Ethical intellectual piracy; ie Music

Fools weep for the crops they could have sowed while they played at art.

Welcome to the coming reality of post-scarcity you “talented” hacks. Your “work” is at most a service, at least an advertisement. And we’d no sooner pay for the privilege of your self-satisfaction, than for the pollution of our thoughts with intellectual "property" and the obligations attached.

Arrogance is reserved for those that have advanced the species with tools, sweat and blood. Most of them have slipped into the dark, thankless and unrewarded.

Your ideas are not yours, your languages are borrowed, your words nothing but shadows. You know nothing.

A historical context will help illuminate the point and will be supplied.

Music has been part of human culture. In terms of compensation for the artist, the service model has been utilized far longer and wider than any commodity market. The bard at the inn was given food, lodging and the occasional coin. A high level of notoriety would sometimes allow an artist to charge directly for their services but most would have survived on charity.

And as it should. Music cannot be eaten, or build shelter, nor heal the sick.

Then technology began and for a while music was able to exist as a commodity. Physical objects could be obtained, traded and even stolen, but this is merely a transitional phase as the technology became more ubiquitous and energy efficient. Now the commodity of music, or song, can be replicated for the merest of costs.

Music is now a substrate and not a luxury. It now has more reach than ever before, plenty of "inns" to play. The work; the hard labour of crafting a song can be preformed once and distributed, the machine has freed the artists from drudgery too.

And so it comes back down to each of us, free to offer patronage to whomever we wish.

Still, they seek to cage us and our art.