3 ms·

"making sure that creators had a limited time where they could exclusively profit" sounds like "protection of profit" to me.

• qu4z-2 4y ago
  Right, but it's the means not the end.
• autoexec 4y ago
  That was a means to an end, not the end itself. That's the point. The goal of copyright has always been very clear. It was for encouraging the creation of new works.
  • godelski 4y ago
    Done through the means of ensuring that the original artist may profit off of their own hard work and no one else can steal the hard work and profit off it. The abuse you're talking about is the extension of the same mechanism that allows rights owners to profit for much longer periods of time, which actually discourages the creation of new works. This can all be true because there aren't binary solutions and things need nuance.
    • autoexec 4y ago
      Copyright is abused in may ways that go far beyond perpetually extended copyright protections. The DMCA has enabled copyright to be used as a weapon to silence criticism. Companies have created a revenue stream out of sending DMCA notices demanding that people (innocent or otherwise) pay settlements now or else face long and expensive court battles. Creators are threatened with lawsuits or dragged through the courts on highly questionable copyright grounds just to bankrupt them and prevent them from being a competitor. Recently, the media industry has taken to suing ISPs for billions if they refuse to permanently stop offering service to customers who have been repeatedly accused of violating copyright. Without any court finding you guilty or any actual proof that a violation took place, if you are accused multiple times and your ISP doesn't disconnect your service forever they could be fined out of existence. Most of the ISPs sued so far have settled out of court, but the media industry has been winning in the courts as well. Copyright is regularly abused to do things that go far beyond what it was intended to, and often to the determent of the creation of new works. Most of the people hurt by such abuses have no ability to fight it, and very little hope of actually winning even if they try.
    • realusername 4y ago
      Most of the copyrights nowadays are held by large conglomerates anyways and not artists, sure that's not a nuanced point of view but copyright isn't nuanced either
      • godelski 4y ago
        The nuance is with respect to the above conversation. I don't think anyone here is disagreeing that the system is being abused and that the copyright holders are abused by large conglomerates. I don't think anyone is arguing against the points you're bringing up.
    • int_19h 4y ago
      Original copyright terms didn't last for a lifetime, either.
      • Oxidation 4y ago
        It's more like 2 lifetimes now: it's usually 70 years after the death of the author, which can be substantially longer than 95 years.