4 ms·

I think they've got a tough legal case. I think they will lose the battle, but I hope win the war. Maybe they can somehow get a win in the court of public opini

• kmeisthax 6y ago
  The 13th Amendment would not come into play here, unless you can somehow prove fictional characters are sentient, or whole-brain emulation becomes a thing and people's brain scans start getting copyright ownership attached to them. Those would make for a great SCP but aren't valid legal arguments today. There will never be widespread support for copyright abolishment, for two reasons: 1. The vast majority of people are apathetic to the issue when it doesn't affect them. There's more public support for abolishing all private property than there is for abolishing or even limiting copyright. Hell, even the Soviets had copyright laws, albeit weak ones. 2. The court of public opinion has a known bias in favor of individual creator-owners. It is very easy to denounce large publishing conglomerates suing individuals for every infringement, but it's harder to denounce, say, a beloved indie creator going after cheaply-made knockoff merch on AliExpress. >I for one am tired of all these obtuse groups who think their minuscule contributions to our common intellectual library, which are mostly regurgitated ideas from the past thousands of years, entitle them to some monopoly profits and control over others. This sentiment is toxic. Making the author out to be the bad guy is a losing opinion (see factor 2). Any copyright reform that attempts to justify itself with "authors are regurgitating ideas" is doomed to failure. The people are not going to go for "authors shouldn't own their work", and arguing that is going to make it harder to argue for more limited reforms.
  • breck 6y ago
    > The 13th Amendment would not come into play here, Yes it would be a huge stretch, but I look at copyright/patent law as unjust restrictions on the freedom of one person by another. > There's more public support for abolishing all private property than there is for abolishing or even limiting copyright. I think this is a really good point. I would say 99/100 of the general population has zero opinion on copyright/patent law, so present day it would fall far low on the list of priorities. > The vast majority of people are apathetic to the issue when it doesn't affect them. You are very much right that people are apathetic to it. But if people weren't affected by it I wouldn't care. I care because I think people are greatly affected by it, though that isn't widely reported. For example, millions of people are strongly affect by the opioid crisis, and if you trace that back to the root cause, what do you find: patent law (Oxycontin was being heavily prescribed over cheap generics like ibuprofen because of an incentive stream due to monopoly profits from patent laws). If you look at healthcare, or the cost of education, or tech consolidation, or the current news industry, all of these problem categories in the USA have a common thread where the industries depend upon copyright/patent laws, with resulting harmful incentives. It's like when you have a software system where you've got the underlying data model wrong. Users will constantly point out the loads of specific easily observable problems but the real root cause and solution is to fix the underlying data model. Why isn't it widely reported on? Well, I could be completely wrong and these laws are a good thing for everyone. Or maybe because the media doesn't amplify the voices who have been researching and promoting this because as the saying goes "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." > This sentiment is toxic. I'm not too sure. I think you could be right, and I think my negative exasperated tone above could be counter productive. But I also think it might help to be direct with creators about the true value of contributions relative to what they are building upon. The success (and humility) in the OSS world is perhaps the way of the future. Successful OSS developers have appropriate humility that they are building mostly on the works of others and give their work away under public domain (ie. sqlite) or permissive licenses like MIT. Very few developers want to use libraries where the authors insist on control. That zeitgeist hasn't yet moved to other creative industries yet though, that I'm aware of. I also think one might win some minds when you make the case that when a janitor cleans a room, she then doesn't get to charge a fee to everyone who enters that room for the next 120 years. Spot on points though. I am not too confident in the odds of success.