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PaperclipPerfector  15d ago (text post)   32195 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 7, 2025

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China's pledge to stop respecting American IP-- and in particular copyright for hollywood movies-- is possibly the only silver lining of this tarrif business. The american entertainment industry is a juggernaut, but that comes at the cost of making sanitized slop consumable by the maximum possible audience. On the liberal end of the table, no one is willing to make movies that really push the boundaries of sex and culture-norm violation (gay people holding hands is the tamest shit ever), and on the conservative end of the table we similarly don't have anyone willing to push the boundaries of violence and jingoism. Plus, completely giving up on IP law is the first step in actually re-industrializing the united states. The whole point of IP law is to create monopolies, and monopolies are intrinsically inefficient-- so the western world's respect for IP law is a massive albatross around our neck. In a world without IP law the only thing we lose is the class of parasitic middlemen that can make a living on the bullshit legal fiction that ideas are an asset.

China's pledge to stop respecting American IP

This is, as far as I can tell, made up

damn 😔

This source I found on China's options for retaliation only mentions banning the import of Hollywood films. Now, that will create a gap in their market, but they likely do have enough of their own industry to fill the void and won't need to resort to industrial-scale infringement to get their fix.

and won't need to resort to industrial-scale infringement to get their fix.

But why not do so anyway, honestly? Rich countries don't do Turkish Star Wars because they have deals that force them to respect copyright law. If the whole thing is breaking down, why not?

On the liberal end of the table, no one is willing to make movies that really push the boundaries of sex and culture-norm violation

For that you have to go to japan (specifically the weird outcasts called otaku) For the really Bizzare pushes.

Related: I just watched Interspecies Reviewers (NSFW), which IMDb sums up as "From elves to succubi to fairies and more, Our heroes: Stunk, a human, Zel, an elf and a hermaphrodite angel named Crimvael are here to rate the red-light delights of all manner of monster girls".

It's way, way better than it sounds; a perfect mix of sexy, comedy, and worldbuilding. I have never seen such a cultured anime in my life.

For the fucc, vote Succ!

You know I was going for currently airing shows but that and Redo of healer are much better at showing my point.

Interspecies reviewers had 1 episode of the dub it was extremely sad they didn't go with fully dubbing the anime. It got removed from funimation a company that hosts softcore porn like high school dxd (NSFW) otherwise we'd actually get the most cultured dub from a mainstream anime site.

There are some truly amazingly strange things in that show.

Temporarily becoming trans

BDSM Roleplays

Grandma's I'd like to fuck

Using a girl as a dinner plate

Making sex Golems

A girl making love to a bottle of Mayo

Semi Public sex

and that's just some of the episodes!

I'm surprised it took you that long to watch it; I've started to forget how good it is.

Actually, I think it hits all the high points of sex and cultural norm violations, including but not limited to:

  • States outright that some races species are different than others, and different people may or may not enjoy different aspects of that
  • Sex with women is Good, Actually/not being afraid of the natural consequences of the [offers resources vs. offers sex] condition that underpins human instinct
    • Even the women do this from time to time too
  • Gender-swapping/having both sets of equipment without going Full Trans(tm)
  • Some of the main characters both look and act younger than 18 (standard fig leaf of Being Over 900 Years Old applies)

And perhaps most importantly, all of those things are portrayed in a natural way; it's clearly not done with the sole purpose of being edgy/iconoclastic.

I disagree here. Without protecting of patents and other IP, companies are not going to invest in creating new technologies.

The philosophical justification for patents is that they allow the genius of a new idea to capture the benefits of their contribution to society, thereby encouraging them to be geniuses. Except-- that almost never actually happens! The people actually responsible for the ideas that lead to vaccines, or to AI advancements, or to new machines, typically only capture a tiny fraction of the value they generate anyway. The rest goes to stockholders and to upper management. And while that parasitical class tries to present themselves as necessary to the genius' ultimate success, you should view that with the same skepticism as if an FDA regulator claimed to be responsible for the creation of some new cure or treatment. Maybe they're contributing something-- but the primary reason they exist is because of a distortionary, monopolistic government intervention. So the default assumption should be that they're worthless rentseekers-- extracting value from consumes and producers through their artificial control of resources that aren't naturally excludable.

Companies might stop investing-- but that's fine, because companies are full of unproductive middlemen. But if people want something done, then they'll invest. Have more faith in the free market! Can you seriously not think of a single financial instrument that might be used to fund research by purely self-interested parties? I can easily imagine something like a "transferrable kickstarter" system, where I put seed money into a research-production concern that's building something I'm interested in, and in return they guarantee me the right to buy a certain quantity of the product early, which gives me access to a potential for arbitrage. Sure, another person might start their own concern, intending to steal the advancement and produce it themselves... but then I get the thing I want even faster, and they have to risk their own money on a product that might not work out, against an unknown number of competitors that want to do the same thing.

And in practice, we already see so many companies funding open research, and posting the results publicly. If it benefits a company to invent something new, they will-- and if their competitors are interested in the same thing, then they're likely to contribute, rather than copy-and-fork, because that gives them the ability to determine the course of the initial development.

The people actually responsible for the ideas that lead to vaccines, or to AI advancements, or to new machines, typically only capture a tiny fraction of the value they generate anyway. The rest goes to stockholders and to upper management.

Stockholders benefit because they provide the capital to actually realize the advancement. You can't actually do anything with an idea that leads to vaccines without massive capital investment -- the two are both necessary to gain any benefit.

And the upper management thing is just plain wrong -- executives are paid massively, but are so few in number that they constitute a tiny fraction of corporate spending. Satya Nadella makes $80M at Microsoft, an eye watering amount that pales next to the total HC cost of $10-20B. Even with all his C-suite and all the VPs and directors, it isn't more than a couple percent.

You're coming at this from the perspective that the current dominance of stockholders is a just a natural feature of society, but it's not. Joint-stock companies are a useful economic innovation, and stockholders a necessary feature of capitalism, but their power is completely distorted by their ability to extract rents from using IP. If the government didn't enable that, stockholders would have less money, and consumers would have far more, and consequently consumers themselves could provide the capital investment required to create-- for example-- new vaccines.

And I'm absolutely sure that should be possible all capital investment ultimately derives from consumers paying for things anyway. The money required is already in the economy. Have no fear of free-riding stifling innovation. If people want a product, they'll pay for it, and financial-services whiz kids will figure out how to connect buyers to sellers regardless.

executives are paid massively, but are so few in number that they constitute a tiny fraction of corporate spending

They constitute a tiny fraction of corporate spending (ignoring stock compensation, which I'm lumping in with "stockholders"), but they determine a massive part of it. And specifically, they determine it should go to all sorts of middlemen-- layers of layers of lawyers and middle management and HR. Not because that actually enables them to make more products, but because those are the people that let them extract their economic rents.

Joint-stock companies are a useful economic innovation, and stockholders a necessary feature of capitalism, but their power is completely distorted by their ability to extract rents from using IP.

All businesses can profit from creating useful IP -- whether they are joint-stock, private, sole-owned or otherwise. This ability is completely independent of ownership structure.

If the government didn't enable that, stockholders would have less money, and consumers would have far more, and consequently consumers themselves could provide the capital investment required to create-- for example-- new vaccines.

That would be great. I wonder though, if consumers wanted to provide the investment required to create something that was capital intensive, whether they could come up with some kind of fractional ownership system whereby each consumer that wanted to fund a given endeavor could pledge some amount of capital and receive a proportional share of whatever profits derived from it.

They constitute a tiny fraction of corporate spending (ignoring stock compensation, which I'm lumping in with "stockholders"),

Even counting stock compensation, the entire suite of executives and all their hangers on correspond to a single digit percentage of all personnel compensation at the median firm.

but they determine a massive part of it.

Uh, they determine all of it -- that's what they do -- mange the company on behalf of the board.

And specifically, they determine it should go to all sorts of middlemen-- layers of layers of lawyers and middle management and HR. Not because that actually enables them to make more products, but because those are the people that let them extract their economic rents.

This makes no sense. Executives would, as a general rule, only pay layers of expensive-as-all-heck white collar employees if they added value to the firm. Of course lots of firms are inefficiently run, but that's true across a wide spectrum of the world.

This is one good reason startups are so common and so profitable -- they run extremely lean and create lots of products (and lots of rich shareholders) without using lots of labor (and hence not paying employees as much) because of simplified processes. They eventually displace inefficient firms.

All businesses can profit from creating useful IP -- whether they are joint-stock, private, sole-owned or otherwise. This ability is completely independent of ownership structure.

But if there was no IP, the valuation of a business becomes more independent of its past accomplishments, and rests more on its ability to keep producing new ones. It would destroy the ability for vulture capital firms to buy up a business with promising IP, fire all the innovators, run it into the ground while extracting maximum rents, and then sell of just the IP later, for example. Removing IP law would change the balance of power between middlemen and producers, to the benefit of producers.

You say that executives determine all of corporate spending, but that's missing the deeper point-- that some proportion of business spending is allocated towards productive investments, but that executives use the power inequalities between them and their consumers/producers to claw away rents for their own personal benefit. I'm talking about corporate money spent on making impressive executive offices, building new corporate headquarters closer to where they live, buying prestige-enhancing charity products, etcetera. And like you mentioned, re: inefficient firms, the ability for executives to do this is a direct result of corporate bureaucracy and much of corporate bureaucracy exists because of IP law. Paying people to file IP claims raises the "value" of a company, but has no material effect on its ability to actually produce a product.

IP is corrupted because investors capture most of the value of the IP development what if instead we [A system in which investors capture most of the value of the IP development].

in return they guarantee me the right to buy a certain quantity of the product early, which gives me access to a potential for arbitrage.

Why would you even need such a right if IP didn't exist?

IP is corrupted because investors capture most of the value of the IP development what if instead we [A system in which investors capture most of the value of the IP development].

Not investors-- consumers. There's a critical difference. An investor doesn't necessarily need or want the end product; they want the chance to perform arbitrage between the producer and the consumer. But-- to use a concrete example-- pharmacies, hospitals, government entities, and charitable organizations would still want new antimalarial drugs even if they can't prevent other people from manufacturing them. Their goal would be to fund the research and production of a certain amount of drugs at a particular price-- and then if other people get the drugs after they do, that doesn't change whatever supply/demand calculus drove their funding in the first place.

There would still be a role for investors in creating financial instruments intended to mitigate e.g. the free rider problem. But after the information is actually created, they wouldn't have the power to extract rents for using it.

You're going to inevitably end up in one of two separate outcomes here.

  1. A substantially less is invested into these searches for new tech

  2. As much is invested and it's done by what is essentially the same apparatus as today.

As it sounds like you want to do away with patents entirely option 1 seems very likely. And this is all very naive about the risk of these attempts to discover new tech not panning out. Every individual hospital is really going to become expert in which new drugs to invest into during the research stage? No, they're going to developed specialized companies.

As much is invested and it's done by what is essentially the same apparatus as today.

That's just not what empirically happens. Look, we've effectively already performed a natural experiment on repealing IP law when it comes to art, books, and music. Instead of no one publishing anything, or alternatively the exact same business models persisting, we get Patreon + Kickstarter for the writers and artists, and Soundcloud + Touring/Streaming for the musicians. There are still middlemen involved, of course, but as compared to publishing companies or record labels they're taking far smaller cuts.

You're talking about things that can be done by a single artist for the most part here. Simple media products with little to no logistics necessary and practically no risk. You can't run a drug research program off of kickstarter. You can't build a new airplane internal part by having all the airlines sign up for an engineer's Patreon.

You can't run a drug research program off of kickstarter. You can't build a new airplane internal part by having all the airlines sign up for an engineer's Patreon.

Do you seriously believe there are no possible financial instruments that could result in complex projects being completed without IP law?

Patreon is an an object lessons of how the market adapts to scenarios where IP law stops being relevant. (In this case, to how the internet makes traditional enforcement of copyright law against individual consumers near-impossible.) Kickstarter proves that complex engineering products can be pre-funded directly by consumers, without need for investors. It's true that we don't currently have Biotech Patreon, for example-- but I'm arguing that that's a consequence not of the boundary conditions of capitalism, but of the specific market distortions introduced by government enforcement of IP law. Looking at the current state of things and saying, "this is the only possible system that results in innnovation" is like living in the 1800s and saying, "the royal monopoly granted to the British East India Company is the only possible system that result in trade with India."

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posting research is a far cry from developing a product.

My argument applies globally. Why should the researcher get to create a rent-seeking monopoly to extract wealth from the work of process engineers? Why would process engineers get to rent-seek from the work of factory laborers? If people actually want a thing, and are willing to pay for that thing, there will still be plenty of market forces conspiring to give them that thing. I just want to take all the rent-seeking out of the equation. Maybe it served a purpose two hundred years ago when we had far worse transportation and communication infrastructure, but now it's a crutch. Our financial services technology has evolved to the point where IP law is wholly unnecessary.

Patent is to disclose. It will just revert to trade secrets. But patents are a joke anyway today - you rarely can reproduce a patent just from the information in the patent. So there is no public benefit from them

The american entertainment industry is a juggernaut, but that comes at the cost of making sanitized slop consumable by the maximum possible audience. On the liberal end of the table, no one is willing to make movies that really push the boundaries of sex and culture-norm violation (gay people holding hands is the tamest shit ever), and on the conservative end of the table we similarly don't have anyone willing to push the boundaries of violence and jingoism.

That's going to be the case for mainstream entertainment pretty much no matter what by definition of being "mainstream entertainment". They're not aiming to be that challenging, they're aiming to appeal to mass markets. Mainstream entertainment isn't going to stop being slop if China stops watching because the average American is still a slop consumer to begin with, yet alone the below average Americans that still have money to spend on the Netflix subscriptions and theater tickets. If anything a lot of modern mainstream media is arguably better compared to the slop of Dance Moms and Real Housewives and Kardashians and Honey BooBoo and shitty reality television from just a decade or two ago.

You want stuff that pushes boundaries you go to the smaller films that actually try to find niche audiences, not the Marvel Movies or Nostalgic Cash-in Remake Of Children's Franchise.

Plus, completely giving up on IP law is the first step in actually re-industrializing the united states. The whole point of IP law is to create monopolies, and monopolies are intrinsically inefficient-- so the western world's respect for IP law is a massive albatross around our neck. In a world without IP law the only thing we lose is the class of parasitic middlemen that can make a living on the bullshit legal fiction that ideas are an asset.

I'd certainly agree we go too far with respecting IP and copyright laws, like Mickey should definitely have been in the public domain way earlier than he was. But if you don't have any protection from copycats then that seems like an issue too. Why spend resources creating new things, especially the risky boundary pushing stuff you wish for, if people can just use any successful thing you make without permission, or at the very least compensation?

Without any protections it seems like success will be defined even more by name recognition and marketing skills rather than genuine creative talent.

There is entertainment that appeals to a large number of people, and there is entertainment that is designed to be mainstream. Post-IP law, the former kind of entertainment will persist, but there will be no point in creating the latter kind except in the form of excludable physical objects and in-person events.

Just think about it:

No more soulless, toyetic cartoons. No more lowest-common-denominator reality television. No more hyper-generic romantasy novels getting polished tiktok campaigns.

These properties only exist because they can be marketed-- because they're the type of cultural product that let middlemen extract the most wealth. Without them taking up a huge chunk of our cultural vigor, more earnest works will have the space they need to thrive. Or not thrive, as the case may be-- but that's fine, because that's natural selection.

Without any protections it seems like success will be defined even more by name recognition and marketing skills rather than genuine creative talent.

My experience with fanfiction (and fanart) proves this wrong. Fanfiction authors have sub-zero protections against "theft." And yet, authors are constantly appearing and making a mark as a direct result of their creative talent. And by establishing their bonafines for quality, they can even start making money themselves off of patreon. Name recognition and marketing will matter, yes, but just think about the incentives-- your goal isn't to sell your last work, it's to sell your next.

Frankly, you have insufficient faith in the free market. It's trivial to think up business models and financial instruments that could pool money from interested readers to generate new texts. Even if every current creative immediately goes out of business, people will still demand entertainment! The market will find some way to make the transaction happen.

That's going to be the case for mainstream entertainment pretty much no matter what by definition of being "mainstream entertainment". They're not aiming to be that challenging, they're aiming to appeal to mass markets. Mainstream entertainment isn't going to stop being slop if China stops watching because the average American is still a slop consumer to begin with, yet alone the below average Americans that still have money to spend on the Netflix subscriptions and theater tickets. If anything a lot of modern mainstream media is arguably better compared to the slop of Dance Moms and Real Housewives and Kardashians and Honey BooBoo and shitty reality television from just a decade or two ago.

The top ten highest grossing movies in 1990 looks very different from today. IPs have always been a thing. Slop has always been a thing.

But you used to have smaller-scale movies like American Beauty be one of the biggest movies of the year, you used to have more variety in your action slop so you'd get a Gladiator along with your Marvel and Bruckheimer slop, and that movie could credibly win Oscars without it being a pity nomination like with current comic book films like Black Panther.

If anything, the American audience has proven itself capable of watching more complex stuff. Not just in the past but on TV today. Part of the problem is the opposite: films have an even larger global market they need to appeal to today. The slop is extra bland because they need to squeeze juice out of every disparate community in the world.

Without any protections it seems like success will be defined even more by name recognition and marketing skills rather than genuine creative talent.

Is that what happened to the zombie genre?

Also if you've ever consumed standard Chinese entertainment products they're hardly immune from slop creation.

The suggestion that China was ever respecting ip is absurd. As a movie-lover, market stalls full of high quality bootlegs used to be one of the perks of visiting Hong Kong.

You're right that I don't exactly have a high opinion of chinese IP protections. Though honestly-- it's not like I'm currently respecting chinese (or japanese, or korean) IPs either... R.I.P kissanime. But As /u/HalloweenSnarry guessed, I want to do away with any fig leaf, any pretense that IP law matters. It's a consummate waste for us all to be jumping through hoops, when increasingly it won't even be humans coming up with new ideas-- it'll be AIs, running on illegaly acquired training data.

The ONLY exception I'd make is for trademarks. I would actually protest against, as you called it, "Chinese Batman." The right to advertise a work as "Batman" should be restricted to original inventor, and their heirs-- a sort of maker's mark, used to guarantee authenticity. In contrast /u/HereAndGone mentioned the use of IP inside another property, and I'm fine with that.

As cannabis legalisation around the globe shows, even trivial inconveniences add up. Before legalisation, I thought legalizing was good but kind of pointless - it wasn't particularly hard to get nor did I expect to get into significant trouble even when caught (at least with the small amounts I had as a customer).

Now after legalisation, I actually lean towards it having been a mistake, bc consumption increased so much, especially in frequency, that it's both gotten really annoying to go over campus due to the smell and evidence is adding up that while occasional usage isn't problematic, daily usage is. At the very least, even assuming no long-term effects, a decent chunk of students is blasted out of their mind perpetually.

Presumably, GBRK is imagining something along the lines of straight-up unlicensed serious productions based on Western IP. Imagine a Chinese Batman that is functionally identical to the actual thing, but they just didn't pay Warner Bros. for any rights.

Imagine a Chinese Batman that is functionally identical to the actual thing, but they just didn't pay Warner Bros. for any rights.

Look at Indian movies, there is a South India director who is working on creating his own cinematic universe of superheroes inspired by native myths and traditions. The movie is great fun, it may not be as polished as Hollywood but it deliberately references Western superheroes and their influence on the villain of the story (he wants to be the Indian Batman or Spiderman and, let's say, goes too far in pursuit of that - the lesson from Bruce Wayne should not be "you need dead parents to motivate you, if you can't get them naturally store-bought is fine so arrange their deaths"!)

There need not be any clue that it's unofficial either. You could just release sequels to novels before the original author has a chance, under the author's own name, why not.

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