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breck · 2021-04-17 · Original thread
> How does this help with journalism?

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.

Thanks for getting my thoughts back on track!

0: https://www.amazon.com/New-York-Times-Complete-1851-2009/dp/... 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act

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