All who live in silicon Valley of course. You seem to have forgotten that "making world a better place" is a mantra repeated across the entire IT. I presume if Facebook employees actively think that, so can RIAA lawyers
I'm convinced the companies considered as 'evil' now didn't think they would at first either. Something something unintended consequences.
I mean Reddit; bastion of free speech or platform for hate speech? (they cracked down on that over the years)
Dropbox; File synchronization and sharing platform or child porn exchange?
Airbnb; Great way to find an affordable place to stay and / or rent out unused room, or platform for dodgy landlords that scam people with pretty pictures?
Coinbase: Platform for libertarian wet dream crypto exchange, or platform for laundering your ill-gotten gains?
Just to name a few YC examples. Everything can be used for bad things and make the world a worse place, and they don't always do the right thing.
But who goes into being an RIAA lawyer position thinking it’s going to be good at first? You have to have believed in the RIAA’s stance from the get-go because it hasn’t really changed.
I was at the Grammy’s one year and at the industry lunch the day before, I wound up at a table with a bunch of lawyers for the labels and the RIAA. It was an interesting position for me to be in, as someone who has been quite critical vocally of their positions and tactics since I was a teenager.
Anyway, everyone was cordial and professional and we didn’t really get into debate too much — and I was clearly the odd woman out, not a lawyer or in agreement with their position — but I walked away from the lunch with the belief that at least most of them absolutely believe they are fighting against what they see as abuse against copyright and ownership and that they see themselves as protectors of the industry, and to a lesser extent, artists. Now, I disagree that their tactics really succeed and would argue that ignoring the push of technology has hurt the music industry and especially artists, but I also accept that it is valid for people to have a completely different view from me. And it’s important to be exposed to that on occasion.
I’ll also say, as I was waiting for my Uber to take me to my next meeting, I saw valet bringing out $200,000 cars for many of the people I had politely been debating with earlier. I’m sure the money doesn’t hurt.
Not unlike my friends who work for tech giants that many of us find abhorrent but get $400,000 in stock grants a year.
Yep. You’ll often find there is nuance to these debates and people will justify their side by blowing the upsides out of proportion and minimizing the downsides.
They’re rent-seeking, and probably view themselves as necessary redistributors of wealth, like landlords, but for copyright enforcement and expansion instead of housing.
Having reddit crack down on hate speech makes it a corporate shill-chamber/chicomm focal point, along with an anti-1A and against American-rights. The evil is always there with these companies brother.
These are good questions /examples, except Coinbase? I'm sure there's something else that could be applied, but doesn't seem it's a place to launder money. They were the first to supply IRS/Treasury Department with detailed records of every customer transaction.
Not everyone here is directly involved in the startup culture and yes, technology and disruption can get shady. But "at least I'm not a lawyer" is a low, low bar to clear.
I work on managed databases. I actually do think that is a positive effect on the world, like many other obscure but important pieces of infrastructure.
Eh, I don't think that's fair. Lots of people here make society a better place, as do the companies and organisations they work for/contribute to.
Sure maybe you could argue that Facebook and Google don't make the world a better place. Maybe a bunch of other FAANG companies.
But not everyone here works for one of those. I don't, and I'd say my work probably improves society in a certain sense (depending on whether web development/UX design/usability work does that).
Well anyone who voluntarily enters into a work for hire arrangement is making society a better place. The employer wouldn't have done it unless they were benefitting and likewise for the employee. What is important is doing something people want.
That is definitely not the case. There are plenty of employers making things worse. One of my first jobs was for a telephone fundraising outfit. We'd cold-call people, manipulate and like to them, so they'd donate money for our charity of the week, and keep 85% of it.
Making society better requires actually making society better. You have to weigh the total societal positives against the total societal negatives.
OK let me qualify my answer. Voluntary financial arrangements are beneficial to society that do not harm others. The government in capitalistic systems enforces the rule that you can't harm one another arbitrarily. So an assassination contract would be illegal. Also, defrauding people with cold calls of their money is illegal. In short, LEGAL voluntary arrangements in a free market are beneficial.
That's progress, but you haven't accounted for negative externalities or the varying shades of "voluntary" that exist. Both of which occur in pretty much any job people take these days.
This is the Just World Fallacy. It's not necessarily true that spending money benefits society. You can spend money to harm society, with or without intention.
And this is just one (extreme) instance of “person A pays person B to destroy person C's value, for net harm”. Imo, the only failing of capitalism is that one can profit by destroying other people's wealth (though this is probably splitting hairs, given how varied the ills that come from that).
Everybody has their price. For some people, it's low enough that they'll actually do the evil things and not lose sleep over it.
Technology has had an impact on nearly any industry you can think of. As such, there is no shortage of tech work outside of ad tech. Ten years ago I worked on ad tech shit for Amazon, but I quit when I realized that made me a parasite.
I don't work in food delivery, but I'd say getting a pizza from point A to B is a hell of a lot more productive than being a lawyer for the RIAA.
There is zero need for a multinational between hungry people and food delivery. Inserting them raises costs, lowers service quality, and lowers revenue to restaurants.
Off topic, but I would like to note this thread's congruence to Snow Crash:
There's only four things we do better than anyone else:
music
movies
microcode (software)
high-speed pizza delivery
I was thinking more along the line of the people who actually deliver the pizza. It's an honest job, unlike being an RIAA lawyer or ad tech programmer. But next to either of those, even delivery app developers are saints.
> There is zero need for a multinational between hungry people and food delivery. Inserting them raises costs, lowers service quality, and lowers revenue to restaurants.
Nonsense.
Everyone I live with went from not ordering any food to using UberEats weekly because it's so much more pleasant than interfacing with every restaurant directly, having to carry cash to pay and tip, having on easy way to answer "what's open right now?", etc.
All these restaurants are getting money they would have never received from me had the app never existed. And everyone I know uses UberEats and will sheepishly admit they use it way too often.
You should talk to people who use UberEats before you assume it provides zero value to anyone, not sure what else to say. Maybe you can do the same for Uber as well.
Yeah, same. Years ago I did work for a medical advertising company. They were lovely, smart, creative people. But the more I thought about it, the more I didn't want to aid for-profit manipulation of people. I've stayed away from ads since, and never regretted it.
Exactly, I'm not fan of these type of lawyers, but they aren't even close to the same level of damage being done by people who work at places like Facebook.
I'm sure it's the usual case of a large enough salary helps you to forgot what a piece of shit you are.
It reminds me of the famous quote by Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
While I agree with you, I'm pretty sure that a lot of people are grateful about food delivery given current events. At the very least, it kept some people employed and businesses in operation.
In their self view they ensure that artists earn money for their living, thus allow artists to survive. And there is some truth to it. Finding the right balance is hard ... but in my view they "rights holder industry" is too strong indeed.
I think its probably similar to medicine in that there is a gigantic industry of middlemen that suck money out of the system and make far more than the actual service providers
"The Value of Everything" by Mariana Mazzucato. Great book. Central thesis: there are value creators and value extractors. Value creation is very connected with most people's idea of "progress". But value extraction is parasitic, and dominates more and more of contemporary economies.
I'd agree. If copyright wasn't valid after death + 70 years
Of course they don't do only that, they also have to spend their time crafting abusive contracts and extensions in detriment of artists and in favour of big recording companies.
I'd be interested in seeing how much money from their suits gets to the artists, or even to distributors - or what effect on revenue their deterrence causes.
Right, these lawyers are parasites sucking blood not just from society in general, but also blood from most of the artists ostensibly represented by the RIAA. If any artists come out ahead from anything the RIAA's lawyers do, it's only the elite already-wealthy ones.
They made 820 million € in revenue, 128M€ are their "costs", 692M€ of that 15% are their fees, remainingnis split between labels and artists and artists got 316.5M€, thus a quite low fraction ... and in German law the creator is theoretically stronger positioned than in US copyright.
(Now this isn't 100% fair as analysis, as some of the payments to labels go to artits, as well and labels also do some marketing etc benefiting the artist ... and then there is this weird distribution mechanism where a successful artist gets over proportionally more ... but in the end: "small" artists only get a very tiny part of the cake)
To clarify: GP asked about "how much money [recovered from the lawsuits] gets to the artists". The revenue you're quoting is mostly not from lawsuits, it's regular license fees paid by broadcasters and event organizers.
It's not really a secret. The music industry has always been about concerts: radio play (or streaming, which uses the same revenue model) doesn't pay anything and artists get pennies on the dollar for record sales. The RIAA represents record labels more than artists.
This is neither here nor there but Nobel Prize winner Gerard 't Hooft has written an opinion piece on wrong-way drivers in science who seem convinced that everyone else is going the wrong way [1] (it's in Dutch unfortunately, but then the Dutch the word 'spookrider' (lit. 'ghostrider') is a lot cooler than 'wrong-way driver' IMHO).
It's a concept that's somehow always stuck with me whenever I hear about people who seem convinced everyone else is wrong.
The whole writeup is a tantrum on why you should stick to "well known" facts. Which sounds to me too much like asserting the truth of things without questioning them. Yes, there are a lot of fools out there whith a spookrijder complex that are a detriment to science. And I would assume a well-known professor would rightly get tired of their emails.
He only shortly adresses at the end that radical ideas are precisely what is needed for progress in science.
I do not think this dismissive mentality does the situation any good. If someone comes with a radical but stupid idea, you need to first recognize the merit in the idea, and then show why it is wrong. Bashing someone with "you cannot create free energy" will only encourage him to waste his time trying to prove you wrong.
I suspect a lot of these spookrijders are curious and fairly smart people, but who's ideas where offhandedly dismissed by a teacher one too many times.
'Everybody' thinks RMS is wrong. He has the worst case of Cassandra's curse I've ever heard of.
But I think it tends to not work like this. Incidentally, the flat earth thing is mostly a myth; literate people have know the earth is round since the ancient Greeks figured it out. Columbus was ridiculed for thinking the Earth was smaller than it really is (his critics were right) and the only reason his trip didn't end badly for him is shear dumb luck in running into another continent in his quest to reach Asia the looooong way around.
That educated people believed that the Earth was flat is largely a myth. Not only people knew the Earth was round since antiquity, but they also had a good idea about its diameter.
Heliocentrism was a bit more debated but for good reasons. Early heliocentric models were actually worse than contemporary geocentric models to calculate the motion of planets.
All that to say that "everyone else is wrong" doesn't happen often in practice, at least not among educated people. And when that happens, either the evidence is solid and it is generally well accepted or it is not, and there is no reason for others to accept it. The burden or proof is for the one who makes the claim.
To go back to heliocentrism, the reason it is the prevailing theory right now is because the model has been refined and now, it matches observation better than older models based en epicycles. It is not because of some philosophical reason about our place in the universe.
Spookrijder translates literally into ghostrider, which is a lot nicer than wrong-way driver.
The joke here goes that on the radio there is an all-bands emergency announcement about a ghostrider on A2, the main artery of the country, between Amsterdam and Utrecht.
In one of the vehicles on that road someone mutters 'A ghostrider? Bloody idiots, there's thousands of them!'.
I mean, if we believe it benefits us to have copyright laws, then obviously it benefits us to have copyright lawyers, and the rest is just implementation details. I'd wager 99% of people believe copyright laws are a net good.
> I'd wager 99% of people believe copyright laws are a net good.
If asked, a majority might say that (though IMHO nowhere near 99%). Their actions indicate otherwise, however, and a person's beliefs are better judged by their actions than by their words.
Everyone thinks they're saving the world. I'm sure the RIAA sleeps soundly knowing they're defending the rights of creative individuals to make a living and holding the line against the scourge of amoral nihilistic pirates.
> Everyone thinks they're saving the world. I'm sure the RIAA sleeps soundly knowing they're defending the rights of creative individuals to make a living and holding the line against the scourge of amoral nihilistic pirates.
Amoral Nihilistic Pirates would be a great name for a band.
Everyone is the hero in their own story. Few people actually gleefully play the scoundrel. The ability humans have to self-rationalize is amazing. And even when folks are doing something they know is wrong, often it gets justified in the balance: the victim deserved it, the perpetrator is Robin Hood and proceeds will benefit those who need it more, the action makes up for a historic injustice, etc ...
People may not play the scoundrel much, but I see plenty of people playing the ronin, the soldier of fortune. E.g., the contract programmer on a 6-month gig where they know the project is fucked, but as long as the check clears, it's not their problem. The sysadmin who doesn't much care what's on the servers. Plenty of others, for sure.
I doubt it. Every time there's an article on here about the latest outrage from $FaceGoogzon there's no shortage of well-paid rationalisers in the comments. I'd expect the same is true of the RIAA. Especially among their legal team: there are far more unseemly clients than the RIAA out there.
Yup. After the mortgage bubble burst, I saw a lots of posts from people in the industry who knew something was wrong, but as long as they kept making commissions, they weren't going to question anything.
I don't really think so. I think a lot of people are just doing something because it's a job. And a lot of people are sound with being sheep and just following the rules because they exist, and don't like the discomfort that comes with questioning everything on a deep level.
> I wonder if RIAA lawyers believe themselves productive members of society, or if they recognize themselves as the parasites they are.
At least one way they could rationalize their actions is by taking an outlandish but not uncommon view of property rights: that no one would bother to create anything without being able to profit from ownership of it, and the more they can profit the more they'll create.
There's also the even more outlandish view that whatever the market does is good for society by definition, so if the market pays you to do something you can assume it's beneficial to society.
I think if people are paid well enough, they can convince themselves that the harm they do is a net positive because it demonstrates that the system needs to change.
I wonder this about a large majority of corporate lawyers who somehow seem like members of a parasitic species which has found a host which they can exploit for resources by inducing changes in their behaviour, comparable to the way the Toxoplasma parasite makes mice less scared of cats [1].
