this post was submitted on 08 May 2024
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This has everything to do with centralization, just not with the one small context for it which you picked.
With real decentralization in place market mechanisms work.
Copyright is an artificial, government given Monopoly.
Market Mechanisms don't work when faced with a Monopoly or work badly in situations distorted by the presence of a Monopoly (which is more this case, since Stack Overflow has a monopoly in the reproduction of each post in that website but the same user could post the same answer elsewhere thus creating an equivalent work).
Pretty much in every situation where Intellectual Property is involved you see the market failing miserably: just notice the current situation with streaming services which would be completelly different if there was no copyright and hence no possibility of exclusivity of distribution of any titles (and hence streaming services would have to compete in terms of quality of service).
The idea that the Free Market is something that works everywhere (or even in most cases) is Politically-driven Magic thinking, not Economics.
Market forces lead to the creation of large corporations that then shut down market forces and undermine fair markets. Once a few big corporations dominate they coordinate their behavior and prices and shut down any new players entering the market. Regulation can counter it to a point, but once the corporations are wealthy enough to dominate government regulation also fails. Right wingers hasten the process by opposing regulation, and have no good answer to how to prevent markets collapsing into monopolies or cartels. I'm not sure anyone has a good answer to that in a capitalist system.
You are not arguing with me. Not reading comments before answering them is disrespectful.
Monopoly situations along with market mechanisms invariably result in centralization ("monopoly" comes from the Greek word for "right of exclusive sale"), hence market mechanism won't "work" in the sense you mean it in such a scenario, as I explained.
Your argument is circular because it's like saying that it will work as long as it creates the conditions to make itself work (which is the same as saying "as long as it works").
Decentralization and distribution should be enforced, yes.
By, for example, institutionalized resistance to anything like IP law, to regulations and certifications allowing bigger fish to call those who can't afford them, and at the same time by maintaining regulations against obvious fraud.
It's not a circular argument, you're just not paying attention.
The friendliness of political systems to decentralization doesn't correlate much with their alignment in terms of left\right or even authoritarian\libertarian. So in my opinion this should be a third dimension on that political compass everybody's gotten tired of seeing. And there are many other dimensions to add then, so useless.
You realize that there have been multiple websites scraped, right? So decentralizing doesn't solve this issue in particular. Especially when federated sites like Lemmy provide a view of the entire fediverse (more or less).
This is orthogonal to what I'm talking about. I don't see scraping as a problem.
The person you were replying to was talking about scraping.
A reaction developed because of there often being some "eat the rich" types thinking they don't need brain because they have taken the right position.