2 ms·

> Commissions are all well and good, but they don’t pay very well and there’s a physical limit on how many a single person can do. > Which is precisely why it'

by comex 11y ago

> Commissions are all well and good, but they don’t pay very well and there’s a physical limit on how many a single person can do. > Which is precisely why it's not okay. You're not adding anything of your own, you're just profiting off of someone else's stuff. Why should it be the original author's right to dictate whether certain forms of creativity can be expressed based on their work? The net effect cannot be anything other than to stifle creativity; this could be justified by ascribing to the author some inherent moral right to the integrity of their idea (as French law does, among others); but the sheer wealth of ideas and creativity - cultural richness - associated with many fan works makes it very hard for me to accept such a puritanical stance. Especially when the "author" is a giant corporation which doesn't actually care much about artistic integrity, but does care about money: as you mention, this is not the case for Undertale, but it is for the majority of culturally important works these days. By the way, by "ideas and creativity" I don't mainly mean putting their picture on a button: I mean things like fan fiction, fan animation, fan games, all sorts of things you can find from dedicated communities on the internet. The original article mentioned Super Mario Bros. - there was recently a new speedrun record on that game. In case you haven't heard of it, there's a big community on the internet dedicated to speedrunning games, meaning completing them as fast as possible. Most do it in person, practicing the routes through the levels over and over like some sort of athletic routine; while some instead see value in painstakingly building a sequence of button inputs which beats the game when played back by an emulator or robot, thereby exploring the game's boundaries of possibility in a way humans can't quite attain, which is more like art. Well, guess what? While speedrunning itself isn't copyright infringement, streaming or uploading videos of your runs is. If game publishers enforced their rights, they could shut down the whole thing, never mind that most of the creative value created by speedrunning has little to do with the original developers. Now it turns out some people at Nintendo don't like emulators, which are required for the latter category (tool-assisted speedruns), so recently some TAS of Super Mario Bros. 3 was semi-randomly taken down from YouTube. Thankfully, the Internet is not so strictly regulated that the video can't be preserved elsewhere; but what if it was? Would it really be culturally positive to enforce the law in this case? That said, even going back to the merch case - if I want to express my personality by putting a button with some character on my shirt - again, how exactly is this hurting the original author? Why should my ability to do so depend on whether they've gotten around to setting up some distribution arrangement yet? Well, the above ignores the obvious money argument. If someone is going to profit from something whose value is mostly based on it containing person X's creative work (with some value added by the work of actually printing it onto buttons and arranging to transport it to a convention or whatnot, as well as the physical materials), shouldn't it be X? In my opinion, yes. That's why I'd support having mandatory royalties instead of the absolute control imposed by current copyright laws. It's not exactly unprecedented - it's what we currently have for both radio stations playing original copies of songs and general distribution of covers. Why not apply it more broadly?

eridius 11y ago
> The net effect cannot be anything other than to stifle creativity This could not possibly be more wrong. The entire purpose of copyright law is to enable creativity. Two main reasons for this: 1. If anyone can take the stories and characters and images you create, and exploit them commercially without having to worry about copyright, that is a massive stifling effect on creativity. You made a popular character? Tough, some big company is going to make all the money off of it and you're going to be left broke. No incentive whatsoever to actually put in the time and effort to create things if you can't reap the benefits. Copyright law exists precisely to let the creator actually benefit from their creations. 2. If everyone can make money by copying other people, who's actually creating stuff anymore? The other main reason for copyright law is to encourage people to come up with their own unique creations, instead of just copying each other. Now, it's certainly true that corporations have managed to extend copyright law far beyond what most people would consider reasonable. But that doesn't negate copyright law's reason for existing. > if I want to express my personality by putting a button with some character on my shirt - again, how exactly is this hurting the original author Because the author has now lost control over the distribution of their work (which is one of the exclusive rights granted by copyright), and any income that said distribution would have generated. Even if they don't want to sell buttons themselves, that's entirely their right to do so, and maybe they have good reasons for not wanting to flood the market with every possible expression of their character. Maybe they don't want to dilute the character, or don't want to have bad reproductions or low-quality merchandise hurting their public perception. Or maybe they just don't care about buttons but would be happy to sign a licensing deal to let someone else sell them if that someone else actually went through the effort of proposing an appropriate deal. No matter what the reason is, it's absolutely their right to control their creation. We as a society have decided that artistic creation is a valid form of work, just as valid as any other kind of work, and that the artist is entitled to benefit from their work. You are not entitled to copy someone else's stuff just because you like it; the very fact that you assign value to their creation means that their creation is valuable, and your copies are literally stealing that value from the creator. If the creator doesn't want to sell the merchandise you want to buy, that's absolutely their right, and the fact that you want something does not entitle you to that thing.

by comex 11y ago

eridius 11y ago

> The net effect cannot be anything other than to stifle creativity This could not possibly be more wrong. The entire purpose of copyright law is to enable creativity. Two main reasons for this: 1. If anyone can take the stories and characters and images you create, and exploit them commercially without having to worry about copyright, that is a massive stifling effect on creativity. You made a popular character? Tough, some big company is going to make all the money off of it and you're going to be left broke. No incentive whatsoever to actually put in the time and effort to create things if you can't reap the benefits. Copyright law exists precisely to let the creator actually benefit from their creations. 2. If everyone can make money by copying other people, who's actually creating stuff anymore? The other main reason for copyright law is to encourage people to come up with their own unique creations, instead of just copying each other. Now, it's certainly true that corporations have managed to extend copyright law far beyond what most people would consider reasonable. But that doesn't negate copyright law's reason for existing. > if I want to express my personality by putting a button with some character on my shirt - again, how exactly is this hurting the original author Because the author has now lost control over the distribution of their work (which is one of the exclusive rights granted by copyright), and any income that said distribution would have generated. Even if they don't want to sell buttons themselves, that's entirely their right to do so, and maybe they have good reasons for not wanting to flood the market with every possible expression of their character. Maybe they don't want to dilute the character, or don't want to have bad reproductions or low-quality merchandise hurting their public perception. Or maybe they just don't care about buttons but would be happy to sign a licensing deal to let someone else sell them if that someone else actually went through the effort of proposing an appropriate deal. No matter what the reason is, it's absolutely their right to control their creation. We as a society have decided that artistic creation is a valid form of work, just as valid as any other kind of work, and that the artist is entitled to benefit from their work. You are not entitled to copy someone else's stuff just because you like it; the very fact that you assign value to their creation means that their creation is valuable, and your copies are literally stealing that value from the creator. If the creator doesn't want to sell the merchandise you want to buy, that's absolutely their right, and the fact that you want something does not entitle you to that thing.