a used book, goes to a copy shop,
spends a few hours copying, then returns and sells
the book back, saving lots of money in the process.
Wouldn't a new book be a better example for effect? The student copies from a new book and returns it, saving a lot of money?
The article ends in a strange way:
> It’s hard to imagine that companies once sued churches for making copies.
That's the end of the article haha (and it's not that hard to imagine). I was hoping they would touch on Napster and CD burning and tie it all into what's going on today with AI, leaving the reader with an informed perspective on IP.
And since I'm apparently a writing critic now: The numerous links to court cases, articles, and interviews throughout made it read like a Wikipedia (in a boring way). Provide sources sure, but in a way that doesn't feel like stepping through the history section of a Wikipedia article. For such a relevant topic and decent headline I expected better writing.
> Wouldn't a new book be a better example for effect? The student copies from a new book and returns it, saving a lot of money?
Books can't simply be returned (unless still shrink-wrapped), it's a sell-back process, and the spread is much narrower for a used book. For example: $200 new, $120 used, $80 sell-back. The author uses the word "return" to mean visiting the store, not to mean perfectly reversing the original transaction.
The point was in your scenario the student doesn't save any money at the end, in both cases they spend $40 to briefly own the book.
If they bought it used for $120 and sold it back for $80 after use vs buy for $120, photocopy, then sell for $80 it's the same overall outcome.
The reason I drew a distinction between school books and others is with some books the infringer might want to keep the photocopied material - I didn't realize we were talking about what is effectively a book exchange anyway (whose profits are the same either way).
Where if I bought Twilight, photocopied it and then returned it, that's a lot different than photocopying a math book that I return anyway - that people return so often there's a system designed around it at the campus bookstore.
This was never solved by lawyers or trials anyway, it was essentially put on ice by e-books and largely overtaken by the music/film piracy conversation and advent of the internet. Could have been a more interesting article is all!
I don't get the impression that things have changed all that much in Catholic music publishing since this FEL Publications case. It sounds very familiar. There are still major music publishers that require parishes to destroy all books at the end of the year. Its the old story of "you don't have ownership, you have a license." This grift predates the "purchasing" digital videos on Prime and the like.
If anything there are even more requirements now. Churches must now purchase individual licenses for music sung in live-streamed liturgies or printed out in programs (through websites like www.onelicense.net).
Thankfully, liturgical music is a pretty old genre (the oldest still around), so there is a huge corpus of public-domain works.
> businesses that once relied on the scarcity of information found themselves leaning on courtrooms to protect their bottom line.
We'll always have a ton of laws passed because an industry had enough money to lawyer up its survival despite the technical advancements working against it.
On one side we'll have luddites who rightfully try to keep humans out of harm, and on the other whole industries which can only brake progress to stay mainstream. While I used to think that it was a lost cause for them, here we are in 2024 still dealing with call centers and getting snail mail spam.
It feels like some industries just found a position where nothing short of a country uprising will displace them, whatever technical advancements we see.
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