The existence of countless freemium businesses disproves the validity of that take on its face.

I would say more, but I already wrote a more detailed response to a similar point here.

That's a pretty contrived hypothetical that AFAIK has never been litigated before.

Regardless, I don't see a problem with people doing that being legal. I'm not sure many other people would have a problem with it either.

That take is oft-repeated, but I just don't buy it. Never have.

File sharing being legal does not make it impossible for authors in any medium to make money. Anyone who believes that simply lacks imagination.

More than that, by now after decades of seeing new business models evolve with the internet, it's fair to say that to subscribe to that take lacks more than imagination â" it lacks observation. Many modern content creators incorporate the reality that file sharing is widespread and inevitable into their business models. The most obvious examples are the countless successful freemium businesses.

If we did legalize file sharing, the result would be 1. little would change because most of the people who would freeload already were freeloading and 2. we'd see even more creative business models emerge to ensure creators continue getting paid now that nobody would be in denial anymore about the existence of a large, inevitable group of freeloaders in all aspects of content consumption.

Free at the point of consumption and creators getting paid are not mutually exclusive. Putting these two things in tension and creating artificial scarcity because for one side to win, the other side must lose is fallacious, zero-sum thinking. We can do better than that as a society, and I hope some day we will.

We all have strong opinions about rms. Some of his ideas are wacky. Some of his ideas are brilliant. I think this is one of his more insightful takes.

Copyright law has a distinction between commercial for-profit infringement, which is regarded as a criminal offense vs. noncommercial infringement which is regarded as a civil offense.

I think this distinction is useful, but it's one degree too severe. For-profit infringement should be the civil offense, and noncommercial infringement (consumer copying) should be fully legal, just as rms is saying.

Why? Because copyright wasn't created to allow authors to impose a toll on every individual consumption of every individual work, otherwise libraries wouldn't have been widespread alongside early copyright laws.

Instead, copyright law was created to make sure the author of a work was the only one who had any right to make any profit at all off of their work.

People often forget this, but the origin of copyright law is important to remember. The Statute of Anne was passed to address the growing problem of people making and selling copies of books they were not the author of, an activity which became much more common once the printing press was invented. The law was passed with the intention of protecting London's publishing business from this unfair competition and in the centuries that followed, other countries passed similar laws. Notably absent from this law: a ban on libraries or noncommercial sharing of books.

That's why file sharing should be legal, and business models should adapt to the decades-old reality that file sharing is widespread and inevitable. Some businesses have adapted rather well. While it's unfortunate that DRM is widespread, things like streaming services aren't that bad an adaptation. They just need a bit more adapting to truly embrace the 21st century.

Also, as a fun aside, one thing that baffles me is if for-profit copyright infringement is a criminal offense, as described above, then why aren't the major AI companies who commit mass copyright infringement with a profit motive in the training and development of their models being held criminally liable for their actions? The courts are currently twisting themselves into pretzels to try to invent some kind of fair use exception for them out of whole cloth because it feels wrong to charge them all with criminal behavior. But the truth is the law is not being interpreted in good faith, in part because the law itself is horrifyingly outdated and needs to be updated and modernized.

But the modernization we need is simple: Reduce for-profit infringement to a civil offense and reduce noncommercial infringement to being legal. We don't need to tinker with copyright terms, we don't need a vast expansion of the public domain, none of that. Just make file sharing legal.

Hopefully the antitrust scrutiny on Apple wedges open the consoles as well.

Enough with the walled gardens.

It should be illegal to disallow sideloading on any computer that has an app development platform.

I understand the distinction you're making. What I'm saying is people don't care about the distinction, because it burdens readers unnecessarily, which is why people circumvent it. If the only way you can make money is to limit a reader's ability to access the book, it's not the reader who's wrong for circumventing your limits, it's you that's wrong for trying to impose them to begin with.

Your business model needs to adapt. You need to learn to attract more flies with honey than vinegar. Use carrots, not sticks. Your strict whack-em-with-the-stick enforcement attitude just leads people to ignore your distribution channels entirely and pirate things. You can't stop it, but you can adapt to it and stop screaming into the void about a reality that won't change.

We should legalize noncommercial infringement fully.

We created copyright law to stop people from selling the work of others as their own, not to force people to pay a toll every time they read a book, listen to music, or watch a movie.

We created free public libraries so that people could consume as much culture as they want for free.

What the Internet Archive did and the very idea of the internet itself basically is a global free public library.

We need to accept that as the reality we live in and business models need to adapt to that reality. Legal prohibitions to deny reality don't work. File sharing is widespread and inevitable. Adapt.

Are you referring to things like .NET applications, or are you saying this works with compiled binaries written in C targeting x86 as well? Because my main concern is with the latter, not the former.

At dramatically reduced performance.

Which won't run apps compiled for x86 / x64 architectures which is the whole point of using them for most people who use it.

Not to mention WINE. I use WINE on macOS too, again for running apps compiled for x86 / x64 architectures.

If this kills VMWare and Boot Camp, I'm never buying another Mac.

And we also have Zombo.com back now via html5zombo.com!

Oh yes there are.

Imagine if on Gmail you couldn't email anybody outside of Gmail.

That's how Facebook and Twitter are today, it's a monopoly.

Public debate about banning on political ads on Twitter vs. not on Facebook has gone fully off the rails. Both Dorsey and Zuckerberg are wrong about it, but--counter intuitively--Zuckerberg has it less wrong than Dorsey.

Where Zuckerberg's instincts are kinda right is I think he recognizes on some level that when one company has control over like 90% of a media market and can make decisions about what speech is or isn't allowed, we might want to consider applying 1st amendment protections.

Yes, there is a "bUt pRiVaTe pLaTfOrMs aRe eXeMpT fRoM tHe FiRsT aMeNdMeNt oBLiGaToRy xKcD https://xkcd.com/1357" trope. Spare me.

Companies with monopolies are effectively the same thing as governments because they replace government as the de facto public square.

As such, speech on such platforms should either be subject to 1st amendment protections, or the company should be broken up into federated platforms that set their own speech rules. Zuckerberg seems to prefer the former. We should prefer the latter.

The root of the problem is Facebook's/Twitter's monopoly, not political advertising. Break up Facebook/Twitter into a bunch of independently-owned, federated services (e.g. Diaspora / Mastodon) that each set their own speech rules.

TL;DR:

Dorsey: Preserve my monopoly and I want to censor things on it with impunity.

Zuck: Preserve my monopoly but I'm skeptical of censorship.

What we should actually want: No monopolies, so the question of regulating speech on these platforms is fully moot.

I have achieved my goal. Now I can rest.