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(I should preface this by noting that I want to discuss the Something Awful forums rather than the website. The reason for this is because the Website resembles a more traditional sort of business that happens to be online, whereas I think internet forums and the sort of widespread creative collaboration that they generate represent a potentially new way of thinking about ownership issues.) Obviously the title of this thread isn't intended to be literal. Instead I thought that this might be an interesting question for helping us to formalize and then explore some of our ideas about the nature of property and ownership in a digital age. The advantage of using Something Awful as the focus of a discussion is that all of us are familiar with this site and can fairly be said to have a legitimate opinion on how the site functions. Unlike highly esoteric or abstract questions about who owns the "social surplus" or who should own a factory or a bank, a question about who "owns" Something Awful is the sort of question that I would expect people to feel comfortable talking about without having a huge theoretical background. In a none pejorative sense its a sort of Idiot's Guide to the philosophy of property and ownership. I'm going to try and avoid my usual tendency of setting out a long and detailed opening post, because honestly this is one of those discussions that doesn't need all that much context. I will offer a couple of my own thoughts first. There are three obvious ways to think of this question, so far as I can tell. They are: The Nihilist/Pragmatist Way of Thinking: This school of thought would deny that "ownership" is even a meaningful concept. "Ownership" is actually just a way of saying "this person has legally sanctioned control over this resource" and nothing else interesting can be said on the matter. The Legalist Way of Thinking: This perspective would emphasize the existing legal and property regime in the United States or in the global legal community. It would presumably emphasize Lowtax's formal ownership of the site and his ability to do with it as he pleases within the boundaries of existing law. The Cult of the Creator Way of Thinking: Presumably such a perspective would emphasize that if you expend creative efforts to set up a new enterprise, then you should have an extremely strong morally derived ability to control the future operations of that enterprise. The distinction between this way of thinking and the legalist or pragmatist way of thinking is that its based primarily on an ethical claim: Lowtax controls the site and that is how it should be. In a Lockean sense we might say that Lowtax came accross the empty url "Something Awful" in a state of nature, and then "mixed his labour" with the website, creating a vastly successful multi-format profit generating enterprise that he has every moral right to enjoy the fruits of. The "Property is Theft" Way of Thinking This perspective would emphasize that while Lowtax and various admins played an invaluable role in starting the site and attracting people to it, an equal or perhaps even far greater contribution has come from the hundreds of thousands of regular goons who frequent Something Awful's forums and actually generate the majority of the content and who constitute the vast majority of the eyeballs that attract advertising revenue. This uncompensated creative work generates profits for the small minority of people who actually derive income from the website. I don't intend for that to be an exhaustive list. That was just my attempt to broadly summarize four approaches that I think would intuitively appeal to a lot of people. An interesting example to think of here (thought its not perfectly equivalent) is Huffington Post. HuffPo was unquestionably the creation of Ariana Huffington, but its success was only made possible by the massive amount of free content (as well as some paid content) and reporting that was provided by numerous bloggers and readers. When Huffington eventually sold the site for $315 million a lot of people were upset that the bloggers on the site itself were uncompensated. Were those complaints legitimate? Or should we say that those bloggers clearly derived some kind of satisfaction based on their willingness to keep contributing, and therefore have no right to complain? I should note that this thread isn't really intended to provide a definitive answer. Instead the question is supposed to provide a framework for thinking about broader questions of property, ownership, creativity and collaboration in the 21st century (with an emphasis on the internet, though I encourage people to bring in non-internet examples). So often talking about "property" feels very intimidating. I'm hoping that by using a familiar and accessible example that everyone on this website should feel comfortable discussing we can encourage people to move past their reflexive assumptions about ownership and actually challenge themselves to see if their beliefs rest on anything other than inertia.
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| # ? Jan 29, 2013 20:33 |
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| # ? May 23, 2013 04:19 |
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Let lowtax tremble at a forums revolution. The posters have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a forum to win. GOONS OF THE WORLD UNITE! (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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| # ? Jan 29, 2013 21:22 |
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I would have thought that the "Cult of the Creator" school of thought would end up with us (posters) collectively owning bits and pieces of the site (i.e. our posts). Lowtax clearly also owns a portion by virtue of having created a "brand" and providing the infrastructure, and I'd argue the mods would claim a portion as well (unless they are being paid and signed away those rights - though IIRC they aren't) as they set and enforce the rules which allow us to create this content in productive manner. I also think that even under the current legal tradition surrounding ownership, it's not really clear that places like huffpo or any site for that matter was ever really in the right for claiming ownership over their users' content. One could argue (and people have tried) that regardless of EULAs and ToSes, this transfer of ownership is not readily apparent or expected from most users. Having said all that, I do think it's unclear exactly what all these portions of ownership amount to and to that end, I think it's reasonable to be skeptical about the idea of property as it applies to internet content without being a marxist/nihilist in the general sense. Property has always been formulated with scarcity of duplication as a fundamental underlying assumption and that's why the we get the usual "copyright infringement is/isn't theft" debates among other things - there just isn't a clear way to look at it based on our existing idea of "property". It's unavoidable that our definitions relating to property have to change to adapt to this and these changes will not be "backward compatible" regardless of which direction you want to take it. The direction things have actually been moving is definitely towards "try to make it more like old property", and let's see some implications of this: consumers no longer "own" anything, they are merely licensed to it, you cannot trade or lend your property or freely move around the world with it. These are all big changes to what we thought were inalienable traits of property. (This is usually the point where we smile smugly towards people who believe property to be some sort of innate concept in nature or whatever...) That's the "is", and as for the "ought", again, I feel like it's reasonable to want information to be something other then property without denying the idea of property in a general sense. Most people will look at this question as a question of social utility (even if they won't outright put it that way) - e.g. "if we don't protect IP, we won't have movies any more!", i.e. they are less concerned about violating some ephemeral standard of property rights (which we are doing anyway, as I said above), and more about the enjoyment they get out of movies etc going away. When put this way, the argument becomes easier in that we can debate about material (non-philosophical) issues ("how many movies would be made if you couldn't profit from their distribution directly?") but also harder because those questions that are left are very difficult to answer convincingly. My own feeling is that opening up all information (i.e. take away all intellectual property rights except perhaps trademarks and state secrets I guess) would yield a net positive. In the case of music, it's almost obvious that musicians make music no matter how much they get paid as long as they can get by, and practice has shown that they can by and large do this via merch sales and concerts. Highly capitalized megastars won't be missed too sorely. I would also guess that movies and TV shows could get by charging for content even without DRM or IP laws simply by providing a convenient and pleasant experience for paying viewers, plus the usual merch revenue or various patronage gimmicks (like kickstarter). I do expect that very high budget movies may no longer be sustainable as a result, but we may well see a whole new type of movies being made in return. I also think that lower budgets and the general democratization of TV/movie production would force a great deal of personnel costs downwards (actors primarily), and technology is already taking huge chunks out of the capital production costs (i.e. film equipment, special effects and so forth). So those lower budgets might not actually be that big a deal after all. Like I said though, it's near impossible to prove any of this would actually happen without it actually happening, so right now the information-as-not-property school of thought is not gaining momentum in a hurry despite the unpopularity of information-as-property efforts and all the new restrictions they bring with them. Mr. Wynand fucked around with this message at Jan 29, 2013 around 21:31 |
| # ? Jan 29, 2013 21:28 |
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Lowtax owns the forums but I'm working on acquiring them through adverse possession. My lawyers should be calling me soon to tell if lurking constitutes a legal entry.
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| # ? Jan 29, 2013 21:36 |
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Mr. Wynand posted:I would have thought that the "Cult of the Creator" school of thought would end up with us (posters) collectively owning bits and pieces of the site (i.e. our posts). Lowtax clearly also owns a portion by virtue of having created a "brand" and providing the infrastructure, and I'd argue the mods would claim a portion as well (unless they are being paid and signed away those rights - though IIRC they aren't) as they set and enforce the rules which allow us to create this content in productive manner. Yeah "cult of the creator" was probably a bad way to phrase that, not least of all because "cult" sounds really pejorative whereas its actually a way of thinking I'm inclined towards. I do think there's a strong case to be made that by virtue of having invented the idea of "Something Awful" and just by virtue of actually being the person who combined the intangible factors of skill, timing, innovation, luck, etc. to actually create the site, Lowtax should have pretty expansive powers in determing what the site is and continues to be. Arguably it'd be arbitrary and unfair to say that once somebody creates something that is really popular, you automatically lose ownership rights over your mass of fans/customers/users. quote:I also think that even under the current legal tradition surrounding ownership, it's not really clear that places like huffpo or any site for that matter was ever really in the right for claiming ownership over their users' content. One could argue (and people have tried) that regardless of EULAs and ToSes, this transfer of ownership is not readily apparent or expected from most users. As I understand it the current legal regime is pretty unambigous here, at least in the US. There was a hundred million dollar lawsuit against Huffington on behalf of her unpaid bloggers that was squashed last March. quote:Having said all that, I do think it's unclear exactly what all these portions of ownership amount to and to that end, I think it's reasonable to be skeptical about the idea of property as it applies to internet content without being a marxist/nihilist in the general sense. Property has always been formulated with scarcity of duplication as a fundamental underlying assumption and that's why the we get the usual "copyright infringement is/isn't theft" debates among other things - there just isn't a clear way to look at it based on our existing idea of "property". I think that there will be growing pressure towards systematic reform of intellectual property laws if only because it seems as though patent trolling and legal fees are becoming such huge problems in terms of stymieing innovation. What kind of new regime emerges is an open question though, but I'd like to think that at least some people within the current system will fight for a somewhat saner copyright regime, if only out of pragmatism. In the context of this discussion, though, I was thinking more along the lines of situations where some kind of creative or collaborative community has been created. That is distinct from a lot of other questions about property or ownership, and its also why I specified in the OP that I was thinking more of the forums than the website itself. quote:That's the "is", and as for the "ought", again, I feel like it's reasonable to want information to be something other then property without denying the idea of property in a general sense. Most people will look at this question as a question of social utility (even if they won't outright put it that way) - e.g. "if we don't protect IP, we won't have movies any more!", i.e. they are less concerned about violating some ephemeral standard of property rights (which we are doing anyway, as I said above), and more about the enjoyment they get out of movies etc going away. I agree that information isn't property but in at least some sense it makes sense to treat it that way under our current system. We don't subsidize wide scale production of art or other creative endeavours in any systematic way, so giving artists and entertainers a way controlling / extracting revenue from their work is the way that we ensure artist gets created. Indeed its also the way that we subsidize most economic innovation. That having been said it seems at least fair to say that we should have a strong presumption that information should be free except where there's a compelling reason for it not to be. Current copyright and patent laws seem to have become absolutely counter productive these days, at least from the perspective of our overall social welfare. However, moving beyond those basic issues, and in cases where we have a large community of people who are in some sense collaborating on things (i.e. photoshop friday contributions, user submitted stories and anecdotes, good threads, etc.) not to mention a lot of what is essentially volunteer effort (as I understand it) by the forums moderators who have to wade through hundreds of thousands of posts each day to prevent the forums from being overrun by shitposts, does it make sense to think that in some large sense the community has some kind of claim to ownership? Or alternatively is this just a misreading of what a community really is? I guess the nihilist perspective might say that there is no community, just a bunch of individual people. In speaking of a community having "ownership" of something you're essentially just anthropomorphizing an abstraction.
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| # ? Jan 29, 2013 22:08 |
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Helsing posted:The "Property is Theft" Way of Thinking This perspective would emphasize that while Lowtax and various admins played an invaluable role in starting the site and attracting people to it, an equal or perhaps even far greater contribution has come from the hundreds of thousands of regular goons who frequent Something Awful's forums and actually generate the majority of the content and who constitute the vast majority of the eyeballs that attract advertising revenue. This uncompensated creative work generates profits for the small minority of people who actually derive income from the website. What Lowtax is selling is a discussion space. He made a place on the internet for people of like minds to come around and talk about things from the issues of the day to what computer to buy to how to play the guitar. Like any other gathering place, it requires people to actively participate. Are you going to go to a gym where nobody else ever works out? Are you going to go a night club where you have a bunch of mouth breathing creeps who just make surprise sex jokes all night while hating all the music that is playing? Would we have come here and provided the content that attracts others if Lowtax didn't create it? Would we remain here if Lowtax did not set up a system of rules and established select individuals who would enforce these rules? It's a metaphysical club-house. Sure, any of us COULD start a club house, and of course, without us the club house would be poo poo. But the club house would also be poo poo if nobody vacuumed the carpets, painted the walls, made sure the building didn't collapse on us while we limbo the night away, paid the mortgage, replace the broken windows, kick out the scum bags, provide us with some snacks, and made sure we played nicely. I would say that there's an implicit understanding that this is Lowtax's space, and what we contribute, we allow him to use, otherwise, the whole place would fall apart. Imagine if Lowtax sold this place and he had to pay us all for the content we provide. First off, most of us probably wouldn't see a good chunk of change, but secondly, how do you decide how much value Helsing's posts had compared to Cemetry Gator's posts? We knew the game going in that we wouldn't be compensated. Yes, we add the value, but for us to cry fowl when we don't get a cut of the action pie is simply reneging on our previous agreed upon deal. Mr. Wynand posted:My own feeling is that opening up all information (i.e. take away all intellectual property rights except perhaps trademarks and state secrets I guess) would yield a net positive. In the case of music, it's almost obvious that musicians make music no matter how much they get paid as long as they can get by, and practice has shown that they can by and large do this via merch sales and concerts. Highly capitalized megastars won't be missed too sorely. I would also guess that movies and TV shows could get by charging for content even without DRM or IP laws simply by providing a convenient and pleasant experience for paying viewers, plus the usual merch revenue or various patronage gimmicks (like kickstarter). I do expect that very high budget movies may no longer be sustainable as a result, but we may well see a whole new type of movies being made in return. I also think that lower budgets and the general democratization of TV/movie production would force a great deal of personnel costs downwards (actors primarily), and technology is already taking huge chunks out of the capital production costs (i.e. film equipment, special effects and so forth). So those lower budgets might not actually be that big a deal after all. It's a nice ideal, but the devil is in the details. For your point about music, I defer to David Lowery, who made this blog posting. http://thetrichordist.com/2012/06/1...ngs-considered/
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| # ? Jan 29, 2013 22:12 |
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Cemetry Gator posted:Are you going to go a night club where you have a bunch of mouth breathing creeps who just make surprise sex jokes all night while hating all the music that is playing? But enough about Reddit. That being said, posting anything is pretty much offering it up to the great Google in the sky for the rest of recorded history. There's something very liberating and depressing knowing that in the future anthropologists will be picking through D&D threads for a window into political discourse on the Internet in the 90's and early 2000's.
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| # ? Jan 29, 2013 23:18 |
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Cemetry Gator posted:
It's a good post but it isn't really correct in some areas. quote:“It’s OK not to pay for music because record companies rip off artists and do not pay artists anything.” In the vast majority of cases, this is not true. There have been some highly publicized abuses by record labels. But most record contracts specify royalties and advances to artists. Advances are important to understand–a prepayment of unearned royalties. Not a debt, more like a bet. The artist only has to “repay” (or “recoup”) the advance from record sales. If there are no or insufficient record sales, the advance is written off by the record company. So it’s false to say that record companies don’t pay artists. Most of the time they not only pay artists, but they make bets on artists. And it should go without saying that the bets will get smaller and fewer the more unrecouped advances are paid by labels. Yes, some artists make a lot of money. Here's how it is for most artists: they sign a napkin that says they intend to sign a contract. That then constitutes a legal agreement; the artist can't sign with any other record label. Then, they flash a bunch of money in front of the artist and give them a massive advance. More often than not, the record fails to recoup and to make their money back, they tell the artist to make another CD and here's some more advance money to get it going. That doesn't recoup either, so make us more music. The advance isn't really written off at any point until the label is done pumping the artist, at which point they dump them. They aren't ever necessarily in tons of debt to the label, but just enough. quote:Secondly, by law the record label must pay songwriters (who may also be artists) something called a “mechanical royalty” for sales of CDs or downloads of the song. This is paid regardless of whether a record is recouped or not. The rate is predetermined, and the license is compulsory. Meaning that the file sharing sites could get the same license if they wanted to, at least for the songs. They don’t. They don’t wanna pay artists. I don't really know how to go about paying an artist directly in 99.9% of cases. Some bands release their stuff for free and say "pay what you want," and it has been fairly successful. They were already established bands, but still. It's a catch-22 to say thepiratebay can obtain licenses if they want to since those sites don't even host files. They just connect people. So who is supposed to pay, exactly? The uploader? Thepiratebay? Google? quote:Also, you must consider the fact that the vast majority of artists are releasing albums independently quote:Artists can make money on the road (or its variant “Artists are rich”). The average income of a musician that files taxes is something like 35k a year w/o benefits. The vast majority of artists do not make significant money on the road. Until recently, most touring activity was a money losing operation. The idea was the artists would make up the loss through recorded music sales. This has been reversed by the financial logic of file-sharing and streaming. You now tour to support making albums if you are very, very lucky. Otherwise, you pay for making albums out of your own pocket. Only the very top tier of musicians make ANY money on the road. And only the 1% of the 1% makes significant money on the road. (For now.) Some artists are rich. Frankly I don't give a poo poo about Metallica, if they wanted they could fill up a venue and make bank, I don't care that they are slightly less ridiculously rich than they might have been. Most independent artists I have met actually do 'tour' a lot. Their opinion is that file-sharing gets their music heard by more people. Free advertising. The merchandise makes money, too. It's an opinion that isn't shared by everyone, of course. He doesn't specify what touring means here though. 'Touring' can be you're a DJ spinning at a party for some money. It doesn't have to mean big stadium, lights, fireworks, etc. Only the very top tier of musicians make ANY money on the road? That's a statement that needs some figures besides the 'average income of a musician,' because again that is vague as gently caress and can be interpreted in many ways. I know plenty of people that practice what they do and get hired for a few hundred bucks a night fairly frequently. It's a hobby for them, not even a full on career attempt. quote:There is no other explanation except for the fact that “fans” made the unethical choice to take their music without compensating these artists. Really? There's NO other explanation. I don't really appreciate the insinuation that the decision to pirate music directly attributed to his friends' suicides, either. A person of sound mind wouldn't kill themselves because their income wasn't as high as last year's. He kind of goes off the deep end at the end when he starts saying the Free Culture pirate everything 'movement' is corporate backed in some odd bid to gain profits off of adsharing, tolling the internet, and technological hardware sales. No dude, it's just harder to restrict the flow of information in this age. He equates filesharing to literally robbing a store, when I equate it to burning a disc for my sister or my friends. It's not okay to try and justify a student spending over two grand on music by just breaking it down to a monthly fee over their lifetime since they started listening to music. Just because some people have data plans on their smart phones and pay tons of money per month for high speed internet doesn't mean everyone that consumes music can afford to consume as much as they want. Or at all. I know I sure didn't have money to spend on music in some hard times in my life. poo poo, I didn't even have money to spend on food, gently caress music. I don't think there was any danger of lost sales when I decided to download some for free instead. quote:1.create an account and provide a payment method (once) He talks about how iTunes IS convenient, if only we'd see the light. Sorry dude, but I remember when the loving Beatles weren't available for download for YEARS. I haven't been on iTunes recently but I seriously doubt it has the entirety of music created by man. Also, those steps are pretty simplified. Every time I logged into iTunes when I had an iPod, it'd have forgotten all the info I told it to save. That means I had to type in my username/password every loving time, no matter what device I was using to log in from. Okay, that's not that bad. Then it asks for my password again randomly sometimes, or it boots me out. Then, again, when I am purchasing stuff. Sometimes, it thinks it's the wrong password and boots me out anyway. Then, if I get my poo poo all straightened out, I get to the payment screen. Then it downloads slower than a torrent and at very 'meh' quality. Granted, it's been a few years since I used iTunes, but the argument of "it's just as easy" doesn't hold water. It's kind of just a lot of false equivalency and appeals to morality. His ending point is literally "you are sticking it to artists while giving even more profits to companies by filesharing" and how it's surprising that we do that given the popularity of Indie Rock. Moridin920 fucked around with this message at Jan 29, 2013 around 23:44 |
| # ? Jan 29, 2013 23:24 |
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Helsing posted:Arguably it'd be arbitrary and unfair to say that once somebody creates something that is really popular, you automatically lose ownership rights over your mass of fans/customers/users. Helsing posted:As I understand it the current legal regime is pretty unambigous here, at least in the US. There was a hundred million dollar lawsuit against Huffington on behalf of her unpaid bloggers that was squashed last March. elsewhere. I have more to say about recompensing artists but I'll do so also addressing the article Cemetery Gator linked to.
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| # ? Jan 29, 2013 23:32 |
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Any number of posters have made a name for themselves beyond the forums through journalism, effort posts, deliberate self-humiliation, etc. As with so much these days, who owns the space seems less important than who constantly posts content and pimps themselves aggressively. It's kind of like we are all starving Russian freelance writers in 1885 Moscow, except instead of flinging us a handful of coins for an article, the editor hands us one of these:  and says "good job, I appreciate you" and we go home to sleep in a filthy garret.
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| # ? Jan 29, 2013 23:48 |
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Helsing posted:I agree that information isn't property but in at least some sense it makes sense to treat it that way under our current system. We don't subsidize wide scale production of art or other creative endeavours in any systematic way, so giving artists and entertainers a way controlling / extracting revenue from their work is the way that we ensure artist gets created. Indeed its also the way that we subsidize most economic innovation. Cemetry Gator posted:It's a nice ideal, but the devil is in the details. For your point about music, I defer to David Lowery, who made this blog posting. http://thetrichordist.com/2012/06/1...ngs-considered/ Here's what I find weird about this conversation: everyone finds it obvious that artists are doing something that is good for society and that they deserve to be supported for this work regardless of whatever fickle changes in distribution technology come up. Just because it is now convenient to simply not pay previously profitable artists, we see this as "unjust" and "selfish" or "short sighted". I can get behind that, but to me it poses a much bigger question: How much worthwhile artistic/creative work isn't getting done right now just because it is "inconvenient" and "unprofitable" for capitalism? I would argue far, far more then anything internet distribution put an end to. In fact, when we consider not just artistic work but basically any work that is good for society as a whole, the difference between what work isn't feasible because it isn't profitable and what work isn't feasible because of the internet is, in my opinion, truly staggering. Several orders of magnitude at least. That these artists were ever profitable is an accident of history, capitalism and the modes of distribution at the time. Well, introducing the newest accident of history: the internet. There are now some artists that are profitable that previously weren't, and some other artists that no longer are. Woe to them, but they are hardly the first or most notable victims of such arbitrary changes in the world around them. If you think this is unfair (and I certainly do), you will be in favor of setting up a system that protects this sort of work (the kind that benefits everyone) from such changes and concerns, and we can have a real argument about what system best meets this goal. Just, let's be clear what our end goal is and by which standards we judge such proposals: it's about what best supports the people who deliver these things we all want. Yes? So, with that in mind, I'm not super sold on the idea of basing this exclusively on government grants either, but I don't think the idea should be dismissed out of hand either. We have national research grants after all, and national artistic grants as well, so I'm not suggesting anything too radical here. I get that there are many problems with such systems, so I am very receptive to other solutions as well, but I would be extremely weary of those solutions which rely on constricting the distribution and availability of the very things we want distributed as widely and as much as possible. I'm not saying such a solution is completely out of the question, but it is an extremely counter-intuitive approach to my mind.
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| # ? Jan 30, 2013 00:28 |
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Whoever has access to the server racks, their bandwidth, and the current powering them. Control of the means of production/communication is true ownership. Kill one man and you're a killer (being a jerk and berating someone until they stop posting) Kill many men and you're a conqueror (An admin or a mod) Kill all men and you are God (Pulling the plug on the server - as we saw with Katrina)
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| # ? Jan 30, 2013 00:33 |
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McDowell posted:
I'm not sure I follow - did the servers go down when Katrina hit? I wasn't particularly politically-literate at the time, so forgive me if I'm forgetting something obvious.
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| # ? Jan 30, 2013 00:41 |
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Spiritus Nox posted:I'm not sure I follow - did the servers go down when Katrina hit? I wasn't particularly politically-literate at the time, so forgive me if I'm forgetting something obvious. Yeah, they were based in New Orleans so the storm killed the site (technically it didn't because there was never a 404, just a placeholder page explaining what happened). But I think that qualifies as an Act of God - which is a consideration in our construct of property.
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| # ? Jan 30, 2013 00:45 |
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Oh and all this has to do with the OP topic because I think it lends credence to the idea that maybe we should be more receptive of diffused or even missing notions of property when it comes to community driven sites like SA (and many others - heck 4 out of the Alexa top 10 are). I think Lowtax unambiguously owns the SA trade mark (use of the brand name, logo and so forth), the domain name, the physical servers. This gives him plenty of room to set the tone for the community, govern posting rights, and plaster the site with as many ads as he wants and keep the proceeds. Who owns the content though? I would lean towards "nobody". It would indeed be pretty ridiculous to expect we all own it in some complicated piecemeal fashion and we all have to be paid if Lowtax ever decides to sell the site whole-hog. Rather, it makes most sense to me that he can only really sell the aforementioned brand, domain name and servers, and anyone is free to use the content as they see fit, for example, to print it, re-host it elsewhere, provide a different API or UI for it (god this site is un-loving-usable on a mobile) or base a bizarre post-modernist novel on. edit: not saying that's how things actually are - in reality Lowtax probably owns the content licensing as well (I honestly don't really care), just how I would like them to be Mr. Wynand fucked around with this message at Jan 30, 2013 around 00:51 |
| # ? Jan 30, 2013 00:45 |
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Here's my thoughts: no mods no masters
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| # ? Jan 30, 2013 01:06 |
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We're sorry, you haven't paid this user the [$3.99] subscription to view this post. Please subscribe to this user, then refresh this page. -or- how to be ignored forever
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| # ? Jan 30, 2013 01:16 |
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Helsing posted:An interesting example to think of here (thought its not perfectly equivalent) is Huffington Post. HuffPo was unquestionably the creation of Ariana Huffington, but its success was only made possible by the massive amount of free content (as well as some paid content) and reporting that was provided by numerous bloggers and readers. When Huffington eventually sold the site for $315 million a lot of people were upset that the bloggers on the site itself were uncompensated. Were those complaints legitimate? Or should we say that those bloggers clearly derived some kind of satisfaction based on their willingness to keep contributing, and therefore have no right to complain? Ugh this horseshit again. I don't want to bang out 10 paragraphs here so I'm going to try to keep this super curt: 1.) "unpaid bloggers" produced an small minority of the content that ran on huffpost, figure 10% (not exact but rough proportion) 2.) of those, the vast majority were PR flacks, campaign aids, people pushing their book, people pushing their movie, people pushing their nonprofit or fad diet, politicians, etc. people with an agenda who were happy to publish for free to get access to that huge audience. So when you combine #1 and #2 you get an incredibly tiny minority of posts written by unpaid bloggers who were genuinely doing it to try to moonlight as "citizen" journalists or get exposure in hopes to write for a living. They contributed zero lines of code to the platform, met zero publishing deadlines and zero traffic goals. Their net contribution to the value huffington post sold for is *negligible*. To me, the interesting thing is what a perfect example of the false-equivalence /teach-the-controversy trope this is. Some people accused huffpo of something, they were wrong, end of story... right? No, constant repetition over and over of the "debate" or the "two sides". Now something that was never even close to true borders on conventional wisdom. StabbinHobo fucked around with this message at Jan 30, 2013 around 02:54 |
| # ? Jan 30, 2013 02:41 |
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F.A.G.G.O.T. posted:Here's my thoughts: no mods no masters I'm sure everyone's had a "That was worth probating over?!" moment or two, but really, what can you do? If an admin shills (or doesn't) for overpriced fruit juice, what can you do? If an admin closes down a forum because he doesn't want to deal with the Secret Service's false alarms, what can you do? If an admin keeps a worse-than-useless "programmer" around for longer than any independent party could conceive as necessary, what can you do? The answer is of course gently caress all. None of this should be news to anyone here, and it isn't unique to the Something Awful Forums in the slightest: we're using ISPs that exist to turn a profit, over Internet backbones that exist to turn a profit, to connect to a web site that exists to turn a profit. None of these are inherently bad per se, but they add up to an environment where "free speech" is kinda sorta tolerated as long as you don't rub the admins the wrong way. I don't mean Something Awful specifically: pretty much every site has "rules" or "terms of service" or an "acceptable use policy" or some such high-minded verbiage which basically boils down to "don't piss off the admins". Indeed, "We here on the Something Awful Forums are very elitist and strict assholes" is basically a somewhat politer way of saying "don't piss off the admins", so in that respect the Forum Rules here are refreshingly honest. Really, the problem of ownership of the Something Awful Forums is a problem of ownership of any web site anywhere, and unless there's a push to run Internet services as non-profit public services (and somehow hold off the powers-that-be who would try to influence or bully these services), I doubt these problematic profit motives will ever get better. I recommend Tim Wu's The Master Switch and Evgeny Morozov's The Net Delusion, and to a lesser extent Eli Pariser's The Filter Bubble, for consideration of how profit-driven enterprises, even well-meaning ones, complicate and corrupt the discussion landscape. "Don't be evil" ain't good enough.
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| # ? Jan 30, 2013 05:57 |
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It was a shame that forum that was created after LF died got killed, and then the other after it sucked. Ultimately, this forum works for Lowtax and is owned by Lowtax and is moderate with his Eastern Missouri Suburban interests in mind, thats generally how the system works. However, since people stay here and don't go anywhere else....unless you challenge the notion of entrepreneurship based on the effort of others, there is nothing much so say. Those who control the flow of information, control the profits and the message.
Ardennes fucked around with this message at Jan 30, 2013 around 07:36 |
| # ? Jan 30, 2013 07:32 |
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That these artists were ever profitable is an accident of history, capitalism and the modes of distribution at the time. Well, introducing the newest accident of history: the internet. There are now some artists that are profitable that previously weren't, and some other artists that no longer are. Woe to them, but they are hardly the first or most notable victims of such arbitrary changes in the world around them. [/quote] I found your point very interesting. My one quibble is the implicit quantification of 'art' as something we have more or less of. Really, what happens is that the internet privileges some sorts of art (meme generation, funny short videos, photography, how-to guides, interesting forum posts, etc) while destroying other classes of media. For example, metro-level news reporting. A conversation of what classes of art are worth taking effort to hold on to would be interesting.
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| # ? Jan 30, 2013 08:18 |
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The only interpretation that is worth talking about is Legalist, because that's the only interpretation that has any salience. Put another way; the other interpretations are meaningless until an actual conflict arises that uses these other interpretations as a argumentative basis (for example, if a poster and Lowtax were in a legal battle over copyrighting a sweet catchphrase, such as,F.A.G.G.O.T. posted:no mods no masters Lowtax is legally and financially on the hook for the forums. He and His guns owns them in every sense that anyone with any authority recognizes. I don't even know why you would entertain thses other dumb ideas jesus crhist Edit: As an example, think back to Gr*v*rgate or a forum that had the same initials as Lilith Fair. Individual posters were not sought out for "owning" or "creating" something there. Rather, the hammer fell on Lowtax and he meted out retribution as he saw fit. This Jacket Is Me fucked around with this message at Jan 30, 2013 around 09:08 |
| # ? Jan 30, 2013 09:02 |
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Mr. Wynand posted:Here's what I find weird about this conversation: everyone finds it obvious that artists are doing something that is good for society and that they deserve to be supported for this work regardless of whatever fickle changes in distribution technology come up. Just because it is now convenient to simply not pay previously profitable artists, we see this as "unjust" and "selfish" or "short sighted". I can get behind that, but to me it poses a much bigger question: How much worthwhile artistic/creative work isn't getting done right now just because it is "inconvenient" and "unprofitable" for capitalism? I would argue far, far more then anything internet distribution put an end to. In fact, when we consider not just artistic work but basically any work that is good for society as a whole, the difference between what work isn't feasible because it isn't profitable and what work isn't feasible because of the internet is, in my opinion, truly staggering. Several orders of magnitude at least. I agree with your last paragraph, that restricting access to art is the wrong way to go, but I just don't get a lot of what's in your first paragraph. What do you mean, work that isn't feasible because of the internet? Do you mean profits? And as far as the bolded sentence: IMHO none. "Worthwhile" art is not created with a profit motive. People make art and then the lucky ones get rich. Once people put the paycheck before the art, the quality of the art declines.
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| # ? Jan 30, 2013 13:39 |
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So what would anyone think if Lowtax published a book that was just forum posts. Nothing he had written himself but just verbatim interesting things people had written, or images people had made and posted on here. That's probably any easy question, he already does that a bit with the Somethingawful website, content from the forums and I've never seen anyone have an issue with it, I certainly don't. What if it was someone else who was republishing it though? Say Brown Moses decided to almost Verbatim publish the hackgate thread. It's an interesting piece of internet history showing how a particular group of people reacted to particular political story that has had a large impact on the British media, and British politics. Looking at the hackgate 2 thread Brown Moses has currently posted 181 of the over 811 posts, so a bit shy of a 1/4 of the total posts in it, more then 5 times more then anyone else. He started it and no one here would deny he's put a hell of a lot of effort into it, but would that give him any rights to republish all of it (minus any pre-existing copyrighted materials that were posted in it of course)? Many of the posts in that thread are responding to something he posted or directly asking him a question so could he argue that he was pretty much publishing a conversation in which he was a leading participant? Do you have any rights to republish writings of someone else if they are writing directly to you? What if it was a poster who was less well liked. Say someone who went into a similar thread to the hackgate one and just started massive, on topic, arguments with everyone to the extent that they posted a similar amount of material in the thread, but everyone in it hated their guts; could they re-publish all of it? could they republish all the posts in it that directly referred to them, or something they had posted?
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| # ? Jan 30, 2013 14:39 |
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greazeball posted:And as far as the bolded sentence: IMHO none. "Worthwhile" art is not created with a profit motive. That's surely not the argument, since doing art for a profit would itself be capitalist. The point is that people have to eat, and for most people under capitalism that means they have to spend much of their lifetimes obeying the orders of capitalists, rather than producing art.
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| # ? Jan 30, 2013 16:46 |
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What? Is Lowtax gonna sell SomethingAwful™ to Condé Nast? He'll be off sipping Mai Tais in Burmuda while the site descends into FYAD chaos as ruthless mods wage civil war to gain supremacy. Great.
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| # ? Jan 30, 2013 22:05 |
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greazeball posted:I agree with your last paragraph, that restricting access to art is the wrong way to go, but I just don't get a lot of what's in your first paragraph. What do you mean, work that isn't feasible because of the internet? Do you mean profits? And as far as the bolded sentence: IMHO none. "Worthwhile" art is not created with a profit motive. People make art and then the lucky ones get rich. Once people put the paycheck before the art, the quality of the art declines. I mean it's no longer feasible because of internet "piracy", like the musicians mentioned in the article I was responding to. I'm not sure I agree about art for profit being innately "not worthwhile", creative work can happen for all sorts of weird reasons like a none too subtle desire to marry an 11 year old, so why not profit? But even if we take what you say at face value, at the end of the day, you gotta eat and have a roof over our head, so unless your creative work takes remarkably little effort (i.e. you manage it "on the weekends"), it has to be profitable in order for you to be doing it.
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| # ? Jan 31, 2013 02:10 |
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j4on posted:I found your point very interesting. My one quibble is the implicit quantification of 'art' as something we have more or less of. Really, what happens is that the internet privileges some sorts of art (meme generation, funny short videos, photography, how-to guides, interesting forum posts, etc) while destroying other classes of media. For example, metro-level news reporting. A conversation of what classes of art are worth taking effort to hold on to would be interesting. Well my problem is that these sort of changes happen haphazardly with no real regard to their social impact. You brought up a great example actually with news - it "so happened" real news reporting is no longer feasible (no need for the "metro-" prefix btw, investigative journalism is dead in the world), so instead we get... HuffPo? Tumblr? I think that was a lovely deal. I'm arguing that it would be better to attempt to take control of such changes rather then being driven by the whims of the market and technology.
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| # ? Jan 31, 2013 02:14 |
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Also I have no idea why so many of you are taking the title to mean some sort of challenge to the actual ownership of SA. Nothing in the OP is about that, it's about the discussion of property as it applies to sites like SA.
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| # ? Jan 31, 2013 02:16 |
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I'd say the current model, in which Lowtax owns the place, works pretty well. It might be interesting to contrast this with Metafilter, where site policy is that everybody owns their own comments, but the site very much belongs to Matt Haughey. I'm not sure there's even a functional difference.
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| # ? Jan 31, 2013 07:36 |
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The Reptilians.
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| # ? Jan 31, 2013 08:00 |
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Its mine now. I found it and now its mine.
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| # ? Jan 31, 2013 14:46 |
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F.A.G.G.O.T. posted:Here's my thoughts: no mods no masters a new world awaits us http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7KFrHxtN1k god bless
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| # ? Jan 31, 2013 16:38 |
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Lowtax needs to change the site so that any act of censorship such as bans and edits require community approval. If some admin guy wants to sticky a thread that is fine but 10% of the users currently online need to approve it first. Only after we are free from the admins iron fist can this e-commune thrive and grow. Seriously though Lowtax owns the site like a farmer owns the land they grow their crops. It pays out but requires constant care to maintain. He could sell it but most who could afford it would only see value in the land. Also according to the EULA Lowtax owns everything you post here so if you post the cure for cancer he can start selling it on the website.
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| # ? Jan 31, 2013 16:57 |
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DrPlump posted:Seriously though Lowtax owns the site like a farmer owns the land they grow their crops. It pays out but requires constant care to maintain. He could sell it but most who could afford it would only see value in the land. So you see all the posters here as, what, seeds? Do you think it's a problem that your go-to analogy for ownership requires objectifying and erasing 99.9% of the people involved? Besides, I've made some pretty sick burns at the site's expense, so I guess you could say it's been owned by me. 
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| # ? Jan 31, 2013 19:35 |
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wheez the roux posted:a new world awaits us Can I be Malcolm McDowell? That's a great video btw.
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| # ? Jan 31, 2013 20:18 |
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Obviously the Illuminati and the reptilians have controlling interest, for proof I point to how forums prophet kyoon is treated
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| # ? Jan 31, 2013 20:51 |
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Lesson of the day: don't use Something Awful as an example when you're trying to hold a debate on the Something Awful forums. Mr. Wynand posted:
I don't really view it from this kind of personalistic angle where artists "deserve to be supported" or where people who download free music are being "unjust". Instead I start out from the premise that I want to live in a society that supports and subsidizes certain kinds of artistic endeavour and then I ask myself what kind of policies can reasonably be expected to complement that aim. This is admittedly a subtle distinction, but its also an important one. The focus here should be encouraging art, not rewarding artists or being "fair". quote:That these artists were ever profitable is an accident of history, capitalism and the modes of distribution at the time. Well, introducing the newest accident of history: the internet. There are now some artists that are profitable that previously weren't, and some other artists that no longer are. Woe to them, but they are hardly the first or most notable victims of such arbitrary changes in the world around them. I think that fictional narratives and music and dance and fashion play a much more important role in the generation and reproduction of our culture than we sometimes like to admit. Right now control over most of our popular culture is concentrated into the hands of a very small number of media conglomerates. It seems reasonable to me that many of these symbols, like Star Wars or Mickey Mouse or music that is more than a decade old should become public property. I see no good reason that the stories and songs that we use to frame and giving meaning to our lives are largely controlled by a small handful of extremely powerful and wealthy people. I feel like this goes beyond issues of individual fairness. People should have an inherent right to alter, play with and reproduce the important symbols and narratives of the culture they live in. I think its problematic on many levels to live in a culture where you're basically forbidden from having an active and creative relationship with your media. For the most part you are only (officially) allowed to passively receive movies and music and such from on high. You aren't allowed to alter that stuff and put it on the market yourself. quote:So, with that in mind, I'm not super sold on the idea of basing this exclusively on government grants either, but I don't think the idea should be dismissed out of hand either. We have national research grants after all, and national artistic grants as well, so I'm not suggesting anything too radical here. I get that there are many problems with such systems, so I am very receptive to other solutions as well, but I would be extremely weary of those solutions which rely on constricting the distribution and availability of the very things we want distributed as widely and as much as possible. I'm not saying such a solution is completely out of the question, but it is an extremely counter-intuitive approach to my mind. I think that any kind of serious attempt to replace our current system of subsidizing art through Intellectual Property and move toward a national grants system would, at a bare minimum, need to utilize some kind of voucher system so that regular people could help determine what sort of art is incentivized. Dean Baker has written some interesting treatments of this idea that I'll try to look up later.
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| # ? Jan 31, 2013 22:20 |
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Helsing posted:I don't really view it from this kind of personalistic angle where artists "deserve to be supported" or where people who download free music are being "unjust". Instead I start out from the premise that I want to live in a society that supports and subsidizes certain kinds of artistic endeavour and then I ask myself what kind of policies can reasonably be expected to complement that aim. This is admittedly a subtle distinction, but its also an important one. The focus here should be encouraging art, not rewarding artists or being "fair". I'm not sure we disagree here, even subtly. I was only using the commonplace intuition that what is happening to (some) artists is, on some level, "unjust" as a sort of "revealed preference" argument... There's too much poison around the idea of outright saying "Government should be in charge of funding most (all?) artistic endeavour" - that's basically communism, don't you know? But despite this, people still have this feeling that something is "wrong" and "unjust" about it all and how fickle and arbitrary it all is. In doing so, I think they reveal that they do look at artistic work as a social necessity after all, not unlike other things that are fairly uncontroversial accepted as "the government's job". To clarify, yes, I think the argument is exactly as you put it: "what kind of policies can reasonably be expected to complement that aim?". I only wanted to garnish it in more popularly palatable terms lest it be dismissed out of hand as "too out there", like a delicious piece of beef marrow which you are far more likely to try as an accompaniment to steak than a minimally prepared appetizer on its own. quote:I think that any kind of serious attempt to replace our current system of subsidizing art through Intellectual Property and move toward a national grants system would, at a bare minimum, need to utilize some kind of voucher system so that regular people could help determine what sort of art is incentivized. Dean Baker has written some interesting treatments of this idea that I'll try to look up later. Here on the other hand, we do disagree, though either side of the argument relies on a great deal of projection and guesswork. In my opinion, any solution involving the maintenance of "Intellectual Property" (I'm assuming you mean specifically copyright here, I personally would also include patents however) has a great deal of justification to do because it goes against the very nature of information in the 21st century. It goes back to information-is-property: it makes everything harder - distribution, access, participation and so forth. Do you really need it though? If we're talking about vouchers, aren't you really just using them as a stand-in for evaluating consumption? I'm assuming here your goal is to base funding on real consumption, as opposed to a more nebulous "social good" approach as with existing film boards and art grants (which is fine, I have sympathy for either approach). Ok, so why not just, I dunno, measure consumption directly? Hire a market research company to do it, they'll do a fine job. After all, that's how how existing for profit corporations evaluate their own internal funding.
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| # ? Feb 1, 2013 00:03 |
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| # ? May 23, 2013 04:19 |
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Mayor Dave posted:Obviously the Illuminati and the reptilians have controlling interest, for proof I point to how forums prophet kyoon is treated I thought Glenn Beck cleared this up for us: major controlling interest is the CIA, Lowtax is just a front for the Director.
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| # ? Feb 1, 2013 00:05 |
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