Well, there are subsets of literature in every country that can perfectly reinforce whichever bias one might have towards the people of that country, especially that towards bleakness and nihilism.
But it would never cross my mind to paint e.g. whole modern Germany bloodthirsty and nihilist based on the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Richard Wagner, Stefan George, Ernst Jünger and the like, for God blessed me with discernment and understanding that any country is a cauldron where wildly different people collide and try to survive the boiling.
I think the reason why it shouldn't be claimed as a moral good is pretty obvious - authors deserve to get paid for their work. I certainly can't claim I stand on a bedrock of morality as I've used it from time to time, but even though I don't have the money that a lot of HN commenters do I make sure to not use it for small-time authors. Even really successful authors I'll only use it about 50% of the time.
If you want information to be free? Great. But most of those authors wouldn't be putting the work in to making that information/literature in the first place if they know they aren't going to get paid.
> But most of those authors wouldn't be putting the work in to making that information/literature in the first place if they know they aren't going to get paid.
My understanding is that the number of authors that can make a full-time job of writing is a rounding error compared to the population of authors. I believe that people should be paid for their work, but I don't think the current copyright regime is actually very effective at paying authors for their work. So I value copyright enforcement proportionately less based on that observation.
Meanwhile, on the flip side of the coin, copyright rulings are causing companies like Atheropic to destroy books as they scan them, creating a rising sense of panic around knowledge scarcity. This panic is a direct result of the scarcity of the copyright intended to create in the first place. It's entirely artificial.
I've been saying this for 25 years, but copyright is essentially broken.
Personally I would say copyright should last somewhere less than 10 years. On the basis that business decisions about whether to fund a book/film/whatever today isn't based on earnings 10 years from now.
So I would say it is morally acceptable to download stuff older than that. Torrents offer brand new things, so I wouldn't say they are morally good. I don't think they're morally worse than those locking up old media though.
Information itself should be free, authors deserve the right to monetise other ways (merch, physical media, exhibitions/shows, etc.) but society should pay artists and creators to do their thing[0]
Not everything needs to be a business, and I think art is one of those things
[0] I don't know much about it but maybe Ireland's Basic Income for the Arts scheme is a model. I think some other European countries do similar-ish things, too
I guess the hopeful one, "Google always kills its products", suggesting that the bad product in this thread is also doomed. I hold this same hope, almost entirely unironically, about so many things.
This quote is so egregiously stupid, I'm instantly disinterested in this product now. No reason to assume the rest isn't the same applied cretinism as the quoted sentence.
The way you’d be uncomfortable telling your friends about.
This will be our little secret.
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