I am ashamed that I hadn’t reasoned this through given all the rubbish digital services have pulled with “purchases” being lies.

    • uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      7 months ago

      You’re asking a loaded question.

      You could be asking can we get quality content without the artifice of intellectual property to which the answer is yes, and has been demonstrated time and again.

      You could ask how many artists get wealthy from producing copyrighted content to which the answer is very few In fact most creators who are good enough to get published by record labels or publishing houses see so little of that money they can’t turn it into a full time career, largely do to Hollywood Accounting but the labels and publishing houses get a lot of money from having controlling ownership of that content.

      You could ask what harm is caused by intellectual property laws to which I can reply their expansion from a monopoly limited to a decade or so extended to life + nearly a century has denied the public a robust public domain which was the whole point of copyright inserted into the Constitution of the United States in the first place. It’s made worse because we don’t know what all is copyrighted or patented, judges don’t know what can be copyrighted, and what is considered fair use, or how art even works. (e.g. Not every blockist painting owes money to Pablo Picasso’s estate). It’s a tangled mess with a ton of precedent that favors richer legal war-chests, and has caused a pronounced reduction both of the quantity of content getting made and the quality of that content.

      So maybe you should ask better questions.