PrincipleOfCharity

My problem with what you said is that it isn’t just capitalists that use patents and copyrights. Russia and China have patents and copyrights. It isn’t limited to capitalists, and saying so confuses people on what the actual issues are.

This isn’t really correct. Free Open Source Software is very much owned. It is just that the owner doesn’t charge for it, has stated that there are rules for use and modification of the software. FOSS was a clever trick that used copyright against itself. It is was a really brilliant trick, but that trick was only necessary because copyrights exist in the first place. If copyrights didn’t exist then it wouldn’t be illegal to redistribute Adobe Photoshop.

You may argue that copyrights are necessary for the betterment of society, but that is debatable. The biggest case against copyright being necessary is, in fact, the FOSS movement. It proves we don’t actually need companies like Adobe to make all our stuff and charge a lot for it.

The idea of free software isn’t political; ie socialist/communist. Free software is also compatible with free market capitalism. In a capitalist market free of coercion there is nothing that stops one from copying something then changing and/or selling it.

If you make a microwave and I buy one and reverse engineer it then I could produce and sell it just fine. Similarly, if you created a program called Adobe Photoshop, and I got a hold of the code, then I could copy and resell it. Neither capitalism nor the free market has a concept of patents or copyrights which are a political thing. Everything is free to reproduce.

Making the software free is just the logical economic price of a product with a marginal cost very close to zero. Give it away and let everyone build on top of it to make increasingly better things because that is the most efficient way to manage those resources. It’s like the progression of science. We give credit for discovery, but encourage all science to happen in the open so others can take the ideas and build on them without being encumbered.

I hope you don’t think that science is socialist/communist.

Note: After going through the trouble of writing this I became concerned that my use of the loaded term “free market capitalism” could be misunderstood so I’ve decided to define my terms. Free market capitalism isn’t a form of government. Capitalism just means stuff can be privately owned. A market is how capital is coordinated. The free refers to the market transactions being voluntary/free of coercion. So free market capitalism is the “voluntary coordination of private capital”. That definition can exist under varying forms of government which is why I argue that it isn’t a political system in itself.

I have also thought this is a good idea. I think that the ActivityPub standard should have a required field that lists a copyright license. Then a copyleft style copyright should be created that allows storing and indexing for distribution via open-source standards, and disallows using for AI training and data scraping. If every single post has a copyleft license then it would be risky for bigtech to repurpose it because if a whistleblower called them out that could be a huge class action suit.

A good question is if a single post can be copyrighted. I think it could. Perhaps you would consider each post like a collaborative work of art. People keep adding to it, and at the end of the day the whole chain could function as a “work”. Especially since there is a lot of useful value and knowledge in some post threads.

I’m confused. Isn’t the commission that is paid just a cut of the profits from sales? The 85% not paying commission would be because their app is free. Apple’s argument is that they are providing a huge platform and infrastructure for app developers; many of which are utilizing it for zero cost (except the annual $99 developer fee).

If someone then uses that infrastructure to make money then Apple takes a cut of either 15% or 30% to help sustain the whole thing. Those numbers are argued to be too high although they are basically in-line with the mark-up of most goods and services.

The real complaint is that Apple doesn’t allow alternate app stores that would compete, and theoretically push down the commission to whatever the free market determines is reasonable (and presumably below 15%). Apple, of course, argues that they do it for safety purposes. One way to offer lower commissions is to have less strict screening processes to save money. This could end up being a race to the bottom of quality which may not really benefit users.