If everyone were doing it, it wouldn't be piracy. It would be free, legal copying.

I just presented you with several models of how big budget movies could make money, even if everyone were freely, legally copying. You haven't responded to that argument, you've merely ignored it and insisted on your original point.

While your claim is true---big budget movies, etc., need someone to pay for them---the unspoken corollary you're implying isn't true---that without the current economic model, no-one would pay for big budget productions, or that undermining the current model via piracy will reduce the rate at which they are funded.

The current model is: massive corporate copyright-holders can purchase the right the profit from an artistic production. They pay for its production up front. Even though we have a technology that can costlessly copy these products and very cheaply distribute them to almost everyone who wants them, the copyright holders maximise their profits by a) crippling this capacity by spend considerable money, labor and human expertise on technologies that artificially limit copying, and b) use state-supported coercion (e.g., fines, lawsuits, police, etc), to punish individuals who would circumvent these crippling technologies. To be clear, these copyright holders still make massive profits, vastly beyond what any individual they are persecuting for copyright infringement could ever dream of. Their policing of piracy is to make even greater profits.

Even though this is how big artistic productions are funded today, it is not true that in the absence of this economic model, big artistic productions would not be funded. The demand for these products would still exist, and if there's one thing our society excels at, it's directing capital to meet demand.

Alternative models that could fund big artistic productions:

• a centralised fund we all contribute to in proportion to our means (e.g., progressive taxation), that pays artists in proportion to how much their product is consumed (like the Spotify model, but publically administered, like TV licences)
• many small scale investors rather than corporate monoliths (like Kickstarter), whose investments are recouped by a) privileged access to get product and b) the still highly profitable cinema and dvd markets whose constraints (physical premises/media) are not compatible with free copying.
• a legislated solution that protects copyright until artists are sufficiently recompensed and then allows free distribution.

These are just some examples of the many possible alternative models for funding large art projects and deciding who should profit from them and how much. However the details aren't nearly as important (many different models could work), as the ultimate driver: whether our actions/systems/laws enhance or undermine demand for the art.

Piracy does undermine the current (corrupt, exploitative, reprehensible) economic model but it also increases demand for the media it distributes more widely and equitably. It doesn't, as you imply, reduce the likelihood of big budget media existing in the future, it increases the likelihood of it existing in a more fair and equitable way, that harness our ability to freely copy rather than crippling it for the benefit of the ultra-wealthy copyright-buyers.

Knowing the distribution of what entire households watch is very useful. It's not about spying on you personally.

[citation needed]

Yeah, the point that the musicians seem to be making, from the very brief quotes he shares (I haven't been following this independently), is about the efficacy of music boycotts as a tool for political change. You can object to a nation's political actions and still think that performing music for your fans in that country will make things better.

The author just insists that Israeli government genocide is bad and that the ordinary citizens are complicit. I think the implicit logic must be: bad people should be punished, depriving them of music punishes them. While it might satisfy a craving to hurt the bad guys, I think it's much harder to claim that this would help stop the genocide.

I think the musicians have a stronger case that actually performing would be more likely to change people's minds and improve the situation. Plus the broader benefits of keeping music and art apolitical, rather than trying to make everything in life a tool for political manipulation. I'd have actually been really interested to hear some substantive arguments about those points, but was disappointed to discover that, as you say, it was just a hit piece.

Wow, what a terrible article. The author doesn't engage with any of the substantive points Radiohead and Nick Cave are making, he just disparages them and insists on his obvious moral superiority. It's dressed up in some, admittedly, very nice writing, but this is just childish name calling.

Still, interesting read. Thanks for sharing.

1. the whole point of statistics is to extract subtle signals from noise, if you're getting wildly different results, the problem is you're under-powered.

Thanks for taking the time to post these links, just letting you know you're efforts have benefited at least one person who's gonna enjoy reading this.

Phew, lucky that there's no disagreement in this society about what right and wrong is and what should and shouldn't be tolerated. Otherwise we might devolve into two antagonistic political factions mutually condemning each other.

Okay, how do you assess that harm has occurred?

I claim that your post just harmed me. You should be excluded from the social contact.

You violated the rules my god laid down. Harmful to me and all my fellow believers. You're out.

Your flagrant homosexuality is harming my children. Excluded.

Your campaign to take away my guns is harming me and all my descendants. I was just minding my own business until you came along with your intolerant gun removal policies. Excluded! Burn him.

This only solves the dilemma in a trivial way, if harm is transparent and uncontentious. It doesn't address the real dilemma, which is widespread disagreement about what should and shouldn't be tolerated.

Putting the recovery center on top of the perfect hill for rolling down...

Are you willing to accept the assumption that bad content (e.g., spam, advertising, trolling, low effort posts) is far more common than good content (I.e.., high effort posts)?

If you are, then it seems to me that your system would involve a lot more people interacting with a lot more bad content than they do good content. Down votes are a mechanism that let's one person's time wasted interacting with bad content reduce the probability that everyone else will have to waste their time on that content.

I have been thinking about this problem recently and believe the solution may be a new fediverse protocol/service that provides:

• Federated Emergent Topic Taxonomies

That is, a model of the relationships (e.g., is the same as, is a type of, is related to, etc) between different communities (/groups/services/instances, etc.) that emerges from the way that users/servers interact with them, that different servers can maintain independently and merge or split by consensus if they choose. Then other services (like Lemmy instances or clients) can tap into this information to provide solutions to problems like the one you describe (e.g., a feed of all the photography communities, regardless of which instance they're on).

I think there are several big conceptual and technical challenges to implementing this. I'm keen to discuss them.

Does anyone know where I would go to discuss this with the people who care, have struggled with developing new fediverse protocols and/or are best positioned to spot the flaws and possiblities in the idea? So far I see mostly w3c working groups taking behind closed doors.