4 ms·

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

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.
  - Retric 3y ago
    Ops, was going for not just just a multimillionaire but actually yacht wealthy but messed up the edit.
bsenftner 3y ago
Beware the abolishing of existing legal systems, because our status quo 'powers that be' will infiltrate the creation and managing organizations of whatever comes next to ensure the new situation is better for them than the old.
thereddaikon 3y ago
A problem relevant to this case directly is why works can be under copyright after the passing of their creator. There shouldn't be an Andy Warhol Foundation licensing works. This is purely a rent seeking behavior. The money made from licensing Andy Warhol works does not fund further output by the artist. They are dead. You just have some randos extracting wealth from society for the privilege to use something that the creator profited from long ago. The work of dead artists should be in the public domain.
- jjcon 3y ago
  > The work of dead artists should be in the public domain. “Murder of popular musicians and artists up 1000% this year… news at 11” Joking aside, if I am the artist, shouldn’t I be able to give those rights to my children to provide for them after I’m gone? I agree with the spirit of what you’re saying but I think a reasonable threshold after death is appropriate (20 years maybe instead of 70?)
  - lotsofpulp 3y ago
    No, a reasonable threshold is 10 years after creation. The question is to what time threshold does society need to pay for police/courts/lawyers to enforce copyright law such that people are sufficiently incentivized to create whatever. For example, if copyright law were 10 years from date of creation, would we see too little in the way of creativity? Would singers still sing and writers still write and artists still paint/draw/whatever? I can see a viewpoint proposing 10, 15, even 20 years, but 100+ years is beyond the pale. That is just a handout from taxpayers to people that own the copyrights.
    - tracker1 3y ago
      I saw an interesting suggestion that copyright should just be for a given period at a given cost of registration... say first 10 years as-is, but if you want it longer, you pay X for N years, and it doubles each time you pay. I mean if Disney wants to pay $1B+ every few years to keep "Steamboat Willie" under copyright, let them. Eventually it will be cost prohibitive and enter the public domain.
      - ghaff 3y ago
        Any such scheme immeasurably benefits large corporations over individual creatives. Disney's lawyers have no issues dealing with copyright frictions. Individual authors do.
    - jjcon 3y ago
      I agree - basing it off creation could make sense but then I’d argue for maybe more like 50 years. Plenty of works take decades in and of themselves. George RR Martin started Game of thrones 27 years ago. Should HBO just have been able to take his work and make millions without paying him a dime? It would just turn into corporations exploiting popular public domain works.
tivert 3y ago
> 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. So your solution to small artists getting ripped off is to take away all the rights those small artists now enjoy, so they get ripped off harder and faster by "those already moneyed and in power"? Ok then. > 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. That's foolish radicalism. Progress doesn't happen by over-reacting to some problem and calling for the abolition of the whole system because it's imperfect. In all but a few rare cases, it happens by reforming things to solve the specific problems while preserving the other benefits. Copyright isn't one of those rare cases. Reform is in order, not abolition.
- account42 3y ago
  > So your solution to small artists getting ripped off is to take away all the rights those small artists now enjoy, so they get ripped off harder and faster by "those already moneyed and in power"? Yes. Those "rights" are not free. They have an immense cost to society. If we want to collectively support artists we can do so without stifling creativity.
anigbrowl 3y ago
But copyright as it exists now does not protect or benefit Fully agreed, and I would drastically curtail it. But complete abolition is throwing the baby out with the bathwater, ignoring the problem copyright was established to solve in the first place. I have yet to see 1 (one) instance of a small artist going against $bigcorp and winning Just did, in this very news story. It's happened on multiple occasions, it's just that such cases are weighed on their individual facts and don't lead to any change in the basic idea. Of course, big corporations always have a starting advantage because they can hire expensive legal teams and weigh down their opponents, but this is a general flaw in the adversarial litigation culture of the UK/US which is unabashedly pro-capitalist.
- pclmulqdq 3y ago
  I would assume that there was some legal financing behind this lawsuit. It's pretty easy to get if you have a decent case, and while they do take a decent chunk of your winnings, it's a lot better than nothing.
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  > ignoring the problem copyright was established to solve in the first place Maintaining copy quality and providing a single point of contact for censorship? You probably mean some other goal people gave it by the end of the Modern Age.
  - anigbrowl 3y ago
    Tendentious nonsense. Copyright was instituted by the same people that came up with the first amendment. Publishers ripping off authors was a well-understood problem at the time, and even before; Daniel Defoe (author of Robinson Crusoe and many other successful books) wrote an essay addressing both freedom of the press and copyright in 1704: https://www.copyrighthistory.org/cam/tools/request/showRecord.php?id=record_uk_1704 https://www.copyrighthistory.org/cam/tools/request/showRecor...
freejazz 3y ago
>But copyright as it exists now does not protect or benefit the "little guy" or indie artists. Yes it does and I'm a plaintiff's attorney that works in copyright and patent for small-time artists and inventors. You could not be more wrong. I have obtained settlements for my clients from some of the biggest media corporations in the US. You have NO IDEA what you are talking about.
- progman32 3y ago
  Can you give specific cases for people to reference?
  - freejazz 3y ago
    They settled before going to suit, I didn't say I obtained verdicts, I said I obtained settlements. Verdicts aren't how most copyright infringement works (more evidence that you have no idea what you are talking about, at all). You do not have to file suit to assert a copyright. You just need the authority to file that suit, in order to have a meaningful threat from which an infringer (especially a large media company) will settle. If this is too hard for you to believe, I'm not sure what to tell you but to spend more time in the real world, and less on whatever media you are reading to engender these thoughts.
chrismcb 3y ago
Copyright is too long. But it isn't broken. And it does indeed protect the little guy

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.
- Retric 3y ago
  Ops, was going for not just just a multimillionaire but actually yacht wealthy but messed up the edit.

bsenftner 3y ago

Beware the abolishing of existing legal systems, because our status quo 'powers that be' will infiltrate the creation and managing organizations of whatever comes next to ensure the new situation is better for them than the old.

thereddaikon 3y ago

A problem relevant to this case directly is why works can be under copyright after the passing of their creator. There shouldn't be an Andy Warhol Foundation licensing works. This is purely a rent seeking behavior. The money made from licensing Andy Warhol works does not fund further output by the artist. They are dead. You just have some randos extracting wealth from society for the privilege to use something that the creator profited from long ago. The work of dead artists should be in the public domain.

jjcon 3y ago
> The work of dead artists should be in the public domain. “Murder of popular musicians and artists up 1000% this year… news at 11” Joking aside, if I am the artist, shouldn’t I be able to give those rights to my children to provide for them after I’m gone? I agree with the spirit of what you’re saying but I think a reasonable threshold after death is appropriate (20 years maybe instead of 70?)
- lotsofpulp 3y ago
  No, a reasonable threshold is 10 years after creation. The question is to what time threshold does society need to pay for police/courts/lawyers to enforce copyright law such that people are sufficiently incentivized to create whatever. For example, if copyright law were 10 years from date of creation, would we see too little in the way of creativity? Would singers still sing and writers still write and artists still paint/draw/whatever? I can see a viewpoint proposing 10, 15, even 20 years, but 100+ years is beyond the pale. That is just a handout from taxpayers to people that own the copyrights.
  - tracker1 3y ago
    I saw an interesting suggestion that copyright should just be for a given period at a given cost of registration... say first 10 years as-is, but if you want it longer, you pay X for N years, and it doubles each time you pay. I mean if Disney wants to pay $1B+ every few years to keep "Steamboat Willie" under copyright, let them. Eventually it will be cost prohibitive and enter the public domain.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      Any such scheme immeasurably benefits large corporations over individual creatives. Disney's lawyers have no issues dealing with copyright frictions. Individual authors do.
  - jjcon 3y ago
    I agree - basing it off creation could make sense but then I’d argue for maybe more like 50 years. Plenty of works take decades in and of themselves. George RR Martin started Game of thrones 27 years ago. Should HBO just have been able to take his work and make millions without paying him a dime? It would just turn into corporations exploiting popular public domain works.

tivert 3y ago

> 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. So your solution to small artists getting ripped off is to take away all the rights those small artists now enjoy, so they get ripped off harder and faster by "those already moneyed and in power"? Ok then. > 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. That's foolish radicalism. Progress doesn't happen by over-reacting to some problem and calling for the abolition of the whole system because it's imperfect. In all but a few rare cases, it happens by reforming things to solve the specific problems while preserving the other benefits. Copyright isn't one of those rare cases. Reform is in order, not abolition.

account42 3y ago
> So your solution to small artists getting ripped off is to take away all the rights those small artists now enjoy, so they get ripped off harder and faster by "those already moneyed and in power"? Yes. Those "rights" are not free. They have an immense cost to society. If we want to collectively support artists we can do so without stifling creativity.

anigbrowl 3y ago

But copyright as it exists now does not protect or benefit Fully agreed, and I would drastically curtail it. But complete abolition is throwing the baby out with the bathwater, ignoring the problem copyright was established to solve in the first place. I have yet to see 1 (one) instance of a small artist going against $bigcorp and winning Just did, in this very news story. It's happened on multiple occasions, it's just that such cases are weighed on their individual facts and don't lead to any change in the basic idea. Of course, big corporations always have a starting advantage because they can hire expensive legal teams and weigh down their opponents, but this is a general flaw in the adversarial litigation culture of the UK/US which is unabashedly pro-capitalist.

pclmulqdq 3y ago
I would assume that there was some legal financing behind this lawsuit. It's pretty easy to get if you have a decent case, and while they do take a decent chunk of your winnings, it's a lot better than nothing.
marcosdumay 3y ago
> ignoring the problem copyright was established to solve in the first place Maintaining copy quality and providing a single point of contact for censorship? You probably mean some other goal people gave it by the end of the Modern Age.
- anigbrowl 3y ago
  Tendentious nonsense. Copyright was instituted by the same people that came up with the first amendment. Publishers ripping off authors was a well-understood problem at the time, and even before; Daniel Defoe (author of Robinson Crusoe and many other successful books) wrote an essay addressing both freedom of the press and copyright in 1704: https://www.copyrighthistory.org/cam/tools/request/showRecord.php?id=record_uk_1704 https://www.copyrighthistory.org/cam/tools/request/showRecor...

freejazz 3y ago

>But copyright as it exists now does not protect or benefit the "little guy" or indie artists. Yes it does and I'm a plaintiff's attorney that works in copyright and patent for small-time artists and inventors. You could not be more wrong. I have obtained settlements for my clients from some of the biggest media corporations in the US. You have NO IDEA what you are talking about.

progman32 3y ago
Can you give specific cases for people to reference?
- freejazz 3y ago
  They settled before going to suit, I didn't say I obtained verdicts, I said I obtained settlements. Verdicts aren't how most copyright infringement works (more evidence that you have no idea what you are talking about, at all). You do not have to file suit to assert a copyright. You just need the authority to file that suit, in order to have a meaningful threat from which an infringer (especially a large media company) will settle. If this is too hard for you to believe, I'm not sure what to tell you but to spend more time in the real world, and less on whatever media you are reading to engender these thoughts.

chrismcb 3y ago