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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • Like, people should be allowed to remove stuff from the Internet that they’ve created if they want,

    No, no they shouldn’t. This is antithetical to the generally good intention behind copyright.

    The point was not to allow people to take away things they have created, but to permit them to profit in order that they might choose to make more, and be able to support their life in a capitalist system. These intentions are largely good.

    Allowing people to take away what they have created is the opposite of this intent, and harmful to the public good, which benefits from as many works as possible being accessible to the public.


  • ‘Nobody would create anything’ is an absolute lie that we’ve been fed, simply another part of the capitalist brainwashing propaganda.

    The truth is people love to create stuff for the sake of it, and many people will create things even when it costs them time and money, because they enjoy it. The only thing that would be necessary for them to create things prolifically would be to ensure their ability to live and work without having to worry about ‘making a living’ or having to ‘earn’ enough money to live, and people would be producing tons of content.

    If you doubt this, you’re not paying enough attention. People create amazing stuff without even hope of being paid. I have read hundreds of fanfics - some poorly written, some very well written - that never made money and never could make money. They were written because the writer wanted to tell a story with characters they loved. I have seen vast amounts of fanart, again, made with no hope of obtaining money. Especially before things like Patreon - these days you can make some money making fanart, which artists resort to because they have to, but every artist I’ve ever talked to hates the part of their life they have to devote to the ‘business’ side of things. Most early webcomics had no way of making money. Even today, most webcomics do not make money - most are simply made by creators that want to share their story and art.

    In the gaming world, mods - free, unpaid mods - have been around for ages, and many of them are as amazing or even moreso than professionally made games. A very tiny minority of mod creators manage to turn a successful mod creation into a job in the industry, but the vast majority do this simply because they want to and enjoy making a thing people will appreciate.

    Movies are about the only field I haven’t seen a plethora of freely made stuff in, and that’s probably a personal experience thing. I know there’s some.

    Overall, I guarantee we would not see less things created as long as we allow creative people to use whatever they want and do not force them to toil for their survival, to have to monetize everything or else lose their standard of living. We would see rather an explosion of new creations, just like we saw when the internet rose to prominence and people started doing this kind of thing and posting it publicly. Only we would see it at an even greater scale.



  • Anything and everything that politicians propose to protect children, I am automatically against. It doesn’t matter how good it sounds, if they say anything about protecting children, I’m opposed to it.

    This is because they know that ‘protect children’ are magic words that let them get away with almost anything, and that’s genuinely about the only time they say that anyway. Basically nothing the government does is actually to protect children.


  • Yep. This post is largely mixing up cause and effect. The popular programs are like that not as the cause of people not learning underlying logic and such, but as the effect of it.

    The only thing that would happen if popular GUI based interfaces had never come along would be that computers in general would still be something only a tiny amount of people use.


  • Most companies are doing this, sticking arbitration agreements in their user agreements. Most of the time it benefits them hugely since arbitration is typically much more favorable to them than court (which is already incredibly favorable to them).

    Once in a while it bites them; I recall reading some company where thousands of users started going to arbitration, and that costs them cause they pay the arbitration fees. In that case they tried to weasel out of the arbitration agreement, but last I heard a judge made them stick to it, forcing them to pay arbitration fees for every user that was asking for it.



  • Interesting thing is they could do this smartly. You buy a refrigerator, and Amazon could keep track of average replacement age of that product, then about the time it’s due to be replaced, start sending you ads for another. That is when they would be useful.

    Instead we get ads for the thing we just bought and I don’t understand why this practice continues. It can’t actually result in higher profits…right?