Technology
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The problem is that without copyright all a big company has to do is steal the work of smaller unknown artists and profit from it big time. The smaller artist then has zero recourse to get any money because their avenue for profit is ruined. Copyright allows them to sue the person who stole their work and get the profits from that.
hence the other issues intertwined with it. if big corpos are going to do that, we must abolish big corpos
What do you define as a big corporation? And why exactly should we abolish them?
that's just my leftie side talking. i'm not inherently opposed to the idea of businesses, since money as a unit of exchange will exist for as long as there is an economic system, but for-profit businesses should be small and relegated to a secondary role in life. there's a lot of debate around what should be the way that we all get food, water, a home, medical care, etc. (the primary split is people who believe in top-down governmental assistance vs bottom-up peer support networks) but every leftist agrees that the corporations that control our lives should be stamped out.
i guess a large corporation can be defined roughly as a business where the owners do not run it directly. an important part of leftist thought is the divisions between the working class (or the "proletariat" if you want to get fancy) and the owning class (or the "bourgeoisie"). the working class does all the work, and the owning class merely takes the value that the working class produces. a business that's large enough to the point where the owners are able to just leave it running and leech money off of it without doing any real work is a large corporation in my book.
when businesses get that size, they tend to forget their mission and instead focus on only profit. and they'll do anything to get more profit, like:
one needs only to look at the Gilded Age for proof of my point. nothing has fundamentally changed between then and now, except that the government is doing things (and even then, not enough).
a lot of problems we face as a society today are the results of big corporations being big corporations. inflation? shareholders being greedy. climate change? corporations forgoing environment-protecting measures because they would cost something. cost of living crisis? you guessed it — corporations trying to squeeze every bit of money out of the working class. and corporations will keep doing this over and over again. as long as they exist, they will dig the hole deeper and deeper because there might be gold at the bottom.
unfortunately, nobody can agree on the best way to hurt big corporations, but fortunately there are a lot of options. they range from electing socialists to office so they can exert governmental control over big corporations, to striking, to outright class warfare. unsurprisingly the practicality of all the different options is mixed, and in any case we are nowhere near where we need to be to put any of them into action.