4 ms·

In what way is copyright "banking the bets"?

• mold_aid 4y ago
  Publishing is generally speculative, and the common perception of "the author" as an ordinary individual with an interesting expression of an idea is inaccurate. A more useful analogue is "student who has just taken out a loan." Non-dominant publishers, meanwhile, bet that the large advances they do give (way too large) pan out into a property that can claw back some market share and cultural attention from major franchises, who should in this metaphor be known less as a copyright holder and more as "the house." For the general expression of ideas in a corporate setting, copyright is an asset that is backed by a legal team. You're betting that a property gives you a competitive advantage.
• rglullis 4y ago
  Do you think it's reasonable to keep all the legal/political apparatus required for enforcement of copyright and IP laws just on the basis of "we need to protect the people who want to go to art school and hope that their art will be worth something one day?" I don't.
  • kaoD 4y ago
    No. I think we need to do that regardless of whether their art will or won't be worth something. I don't think my open source stuff is every going to be worth a penny. I still want it to be protected so that its license is respected. Mine, and everyone else's.
    • rglullis 4y ago
      Copyright law does not stop bad actors. The fact that you (and I) wish it was respected does not change things in any practical way.
      • kaoD 4y ago
        > Copyright law does not stop bad actors. Yes it does.
        • rglullis 4y ago
          Back in 2005, way before Huawei was known as a smartphone manufacturer, I was working at an R&D office focused on phone networks in Brazil. I went to a meeting with one of our clients that was just signing with us. The main reason that he was contracting with us was, I quote, "the last time we went to China we found a Huawei rep making a demo of an application that worked exactly like ours - which was meant to run on Cisco gear. Even the terminal escape sequences to get to debugging mode was the same. The Chinese were stealing from us and there was absolutely nothing we could do about it." Copyright law might be enough of a deterrent to make Joe Nobody pay $9.99 to Netflix instead of torrenting movies, and (on occasion) it may be enough to force some high-profile artist to give credit to some other lesser known musician who "served as inspiration". Outside of that, copyright law is as effective to "stop bad actors" as the "War on Drugs" is effective to stop organized crime and drug trafficking.
          • Dalewyn 4y ago
            Copyright laws rely on enforcement, which China couldn't give a rat's ass about. Brazil, however, clearly does, and your employer at the time earned a new client because of copyright laws that will hopefully protect the client.
            • rglullis 4y ago
              If that was true, people in Brazil wouldn't be pirating movies as much as they do, and there wouldn't be computer shops in downtown São Paulo selling cracked copies of Windows to small/medium business like they still do.
              • kaoD 4y ago
                So following your logic we should decriminalize murders since, well, those still happen anyways.