The most interesting thing about this article was the Bow Wow Wow song linked. It's a song about music piracy (including a usage of the word "pirate") from 1980, including this stanza:
It used to break my heart when I went in your shop
The power of macros is somewhat overblown and not at all hard to explain.
Consider e.g. the "with" statement in Python[1]. Someone came up with the idea, found a way to integrate it into python and a year later, people could use it. In Lisp, you write a macro.
Now Python is a rather agile language as these things go. In other languages it would be a lot more than a year. When I was in college, my professor wanted us to use generics, but the school mandated language, Java, lacked generics at the time. So we were told to use a fork of javac that had generics added. Pretty much none of the development tools would play nicely with this, and javac was at least two orders of magnitude slower at compiling than my preferred java compiler at the time (jikes).
None of this is world-ending, but it really is annoying. The argument for macros is just "what is the next generics/with/whatever feature that your language is missing." Most of the features that lisp programmers use macros for have made it into modern languages that continue to evolve, so the leverage narrows. In the late '90s it was probably a much bigger multiplier than today.
That can still have work disincentives; anywhere the magnitude of slope of the benefits is close to (or steeper than) the slope of the income as it phases out, then working more can get you no gain (or lose you money).
Of course they're going to be coy and try to pretend like they don't agree with and love every single opinion D14HH and the Hyprborean dev have expressed.
We can change the laws. Radio stations don't have "licensing issues" with playing songs.
From another angle, if copyright were more like it was originally in the US, every single show I watched as a kid would be in the public domain, since I haven't been a kid for 28 years.
Radio is a lot simpler. Used to work in that realm back in the Napster and Kazaa days.
You have a broadcast station. You know that estimated 30k people are listening. You sell those numbers to advertisers. Now you play a song 1x, you record that fact. At the end of the month, you tally up 30k users for that artist and you cut a check to ASCAP or BMI. Thats it. You just keep track of how many plays and your audience size, and send checks monthly itemized.
They were downloading pirate Britney Spears over Napster and playing it on air. And since 100% royalties are paid for, was actually legal. Not a lawyer, but they evidently checked and was fine.
I'd like something similar for video. Grab shows however, and put together the biggest streaming library of EVERYTHING, and cut royalty checks for rights holders. But nope, can't do that. Companies are too greedy.
That shows how tech monopolies are bad for content creators.
Like Spotify monopolizing music streaming, and now creators have the choice of getting virtually nothing from Spotify or literally nothing by avoiding Spotify (unless you're already Taylor Swift).
With radio stations, no single radio station could really hold you over a barrel, because there were still a lot of other radio stations to work with.
Sure, that was very early though. You could argue that was crucial for establishing their brand, but the industry has caught up and doesn't do that very much now.
A more generous reading of this is "If you were around kids more, you would probably understand that kids have internet access even without their parent's permission and/or help" At least some of this access is essentially state-mandated, as it happens at public schools, which you are required to send your kids to unless you have the resources to arrange alternative education.
I don’t give generous readings to bad arguments from online anons. The point of anonymous discourse is to come at it with your best arguments and debate them thoroughly, which is why there’s a lot of discussion about common methods of “bad faith” argument styles like the preceding commenter used (“you don’t have kids” = “your opinion is irrelevant”).
Also, a lot of folks are making some assumptions about my person and profession to suit their own arguments, rather than discuss the merits of what I raised. These assumptions ultimately destroy their own arguments by showing a resultant lack of curiosity and a reliance on pre-existing narratives rather than carefully thought out rationale.
That’s why these ID checks keep winning: suckers drinking the Kool-Aid without thinking for themselves and dismissing what they perceive to be opposition, who in reality have more experience with this with kids and in education than they assume when dismissing our positions.
I don’t need to be more understanding of bad actors or bad arguments, they need to be better at discussing their positions rationally or trusting experts who have lived these problems.
It used to break my heart when I went in your shop
And you said my records were out of stock
So I don't buy records in your shop
Now I tape them all 'cause I'm 'Top Of The Pops'
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