One thing I should have made clearer: All of this is assuming that artists/journalists/production companies/record labels would be paid per play/read/watch/download, similar to how artists are paid via Spotify, minus the marketing, profit-margin, and a lot of operating expenses unrelated to hosting the files themselves.
Would they be paid at a flat rate or would the tax be redistributed? If I only listen to the grateful dead and watch the matrix (I'm not), would my 36$ be split into those things or would my tax contribute to Taylor Swift's hegemony?
Great question. Ideally, no, Taylor would not get your GD/Matrix bucks. But I could also see some value in slowly transitioning from current models to the new and improved one if this thing were to actually get legislative legs.
The issue with a flat per-use distribution is that is removes one of the two levers creators have to break even on their investment. Currently, not only volume, but also profit per-unit can be used to try to make back the money I spent building content. This means that if I made something super-niche, but expensive to create, I can charge significantly more per-unit to ensure I make back the money I invested in the process. I worry that by not being able to say "this is budget content" or "this is premium content", everyone is now forced to optimize for mass appeal if they want to take big bets. An alternative would be to allow creators to set their "price" for their content, but that would encourage creators to high-ball their demands since there's no drawback to doing so. Also, this cost is hidden from users, so a user wouldn't weigh accessing single $70 piece of content in relation to 7 $10 pieces of content. You COULD make this cost visible to users by giving them a budget for their consumption, but I'm guessing that goes against the spirit of what you're envisioning, since it would discourage people from going out of their comfort zone and trying content they're not sure they would like.
@@JoshuaMaiche Wouldn't reviews and critics help guide people into what is budget, b-rate, amateur vs quality, AAA titles? I personally avoid gauging things by their price tag even as things are, and instead rely on critical review and word-of-mouth when choosing what content I consume.
Copyright protects more than just profits. Consider the following: People's opinions of Benn Jordan might decline should his music become the main soundtrack to, say, neo-nazi rallies. But as the copyright holder, you get to say "no" should they come around asking to use it. The same is true of licensing for movie, tv and video game usage. By being the sole copyright holder, you get to frame how the majority of people hear your music. If you remove that protection, anyone can use your art in ways that might turn people off to ever wanting to hear your music again.
I remember how long it would take sometimes for my piano teachers to find certain pieces for students because of this… At least we learned more about transcribing
@@artisan002 most of the time it's $5-$10 per song, they're not often accurate, the teacher and the student both have to purchase it, you can't technically share them, and the front page of the print usually identifies who purchased the sheets, the websites you buy from usually let you print once, so if you lose that pdf you printed, you're buying it again. The biggest issue I face is that very few parents will respond when I ask them to buy things. While $5-$10 might not sound like a lot, a whole album would cost $25-$50.
It does seem that overprotecting IP and preventing derivative art has the effect of impoverishing creativeness in the long run, the more we make the less we can make for it can always be compared to previous work, and sets a limit for inspiration
People just underestimate how much of art is derivation. Some of the greatest artists like shakespeare would be considered plagiarists by our modern logic. You could possibly argue that more people are screwed now by exorbitant limitations than in the past by actual plagiarism.
I've spent my entire career making free software, and even converting whole industries to open-source... and the results are clear: When everyone shares what they make, everyone ends up richer. The way I usually explain it to business people is: With proprietary software, you get what you pay for. But with open-source software you get what you pay for, everyone gets what you pay for, and you also get what everyone _else_ pays for. So you get a lot more bang for your buck.
You're also sharing liabilities; methods; technological frameworks; data formats and a whole boot full of everything else. I like to explain to economic type people that open source is a demand driven market, where as your investor funded proprietary software is *supply* driven. Mostly that change in thinking is worth it because it stops people thinking open source is some charity case instead of serious business with different rules.
This!! I've dedicated my life to making free audio resources, and if I were charging money for them only a fraction of my current audience would be able to make cool art with it. Copyright needs to go.
@@Nemion Same way as almost any other tech work, basically. The entire world runs on free software these days, so basically just throw a rock and you'll probably hit someone who uses it. And a lot of those people are hiring.
What worries me is this is all predicated on a substantial amount of trust to the government. Trust for them not to screw with numbers, not to punish artists along political/ideological lines, not to censor media along political/ideological lines, whether left or right, and not to favor things for one company/entity just because they donated to that candidate's campaign or something. there would have to be a strong checks and balance system. maybe I'm just jaded but I don't think the Gov would pull this off very well. but neither has private entities yet.
They can independently, and they already and have always have treated access to it in multiple places of the world, and are ultimately the arbiter between artists and companies that ultimately screw them and always have.
Fun facts: In Hungary there is a tax on every CD/cassette/iPod/iPhone etc. recording device, because you'll record copyrighted material anyway... There is even a process where you can apply for exemption :D It wouldn't be a bad idea if people wouldn't have to pay for actual copyrighted material... Same goes for fuel, there is a tax on it basically to maintain roads (at least this is how it started), which would be a great idea if people wouldn't have to pay "road tax" in addition to this... :D
Wasn't that the idea of "Music CD-Rs" for use in audio CD recorders? Of course, the easy way around that was to just buy plain "data" CD-Rs and burn them on a computer .... If that doesn't sum up the recording industry's understanding of technology in a nutshell, I don't know what does.
Same in FInland. started as cassette tax and then moved to other mediums like cd's and usb drives. DJ's also have to pay license depending on what medium they play. Physical formats are free, mp3's you need to pay license based on amount of different tracks played.
Thing is if its the same thing as in austria, drm is still everywhere and bypassing said drm is still illegal even though you technically paid for it which makes those taxes "you could do bad things, so just pay upfront (even though we will charge you seperately as well) " - taxes.
That "tax" goes to the record industry, not the artists, so it's really just another way for them to do yet more rent seeking without the people who produce the thing we actually want seeing any of the benefits.
One of the reasons I got into watching your channel was exactly because of these kinds of videos. Even though our opinions are not necessarily in complete alignment, they don't need to. It is always interesting to watch you express your thoughts and I almost always get something out of them. I obviously watch you for your music content as well but this side of your channel has always been slightly more interesting to me. I've always disliked the current copyright laws since I was little. I grew up in a relatively poor country, legal foreign media acces to me was unattainable/unthinkable. Where I come from, I didn't know anyone who held legal copies of almost any piece of media. If you had an account on an invite-only torrenting site, you were the coolest kid around. To buy a single 60$ triple A game, it would cost us, in relative terms, as much as it would cost you guys to buy it for 300$. As such, I've "sailed" all my life. I could, if I wanted to, attribute 80-90% of my knowledge, passions, skills, basically, the person I am today, to having "free" access to these things. It is highly questionable if I would have gotten back into music (am an ex-"piano prodigy") if copyright laws were truly enforced everywhere. It is also highly questionable what my political views, for example, would have been. My home country is not that progressive, to put it mildly. I believe that without us having such "free" access to otherwise illegal forms of media consumption, there would not be as many young people that have now went on to rise above their status and make it in life. Behind almost every computer science student in or from my country, there's a drive full of crack folders for games they could have otherwise never played. I would know, I'm one of them ;) I also come from the perspective of a guy that really got into anime in his teens, an industry that was always behind the movie/tv show industry in terms of legal distribution. Illegal streaming was and still is one of the biggest parts that go into being an anime fan. That being said, I'm used to being put on blast for "not supporting the industry" and "stealing art/products". There have always been weird arguments between people thinking they have the higher moral ground for upholding the copyright laws and those who do not. It makes me hopeful to see that discussions about the actual fucked system we have are becoming more frequent than debates about those who operate outside of it. I think a lot of young people (me included) are increasingly tired of the corporate greed that keeps all these fucked systems in place. You are one of the creators on this platform that has helped me come to grips with my role as a consumer and has opened my eyes to a few things that I did not consider before. I thank you for that.
I live in a country where the government controls much of the information people can easily access. That includes music. Also, we would trade that government for an actual bucket of sh*t, if given the chance - because it's infinitely more useful (yes, it's Hungary 😅). So... I have my doubts about giving any politician the right to control media. I mean... There are more terrible governments around right now than proper ones 🫤.
Yeah, I think this video didn't make it clear that this would need to be a public organization independent of the government. It still would be a lot of power concentrated into one point and the government would still be able to influence it at least via funding. See all the independent public broadcasters. They could be much more independent.
The libraries of some European countries have so well developed digital libraries (you can rent music, ebooks, films and even software online in e.g. Denmark), that i'd say they're already almost there. Unfortunately I live in Austria where libraries aren't seen as a public necessity
Yes but because of the copyright shenanigans it is very complicated and you have to install proprietary software (at least in Germany). The good thing at least for books is that the DRM is a joke and can be removed easily so that you can keep the stuff you “rented” forever.
I was scrolling through my homepage feed, thinking to myself, how I really need to get on task for the day and then I saw a screenshot for a new Benn Jordan video. I said “God damn you, Benn!” and now here I am.
I think I'd actually pay a bit more for my media than I do now, but thats in part because I'm stingy and am fatigued by subscription services. This proposal really doesn't sound too bad, but isn't possible due to very powerful people losing a ton of that power in its implementation. I'm not sure how we can progress this country toward something a lot more equitable than what we have now... I'm still waiting for that revolution to happen, myself. /s Side note: the libertarians I've known had some...pretty interesting perspectives on things that kind of rubbed me the wrong way, as a very left-leaning person. I guess I just want to say thank you for being measured and well researched in your videos. A lot of your content has challenged the way I see things in a variety of ways and has helped expand my understanding on things.
Yeah, I think it's fair to say that Benn seems to align more with lowercase-L libertarianism (a non-politically-aligned ideology aimed at maximizing freedom in as many areas as possible), rather than capital-L Libertarianism (the psychotic political group who thinks taxes are theft, roads should be privatized, and public schools demolished). As someone who's also "far-left," it seems to me that a lot of lowercase-L libertarians are just socialists in denial haha :)
Yeah tbh this sounded more like left-libertarian philosophy to me (which was actually the original kind, but right-wing hyper-individualist libertarianism went on to stain the name in the USA).
This is a very interesting thought experiment. I am known among my friends as a person not afraid to ask big fundamental questions that most people take for granted and I live for asking all the big questions that we may never know the answer to, so I will most certainly be pondering this question and perhaps debating it with my friends. Thank you kind sir, you have just sparked the creative juices in my brain providing me with more philosophy to entertain me for hours if not more.
The iPod tax has been implemented in Sweden since the late 90s, it's called "Privatkopieringsersättning". It's HORRIBLE and drive up prices (especially in the last decades where the digital storage space has EXPLODED) on anything with storage space in it (which is pretty much anything these days).
@@Lance_G it's not really a TAX per se, it's a fee that companies that create and/or import any kind of digital storage has to pay. the problem is that companies then put the price for this fee on the consumers, which indirectly makes it a tax. the money goes to COPYSwede.
i struggle to see how this system would work in something like the games industry/computers. developers spend years on their code and game developers spend years just making the engine for their game. its going to be hard to convince any of them to sink the time or millions of dollars into development if they know that in five years someone can just Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V on all of your work without any repercussions. in order for a hypothetical system like this to exist , it requires someone to essentially “take the L” so that the greater good to benefit from it.
In my opinion, the more pressing problem is that copyright hinders artists etc. from building upon existing IP. Your proposition does not solve this issue (because there still need to be royalties paid out), but frankly I don't know how to either. Especially in music, it is quite easy to infringe on copyright you don't even know of. There was this guy who stored basically all possibe melodies in TET on a device and tried to declare it open-source to end this nonsense, but I don't think he made an impact in reality
@@cd2320 In the system being proposed, all royalty payments go through the government, so you wouldn't pay anything directly. One possible approach is that if you make a derivative work, the government would give some proportion of "your" royalties to the creator of the original work instead of you.
I think that answer is baked in. Problems I can see might include how you calculate percentage. And does everyone's percentage reduce for every new derivative work? So, a popular song would pay almost nothing to a huge number of people who all made remixes? Overall, very interesting ideas and diametrically opposed to libertarianism, but that's either argument.
I've noodled on this problem when thinking about sampling and remixing. I think one thing that would make this more plausibly workable is to have some kind of compulsory licensing system (like has long existed for cover songs) so that an artist can't stop their work being sampled or remixed (eg by demanding a ridiculously high fee) but rather have some kind of fixed royalty free structure so if you use a sample, you declare it and just pay out based on the compulsory rate. This would get a lot easier with Benn's proposed system if we're trusting the government to register and manage the central royalty clearinghouse...
I think one of the worst things about the copyright system as it currently stands is how the government is shooting itself in the foot with educational materials. If a textbook is copyrighted and expensive, lots of people won't be able to afford it. Assuming it contains useful information, the government spends time and money enforcing artificial scarcity on information that would make society as a whole more productive, in order to try and give the publisher revenue that they wouldn't get anyway (since the people couldn't afford it)
One of my favorite videos of yours. I think another positive aspect of abolishing IP is having a generally healthier collaboration scene. I’ve had so many situations with musicians who were paranoid that their stuff was gonna be stolen that it just killed the vibe completely. I still have difficulty trusting any central authority with so much responsibility of managing so much content and actually allowing all forms of expression (both govts or companies like Spotify), but it seems like a better and unfortunately necessary alternative to that of letting companies take advantage of a corrupt govt that plays favorites with how laws are made and applied.
The proposal is NOT, repeat NOT, about abolishing IP! BJ> All of this is assuming that artists/journalists/production companies/record labels would be paid per play/read/watch/download, similar to how artists are paid via Spotify The record label (album) or production company (movie) or sometimes individual artist would still own the property rights to collect royalties deriving from government taxes, rather than from user fees. The government would collect information about every time you read an article or listen to a song or watch a video, and use that to distribute a pool of tax money to property owners, in proportion to how much that property is accessed by users. To make this work, solid DRM might be needed - requiring monitoring every playback on any device, so that property owners can claim their due compensation. It's very much not about abolishing IP, but about shifting the enforcement of IP copy restrictions (avoiding unauthorized/unmonitored accesses) to the government rather than just authorizing private companies to protect their own IP, and shifting the costs from the users of each product (in some proportion to their usage), to the taxpayers (via progressive taxation). Some person or company stealing your property (so THEY can receive the government royalties therefrom, rather than you) would continue to be as important an issue as ever under the system as described.
Including the concept of (non) scarcity here was a really good idea. In fact, it was what got me from "I don't like the idea of yet another tax" to "I think it makes sense". Sometimes, it's really helpful to view things from a different perspective. 👍
15:42 that’s not even considering the private equity companies that own shares in all of those media/streaming services (BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street Corp, Apollo, etc).
Love this thought experiment. For _this_ scale of distribution, calculating expected compute/bandwidth costs (even if heavily discounted) would be more interesting than looking at the cost of those companies to run themselves. Looking at CDN costs for some of the bigger dogs (akamai, aws, etc) could give some good napkin math.
That's true, but the thought experiment takes that into account by using the revenues of these companies, rather than their profits or payouts. The numbers already include everybody's infrastructure, management, and CDN costs, on top of development and marketing costs that would largely vanish under this scheme.
Wow. Just wow. I can’t think of anything more to add to express my admiration for how thoroughly you’ve thought this through. If you decide to use this as the basis for a revolution, I will swim across the Atlantic to pledge my allegiance.
@@icedragon769 They include these costs as they stand _now,_ but how does that change if there isn't an IP gatekeeping? Do streaming companies still exist as pay-for-distribution services? Would that make them significantly cheaper, or do we end up paying a tax on top of our monthly subs? And if you could just share media without regard for copyright, then would streaming services even exist? Surely there's value in a well-curated catalog, but if it's a lot "Free"er to just tap into your buddy's Plex system, then that might be the way to go. And if it's not longer a legal gray-area to sell appliances that aid this, then peer-to-peer traffic would escalate rapidly. Now, how would that affect ISP traffic allocation? Large ISPs can offload streaming service traffic to local hosting (where the ISP partners with the provider to host popular media locally, thereby preventing out-of-network streaming.) If everything's peer-to-peer, that optimization goes away. Unless ISPs shift to hosting large media catalogs themselves... This is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what shifts with a change like this. You could even go so far as wondering with Benn's "song" at the beginning would become a meal ticket, if IP were paid for by the government. Is it paid by meritocracy, or just handed out to anyone who registers their media? What if you then play that "song" in public, continuously, whether anyone wanted to hear it or not? Can you send a bill to the government? Could I earn a wage by literally tapping a piano key over and over? I love the idea of making information free, but it definitely has the potential to upset the economic system we have today. Such things should not be taken lightly, even if they are potentially worthwhile. That is to say: Warrants discussion, not shutting it down without bothering to explore the repercussions.
The copyright "protections" have gone b beyond insanity... Several websites with guitar chords for songs have been unplugged and vanished... What kind go loss would an artist suffer if I slaughtered their track on my cheap guitar in frobt of a few inebriated friends?
so it sounds like the main take away is that for profits should be banned from lobbying or basically interacting with government. I have to say, the idea is "simple" enough but it would need to be a worldwide thing to really take hold properly. I hate to say it, but I don't see that happening unfortunately :(
There's lots of issues and holes with this ideas, most of which I don't really have the words to describe, but I'm somewhat interested. I think the biggest question here is - how do you decide who gets paid how much? Watch time seems to be a decent option, but I think there would have to be an option for more conscientous consumers to directly dictate where their tax goes, this would help fund smaller and more niche creations. Though, of course, this introduces a layer of complexity that also needs safeguards against fraud and the like. Second issue is that we'd need more legal distinction between copyrights (which is basically economic rights and redistribution) and moral rights (which in many systems cannot be waived or transferred) which mean the right to "claim authorship of the work and to object to any distortion, modification of, or other derogatory action in relation to the said work, which would be prejudicial to the author's honor or reputation"(Berne Convention).
If I make a derivative work, how much of the money goes to me vs the original artist? What if in one case I simply briefly sample 1 second of the original track, whereas in another case I play the original track in its intirety but make just a few tiny changes? Who decides the split?
I have believed something like this since high school. The system built on copyright absorbs 90% of the content-consumption revenue stream, and hands-on content creators are left with 10%.
I've been saying this shit for a decade now. Copyright laws are the dumbest concept ever. What the internet archive does is the golden model imo and should be ingested by the federal government and subsidized.
I remember watching videos you made about copyright back in like 2006 and the whole Sublight debacle / pirating call for soundtrack to a vacant life in 2008 This should be interesting
I've been thinking about this too since about 2007 when I got into creative commons. We've made more money from cc than from royalties from ads and stuff! Crazy considering I've have big ads! The unbelievable amount of middle men and collection agencies dragging their feet and taking big percentages is partly to blame.
Given that money is currently controlling all of the decision making (as far as those who are making a lot of it off of those who are doing most of the work) this will not happen in the US, but I do support the idea if dreams ever come true.
I don't think you factored in the fact that the creative need a substantial raise, and then what are the qualifiers for creative content to receive tax money payments? Do I get to hit 5 keys on the piano as a minimalist artist then start receiving a check?
Agreed. Now apply the same to medicine development. Pay big pharma directly to perform research and development to eliminate the incentive to only pursue high profit treatments.
Like so many things in the US, you're already socializing it, only you give a huge chunk of the money to private companies, making the service/product more expensive and often less good. We do the same thing in Canada, but to a lesser extent. It's very frustrating.
Fun fact: as someone who works in production animation in LA, if you want to use a licensed song, gotta pay a license fee. However if you want to include the LYRICS of the song in the CLOSED CAPTIONS? That's ANOTHER separate licensing fee because the lyrics are copyrighted separately from the song. COOL. Anyway, that's why if you've ever had the subtitles on while watching a show and you see it just say "Song by Artist is playing" with no lyrics, that's why. They didn't pay the extra fees.
Minor but important point, Libertarianism is distinct from Libertarian Socialism. The former was synonymous with the latter at its beginning, but these days, basically it's Libertarianism = Anarcho Capitalism and Libertarian Socialism = Anarcho Socialism. Benn Is leaning heavily towards Anarcho Socialism
One thing I felt was kinda missing from this video was regarding data logistics. The only way I see royalties being paid out fairly is with something resembling DRM or some other kind of tracker, since without it you can't reasonably collect that data in any meaningful way if everyone is not only allowed to, but encouraged to redistribute content. The idea of a fully centralized media.gov sounds a little ridiculous, especially given the huge swaths of existing infrastructure (like UA-cam, Spotify etc). Those proprietary platforms aren't just going to vanish, and a competent replacement would not be cheap even if they did.
There are some serious downsides to this, though. For the resources it takes to run one news program that does research, you can make dozens that just make things up. For a long time, the thing that has kept that vaguely in check is that they largely can't get "reputable" ads. Unfortunately, the marketplace of ideas doesn't work when media literacy hardly exists. The marketplace of ideas is great when it comes to things that don't deal with matters of truth or reality -- because if you can make up a hundred lies, the truth has to spend its time debunking them instead of spreading and growing.
Great hypotheticals... As an independent Artist and content creator i feel eventually it will come down to someone spending hours or days to create content vs someone in a bikini falling down next to puppies... AI alone has already starting eating into my profits and i try to stay positive about the future of art and creativity but i feel eventually due to a lot of what you discuss, alongside AI advancing weekly... Creatives will eventually just partake in creative objectives because of passion and less about profit... Which can be seen as horrible or amazing... I have worked in the arts for over two decades and I already see the writing on the wall per se... I feel creatives should create for themselves and not just an audience or hopes to make profit but of course i would also love to see artists be able to pay their bills from their art... It is a complicated topic since as long as I can remember musicians, actors, models etc are dream careers so there will always someone who will undercut because they want to "make it big"... i have seen behind the curtain and it can be really complicated and definitely needs an enema... Will is happen? I hope so... In a perfect world stock portfolios would not be valued over humans... I just hope for the best...
As I understand Ancient Greeks used to *require* incoming ships to surrender any books they had on board so that they could be copied to add to the library of Alexandria. Seems to me there’s historical precedent for exactly this kind of thing, the making freely available all valuable information/knowledge, so that any inclined and in need can partake to the overall benefit of society at large… the current issue being the profiteering in the middle. I’m all for this.
The Ancient Greeks also highly lived in a completely different civilization. You are proposing it be literally impossible to make any living off of any form of art unless the government approves of your form of artistic expression. And that’s a terrible idea
Pirate Party has similar ideas on some of the points you talked about. It is a party which isn't really on left or right but picks things from either side that they seem logical, reasonable or helpful. If you have time take a look of what they have achieved and what they would like to do next.
I wish this is how things could be :/. Unfortunately the solution to this problem is giving more money to the people who made the system how it is (the government) and as long as the same corrupt people keep getting elected you know they would abuse and bastardize this system.
I would argue that Disney, the MPAA, and the RIAA had way, way more to do with how the system is today than the government. The government just allows politicians to be lobbied (bribed), making them no more than a rubber-stamp operation on corporation-created legislation.
Same principal applies to politics. 1-Companies can no longer give money to candidates and political parties. 2-Individual political donations have a very low ceiling Max $200. All the available money that now becomes available can be used to fund parties and candidates based on representation. Have a strong check and balance to make sure the money is properly spent. This will clean your corruption and no candidate will be backed by corporations.
The amount of cold sweat that would result from serious consideration of this among many folks and corporations could also solve any future water shortages. As an artist, it is super easy to get caught up in wanting copyright protection since violation of copyright is marketed as another way you’re getting fleeced by someone… which is interesting when put into the perspective presented by this video. 🙂
The part about artists getting "paid more" is pretty hand-wavey. "Hypothetical royalty number is bigger", but this only accounts for per-listen payouts. Artists who survive by composing and licensing would get kinda destroyed if a good music editor could just needle-drop any music, ever, anywhere into a media production.
That's why he said 'consumer/retail'. Also, very few composers actually *want* to do that - they do it because they can't make money doing what they actually want to do. Every jingle writer would rather do punk ballads.
@@paulie-g Copyright law impacts way more than just 'consumer/retail'. Also, it's true that most of us don't do *exactly* what we want, but so what? It puts money in the bank and it beats selling insurance. I'll tell you what composers definitely don't want - it's to not be able to be working composers anymore.
@@SoundslikeLogic He specifically narrowed his proposal to consumer-facing media IP. We do this now - the right to play music in your home does not imply the right to play it publicly. I don't see how this proposal changes things for composers. I don't think the proposal is well thought through and it's absolutely impossible because of international IP conventions (although the US no longer cares about international law, so maybe).
I'm always a fan of individual creator ownership. Citing the manga industry where this is a big deal versus the situation in the US where characters are owned by the corporations DC and marvel.
Individual ownership already exists in the US? People who founded those companies pay others to buy the rights. That’s not the same thing at all. You always own your original work unless you intentionally sign away your rights to another corporation or company.
I appreciate the work you put into this video/subject, and I do agree that there must be a better way than what we have currently. Given that, and it's possible that I just missed it, but it's one thing for us to pay more taxes to get all this content, and I appreciate that you broke down roughly the tax cost, but how do artists get paid for their art? I agree that artists are criminally underpaid, but within this discussion, how much do/would artists make? Would artists get tax breaks/refunds for the amount of content they create regardless of the quality? I could put out hours of blah instrumental music (I could probably program A.I. to create it for me) and then I could claim a tax break on hundreds of thousands of hours of music. Would artists get paid based on monitoring algorithms that calculate how much their content is watched? I could just open up an internet window and put something on a loop to watch over and over to make fake numbers. I'm just not getting the incentive for artists to make content, film, music, whatever under this system.
I think this will indirectly help artists get more money from merch, cds, vinyl, touring, and other means. Many artists only make money this way and don't use streaming services to make money. The majority of artists already don't get paid from streaming services even if they do have listeners. Maybe by switching to this method, people will be more willing to purchase stuff from artists because they are not already paying for it.
I gladly pay for my neighbor's kids to go to public school because society works better when citizens are literate and can do basic math. Also studies have repeatedly proven that higher access to education directly reduces both poverty and crime in an area. I'm definitely getting my money's worth on that deal.
The idea of short copyright, like 5 years, is interesting, so people will need to move and create something new, instead of franchise decades the same ideas.
As legally constructed entities, for-profit corporations should be the only ones subject to paying any form of IP royalties/residuals/fees. All natural persons should be free to use any information as they see fit. Artists commercializing their art should monetize via performances, official merch, and tips/donations from fans/patrons, and sponsorships. In the business context, their art is branding and advertisement for their products ( merch ) and services ( performances/consulting/etc. ). All Taxation leads to corruption and graft. The proposal from this video, while pragmatic, will ultimately trade one unjust system for another.
All of this relies upon two things we know we don't have. The first is accurate streaming numbers. This is the core of the SAG-AFTRA strike, and there's a real concern that if the real numbers got out it would be the end of streaming. The second is a competent and impartial government, which is by necessity going to be monitoring all citizens media consumption habits, and deciding what media is even allowed on the government network. In other words, it may well be a great idea, but the people that would be in charge of managing it would be significantly worse than what we have now.
There is a very real possibility that in the future, much more people will make music only for pleasure, and not to earn a living. As more and more art is created by AI, and as it gets better and better, how are creators going to compete? Especially if the AI can produce content at a furious pace, and perhaps even copyright it? Perhaps for some, there will be a shift to live performances. It’s all a bit “What If?” right now, but it’s looking more and more possible.
I think the only part of music threatened by machine learning is corporate pop. ML is best at mass producing things that are already mass produced, and unless you live under a rock, you’d know that that kind of pop music follows the same formula and very much is mass produced. Machine learning can’t really innovate or be human so it doesn’t seem like “AI” is going to be the next big musical innovator (unless everyone is entertained by basic-ahh radio pop).
Live music isn't even the golden ticket anymore for all but the most famous artists. Even well-known up-and-coming performers are canceling tours because the expense is too high, and the risk of coming out in the red is very real.
If you were a politician, the mid-roll ad would be, "Benn Jordan wants to bring socialism to America. But Rick Beato believes in hard-working Americans. Don't let Benn Jordan give away America. Vote for Rick Beato and fight for what you've earned." (With apologies to Rick Beato.)
man... after some videos ,,, i subscribed... very good quality info, nice guy, very honest, cool perspectives, nice hummor.. i like your takes on the sick industry.. nightmare.. very cool work.. thank you
Did you take into account storage costs? Same with distribution... AWS costs is a big reason why smaller/open-sourced data isnt that easily available. It's expensive to host and distribute content, ESPECIALLY video content
As many others have pointed out, the logic of this argument is flawless when looking at its proposal of logistics and execution, the only hindering factor lies within the executioner. The epitomy of the argument, and perhaps of your self affirmed "libertarian" standpoint too, is when we apply this logic to a non-governmental entity, comprised solely of the demos itself and ruling out that final middleman of executive power. A collaborative effort between artists and their patrons, unified, regulated, and self-maintained.
For millennia the privileged and educated have ruled over the poor and uneducated - the game hasn't changed, it's only gotten more sophisticated/convoluted heh
sorry but the educated ruling over uneducated seems the sensible thing? why are you even putting it in a bad light, lol? and it's not even on the same level or universe as privileged/rich ruling over poor.
@@notioncreanga It's literally the same thing, Dunning-Kruger ROFLMEYERWIENER The sensible thing would be to educate everyone instead and have an entire society of people contributing to our progression of the species ;) Thank you for proving how effective dumbing people down has been though ...
@@3nertia you're the only one that proves dumbing down is so effective, since your logic is so flawed you can't even see it. And hey, educate everyone? good luck with that in a world that doesn't give equal chances to everyone. Try a bit more realism, man
@@notioncreanga Capitalism is the reason not everyone has an equal chance and idiots like you are willing to fall on their proverbial swords to protect it ROFLMEYERWIENER I'm sure you'll have a *nice* day - ah, the irony of Dunning-Kruger ...
Nah your correct, let’s be pirates. An excellent answer to those artists who insist it’s plagiarism when a bot is using references. (They don’t actually believe that probably, they just want to force you to pay them for it)
I say cut out the middleman, abolish copyright, and forget about the tax. There is no way in hell that this won't be exploited by bigger companies. They will suck this copyright fund dry. As long as lobbying exists, that's basically an inevitability.
You can't ensure health and housing as a human right unless you ensure providing healthcare and housing is a human responsibility. Doctors don't wake up at 5 am and spend a decade in school just because they love you. If you stood by uour convictions, you'd be building houses for those in need. I'm guessing you'd rather it be someone elses problem.
umm wtf not ? i am guessing there is a very small amount of middle-class IP income, you either make it big, or not at all, doesn't really seam like a pillar the common people. Try to keep the bitching on topic please
Sure I can, as I have no expertise in housing or healthcare outside of my own. This is about restructuring the distribution of things that do not experience scarcity.
@@benjamindover4337 They wake up at 5am and spend a decade in school in order to train for their job. Doctors exist outside of the for-profit US healthcare system, right? They even exist in socialist countries. Heck, with your logic, there would be no police in the US because they are paid by the government. But there are police, they are regularly paid 6 figures, and retire with a cushy pension. People who want to help people will still become doctors. I've worked at a hospital for 20 years. We'd be fine.
Censorship would be a significant problem in such a system. Content and art criticizing the administration and its narratives would likely not make it through on the media.gov website and would not receive financial support. Political gatekeepers would oversee the content.
Between this and the Spotify video from earlier this year, I am loving your videos on the economics involved and how utterly silly and dysfunctional the whole house of cards really is. I am not that interested in music production so I don't know if I want to subscribe to your channel, but I can at least boost engagement through commenting ;-).
Credit to you for recognizing how incredibly regressive our systems of fees and excise taxes are. Studies have been done comparing actual expenses per capita from regressive excise and sales taxes, "fees," "surcharges," property taxes, and so on, vis-å-vis simply applying progressive taxation, usually (but not necessarily or exclusively) via income taxes. Compare two states that hype their lack of income taxes, Texas and Washington, rated #49 and #50 respectively the most regressive of the 50 states. Unless a Texas or Washington resident makes well over a few hundred thousand dollars per year, there's a strong likelihood that they pay more for the same products/services as a resident in the same income bracket of California. Smart RVers make a big fuss over these details when they have the option to "domicile" wherever they wish. For things that we all share and can't really be measured separately because they also make society function and prosper together, e.g. roads and utilities infrastructure, it makes sense to take it out of progressive income taxation. For services that we can opt in or out of, such as forms of entertainment, we should pay separately, but again on a progressive structure. It's win-win for everyone except corporations who want to monopolize a niche and gouge the public for solely their own benefit. Fine and dandy for things we don't NEED, or consume at vastly different values, e.g. cars (Kia versus Rolls, pickup shell versus $200k+ RV, multimillion-dollar mansion versus 2-bedroom apartment). Most importantly, the many producers of the goods, who presently get pretty screwed, receive better income more commensurate with their output. I know it wasn't quite what you MEANT to say, but you illustrated why taxation and fees should be as simple as possible yet highly progressive. I would add that transparency matters a great deal, too. Price tags should always already include all the add-on charges.
I'd rather just do away with the need to produce commodities in order to consume comomodities, so that I can engage socially through these transactions. Maybe I want to fish in the morning and be a critic in the evening without my occupation being either.
Thought provoking. Current copyright law interpretation is harming the creation of new creative content by providing economic incentives to large corporations to RECYLCE known "good" (e.g. money-making) content rather than taking risks by supporting the creation of NEW creative content. That's why we have 5 versions of NCIS, five Rocky movies, and "franchise" movies based upon 50+ year old comics characters. Your concept of devising an Intellectual Property tax that would pay for the cost of DELIVERING all existing entertainment / intellectual content for a sliding scale fee based on taxable income DOES solve the problem of ensuring uniform access to EXISTING content so the cost of paid access doesn't further widen economic gaps and hasten the forgetting of old, unpopular art and ideas that we might need in the future. It DOESN'T solve the problem of incenting new creation and rewarding those creating valued content. The public CAN use mechanisms like Patreon, etc. to contribute directly to a creator producing what interests them but in reality, a LARGE share of consumers will choose not to, producing a "tragedy of the commons" condition where the creator cannot collect enough funding to incent continued creation at the level desired. The creator quits, finds something else to do, the public doesn't get his/her content and we all (presumably) are the poorer for it. Love the discussion but more angles of the mechanisms at play need to be addressed. In general, copyright term needs to be REDUCED and somehow limited back to HUMANS rather than allowing CORPORATIONS to leverage copyright indefinitely to churn out trite rehashes of old hits.
Talking about melodies, there's a project by Damien Riehl and Noah Rubin. It was featured in Adam Neely's video "Every Melody Has Been Copyrighted". They brute force generated melodies, to help melodies be more available to everyone.
We actually have the “iPod Tax” in Switzerland and it is legal in our country to download (only download no upload) music, films and books (I think because of a different tax on paper or printers or so). However The distribution of the money could be better.
The current system has alot of bullshit and reforms are necessary, but I'm not convinced this is the way. I am a market socialist, an artist who makes things for the creative commons and for profit on a case by case basis. I believe that copyright duration needs to be shorted by at least 20 years (at LEAST). I am ok with luxuries like media (not other information like education) being mostly a private venture, and I feel that the exploitation of the workers in those private industries is the main problem that needs to be resolved. Anyway, this video needs to be longer. How the money for subsidies gets raised is straightforward, sure. But that's the easy part. It needs to talk about how artists gets paid for their work. How does the government authority give out the money to projects? For how long? And also there's the issue of derivative works, reproduction, and distribution. Copyright is fundamentally supposed to protect that. The public domain is important and necessary, but artists should have a choice to where their new original work goes when they make it. Ownership is a much stronger incentive than profit. And that goes right back to the previous problem. How do the creators of de-facto public domain work get properly compensated for their work? How do you prevent bad actors using AI generated sludge from taking all the funds? And it's a big problem you chose to avoid talking about software. This is largely half-baked. I know for some people the "how do you pay for it?" question is what they need the most convincing of, but for the people that would actually have to interact with this system, the actual people who make the media, how would it actually work for us? How does it make sure we aren't fucked over like we are now? OK Hollywood is subsidized by our taxes now and people can watch movies for "free." So the bullshit they pull on workers is still happening? What changed?
Does this include independent or niche genre artists? How do those artists get compensated for the work they put into their art? How would this treat derivative works, aka sampling, remixing?
I'm immensely excited about this idea. It's something I've thought about before. Building standards, safety standards, engineering standards... if governments would fund these bodies to make their standards freely available we'd live in a safer world but it would also empower individuals to innovate and create, all ultimately contributing to the economy. Extend this idea to all (most/some) media and we have something deeply interesting.
UA-cam has started making videos play at lower quality unless they're uploaded in a 4k container (1080p 'premium') - any way you can upload in '4k' even if it's just a 1080p copy blown up with integer scaling? love your videos
Interesting idea! The way I could see this actually gaining traction is: run the math deeper to show large media production companies they would stand to profit more should they all agree to put their primetime content into a centralized system. They could save a ton on all the middle men involved in licensing, trying to gain/keep subscribers, up-keeping systems, getting advertisers*, etc. They’d just have to make content people want to watch and spend on advertising to get people to watch it and that’s it. I’d wager the math works out they’d stand to profit more because it’s essentially a guaranteed subscriber base. If you do that, they could easily lobby to make this happen. That said, this would put hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people in the existing system out of work. Then there’s the issue of protecting against people accessing this content outside the system that could track views/streams/etc to pay royalties out correctly. No one in the US would pirate anything bc they don’t have to, but what about outside the US? Do we figure out some US DRM system for the content? *In theory you could subsidize this system by allowing ads on the government run website, but that sort of goes against a big point of all this. Great video, def fun to think about.
yep been basically thinking about this for a while, I completely agree and have pretty much reached the same model. And you can still have a market inside that system, attention market or monetary.
As a professional artist watching this video I went from, “this is a terrible idea” to “oh this is actually a great idea” but landed on, “hey wait a minute…” My “hey wait a minute causes it all to fail”: who decides who is an artist and what qualifies as art when it comes to PAYMENTS. Forget the tax part. That’s easy. The hard part is whether Duchamp gets a payment for his “water fountain” or Cage gets a payment for “4:33”. And if Cage gets paid for 4:33 than everyone will be uploading 4:34, etc. It will be the new “easy money” of everyone’s an artist and therefore… no one is. No one gets paid. Art is devalued. The current system sucks, I’m a Democratic Socialist overall, but I just don’t know how to solve for the payment side of this that doesn’t put bureaucrats in charge of artistic gatekeeping (anymore than corporate bureaucrats already are). Fun idea, good to have the discussion, but I think you might need a Part II for payments.
I am far more interested in things we can actually do instead of some idealized future. A real step we can go to making things better, especially if you want to get to this type of hypothetical ideal, is to create more mechanical licenses. As was pointed out in this video, making real change will see a lot of pushback. If one wants to get to that type of end-state then you have to lay the groundwork. It won’t just magically happen. There is a reason why Brown v. Board happened in the 50s and not the 10s or 20s. The legal legwork had to be laid before you can get the good outcome.
One thing I should have made clearer:
All of this is assuming that artists/journalists/production companies/record labels would be paid per play/read/watch/download, similar to how artists are paid via Spotify, minus the marketing, profit-margin, and a lot of operating expenses unrelated to hosting the files themselves.
Would they be paid at a flat rate or would the tax be redistributed? If I only listen to the grateful dead and watch the matrix (I'm not), would my 36$ be split into those things or would my tax contribute to Taylor Swift's hegemony?
Great question. Ideally, no, Taylor would not get your GD/Matrix bucks. But I could also see some value in slowly transitioning from current models to the new and improved one if this thing were to actually get legislative legs.
The issue with a flat per-use distribution is that is removes one of the two levers creators have to break even on their investment. Currently, not only volume, but also profit per-unit can be used to try to make back the money I spent building content. This means that if I made something super-niche, but expensive to create, I can charge significantly more per-unit to ensure I make back the money I invested in the process.
I worry that by not being able to say "this is budget content" or "this is premium content", everyone is now forced to optimize for mass appeal if they want to take big bets.
An alternative would be to allow creators to set their "price" for their content, but that would encourage creators to high-ball their demands since there's no drawback to doing so. Also, this cost is hidden from users, so a user wouldn't weigh accessing single $70 piece of content in relation to 7 $10 pieces of content.
You COULD make this cost visible to users by giving them a budget for their consumption, but I'm guessing that goes against the spirit of what you're envisioning, since it would discourage people from going out of their comfort zone and trying content they're not sure they would like.
@@JoshuaMaiche Wouldn't reviews and critics help guide people into what is budget, b-rate, amateur vs quality, AAA titles? I personally avoid gauging things by their price tag even as things are, and instead rely on critical review and word-of-mouth when choosing what content I consume.
Copyright protects more than just profits. Consider the following:
People's opinions of Benn Jordan might decline should his music become the main soundtrack to, say, neo-nazi rallies. But as the copyright holder, you get to say "no" should they come around asking to use it.
The same is true of licensing for movie, tv and video game usage. By being the sole copyright holder, you get to frame how the majority of people hear your music.
If you remove that protection, anyone can use your art in ways that might turn people off to ever wanting to hear your music again.
The thing that kills me as a teacher is how sheet music is sold and distributed in the digital era because of copyright.
I remember how long it would take sometimes for my piano teachers to find certain pieces for students because of this…
At least we learned more about transcribing
@@ZonymaUnltd.Definitely a silver lining to learn how to transcribe!
Oh, god. I hadn't thought about that. How bad is it?
@@artisan002 most of the time it's $5-$10 per song, they're not often accurate, the teacher and the student both have to purchase it, you can't technically share them, and the front page of the print usually identifies who purchased the sheets, the websites you buy from usually let you print once, so if you lose that pdf you printed, you're buying it again. The biggest issue I face is that very few parents will respond when I ask them to buy things. While $5-$10 might not sound like a lot, a whole album would cost $25-$50.
@@JewettMusic Good god... That's as bad as ticket scalping. Out and out profiteering. I had no idea.
i have been 100% for this since highschool.
gatekeeping information slows development in any field.
I love when you talk about this kind of thing. Copyright abolition has been one of my greatest fantasies for ages now.
It does seem that overprotecting IP and preventing derivative art has the effect of impoverishing creativeness in the long run, the more we make the less we can make for it can always be compared to previous work, and sets a limit for inspiration
Deterministic Probability heh
People just underestimate how much of art is derivation. Some of the greatest artists like shakespeare would be considered plagiarists by our modern logic. You could possibly argue that more people are screwed now by exorbitant limitations than in the past by actual plagiarism.
the moment you’d say “you’re household would have no advertising” an ad comes on. signal moment
I've spent my entire career making free software, and even converting whole industries to open-source... and the results are clear: When everyone shares what they make, everyone ends up richer. The way I usually explain it to business people is: With proprietary software, you get what you pay for. But with open-source software you get what you pay for, everyone gets what you pay for, and you also get what everyone _else_ pays for. So you get a lot more bang for your buck.
You're also sharing liabilities; methods; technological frameworks; data formats and a whole boot full of everything else.
I like to explain to economic type people that open source is a demand driven market, where as your investor funded proprietary software is *supply* driven. Mostly that change in thinking is worth it because it stops people thinking open source is some charity case instead of serious business with different rules.
This!!
I've dedicated my life to making free audio resources, and if I were charging money for them only a fraction of my current audience would be able to make cool art with it.
Copyright needs to go.
Can you share how you are monetizing your career?
@@Nemion Same way as almost any other tech work, basically. The entire world runs on free software these days, so basically just throw a rock and you'll probably hit someone who uses it. And a lot of those people are hiring.
As a musician, business school graduate with an MBA from the top economics university in Russia and avid Linux user I couldn't agree more!
I love this idea! This is something that could fold right into The Internet Archive.
What worries me is this is all predicated on a substantial amount of trust to the government. Trust for them not to screw with numbers, not to punish artists along political/ideological lines, not to censor media along political/ideological lines, whether left or right, and not to favor things for one company/entity just because they donated to that candidate's campaign or something. there would have to be a strong checks and balance system. maybe I'm just jaded but I don't think the Gov would pull this off very well. but neither has private entities yet.
They can independently, and they already and have always have treated access to it in multiple places of the world, and are ultimately the arbiter between artists and companies that ultimately screw them and always have.
Fun facts: In Hungary there is a tax on every CD/cassette/iPod/iPhone etc. recording device, because you'll record copyrighted material anyway... There is even a process where you can apply for exemption :D It wouldn't be a bad idea if people wouldn't have to pay for actual copyrighted material...
Same goes for fuel, there is a tax on it basically to maintain roads (at least this is how it started), which would be a great idea if people wouldn't have to pay "road tax" in addition to this... :D
Wasn't that the idea of "Music CD-Rs" for use in audio CD recorders? Of course, the easy way around that was to just buy plain "data" CD-Rs and burn them on a computer .... If that doesn't sum up the recording industry's understanding of technology in a nutshell, I don't know what does.
Same in FInland. started as cassette tax and then moved to other mediums like cd's and usb drives.
DJ's also have to pay license depending on what medium they play. Physical formats are free, mp3's you need to pay license based on amount of different tracks played.
@@nickwallette6201 The recording industry has been against technology since the Mellotron was first released in the 1960’s
Thing is if its the same thing as in austria, drm is still everywhere and bypassing said drm is still illegal even though you technically paid for it which makes those taxes "you could do bad things, so just pay upfront (even though we will charge you seperately as well) " - taxes.
That "tax" goes to the record industry, not the artists, so it's really just another way for them to do yet more rent seeking without the people who produce the thing we actually want seeing any of the benefits.
One of the reasons I got into watching your channel was exactly because of these kinds of videos. Even though our opinions are not necessarily in complete alignment, they don't need to. It is always interesting to watch you express your thoughts and I almost always get something out of them. I obviously watch you for your music content as well but this side of your channel has always been slightly more interesting to me.
I've always disliked the current copyright laws since I was little.
I grew up in a relatively poor country, legal foreign media acces to me was unattainable/unthinkable. Where I come from, I didn't know anyone who held legal copies of almost any piece of media. If you had an account on an invite-only torrenting site, you were the coolest kid around.
To buy a single 60$ triple A game, it would cost us, in relative terms, as much as it would cost you guys to buy it for 300$.
As such, I've "sailed" all my life. I could, if I wanted to, attribute 80-90% of my knowledge, passions, skills, basically, the person I am today, to having "free" access to these things. It is highly questionable if I would have gotten back into music (am an ex-"piano prodigy") if copyright laws were truly enforced everywhere. It is also highly questionable what my political views, for example, would have been. My home country is not that progressive, to put it mildly.
I believe that without us having such "free" access to otherwise illegal forms of media consumption, there would not be as many young people that have now went on to rise above their status and make it in life.
Behind almost every computer science student in or from my country, there's a drive full of crack folders for games they could have otherwise never played. I would know, I'm one of them ;)
I also come from the perspective of a guy that really got into anime in his teens, an industry that was always behind the movie/tv show industry in terms of legal distribution. Illegal streaming was and still is one of the biggest parts that go into being an anime fan. That being said, I'm used to being put on blast for "not supporting the industry" and "stealing art/products".
There have always been weird arguments between people thinking they have the higher moral ground for upholding the copyright laws and those who do not. It makes me hopeful to see that discussions about the actual fucked system we have are becoming more frequent than debates about those who operate outside of it.
I think a lot of young people (me included) are increasingly tired of the corporate greed that keeps all these fucked systems in place.
You are one of the creators on this platform that has helped me come to grips with my role as a consumer and has opened my eyes to a few things that I did not consider before.
I thank you for that.
I live in a country where the government controls much of the information people can easily access. That includes music. Also, we would trade that government for an actual bucket of sh*t, if given the chance - because it's infinitely more useful (yes, it's Hungary 😅).
So... I have my doubts about giving any politician the right to control media. I mean... There are more terrible governments around right now than proper ones 🫤.
Amen!
Yeah, I think this video didn't make it clear that this would need to be a public organization independent of the government. It still would be a lot of power concentrated into one point and the government would still be able to influence it at least via funding. See all the independent public broadcasters. They could be much more independent.
The libraries of some European countries have so well developed digital libraries (you can rent music, ebooks, films and even software online in e.g. Denmark), that i'd say they're already almost there. Unfortunately I live in Austria where libraries aren't seen as a public necessity
copyright industry majors lobby a lot the EU to reduce these kind of public services...
I think Italy did something similar a few years ago - every song, book, tv show, etc is available online from a national library
Wait I live in Denmark, what software do I get and why hasn’t anyone told me??
Yeah, the pain of living in austria... at least libby works pretty well if you have a library card (still not much there though afaik )
Yes but because of the copyright shenanigans it is very complicated and you have to install proprietary software (at least in Germany).
The good thing at least for books is that the DRM is a joke and can be removed easily so that you can keep the stuff you “rented” forever.
I was scrolling through my homepage feed, thinking to myself, how I really need to get on task for the day and then I saw a screenshot for a new Benn Jordan video. I said “God damn you, Benn!” and now here I am.
I think I'd actually pay a bit more for my media than I do now, but thats in part because I'm stingy and am fatigued by subscription services. This proposal really doesn't sound too bad, but isn't possible due to very powerful people losing a ton of that power in its implementation. I'm not sure how we can progress this country toward something a lot more equitable than what we have now... I'm still waiting for that revolution to happen, myself. /s
Side note: the libertarians I've known had some...pretty interesting perspectives on things that kind of rubbed me the wrong way, as a very left-leaning person. I guess I just want to say thank you for being measured and well researched in your videos. A lot of your content has challenged the way I see things in a variety of ways and has helped expand my understanding on things.
Yeah, I think it's fair to say that Benn seems to align more with lowercase-L libertarianism (a non-politically-aligned ideology aimed at maximizing freedom in as many areas as possible), rather than capital-L Libertarianism (the psychotic political group who thinks taxes are theft, roads should be privatized, and public schools demolished).
As someone who's also "far-left," it seems to me that a lot of lowercase-L libertarians are just socialists in denial haha :)
Yeah tbh this sounded more like left-libertarian philosophy to me (which was actually the original kind, but right-wing hyper-individualist libertarianism went on to stain the name in the USA).
This is a very interesting thought experiment. I am known among my friends as a person not afraid to ask big fundamental questions that most people take for granted and I live for asking all the big questions that we may never know the answer to, so I will most certainly be pondering this question and perhaps debating it with my friends. Thank you kind sir, you have just sparked the creative juices in my brain providing me with more philosophy to entertain me for hours if not more.
The iPod tax has been implemented in Sweden since the late 90s, it's called "Privatkopieringsersättning". It's HORRIBLE and drive up prices (especially in the last decades where the digital storage space has EXPLODED) on anything with storage space in it (which is pretty much anything these days).
Wow that sounds terrible, I must ask, who gets the money from the tax?
@@Lance_G it's not really a TAX per se, it's a fee that companies that create and/or import any kind of digital storage has to pay. the problem is that companies then put the price for this fee on the consumers, which indirectly makes it a tax. the money goes to COPYSwede.
i struggle to see how this system would work in something like the games industry/computers. developers spend years on their code and game developers spend years just making the engine for their game. its going to be hard to convince any of them to sink the time or millions of dollars into development if they know that in five years someone can just Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V on all of your work without any repercussions.
in order for a hypothetical system like this to exist , it requires someone to essentially “take the L” so that the greater good to benefit from it.
Because its a Communist idea. The only winner is the Government in this scenario.
In my opinion, the more pressing problem is that copyright hinders artists etc. from building upon existing IP. Your proposition does not solve this issue (because there still need to be royalties paid out), but frankly I don't know how to either.
Especially in music, it is quite easy to infringe on copyright you don't even know of. There was this guy who stored basically all possibe melodies in TET on a device and tried to declare it open-source to end this nonsense, but I don't think he made an impact in reality
How do you fairly pay out royalties? If I slam a couple keys over a song, how much should I have to put the copyright holder?
@@cd2320 In the system being proposed, all royalty payments go through the government, so you wouldn't pay anything directly.
One possible approach is that if you make a derivative work, the government would give some proportion of "your" royalties to the creator of the original work instead of you.
I think that answer is baked in. Problems I can see might include how you calculate percentage. And does everyone's percentage reduce for every new derivative work? So, a popular song would pay almost nothing to a huge number of people who all made remixes?
Overall, very interesting ideas and diametrically opposed to libertarianism, but that's either argument.
I've noodled on this problem when thinking about sampling and remixing. I think one thing that would make this more plausibly workable is to have some kind of compulsory licensing system (like has long existed for cover songs) so that an artist can't stop their work being sampled or remixed (eg by demanding a ridiculously high fee) but rather have some kind of fixed royalty free structure so if you use a sample, you declare it and just pay out based on the compulsory rate. This would get a lot easier with Benn's proposed system if we're trusting the government to register and manage the central royalty clearinghouse...
I think one of the worst things about the copyright system as it currently stands is how the government is shooting itself in the foot with educational materials.
If a textbook is copyrighted and expensive, lots of people won't be able to afford it. Assuming it contains useful information, the government spends time and money enforcing artificial scarcity on information that would make society as a whole more productive, in order to try and give the publisher revenue that they wouldn't get anyway (since the people couldn't afford it)
One of my favorite videos of yours. I think another positive aspect of abolishing IP is having a generally healthier collaboration scene. I’ve had so many situations with musicians who were paranoid that their stuff was gonna be stolen that it just killed the vibe completely. I still have difficulty trusting any central authority with so much responsibility of managing so much content and actually allowing all forms of expression (both govts or companies like Spotify), but it seems like a better and unfortunately necessary alternative to that of letting companies take advantage of a corrupt govt that plays favorites with how laws are made and applied.
The proposal is NOT, repeat NOT, about abolishing IP!
BJ> All of this is assuming that artists/journalists/production companies/record labels would be paid per play/read/watch/download, similar to how artists are paid via Spotify
The record label (album) or production company (movie) or sometimes individual artist would still own the property rights to collect royalties deriving from government taxes, rather than from user fees.
The government would collect information about every time you read an article or listen to a song or watch a video, and use that to distribute a pool of tax money to property owners, in proportion to how much that property is accessed by users.
To make this work, solid DRM might be needed - requiring monitoring every playback on any device, so that property owners can claim their due compensation.
It's very much not about abolishing IP, but about shifting the enforcement of IP copy restrictions (avoiding unauthorized/unmonitored accesses) to the government rather than just authorizing private companies to protect their own IP, and shifting the costs from the users of each product (in some proportion to their usage), to the taxpayers (via progressive taxation).
Some person or company stealing your property (so THEY can receive the government royalties therefrom, rather than you) would continue to be as important an issue as ever under the system as described.
Including the concept of (non) scarcity here was a really good idea. In fact, it was what got me from "I don't like the idea of yet another tax" to "I think it makes sense". Sometimes, it's really helpful to view things from a different perspective. 👍
15:42 that’s not even considering the private equity companies that own shares in all of those media/streaming services (BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street Corp, Apollo, etc).
Love this thought experiment. For _this_ scale of distribution, calculating expected compute/bandwidth costs (even if heavily discounted) would be more interesting than looking at the cost of those companies to run themselves. Looking at CDN costs for some of the bigger dogs (akamai, aws, etc) could give some good napkin math.
That's true, but the thought experiment takes that into account by using the revenues of these companies, rather than their profits or payouts. The numbers already include everybody's infrastructure, management, and CDN costs, on top of development and marketing costs that would largely vanish under this scheme.
Wow. Just wow. I can’t think of anything more to add to express my admiration for how thoroughly you’ve thought this through.
If you decide to use this as the basis for a revolution, I will swim across the Atlantic to pledge my allegiance.
@@icedragon769 They include these costs as they stand _now,_ but how does that change if there isn't an IP gatekeeping? Do streaming companies still exist as pay-for-distribution services? Would that make them significantly cheaper, or do we end up paying a tax on top of our monthly subs? And if you could just share media without regard for copyright, then would streaming services even exist? Surely there's value in a well-curated catalog, but if it's a lot "Free"er to just tap into your buddy's Plex system, then that might be the way to go. And if it's not longer a legal gray-area to sell appliances that aid this, then peer-to-peer traffic would escalate rapidly. Now, how would that affect ISP traffic allocation? Large ISPs can offload streaming service traffic to local hosting (where the ISP partners with the provider to host popular media locally, thereby preventing out-of-network streaming.) If everything's peer-to-peer, that optimization goes away. Unless ISPs shift to hosting large media catalogs themselves...
This is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what shifts with a change like this.
You could even go so far as wondering with Benn's "song" at the beginning would become a meal ticket, if IP were paid for by the government. Is it paid by meritocracy, or just handed out to anyone who registers their media? What if you then play that "song" in public, continuously, whether anyone wanted to hear it or not? Can you send a bill to the government? Could I earn a wage by literally tapping a piano key over and over?
I love the idea of making information free, but it definitely has the potential to upset the economic system we have today. Such things should not be taken lightly, even if they are potentially worthwhile. That is to say: Warrants discussion, not shutting it down without bothering to explore the repercussions.
The copyright "protections" have gone b beyond insanity... Several websites with guitar chords for songs have been unplugged and vanished... What kind go loss would an artist suffer if I slaughtered their track on my cheap guitar in frobt of a few inebriated friends?
so it sounds like the main take away is that for profits should be banned from lobbying or basically interacting with government. I have to say, the idea is "simple" enough but it would need to be a worldwide thing to really take hold properly. I hate to say it, but I don't see that happening unfortunately :(
There's lots of issues and holes with this ideas, most of which I don't really have the words to describe, but I'm somewhat interested. I think the biggest question here is - how do you decide who gets paid how much? Watch time seems to be a decent option, but I think there would have to be an option for more conscientous consumers to directly dictate where their tax goes, this would help fund smaller and more niche creations. Though, of course, this introduces a layer of complexity that also needs safeguards against fraud and the like. Second issue is that we'd need more legal distinction between copyrights (which is basically economic rights and redistribution) and moral rights (which in many systems cannot be waived or transferred) which mean the right to "claim authorship of the work and to object to any distortion, modification of, or other derogatory action in relation to the said work, which would be prejudicial to the author's honor or reputation"(Berne Convention).
If I make a derivative work, how much of the money goes to me vs the original artist? What if in one case I simply briefly sample 1 second of the original track, whereas in another case I play the original track in its intirety but make just a few tiny changes? Who decides the split?
To build on this vagueness: generative AI takes this case, and explodes it into an even more intractable mess.
I have believed something like this since high school. The system built on copyright absorbs 90% of the content-consumption revenue stream, and hands-on content creators are left with 10%.
that misplaced comma on the thumbnail is killing me
Great ideas. Cooperation is better than exploitation.
Damnit now I’m gonna live the rest of my life angry this isn’t a thing
The blues, jazz, and classical music, just to name a few, would not have been created if copyright concerns were a thing.
The details are messy; but we have to do something so it’s 100% worth having the conversation. Agreed.
I've been saying this shit for a decade now. Copyright laws are the dumbest concept ever. What the internet archive does is the golden model imo and should be ingested by the federal government and subsidized.
I remember watching videos you made about copyright back in like 2006 and the whole Sublight debacle / pirating call for soundtrack to a vacant life in 2008
This should be interesting
2:25 "giving something value, by making a computer solve sudoku puzzles is pretty odd" 🤣
This was a great video. Thanks Benn. Your ideas need to be heard!
I've been thinking about this too since about 2007 when I got into creative commons. We've made more money from cc than from royalties from ads and stuff! Crazy considering I've have big ads! The unbelievable amount of middle men and collection agencies dragging their feet and taking big percentages is partly to blame.
Given that money is currently controlling all of the decision making (as far as those who are making a lot of it off of those who are doing most of the work) this will not happen in the US, but I do support the idea if dreams ever come true.
Shorting Spotify stock makes more than putting music on Spotify. I laugh so hard on that one
I don't think you factored in the fact that the creative need a substantial raise, and then what are the qualifiers for creative content to receive tax money payments? Do I get to hit 5 keys on the piano as a minimalist artist then start receiving a check?
Unless you post a controversial opinion on line. Then NO CHECK FOR YOU!
Agreed. Now apply the same to medicine development. Pay big pharma directly to perform research and development to eliminate the incentive to only pursue high profit treatments.
Like so many things in the US, you're already socializing it, only you give a huge chunk of the money to private companies, making the service/product more expensive and often less good. We do the same thing in Canada, but to a lesser extent. It's very frustrating.
Fun fact: as someone who works in production animation in LA, if you want to use a licensed song, gotta pay a license fee. However if you want to include the LYRICS of the song in the CLOSED CAPTIONS? That's ANOTHER separate licensing fee because the lyrics are copyrighted separately from the song. COOL.
Anyway, that's why if you've ever had the subtitles on while watching a show and you see it just say "Song by Artist is playing" with no lyrics, that's why. They didn't pay the extra fees.
Minor but important point, Libertarianism is distinct from Libertarian Socialism. The former was synonymous with the latter at its beginning, but these days, basically it's Libertarianism = Anarcho Capitalism and Libertarian Socialism = Anarcho Socialism. Benn Is leaning heavily towards Anarcho Socialism
One thing I felt was kinda missing from this video was regarding data logistics. The only way I see royalties being paid out fairly is with something resembling DRM or some other kind of tracker, since without it you can't reasonably collect that data in any meaningful way if everyone is not only allowed to, but encouraged to redistribute content. The idea of a fully centralized media.gov sounds a little ridiculous, especially given the huge swaths of existing infrastructure (like UA-cam, Spotify etc). Those proprietary platforms aren't just going to vanish, and a competent replacement would not be cheap even if they did.
There are some serious downsides to this, though. For the resources it takes to run one news program that does research, you can make dozens that just make things up. For a long time, the thing that has kept that vaguely in check is that they largely can't get "reputable" ads. Unfortunately, the marketplace of ideas doesn't work when media literacy hardly exists. The marketplace of ideas is great when it comes to things that don't deal with matters of truth or reality -- because if you can make up a hundred lies, the truth has to spend its time debunking them instead of spreading and growing.
Great hypotheticals... As an independent Artist and content creator i feel eventually it will come down to someone spending hours or days to create content vs someone in a bikini falling down next to puppies... AI alone has already starting eating into my profits and i try to stay positive about the future of art and creativity but i feel eventually due to a lot of what you discuss, alongside AI advancing weekly... Creatives will eventually just partake in creative objectives because of passion and less about profit... Which can be seen as horrible or amazing... I have worked in the arts for over two decades and I already see the writing on the wall per se... I feel creatives should create for themselves and not just an audience or hopes to make profit but of course i would also love to see artists be able to pay their bills from their art... It is a complicated topic since as long as I can remember musicians, actors, models etc are dream careers so there will always someone who will undercut because they want to "make it big"... i have seen behind the curtain and it can be really complicated and definitely needs an enema... Will is happen? I hope so... In a perfect world stock portfolios would not be valued over humans... I just hope for the best...
"I make more money shorting Spotify stock than I do from Spotify paying me for my music." - OUCH!
As I understand Ancient Greeks used to *require* incoming ships to surrender any books they had on board so that they could be copied to add to the library of Alexandria. Seems to me there’s historical precedent for exactly this kind of thing, the making freely available all valuable information/knowledge, so that any inclined and in need can partake to the overall benefit of society at large… the current issue being the profiteering in the middle. I’m all for this.
The Ancient Greeks also highly lived in a completely different civilization. You are proposing it be literally impossible to make any living off of any form of art unless the government approves of your form of artistic expression. And that’s a terrible idea
Pirate Party has similar ideas on some of the points you talked about. It is a party which isn't really on left or right but picks things from either side that they seem logical, reasonable or helpful. If you have time take a look of what they have achieved and what they would like to do next.
I wish this is how things could be :/. Unfortunately the solution to this problem is giving more money to the people who made the system how it is (the government) and as long as the same corrupt people keep getting elected you know they would abuse and bastardize this system.
I would argue that Disney, the MPAA, and the RIAA had way, way more to do with how the system is today than the government. The government just allows politicians to be lobbied (bribed), making them no more than a rubber-stamp operation on corporation-created legislation.
Same principal applies to politics. 1-Companies can no longer give money to candidates and political parties. 2-Individual political donations have a very low ceiling Max $200. All the available money that now becomes available can be used to fund parties and candidates based on representation. Have a strong check and balance to make sure the money is properly spent. This will clean your corruption and no candidate will be backed by corporations.
I am looking at my phone and my earbuds over there on the table and try imagine how it would be if government would create something like those...
Unrelated: Please come to the UK. I feel like I have spent my whole adult life wanting to see you perform live. I just love your music!
Just stumbled across your channel and literally everything was right up my alley, apparently I was already subbed so past me has good taste
The IRONY of seeing a new option in your video to get "1080p Premium Enhanced Bitrate" but only if I pay for UA-cam Premium
The amount of cold sweat that would result from serious consideration of this among many folks and corporations could also solve any future water shortages.
As an artist, it is super easy to get caught up in wanting copyright protection since violation of copyright is marketed as another way you’re getting fleeced by someone… which is interesting when put into the perspective presented by this video. 🙂
The part about artists getting "paid more" is pretty hand-wavey. "Hypothetical royalty number is bigger", but this only accounts for per-listen payouts. Artists who survive by composing and licensing would get kinda destroyed if a good music editor could just needle-drop any music, ever, anywhere into a media production.
That's why he said 'consumer/retail'. Also, very few composers actually *want* to do that - they do it because they can't make money doing what they actually want to do. Every jingle writer would rather do punk ballads.
@@paulie-g Copyright law impacts way more than just 'consumer/retail'. Also, it's true that most of us don't do *exactly* what we want, but so what? It puts money in the bank and it beats selling insurance. I'll tell you what composers definitely don't want - it's to not be able to be working composers anymore.
@@SoundslikeLogic He specifically narrowed his proposal to consumer-facing media IP. We do this now - the right to play music in your home does not imply the right to play it publicly. I don't see how this proposal changes things for composers. I don't think the proposal is well thought through and it's absolutely impossible because of international IP conventions (although the US no longer cares about international law, so maybe).
Isn't the idea that that also counts as use and accrues royalties?
@@jonwatte4293 In US IP law, it's a separate right/license at least for music and film called 'public performance'.
I'm always a fan of individual creator ownership. Citing the manga industry where this is a big deal versus the situation in the US where characters are owned by the corporations DC and marvel.
Individual ownership already exists in the US? People who founded those companies pay others to buy the rights. That’s not the same thing at all. You always own your original work unless you intentionally sign away your rights to another corporation or company.
You had Us at "Academic Paper Paywalls". Burn it to the ground.
I appreciate the work you put into this video/subject, and I do agree that there must be a better way than what we have currently. Given that, and it's possible that I just missed it, but it's one thing for us to pay more taxes to get all this content, and I appreciate that you broke down roughly the tax cost, but how do artists get paid for their art? I agree that artists are criminally underpaid, but within this discussion, how much do/would artists make?
Would artists get tax breaks/refunds for the amount of content they create regardless of the quality? I could put out hours of blah instrumental music (I could probably program A.I. to create it for me) and then I could claim a tax break on hundreds of thousands of hours of music.
Would artists get paid based on monitoring algorithms that calculate how much their content is watched? I could just open up an internet window and put something on a loop to watch over and over to make fake numbers.
I'm just not getting the incentive for artists to make content, film, music, whatever under this system.
Couldn't you do the loop plays with Spotify right now anyway?
@@donpetrossi I'm sure some do that already....
I think this will indirectly help artists get more money from merch, cds, vinyl, touring, and other means. Many artists only make money this way and don't use streaming services to make money. The majority of artists already don't get paid from streaming services even if they do have listeners. Maybe by switching to this method, people will be more willing to purchase stuff from artists because they are not already paying for it.
@@donpetrossi You can, but if it's found out you're canned from the service.
I gladly pay for my neighbor's kids to go to public school because society works better when citizens are literate and can do basic math. Also studies have repeatedly proven that higher access to education directly reduces both poverty and crime in an area. I'm definitely getting my money's worth on that deal.
The idea of short copyright, like 5 years, is interesting, so people will need to move and create something new, instead of franchise decades the same ideas.
Great idea. Except the corporations own 98% of US congress. First we have to get money out of politics before any issue can be solved.
If you want those scientific articles for free, just email the authors. Most of the time they'll happily send you their author's copy.
As legally constructed entities, for-profit corporations should be the only ones subject to paying any form of IP royalties/residuals/fees.
All natural persons should be free to use any information as they see fit.
Artists commercializing their art should monetize via performances, official merch, and tips/donations from fans/patrons, and sponsorships. In the business context, their art is branding and advertisement for their products ( merch ) and services ( performances/consulting/etc. ).
All Taxation leads to corruption and graft. The proposal from this video, while pragmatic, will ultimately trade one unjust system for another.
All of this relies upon two things we know we don't have. The first is accurate streaming numbers. This is the core of the SAG-AFTRA strike, and there's a real concern that if the real numbers got out it would be the end of streaming. The second is a competent and impartial government, which is by necessity going to be monitoring all citizens media consumption habits, and deciding what media is even allowed on the government network.
In other words, it may well be a great idea, but the people that would be in charge of managing it would be significantly worse than what we have now.
There is a very real possibility that in the future, much more people will make music only for pleasure, and not to earn a living. As more and more art is created by AI, and as it gets better and better, how are creators going to compete? Especially if the AI can produce content at a furious pace, and perhaps even copyright it? Perhaps for some, there will be a shift to live performances. It’s all a bit “What If?” right now, but it’s looking more and more possible.
I think the only part of music threatened by machine learning is corporate pop. ML is best at mass producing things that are already mass produced, and unless you live under a rock, you’d know that that kind of pop music follows the same formula and very much is mass produced. Machine learning can’t really innovate or be human so it doesn’t seem like “AI” is going to be the next big musical innovator (unless everyone is entertained by basic-ahh radio pop).
Live music isn't even the golden ticket anymore for all but the most famous artists. Even well-known up-and-coming performers are canceling tours because the expense is too high, and the risk of coming out in the red is very real.
If you were a politician, the mid-roll ad would be, "Benn Jordan wants to bring socialism to America. But Rick Beato believes in hard-working Americans. Don't let Benn Jordan give away America. Vote for Rick Beato and fight for what you've earned."
(With apologies to Rick Beato.)
man... after some videos ,,, i subscribed... very good quality info, nice guy, very honest, cool perspectives, nice hummor.. i like your takes on the sick industry.. nightmare..
very cool work..
thank you
Did you take into account storage costs? Same with distribution... AWS costs is a big reason why smaller/open-sourced data isnt that easily available. It's expensive to host and distribute content, ESPECIALLY video content
P2P
Sure, you pay for it now and there's a profit margin for non-creators on top.
You're overlooking the fact that technologies already exist to mitigate or even negate that altogether ...
@@BennJordan ok, just wasn't sure it was included in the initial breakdown of how much it would cost consumers via taxes
As many others have pointed out, the logic of this argument is flawless when looking at its proposal of logistics and execution, the only hindering factor lies within the executioner. The epitomy of the argument, and perhaps of your self affirmed "libertarian" standpoint too, is when we apply this logic to a non-governmental entity, comprised solely of the demos itself and ruling out that final middleman of executive power. A collaborative effort between artists and their patrons, unified, regulated, and self-maintained.
For millennia the privileged and educated have ruled over the poor and uneducated - the game hasn't changed, it's only gotten more sophisticated/convoluted heh
sorry but the educated ruling over uneducated seems the sensible thing? why are you even putting it in a bad light, lol? and it's not even on the same level or universe as privileged/rich ruling over poor.
@@notioncreanga It's literally the same thing, Dunning-Kruger ROFLMEYERWIENER
The sensible thing would be to educate everyone instead and have an entire society of people contributing to our progression of the species ;)
Thank you for proving how effective dumbing people down has been though ...
@@3nertia you're the only one that proves dumbing down is so effective, since your logic is so flawed you can't even see it. And hey, educate everyone? good luck with that in a world that doesn't give equal chances to everyone. Try a bit more realism, man
@@notioncreanga Capitalism is the reason not everyone has an equal chance and idiots like you are willing to fall on their proverbial swords to protect it ROFLMEYERWIENER
I'm sure you'll have a *nice* day - ah, the irony of Dunning-Kruger ...
@@notioncreanga Nice "I'm rubber, you're glue" argument, by the way - very classy, for a schoolyard bully ...
Nah your correct, let’s be pirates. An excellent answer to those artists who insist it’s plagiarism when a bot is using references. (They don’t actually believe that probably, they just want to force you to pay them for it)
I say cut out the middleman, abolish copyright, and forget about the tax. There is no way in hell that this won't be exploited by bigger companies. They will suck this copyright fund dry. As long as lobbying exists, that's basically an inevitability.
abolishing copyright without setting something up for creators to be paid is a sure way to get creators screwed by companies and conmen.
@@Arkansya As if that's not already happening and the companies already arent the ones who truly benefit from copyright.
And as long as lobbying exists there is no way in hell your proposal could happen either, so what is your point really?
You could do all of those things simultaneously by abolishing capitalism xD
@@joelambert7128 Neither could his, so while we're all saying what we want, thought I'd chime in.
Man, that was one hell of a regressive ass tax bracket system
You can't talk about abolishing IP without ensuring housing and health as a human right.
You can't ensure health and housing as a human right unless you ensure providing healthcare and housing is a human responsibility. Doctors don't wake up at 5 am and spend a decade in school just because they love you. If you stood by uour convictions, you'd be building houses for those in need. I'm guessing you'd rather it be someone elses problem.
umm wtf not ?
i am guessing there is a very small amount of middle-class IP income, you either make it big, or not at all, doesn't really seam like a pillar the common people.
Try to keep the bitching on topic please
Sure I can, as I have no expertise in housing or healthcare outside of my own. This is about restructuring the distribution of things that do not experience scarcity.
@@BennJordanBRAVO 👏👏
@@benjamindover4337 They wake up at 5am and spend a decade in school in order to train for their job. Doctors exist outside of the for-profit US healthcare system, right? They even exist in socialist countries. Heck, with your logic, there would be no police in the US because they are paid by the government. But there are police, they are regularly paid 6 figures, and retire with a cushy pension. People who want to help people will still become doctors. I've worked at a hospital for 20 years. We'd be fine.
Information is the currency of the modern world. Take control of information and the rest gets much easier to control.
RIP Aaron Swartz.
Ive sent this to a few people already, don't stop with these videoes im learning so much from you.
Censorship would be a significant problem in such a system. Content and art criticizing the administration and its narratives would likely not make it through on the media.gov website and would not receive financial support. Political gatekeepers would oversee the content.
Between this and the Spotify video from earlier this year, I am loving your videos on the economics involved and how utterly silly and dysfunctional the whole house of cards really is. I am not that interested in music production so I don't know if I want to subscribe to your channel, but I can at least boost engagement through commenting ;-).
Credit to you for recognizing how incredibly regressive our systems of fees and excise taxes are. Studies have been done comparing actual expenses per capita from regressive excise and sales taxes, "fees," "surcharges," property taxes, and so on, vis-å-vis simply applying progressive taxation, usually (but not necessarily or exclusively) via income taxes. Compare two states that hype their lack of income taxes, Texas and Washington, rated #49 and #50 respectively the most regressive of the 50 states. Unless a Texas or Washington resident makes well over a few hundred thousand dollars per year, there's a strong likelihood that they pay more for the same products/services as a resident in the same income bracket of California. Smart RVers make a big fuss over these details when they have the option to "domicile" wherever they wish. For things that we all share and can't really be measured separately because they also make society function and prosper together, e.g. roads and utilities infrastructure, it makes sense to take it out of progressive income taxation. For services that we can opt in or out of, such as forms of entertainment, we should pay separately, but again on a progressive structure. It's win-win for everyone except corporations who want to monopolize a niche and gouge the public for solely their own benefit. Fine and dandy for things we don't NEED, or consume at vastly different values, e.g. cars (Kia versus Rolls, pickup shell versus $200k+ RV, multimillion-dollar mansion versus 2-bedroom apartment). Most importantly, the many producers of the goods, who presently get pretty screwed, receive better income more commensurate with their output. I know it wasn't quite what you MEANT to say, but you illustrated why taxation and fees should be as simple as possible yet highly progressive. I would add that transparency matters a great deal, too. Price tags should always already include all the add-on charges.
What he said!
Ads: Some supposedly innovative special bag for clothes and soylent green food-supplements.
I'd rather just do away with the need to produce commodities in order to consume comomodities, so that I can engage socially through these transactions.
Maybe I want to fish in the morning and be a critic in the evening without my occupation being either.
Excellent ideas Benn. Well researched and articulated. Thank you.
I think the internet archive would be in a prime position to do something by like this. They already kind of do to some extent.
Thought provoking. Current copyright law interpretation is harming the creation of new creative content by providing economic incentives to large corporations to RECYLCE known "good" (e.g. money-making) content rather than taking risks by supporting the creation of NEW creative content. That's why we have 5 versions of NCIS, five Rocky movies, and "franchise" movies based upon 50+ year old comics characters. Your concept of devising an Intellectual Property tax that would pay for the cost of DELIVERING all existing entertainment / intellectual content for a sliding scale fee based on taxable income DOES solve the problem of ensuring uniform access to EXISTING content so the cost of paid access doesn't further widen economic gaps and hasten the forgetting of old, unpopular art and ideas that we might need in the future. It DOESN'T solve the problem of incenting new creation and rewarding those creating valued content. The public CAN use mechanisms like Patreon, etc. to contribute directly to a creator producing what interests them but in reality, a LARGE share of consumers will choose not to, producing a "tragedy of the commons" condition where the creator cannot collect enough funding to incent continued creation at the level desired. The creator quits, finds something else to do, the public doesn't get his/her content and we all (presumably) are the poorer for it. Love the discussion but more angles of the mechanisms at play need to be addressed. In general, copyright term needs to be REDUCED and somehow limited back to HUMANS rather than allowing CORPORATIONS to leverage copyright indefinitely to churn out trite rehashes of old hits.
Talking about melodies, there's a project by Damien Riehl and Noah Rubin. It was featured in Adam Neely's video "Every Melody Has Been Copyrighted".
They brute force generated melodies, to help melodies be more available to everyone.
I love dreaming but I don't know if i'll ever see anything so helpful to culture and the working class before I die
We actually have the “iPod Tax” in Switzerland and it is legal in our country to download (only download no upload) music, films and books (I think because of a different tax on paper or printers or so). However The distribution of the money could be better.
The current system has alot of bullshit and reforms are necessary, but I'm not convinced this is the way.
I am a market socialist, an artist who makes things for the creative commons and for profit on a case by case basis. I believe that copyright duration needs to be shorted by at least 20 years (at LEAST). I am ok with luxuries like media (not other information like education) being mostly a private venture, and I feel that the exploitation of the workers in those private industries is the main problem that needs to be resolved.
Anyway, this video needs to be longer. How the money for subsidies gets raised is straightforward, sure. But that's the easy part. It needs to talk about how artists gets paid for their work. How does the government authority give out the money to projects? For how long?
And also there's the issue of derivative works, reproduction, and distribution. Copyright is fundamentally supposed to protect that. The public domain is important and necessary, but artists should have a choice to where their new original work goes when they make it. Ownership is a much stronger incentive than profit.
And that goes right back to the previous problem. How do the creators of de-facto public domain work get properly compensated for their work? How do you prevent bad actors using AI generated sludge from taking all the funds?
And it's a big problem you chose to avoid talking about software. This is largely half-baked.
I know for some people the "how do you pay for it?" question is what they need the most convincing of, but for the people that would actually have to interact with this system, the actual people who make the media, how would it actually work for us? How does it make sure we aren't fucked over like we are now?
OK Hollywood is subsidized by our taxes now and people can watch movies for "free." So the bullshit they pull on workers is still happening? What changed?
Does this include independent or niche genre artists? How do those artists get compensated for the work they put into their art?
How would this treat derivative works, aka sampling, remixing?
I'm immensely excited about this idea. It's something I've thought about before. Building standards, safety standards, engineering standards... if governments would fund these bodies to make their standards freely available we'd live in a safer world but it would also empower individuals to innovate and create, all ultimately contributing to the economy. Extend this idea to all (most/some) media and we have something deeply interesting.
UA-cam has started making videos play at lower quality unless they're uploaded in a 4k container (1080p 'premium') - any way you can upload in '4k' even if it's just a 1080p copy blown up with integer scaling? love your videos
Interesting idea! The way I could see this actually gaining traction is: run the math deeper to show large media production companies they would stand to profit more should they all agree to put their primetime content into a centralized system. They could save a ton on all the middle men involved in licensing, trying to gain/keep subscribers, up-keeping systems, getting advertisers*, etc. They’d just have to make content people want to watch and spend on advertising to get people to watch it and that’s it. I’d wager the math works out they’d stand to profit more because it’s essentially a guaranteed subscriber base. If you do that, they could easily lobby to make this happen.
That said, this would put hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people in the existing system out of work.
Then there’s the issue of protecting against people accessing this content outside the system that could track views/streams/etc to pay royalties out correctly. No one in the US would pirate anything bc they don’t have to, but what about outside the US? Do we figure out some US DRM system for the content?
*In theory you could subsidize this system by allowing ads on the government run website, but that sort of goes against a big point of all this.
Great video, def fun to think about.
yep been basically thinking about this for a while, I completely agree and have pretty much reached the same model. And you can still have a market inside that system, attention market or monetary.
As a professional artist watching this video I went from, “this is a terrible idea” to “oh this is actually a great idea” but landed on, “hey wait a minute…”
My “hey wait a minute causes it all to fail”: who decides who is an artist and what qualifies as art when it comes to PAYMENTS. Forget the tax part. That’s easy. The hard part is whether Duchamp gets a payment for his “water fountain” or Cage gets a payment for “4:33”. And if Cage gets paid for 4:33 than everyone will be uploading 4:34, etc. It will be the new “easy money” of everyone’s an artist and therefore… no one is. No one gets paid. Art is devalued.
The current system sucks, I’m a Democratic Socialist overall, but I just don’t know how to solve for the payment side of this that doesn’t put bureaucrats in charge of artistic gatekeeping (anymore than corporate bureaucrats already are). Fun idea, good to have the discussion, but I think you might need a Part II for payments.
I am far more interested in things we can actually do instead of some idealized future. A real step we can go to making things better, especially if you want to get to this type of hypothetical ideal, is to create more mechanical licenses.
As was pointed out in this video, making real change will see a lot of pushback. If one wants to get to that type of end-state then you have to lay the groundwork. It won’t just magically happen. There is a reason why Brown v. Board happened in the 50s and not the 10s or 20s. The legal legwork had to be laid before you can get the good outcome.