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Without copyright you cannot write contracts about creative works, because there is no value to exchange. Creative works without legal protection are free and t

Without copyright you cannot write contracts about creative works, because there is no value to exchange. Creative works without legal protection are free and therefore cannot be investments or subscriptions. Just like I can’t get people to invest in or subscribe to the air in front of my house. I think you are headed down the wrong path here. You don’t need to eliminate intellectual property to preserve general purpose computing. You just have to change the guardrails on how IP enforcement works. They’ve changed many times and they can change again. And it’s way more achievable than ripping copyright out of society entirely.

matheusmoreira 5y ago
> Without copyright you cannot write contracts about creative works, because there is no value to exchange. There is no value even with copyright. Its value is made up, created via artificial scarcity whose days became numbered the minute computers were invented. There's no point in perpetuating this system. The true value is the labor of creators. Data is abundant. Creators are rare. They need to somehow get paid for the labor of creating rather than copies of the finished product. > Creative works without legal protection are free and therefore cannot be investments or subscriptions. We can invest in the creator. Paying them up front like investments, or continuously every month like patronage. > You don’t need to eliminate intellectual property to preserve general purpose computing. You just have to change the guardrails on how IP enforcement works. I'm not convinced the copyright industry will ever stop. The situation gets worse every year. How is this supposed to change with copyright holders still around? Their lobbying power is immense. > They’ve changed many times and they can change again. They've changed for the worse. How many times has copyright duration been extended? How many of our rights eroded? Fair use rights? Public domain rights? They mean nothing anymore. When was the last time some work entered the public domain?
- snowwrestler 5y ago
  Winnie the Pooh entered the public domain 24 days ago. And value has a legal meaning in the context of contracts, regardless of how you personally feel about copyright. You’re convinced that copyright industry has tremendous power; but apparently you are also convinced that the only way forward is to 100% defeat them. I’m just saying there may be more options than the extremes of total fail / total win. Also, your ideas about investing in creators are orthogonal to copyright; you can do all of that today and copyright will neither help nor hinder. Commissioning creative works is great and in fact predates copyright.
- SR2Z 5y ago
  > There is no value even with copyright. Its value is made up, And I'm sure that's why Disney makes billions of dollars selling movie tickets every year, right? The moviegoers who drag themselves out of the house just can't be trusted to determine value? Yeah, the value is determined by scarcity. That's the point of IP law. Otherwise the value would be zero, and these movies would not be made because they'd instantly get copied ad infinitum and anyone proposing to spend more than fun money on one would be shunned. > The true value is the labor of creators. No, and this sounds an awful lot like the Labor Theory of Value. The value of IP is what people are willing to pay for it, same as any other market good. Comic book franchises were basically worthless until Disney and WB blew them up, for example. It's rare for any media to succeed without marketing. Value requires far more than just creators and it's absurd to pretend otherwise. > We can invest in the creator. Paying them up front like investments, or continuously every month like patronage. There are far, far more creators than there could ever be works of great cultural significance, and the creators building valuable IP are compensated for it far more than they would under any other practical scheme. > I'm not convinced the copyright industry will ever stop. The situation gets worse every year. How is this supposed to change with copyright holders still around? Their lobbying power is immense. By passing laws. It's literally that simple. You can replace "copyright holders" with "oil barons" or "AT&T" and see how silly that sounds. Copyright, unfortunately, is at the very bottom of everyone's list of priorities, and for obvious reasons. You ask "how is this supposed to change?" as if the situation is unbearable, but it's really not. A big reason for why nobody cares is that your average consumer now can consume pretty much everything more cheaply than ever before - fully legally. And so what if Google makes an obvious and stupid mistake with Google Drive every now and then? They'll generally fix it pretty quickly, and there are a million similarly-priced competitors that don't do this if you're not satisfied with the quality of the (free) service. > When was the last time some work entered the public domain? Given that copyright is automatic and requires no registration, there's a steady flow of works entering the public domain. OG Mickey Mouse lost copyright a few years ago, IIRC. tl;dr there's a gigantic jump from "copyright protections are frequently onerous and stupid" to "we should abolish IP law." You are giving evidence for the first and acting like it justifies the second.

matheusmoreira 5y ago

> Without copyright you cannot write contracts about creative works, because there is no value to exchange. There is no value even with copyright. Its value is made up, created via artificial scarcity whose days became numbered the minute computers were invented. There's no point in perpetuating this system. The true value is the labor of creators. Data is abundant. Creators are rare. They need to somehow get paid for the labor of creating rather than copies of the finished product. > Creative works without legal protection are free and therefore cannot be investments or subscriptions. We can invest in the creator. Paying them up front like investments, or continuously every month like patronage. > You don’t need to eliminate intellectual property to preserve general purpose computing. You just have to change the guardrails on how IP enforcement works. I'm not convinced the copyright industry will ever stop. The situation gets worse every year. How is this supposed to change with copyright holders still around? Their lobbying power is immense. > They’ve changed many times and they can change again. They've changed for the worse. How many times has copyright duration been extended? How many of our rights eroded? Fair use rights? Public domain rights? They mean nothing anymore. When was the last time some work entered the public domain?

snowwrestler 5y ago
Winnie the Pooh entered the public domain 24 days ago. And value has a legal meaning in the context of contracts, regardless of how you personally feel about copyright. You’re convinced that copyright industry has tremendous power; but apparently you are also convinced that the only way forward is to 100% defeat them. I’m just saying there may be more options than the extremes of total fail / total win. Also, your ideas about investing in creators are orthogonal to copyright; you can do all of that today and copyright will neither help nor hinder. Commissioning creative works is great and in fact predates copyright.
SR2Z 5y ago
> There is no value even with copyright. Its value is made up, And I'm sure that's why Disney makes billions of dollars selling movie tickets every year, right? The moviegoers who drag themselves out of the house just can't be trusted to determine value? Yeah, the value is determined by scarcity. That's the point of IP law. Otherwise the value would be zero, and these movies would not be made because they'd instantly get copied ad infinitum and anyone proposing to spend more than fun money on one would be shunned. > The true value is the labor of creators. No, and this sounds an awful lot like the Labor Theory of Value. The value of IP is what people are willing to pay for it, same as any other market good. Comic book franchises were basically worthless until Disney and WB blew them up, for example. It's rare for any media to succeed without marketing. Value requires far more than just creators and it's absurd to pretend otherwise. > We can invest in the creator. Paying them up front like investments, or continuously every month like patronage. There are far, far more creators than there could ever be works of great cultural significance, and the creators building valuable IP are compensated for it far more than they would under any other practical scheme. > I'm not convinced the copyright industry will ever stop. The situation gets worse every year. How is this supposed to change with copyright holders still around? Their lobbying power is immense. By passing laws. It's literally that simple. You can replace "copyright holders" with "oil barons" or "AT&T" and see how silly that sounds. Copyright, unfortunately, is at the very bottom of everyone's list of priorities, and for obvious reasons. You ask "how is this supposed to change?" as if the situation is unbearable, but it's really not. A big reason for why nobody cares is that your average consumer now can consume pretty much everything more cheaply than ever before - fully legally. And so what if Google makes an obvious and stupid mistake with Google Drive every now and then? They'll generally fix it pretty quickly, and there are a million similarly-priced competitors that don't do this if you're not satisfied with the quality of the (free) service. > When was the last time some work entered the public domain? Given that copyright is automatic and requires no registration, there's a steady flow of works entering the public domain. OG Mickey Mouse lost copyright a few years ago, IIRC. tl;dr there's a gigantic jump from "copyright protections are frequently onerous and stupid" to "we should abolish IP law." You are giving evidence for the first and acting like it justifies the second.