The only sustainable solution is to abolish copyrights. Stupidest fucking laws on the planet. It's intellectual slavery—restricting people from peacefully sharing and building on information between each other. Propped up by billions of lies pitched daily by industry. It's the big dirty secret propping up big tech, the media, et cetera.
While Bill Gates had access to the world's best information growing up attending elite institutions, a significant number of Americans weren't even able to vote or attend their local libraries, or outside the country you had places like South Africa with apartheid preventing access to education. The charity work of these assholes is a fucking farce, as long as they are pushing #ImaginaryPropertyLaws. You want to improve the world BG—stop preventing people from educating themselves! (I pick on BG just b/c he's the most famous, but really goes for all these tech assholes who don't realize the #IdeaPrivilege they had, which they deny to others via their support of copyrights and patents, and whose outlier wealth is dependent on these laws which put chains on people and ideas).
How does this help with journalism? Facts are not subject to copyright and articles about what other articles say or that are rewritten to share the same info are common.
I'm sorry, I veered horribly off topic in that comment. Hard
to edit on a phone.
The only sustainable solution to fix journalism is to
abolish copyright. That's it. That's the only thing we can
do to fix journalism.
For some context, journalism has not signicantly improved in
roughly 150 years, perhaps longer. Perhaps it some slight
areas it has gotten better, in others it has regressed. You
can test this for yourself. There's a book available right
now used on Amazon for $3.51, called "New York Times: The
Complete Front Pages 1851-2009" ^0. Get that book, read some
of the front pages from ~170 years ago, and compare to
today's paper. It's a toss up which is better.
So I will conclude in part from that the field of journalism
has plateaud for at least the past 100 years. This is
surprising, as technology has improved dramatically. You'd
expect the quality of the news should have gone up.
What else has happened in the past century? Well we
know governments dramatically extended copyright laws. So
now our prior should be that increasing copyright has not
improved journalism at all, and probably has had a
significant negative effect, enough to offset the
improvement we'd expect from better technology.
Why would moving away from copyright lead to better
journalism?
Let's talk about 3 parameters that will change.
First, collaboration will go up. Lots of people who are now
prevented from seamlessly collaborating to improve the news
would now be free to do so. Articles will be developed on
git. Instead of constantly sucking everyone's attention to
show frivolous novelty covered in ads, more important long
term stories will be iterated upon.
Second, trust will go up. If one paper starts lying and
someone knows the truth, they can fork that article/paper
and offer the better version. Over time sources that
prioritize truth will win gravity from tabloids. Every
article will be backed by git (or similar) and the chance
history and authors will be visible at every step of the
way.
Finally, distribution will be improved in myriad ways.
Starting a publisher will be easy for everyone, and you'll
see a resurgence in regional and topic specific publishers.
You'll have lots of innovation around customizing content
for specific kinds of devices and readers.
So collaboration will increase and the cost of doing great
journalism will fall dramatically, trust and auditability
will increase, and distribution will increase.
It will be a dramatic win for journalism, and journalism in
10 years (or 100, if it takes society longer to wake up to
the obvious), will be a big delta different compared to the
delta in the previous century.
The only sustainable solution is to abolish copyrights. Stupidest fucking laws on the planet. It's intellectual slavery—restricting people from peacefully sharing and building on information between each other. Propped up by billions of lies pitched daily by industry. It's the big dirty secret propping up big tech, the media, et cetera.
While Bill Gates had access to the world's best information growing up attending elite institutions, a significant number of Americans weren't even able to vote or attend their local libraries, or outside the country you had places like South Africa with apartheid preventing access to education. The charity work of these assholes is a fucking farce, as long as they are pushing #ImaginaryPropertyLaws. You want to improve the world BG—stop preventing people from educating themselves! (I pick on BG just b/c he's the most famous, but really goes for all these tech assholes who don't realize the #IdeaPrivilege they had, which they deny to others via their support of copyrights and patents, and whose outlier wealth is dependent on these laws which put chains on people and ideas).