2 ms·

I don't disagree with your initial point, copyright does indeed work to allow people to make income on things they've produced in the past. I think where we dis

I don't disagree with your initial point, copyright does indeed work to allow people to make income on things they've produced in the past. I think where we disagree is on that being a bad thing. It costs huge amounts of money to make a TV show, even one that doesn't look technically demanding. You summarise it as "gatekeeping access to already-produced digital files", when as I'm sure you know the costs here aren't the incremental cost of providing you with a copy of that file, the costs are the initial production of the contents of that file which is amortised over however many thousands or millions of people are going to watch it. As fun as theatre can be, I don't think you'll get many people deciding they want to go and watch the live stage production of the new Mission Impossible (unless I guess every night they blow up the entire theatre, but then you have the same issues of cost). In my opinion copyright law is overreaching now. The fact that Tolkien's children are still raking in money from his work is somewhat ridiculous to me, there should definitely be better limitations on copyright length, with work entering the public domain sooner than it does now, but I don't think the system is fundamentally broken.

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
I don’t think that copyright is bad, per se. I do, however, see that copyright enforcement is often overreaching and it appears to be because some people running a business somewhere don’t want to fail. The business model of “creating content” is simply not something that scales into a billion dollar company in the age of the internet. Perhaps this is mistaken. Disney and Nintendo come to mind as very successful but also very aggressive about protecting copyright, even such that (as you brought up with the Tolkien estate) Disney has successfully lobbied to have copyright terms extended so they can be the only arbiters of all things Mickey Mouse (and Nintendo all things Mario, etc.). But Nintendo keeps making (good!) Mario games. Still, there could be great works produced by independent creators but they seem to be stifled precisely due to copyright law. When Disney bought Star Wars, they decided that all non-film iterations of the stories are non-canon. Imagine being an Expanded Universe creator who made an Official Star Wars Game only to be told after-the-fact that it’s not official anymore. That’s not even getting into fan creations which are somehow illegally distributed for free. I might agree that it’s not fundamentally broken but it does not seem to work in practice; at least, there are many cases in which it is abused which need to be curbed for me to really consider it a Good Thing. Commonly a person’s labor is invalidated by dubious copyright claims and I see that as more harmful to society than what harms are caused to corporations by individual piracy. Let corporations duke it out with copyright law and ignore the individual consumer, even if it’s millions of individuals. Such a scenario means the business model doesn’t work and that is absolutely not a consumer problem. (Thanks for sharing your thoughts! There is a lot of nuance around this topic so I apologize if my initial comment over-simplified.)

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago

I don’t think that copyright is bad, per se. I do, however, see that copyright enforcement is often overreaching and it appears to be because some people running a business somewhere don’t want to fail. The business model of “creating content” is simply not something that scales into a billion dollar company in the age of the internet. Perhaps this is mistaken. Disney and Nintendo come to mind as very successful but also very aggressive about protecting copyright, even such that (as you brought up with the Tolkien estate) Disney has successfully lobbied to have copyright terms extended so they can be the only arbiters of all things Mickey Mouse (and Nintendo all things Mario, etc.). But Nintendo keeps making (good!) Mario games. Still, there could be great works produced by independent creators but they seem to be stifled precisely due to copyright law. When Disney bought Star Wars, they decided that all non-film iterations of the stories are non-canon. Imagine being an Expanded Universe creator who made an Official Star Wars Game only to be told after-the-fact that it’s not official anymore. That’s not even getting into fan creations which are somehow illegally distributed for free. I might agree that it’s not fundamentally broken but it does not seem to work in practice; at least, there are many cases in which it is abused which need to be curbed for me to really consider it a Good Thing. Commonly a person’s labor is invalidated by dubious copyright claims and I see that as more harmful to society than what harms are caused to corporations by individual piracy. Let corporations duke it out with copyright law and ignore the individual consumer, even if it’s millions of individuals. Such a scenario means the business model doesn’t work and that is absolutely not a consumer problem. (Thanks for sharing your thoughts! There is a lot of nuance around this topic so I apologize if my initial comment over-simplified.)