Showerthoughts

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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. A showerthought should offer a unique perspective on an ordinary part of life.

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We live in a post information scarcity society and we still haven't moved on from capitalism. (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by [email protected] to c/showerthoughts

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Edit: Changed title to be more accurate.

Also here is the summary from Wikipedia on what Post-scarcity means:

Post-scarcity is a theoretical economic situation in which most goods can be produced in great abundance with minimal human labor needed, so that they become available to all very cheaply or even freely. Post-scarcity does not mean that scarcity has been eliminated for all goods and services but that all people can easily have their basic survival needs met along with some significant proportion of their desires for goods and services. Writers on the topic often emphasize that some commodities will remain scarce in a post-scarcity society.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

The point about made up concepts is to point out that there is nothing fundamental, foundational, or intrinsic about IP law. It's just an arbitrary system that we made up that we can replace with a different arbitrary system.

It's really not hard to imagine a system where a certain portion of the government budget is devoted to rewarding artists and inventors and then the number of streams / downloads / units sold / etc means that they get rewards from that pool of money. We spend billions on creating systems of artificial scarcity, you put all those people and all that money to work and you can come up with a feasible system that catches most edge cases.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

So here's the problem with that idea: it means that you would need to keep the entire IP system operating and add more layers on top of it. For example, you would still need to file patents, it is just that the way that it is monetized by the creator would change.

This means that you still need the same amount of money to keep doing what we've been doing, then you need more money because if things like pixiv uploads are eligible you need way more people to track way more things.

Then you have to actually assess performance of a given thing, be it number of streams / downloads / units sold / etc, meaning that we have to basically track everything happening in the entire economy as well as the entire internet.

Sounds like a bureaucratic black hole to me, but I will grant you that if it was feasible it would probably lead to more innovation.

One thing I will add to the end here is that the current IP laws specifically are currently ridiculous, fuck Disney.