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Copyright is backwards, does not help artists and is holding back humanity as a whole. Imagine the renaissance of art, science and culture we would have if we

• colesantiago 3y ago
  Copyright gets destroyed after the artist is dead + 70 years, then it is public domain. So it is either: Use public domain works Use the artists work but ask for permission or pay license Change the laws on copyright length. (how many lawyers can you pay for?) Wait for the work to enter in the public domain (unlikely anyone will do this for any work made today)
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • FigmentEngine 3y ago
    Mickey Mouse has been extended to ~95 years so far
    • colesantiago 3y ago
      You will be soon free to use this one without Disney's permission. https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/SteamboatWillie-mickey-mouse.jpg https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Steam... But not this one. https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Standing-Picture-Of-Micky-Mouse1-1280x1289.jpg https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Stand...
• JohnFen 3y ago
  While I think copyright law is currently overbearing and harmful and desperately needs fixing, I don't agree that the concept of copyright itself is broken. The legitimate role of copyright is to encourage artists to allow public access to their works. Without some form of protection, a lot of work would never be available to most people because keeping it hidden will become the only protection artists have.
  • anonymouskimmer 3y ago
    Right. Wu Tang Clan showed how this can be done in the modern age with their Shkreli album.
    • Lacerda69 3y ago
      Sorry i dont get the point. Wutang chose to not release the album publicly and it will most likely never be public. copyright does not change that in any way, it would still be private without copyright - what am i missing?
      • anonymouskimmer 3y ago
        Agreeing with the original post I was commenting on that said: > Without some form of protection, a lot of work would never be available to most people because keeping it hidden will become the only protection artists have. Wu Tang had a bunch of listening sessions where people could listen to the record with headphones for a price. They could not record what they were listening to. It's like a concert, but no one can make bootleg recordings of it (okay, maybe with hearing aids). In the early days of the telephone there were similar ways to listen to operas and concerts remotely through a headset. If copyright didn't exist, musical artists and visual artists would be incentivized to release public snippets of their work to generate interest, and then only showcase the whole thing in private without the ability to reproduce. I can only imagine what radio would turn into.
        • 8note 3y ago
          If copyright didn't exist, artists would primarily monetize by taking commissions to make art, rather than looking to sell copies of art they already made
          • anonymouskimmer 3y ago
            Yes? Are you contradicting me or just adding another route in which broad availability of art would be limited? Most musicians monetize through performance after selling copies. While there are some jobs for spec music, it's not enough to support all of the musicians who are currently making a living off of their music.
• endisneigh 3y ago
  copyright isn't backwards. you could argue free loaders who enjoy amazing things and then want to profit off derivatives is backwards. consider that there are amazing things, right now in human existence that will exist, but do not at this moment. money fundamentally is about resource allocation. such things are less likely to be discovered without incentive. money is part of that incentive (though not the only thing). the problem is that copyright has become too overzealous and too long lasting. ideally imho it would be exponentially decaying in length based on use, or exponentially expensive to keep an exclusive right to. or perhaps right of first refusal around anyone who wants to use it being able to bid for the opportunity. there are many improvements that could be made, yes. in my view copyright should be use it or lose it. I do agree with your sentiment in that many people hold copyright to things that they are not actually using.
  • anonymouskimmer 3y ago
    > in my view copyright should be use it or lose it. It serves an additional purpose with respect to takedowns of private material (such as revenge porn). Using that would obviate the purpose in the first place. But yes, if something was available for purchase earlier, it should still be available later (and not just on the second-hand market).
    • Lacerda69 3y ago
      We can take down revenge porn or other private material without copyright of important works of science and art.
• ghostbrainalpha 3y ago
  How doesn't it help artists? It seems like the photographer here is pretty happy about her copyright. I love SCI-FI thinking about a world without copyright or patent protections, to wonder what it would be like for humanity after a couple centuries. But I can't help but feel artists not getting credit for their work, would at least hurt them on the individual level.
• anotheronebytes 3y ago
  > What redeeming quality does copyright have in light of the intellectual damage and huge amount of unnessecary bureaucracy it causes? it enforces the existence of a market of royalties dues. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royalty_payment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royalty_payment I agree, the digital technology changed things so much that it no longer makes any sense. but tell it you the king of the UK? (or some other country with "kqweeng")
• CptFribble 3y ago
  Without copyright, moneyed interests would be able to simply wait for promising new artists to create something that resonates with an audience, then copy that thing and aim their massive marketing budgets at dominating that audience with the new version owned by the [corporation, famous artist, etc]. Similar to how going viral with a new mobile game as an indie dev means you will almost immediately be cloned and pushed out by King et. al., removing copyright protections would mean that only the largest and wealthiest artists' and corporations' versions of art dominate the market. Creating something truly new and interesting would become simply a donation of that idea to the powers that be. The main problem with copyright isn't it's existence, it's that technology has allowed the wielding of it to become too quickly and brutally applied a la youtube's automated DMCA system.
  • Lacerda69 3y ago
    I get your point i think. But copyright as it exists now does not protect or benefit the "little guy" or indie artists. There have been many many instances of big record labels or game producers ripping of small artists and I have yet to see 1 (one) instance of a small artist going against $bigcorp and winning. Copyright is broken; it only protects those already moneyed and in power and savagely attacks small artists, destroys the basis of creativity (sampling) and blocks access to vital research. It must be abolished.
    • Retric 3y ago
      Copyright has transformed many poor people into multimillionaires. The Music world is full of artists going huge but it extends to other areas. J.K. Rawling for example didn’t have any significant leverage at the beginning but is wealthy by any reasonable metric.
      • dboreham 3y ago
        Was that a typo? Joanne is pretty rich by Scottish standards.
        • 3y ago
• libraryatnight 3y ago
  It's getting to the point where it seems absolutely silly that you can 'own' a particular arrangement of light and sound.
  • tgv 3y ago
    Precisely as ridiculous as owning a particular arrangements of elementary particles or varying magnetic patterns.
  • modriano 3y ago
    Sure, we can record light/sound/voltage/physical signals to more durable media, and we can distribute copies of those recordings, but the value isn't in the media used to record the signal; the value is in the desirability of the signal. To be more concrete, imaging two arrangements of light in a fiber; one is ~20GB of randomly generated noise and the other encodes instructions that a Nintendo Switch can interpret and present as the Zelda game Tears of the Kingdom. The random noise arrangement is much, much, much (!) cheaper to create than the TotK arrangement, which took 5 years of labor from a massive team to create, but people seem to like the TotK arrangement a lot more, and I don't know if it would have been possible to get that much labor allocated to arranging those bits without some technology that enables an entity to finance the labor and hopefully recover more than their costs (that technology being a legal construct that grants the entity entity exclusive ownership of the right to distribute TotK-arranged bits).
  • freejazz 3y ago
    do you mean movies? what's silly about that?
• TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
  What intellectual damage does it cause? If I build a house, do I have ownership of it? Or should I allow someone to walk in, change the locks, repaint one of the rooms, and rent it out for their own profit without paying for it? Artists create new things. That's the job. There's a certainly a case to be made against parasitic rent-seeking which sweats existing resources for profit. But you're not going to have your "renaissance of art, science and culture" if the people working on it full-time aren't getting paid. Mostly these arguments come down to "I want something for free so why I should pay for it?" and "I don't understand what these people do, it seems pretty replaceable and trivial, so it can't be worth anything." It's classic management-think. It's exactly why so many jobs, including many elements of software development, are hugely undervalued, and why so many people have to work in harsh and aggressively inhumane environments.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• interroboink 3y ago
  I thought this was a decent debate on the subject: "Abolish Copyrights and Patents? A Soho Forum Debate" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ep2-ohgFOys https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ep2-ohgFOys) One thing that struck me was that both sides in that debate agreed that the current copyright/patent system was not in very good shape. That's one nuance that I think can get lost in these discussions — somebody says "copyright can be good" and is met with the retort "look at how bad our system is right now" without allowing for the possibility that we could have a better system, rather than outright abolishing it. Anyway, I think there are good points on both sides; you seem to be more on the absolutist side (fair enough), but you might enjoy watching it.
  • Lacerda69 3y ago
    Thanks for sharing this, will definitely give it look. I get that my position here is considered extreme, but then again the nuanced one is much harder to express in a couple of sentences. A lifetime of being denied access to science or art on the grounds of copyright has made me cynical. To me it's just a classist defense barrier - keep the lower class from getting education and art to keep the class system intact. Copyright is just one method that has been corrupted to this purpose.
    • ChoGGi 3y ago
      I'd rather reform than absolution. Separate corporate owned copyright and personal copyright. Personal has 14 years with option to pay to extend twice (7 years each time manually). Corp starts at 7 years with option to extend like personal. Little guy has time enough to profit, corp had more budget for advertising than personal so needs less time for profit. Everyone else can enjoy within a reasonable time.
      • ChoGGi 3y ago
        Sure, I suppose this is worth downvoting?
    • nonethewiser 3y ago
      > A lifetime of being denied access to science or art on the grounds of copyright has made me cynical. What do you mean by this? People have better access to information now via the internet more than ever. In theory the absolute access could still be low, but the outcomes from online learning from free sources are very impressive. People can train themselves for free and make a ton of money from it.
• rayiner 3y ago
  What “renaissance” would result from not having copyright? It seems to me that history is showing the opposite. It’s easier than ever, thanks to technology, to make original movies, songs, etc. But demand for specific creations is more concentrated than ever. Of all of the types of property, copyright seems to me the least offensive. It’s not like the dirt I built my house on, which is finite, and which which I had no hand in creating. There is an infinite amount of original works, all you need to do is make your own.
  • thebooktocome 3y ago
    The Disney Renaissance, for example, was built on the back of works in the public domain (Aladdin, The Lion King, The Little Mermaid, etc.)
    • bdw5204 3y ago
      Disney itself was built on the back on works in the public domain. Snow White, Pinocchio, Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, Sleeping Beauty, The Jungle Book and Robin Hood were all based on public domain works.
    • tptacek 3y ago
      Those works remain in the public domain.
      • thebooktocome 3y ago
        The question was, “What renaissance would occur if copyright didn’t exist?” Here’s one that happened because the source works weren’t indefinitely protected (ironically, what Disney wanted for their own derived works.)
        • tptacek 3y ago
          Why would any renaissance occur if copyright didn't exist? You'd be eliminating financial incentive to produce interesting new work. If those financial incentives weren't required, we'd already have those works today.
• boplicity 3y ago
  Anne of Green Gables copyright is an interesting study in what happens here. There has been a recent tidal wave of "remixes" of the original work. TV shows, graphic novels, etc. My read: A lot of it is very good, very few new ideas are being created, and a lot of money is being made. It's hard to argue this counts toward anything like a "renaissance." The fundamental argument for copyright is that creators of certain works should able to earn a living based on those ideas; it turns something abstract into "property," thus granting property rights to a class of things that wouldn't otherwise have such rights. This allows people to become professional "idea creators." The problem to be solved with abolishing copyright, of course, is the problem of funding "idea creators." This doesn't seem to be something most opponents of copyright have solutions to. In the case of something like Anne of Green Gables, once the "property" is no longer exclusive to someone, it is much, much, much harder to generate an income from that property. Imagine building a house, but not having control over who enters it. Same idea. Maybe people shouldn't have long-term property rights at all? Who knows? That's starting to sound like communism or something.
  • rhn_mk1 3y ago
    > Imagine building a house, but not having control over who enters it. Same idea. It's not quite the same idea. When you build a house for yourself, the implicit assumption is that you can't use it the same way if there's someone else in there. Put in a crowd and it's unuseable. On the other hand, multiple people can use a creative work simultaneously without noticing each other. If anything, it can make the experience richer. Your simile holds if you're not creating something with the goal of extracting value from using it, but with the goal of extracting money from others for using it. Which leads me to the conclusion that abolishing copyright would stop people creating things for sale (second scenario), but would not influence those who create for its own sake (first sccenario).
    • boplicity 3y ago
      > influence those who create for its own sake Of course it influences those who create for its own sake. "Creators" are people who need money on a fundamental level, to pay for food, shelter, etc. If you make it impossible for them to earn a living from being creative, you're limiting such creativity to those who are otherwise independently wealthy. In other words, you're making it harder for the less-well-off to actually be creative.
• majormajor 3y ago
  There's already a MASSIVE amount of free art and culture on the internet, with very loose copyright. There's also a ton of original fiction and art for cheap, existing within the realm of copyright but outside of the "IP titans" of Disney, etc. What more renaissance do you want? The ability to put Spiderman in even more stuff? (Shit, even this already exists!) EDIT: downvoted, but seriously: I can spend 10 bucks a month on Spotify today and get an order of magnitude more variety and depth of non-major-label music - ON DEMAND - than I could've gotten thirty years ago for practically any amount of money.
  • anigbrowl 3y ago
    Great for consumers, not so great for artists. Spotify and most other platforms are MITM attacks, they just hit social technology rather than silicon. There are whole books that describe and lionize the process of platform construction and preventing the establishment of direct communication between producer and consumer. Entrepreneur literally means 'bringer between' which describes the traditional mode of trade perfectly - I prefer to go to a farmer's market and buy 10 different kinds of food there than visit 10 individual farms. But as entrepreneurship moves toward exclusive distribution agreements and other contractual infrastructure, it devolves into rent-seeking.
    • majormajor 3y ago
      I don't think getting rid of copyright would help musicians there, though. In the movie/TV world, today's exclusivity deals have pros and cons for artists, if you mean to highlight negative effects of copyright on artists in that regard (but how does that compare to the compensation from torrents, still)? But in the music world, there's much less platform exclusivity. (Copyright-aside, myself not having time to manage direct relationships with hundreds of musicians/bands is a good reason we still need the Spotifys of the world, though. And again, yesterday's middlemen were even more restrictive.) But I'm still really just waiting for someone in the "copyright is ruining culture" camp to tell me what exactly they want that isn't being catered to today, that is blocked by copyright? (In the US - internationally distribution systems have a lot of roadblocks so the answer becomes "access to certain pieces of foreign content at all")
• pavlov 3y ago
  Copyright is fine in principle. Patents are fine too. The difference is that one lasts nearly a century, the other just twenty years. Originally copyright and patent terms were effectively identical. Western societies allowed them to slowly diverge, like proverbial frogs being boiled. How could we undo this mistake?
  • anigbrowl 3y ago
    Blackmail a majority of legislators. Bribing them is no good because you can be outspent. Appealing to logic is also no good because legislators rely on emotional demagoguery to get elected. Persuading the public is no good because a) collective action problems are hard, b) abstract issues are very hard to get traction around, c) many people are jealous of artists and derive irrational satisfaction from annoying them.
  • mrguyorama 3y ago
    Purchase disney. They are essentially entirely responsible for current copyright nonsense.
• wingspar 3y ago
  Are you talking about no copyright for DERIVATIVE works or no copyright on actual works themselves? - No copyright on derivative works mean I can finally make my 'fan fiction' Top Gun movie. - No copyright on actual works themselves, mean's I can be streaming Top Gun for free to the world. (only bandwidth/server costs) Copyright terms are way too long, but who's going to spend big money on production when you potentially get to sell ONE copy before it's 'free' for someone else to distribute (sell) to the rest of the world?
  • account42 3y ago
    Why are you assuming that things have to be funded by selling individual copies.
• chrismcb 3y ago
  It gives people a reason to create works. You might not like big budget movies, but I do. We works loose those. No more good TV shows, just amateur hour. No more good books. Just more amateur hour.