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Yet more examples of how copyright destroys culture rather than driving it
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this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2024
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As an artist, I like having the ability to tell people they cannot host my commercial works, cannot claim my own writing or characters for themselves, cannot reproduce them for profit, need my permission to sell them.
I think copyright abuse is rampant and favors corporate entities far too much in most countries, but I think the solution is reform not destruction of the system.
I'm more open to burning the whole edifice of copyright law down than you are, but the key reform that I want that maybe we could agree on is that it should be legal to distribute coprighted works for free. No need to to let someone else try to make a profit by undercutting your sales, but if someone is willing to make and distribute copies (or ecopies) of a work to no profit for themselves they should be allowed to. What that would mean in practice if it was legal would be an online content library containing all human art and culture, freely available for download to all comers. It might hurt the income of some creators, but you'd still have a lot of other ways to make money that don't entail depriving people of that library.
You can have that library today (see: Project Gutenberg), just on a delay. The problem, IMO, is that the delay is much too long. If copyright only lasted 10 years, it would be much more useful as a store of human knowledge. We could even allow an application for a longer term for smaller creators who need more time to monetize their works.
That's pretty close to how it used to work in the US, it has just been twisted by large orgs like Disney and the RIAA.
Yeah Project Gutenberg really demonstrates how this is all pretty much already built, just illegal to include recent works in. Though of course that's just books where the post copyright free library could also include all other art and culture such as tv, radio, movies, images, games, etc
Sure, and there's no reason it can't include other art and culture, like TV shows, radio programs, etc. The main issue is the length of time before those become legal to redistribute. It sucks that only movies made in the early 1900s are legal to redistribute, when the most culturally relevant works are still 50+ years away from entering the public domain.
So we should be looking at shortening that time, trying to end copyright entirely isn't going to happen.
Shortening the time is good, and adjusting it while it still does apply to allow for more legal free sharing of the work.
The problem is that copyright owners are concerned about losing sales, they care much less whether you're making a profit on that lost sale.
One thing I think we should do is require stores to allow transfer of copyright. So if I buy a game or movie, I should be able to give that game or movie to someone else. I would no longer have access to it, so it would be like giving a physical disk or whatever.
Alright but Archiving is already an exception to most laws (clearly not well enforced seeing what happened to the IA) and your proposal would harm new artists who need to share their works in order to gain publicity for something they intend to sell and sustain themselves on.
"your proposal would harm young artists who need to share their works in order to gain publicity for something they intend to sell and sustain themselves on."
The default is already for young artists to share a lot of their work hoping to get noticed. Getting rid of copyright would be reorienting the whole system to center that experience more rather than the established artists and art producing corporations who now are in a strong enough position to charge. "Making it" would just mean that your patreon was doing gangbusters rather than selling a lot of copies of whatever your art is.
No, it would empower anybody, especially corporations, to take the new artists' ideas and work and repackage them as an item for sale to others. Anything you share would not be covered by copyright and therefor no longer be your property.
Individuals cannot compete with organizations.
If you are already sharing something for free in order to gain publicity, what is the downside of others repackaging them and spreading them further? That is exactly the kind of publicity you're trying to gain.
But you're not profiting off of it. The corporation is. They have no incentive to give you credit, every incentive to claim that they made it which they would of course be allowed to do. They could even start making their own derivative pieces or continuations. The artist has gained nothing from this hypothetical.
Eliminating copyright doesn't mean they'd be allowed to lie about who wrote what they were publishing. Anything an artist creates blowing up and gaining wide appreciation is very good for that artist's future prospects. An artist who is spreading their work for free anyway is much better off in the scenario where there's no copyright and everyone understands the need to tip / patronize their favorite artists.
That is literally what Copyright is. Removing it means exactly that.
No copyright is about the "right" to "copy" the work in question, not the attribution. Works that are in the public domain still list the author.
IA didn't get sued for archiving. They got sued for mass redistribution.
Pretty sure that's a basic function of a publicly operated archive, but for sure there was a lot of nuance.
That's the point, though. The law is very clear that mass distributing wholesale copyrighted works isn't fair use. Digitizing it was the part justified by fair use "archival". Distribution isn't.
You have to start over and throw out the old laws. Right now there's no framework to own a file at all (outside of actually holding the copyright). It's always a license.
Throwing them out and restarting is a lot harder than restarting without throwing them out.
The core concept of ownership and copying needs to change if you want anything resembling what IA did to be protected. Because the underlying premise behind copyright legislation that that any unauthorized copy needs a specific exception to be legal, and it's impossible to use digital files without numerous copies.
That's starting from scratch.
Okay but you can literally just overwrite laws without making a period inbetween where anything and everything is allowed. That's fucking stupid.
Where did anyone say anything that resembles "make a free for all in between" in any way?
The core concepts of current laws are completely incompatible with any form of actual ownership in a digital world. You need to write new laws that start from the ground up with concepts that work.
You, then.
You should work on your reading comprehension.
You should work on your shit ideology and core values, or if you meant something other than what you explicitly said then you should work on your English writing capability.
Your inability to read a straightforward sentence is not my issue.
Do you like suing people in a court of law to enforce these rights?
What if in a world of billions of people someone makes stories or characters similar to yours. Should you sue them? What if they sue you and have better lawyers and more money. Are you prepared to go to court?
I think you are experiencing a sunken cost fallacy. Unless you have the time and money to enforce copyright then it will never work for you, only against you.
I like having the options to sue in a court of law to enforce these rights a lot more than not having rights at all.
Keep saying that when a big corporation takes your work for theirs and then sues you.
We have already past the tipping point where content creators are now paying more for their work to be heard then getting paid for their work.
Corporations are controlling our very culture with the framework that makes you feel like you have rights. There is a major disconnect here.
The gatekeeping of modern social media plus the data harvesting of LLM is strangling independent ownership, without a doubt.
It's a shame folks on Lemmy can't see it. But then Reddit is the Ur-example of big business robbing people of their work product.
Lmao
The average cost of litigating a federal copyright case from pre-trial through appeals is $278,000. But sure, keep pretending you could play with the big boys.
With a good case a lot of lawyers would be willing to work pro bono, especially when it's an individual infringed by a corporation who have plenty to take from.
For example, the script for the movie The Purge was stolen from an individual in 2012, and after 4 years of litigation Universal paid out a massive settlement in 2018 and also ended the series despite its success.
A lot of lawyers would be willing to work pro bono on a IP case? You have no way to pay for your rights then. Sounds like a system that is going to work well for you.
Reforming a bad idea does not make it a good idea. Until you can come to terms with just how imbalanced the system is then you probably don't know what is really going on.
It's imbalanced, I never said otherwise, but not having it would suck more.
If by "claim" you mean falsify authorship, I suspect this would still be illegal even without all the copyright laws.
Well, this is a problem.
You would be wrong, in the USA at least.
OK, well, that certainly should be illegal.
You love capitalism. We get it.
Not liking Anarchy isn't remotely the same as loving capitalism.
As in no copyright=anarchy?
As much as Copyright=Capitalism, yeah.
Anarchy by definition is:
Absence of any form of political authority.
Political disorder and confusion.
Absence of any cohesive principle, such as a common standard or purpose.
Literally what that word has meant for generations, etymology stemming from middle French "Anarchie" in 16th century.
Oh as in you mean no copyright makes things more like an anarchy instead of becoming 100% anarchy. I see what you mean now.