4 ms·
Fictional works are not a special case. I'd personally argue copyright never made sense, but people like to say back when the marginal cost of producing duplica
by zanny 10y ago
Fictional works are not a special case. I'd personally argue copyright never made sense, but people like to say back when the marginal cost of producing duplicates of information was greater than nothing, copyright at least functioned.
Remember, today, there are millions of people using their computer to voluntarily and entirely charitably give away information for free, that other people want to stop them from doing. That is so absurd and insane.
I've said it before, and many of us will inevitably say it again, but this is not 1800. Charge for what is valuable and scarce, your creativity (or in the case of a scientist, their knowledge), not what is not valuable or scarce, which is bits on a hard drive.
- dnautics 10y agoTo help categorize and understand: I'd characterize your argument as the "Stallman" argument, where the simplicity of copying justifies the moral argument against copyright. There is a alternate vein which doesn't have to do with value or scarcity, but which has to do with rivalrousness (that is a very subtle distinction): http://blog.ninapaley.com/2011/07/09/culture-is-anti-rivalrous/ http://blog.ninapaley.com/2011/07/09/culture-is-anti-rivalro... You may find it interesting.
- zanny 10y agoThat is an excellent argument from what I would also call the big picture perspective. I just usually use the utilitarian one because it just seems any time you want to argue about social fundamentals - be it anything from segregated bathrooms (of all varieties) to street naming to intellectual property, people get incredibly defensive about the status quo as if their livelihood depended on it - as if culture / information cannot be made without IP, rather than the reverse. I do think at some point in the future historians will look back and see the catastrophic death of culture permanent copyright wrought throughout the 20th / 21st centuries as a huge crime against humanity. We are sad we have few historical recounts of ancient Egyptian / Greek / Roman living, or even moreso ancient Mesoamerican peoples, or the Babylonians, but we seem perfectly complacent in how some ~95% of all music, film, photography, writing, and even probably code is lost forever because of copyright meaning if the owners take it to their grave it stays dead with them. It is just a tremendous disservice to humanity to just let so much creative work die like that, and how generations have now grown and died without any of the commercial works of their childhood ever being accessible to their own creativeness in their lifetimes.
- mjevans 10y agoFuture historians will view those who today take steps to 'liberate' and 'preserve' the modern culture as the heros and those who sought to lock it away as villains. Either that, or I fear we face a future as described in Idiocracy.
- abetusk 10y agoI think this is a mis-representation of Stallman's point. Notice that Stallman has his non-code media mostly under a no-derivatives creative commons license. From what I understand, Stallman is concerned about making sure our infrastructure is free (as in freedom). The simplicity of copying is almost a tangential issue. His point is that for a society to be considered free (democratic, empowered, etc.) the people need access in a meaningful way to the infrastructure that helps create that society. To me, his point is a natural extension of forcing government documents to be under public domain and providing architectural blueprints for public scrutiny. Maybe I'm wrong and mis-interpreting Stallman's point. Do you have a reference that would support your claimed stance on Stallman's 'ease of copying = moral justification against copyright' interpretation?
- zanny 10y agoNo, Stallman is a copyright supporter. He just sees it as a tool to empower users. And from his perspective, it makes some sense. If everything were IP liberated, there would be no compulsion to release source code, but my optimism makes me hope that if you cannot profit off software sales, you have no reason not to also disclose the source. If you can only make money off people paying you to write the software, having the broadest audience becomes crucial, and in such a world (much in the same way most developer tools work outside the MS ecosystem) not being free software would mean nobody would fathom using your software.
- dnautics 10y agoI have had an extensive 10+ email personal correspondence with Stillman about patents. Tl;dr He's very much for patents that aren't software patents.
- rogual 10y agoThat was a good read. I'd be interested to see the author address trademarks and branding, because that's where you find the intersection of identity (rivalrous in her thesis) and the creative arts (non-rivalrous). The author states that cultural works increase in value the more they are shared. At the risk of debating semantics ("shared", "value") — would Disney still be a $50B company if anyone had been allowed to release a Mickey Mouse cartoon?
- pbhjpbhj 10y agoMickey Mouse is a trademark too, so once out of copyright one could release a cartoon featuring the character but not a "Mickey Mouse cartoon" per se. It's not clear to me if you could even call the mouse Mickey and avoid infringing the trademark.
- dnautics 10y agoI'm not sure about that. Once out of copyright you couldn't release a cartoon featuring the character (as that's a trademark), but you could make copies of steamboat willie and freely distribute the content over the internet (or VHS).
- dnautics 10y agoI don't know about nina, but I personally see trademark as the only "valid" one of the three forms of IP (precisely because of rivalrousness). On the other hand, there are always things which challenge me: David Tran does not trademark Sriracha.
- Houshalter 10y agoI somewhat agree with you, but I'm trying to propose a reasonable compromise. Let Disney keep the mouse copyrighted forever, but give us scientific works that have lots of value being public. Maybe we should try to get fictional works freed later, but at least everyone can agree on this.
- patmcc 10y agoI don't understand why marginal cost going down causes copyright to make less sense; I'd argue it now makes more sense, as creators can more easily lose out. Copyright is intended to incentivize people to create things by giving them a limited monopoly on the ability to copy/distribute it. I write a book, no one else can print and sell copies without my permission. Thus I have a chance to make some money off it. If I write a book and anyone can sell it, I'm less likely to make money off it. If that argument was true in 1800 when some other guy had to physically print out my book, why is it somehow not true today when you can upload a torrent of it? (I do think current copyright terms are absolutely absurd. If they were 10 years or renewable with fees or anything else that would solve 95% of the problems.)
- zanny 10y agoBecause in 1800 someone had to spend some money making copies. If you have no copyright back then, the argument (albeit wrong, in my mind) would go that you needed the monopoly power to stop your published works being immediately undercut by bootleg copiers, because they did not have the upfront costs of actually producing the novel material. In practice, even that explanation reflects on the insanity of copyright, in that you should never get to the point where you have done free work and now need the state to assist you in making a living off it. You should be seeking compensation for the act of creation, not for the act of copying.
- st3v3r 10y agoHow is that not exactly how it is today? Those people uploading torrents don't have any of the costs of creating the work.
- zanny 10y agoFor the same reasons people habitually treat fan works as independent from commercial ones, today people are doing the work for free when in the 18th century you could make a business out of duplicating others written works for profit. Today, while counterfeiting markets like that still exist in less Internet-rich countries, once you have the Internet, the only thing such markets still apply to are novel physical inventions, and that is never done by small entrepenurs stealing other peoples work, it is by large corporations using economies of scale to produce replcias of a novel product that can undercut the original creator. Because there is an important distinction between goods and information. A good is valuable for what it is - a fridge because it cools, a car because it can move on roads. The utility is in the physical atomic composition of the product. With informational works, which is what copyright applies to, the value is exclusively in the encoded information - you can transfer it in myriad forms, from light to electrons to magnetism to etchings on a wall, but in those circumstances the media of transit is much less relevant than the material itself. It was only when the transit material was itself scarce that the argument for copyright was made. When transit becomes so cheap it is effectively free where millions will send you a copy for no charge, the assumptions are broken.
- st3v3r 10y agoReproduction is not the only cost. There is also a large cost in actually making the thing in the first place. "Remember, today, there are millions of people using their computer to voluntarily and entirely charitably give away information for free, that other people want to stop them from doing. That is so absurd and insane." Only until you remember that what they're trying to share wasn't theirs in the first place. If you create something, great, share it with everyone you want. But don't you dare force others into doing the same thing with what they created.