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> [..] creative work that deserves to be copyrighted As I've grown older I've become less and less convinced that any of our current legal frameworks actually

> [..] creative work that deserves to be copyrighted As I've grown older I've become less and less convinced that any of our current legal frameworks actually protect the output of "creatives". Instead, it seems that those with the deepest pockets - <cough> looking at you, Disney(!) - have, over the decades, moulded the system to fit their own purposes, leaving most actual creatives high and dry. When I read sentences including both "Abigail Disney" and "philanthropist" it makes me want to vomit.

Angostura 3y ago
> When I read sentences including both "Abigail Disney" and "philanthropist" it makes me want to vomit. Why?
- kylebenzle 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - dkonofalski 3y ago
    >Maybe because it is a pharse Surely you meant 'farce'.
  - frogpelt 3y ago
    /sarcasm?
    - hotnfresh 3y ago
      Nah, you can’t earn a billion dollars. Dig the hourly rate for someone working 50 years to hit a billion. It’s just not possible. Nobody actually does that much good or delivers that much value. They just happen to capture or steal it somehow, combination of guile and right-place-right-time. If they “earn” it at all. It’s an artifact of our system that creates a few kinda capitalist-aristocrats, with about the same (poor) level of justification for the power they wield as feudalism had for dukes and kings and shit. Complete with it often having a hereditary element. [EDIT] Nb I'm not proposing an alternative, and I'm not sure how we might eliminate that wart on our system without doing more harm than good. But once you break a few tens-of-millions net worth, the rules of our economic system start doing some weird and probably not all that great things, "risk" becomes mostly pretend, and you can "earn" more than most do in a lifetime just being a middleman on access to your capital, and not necessarily a very good one. That reaching these levels isn't super connected to competence or expertise at acting as that sort of middleman—doubly so if it's inherited—makes it all rather inefficient and unfortunate and certainly unfair and even corrosive to democracy (since money converts so well into power), but, it's the system we've got and no, I don't have a better suggestion. But it's surely comparably unjust and evil to rule-by-divine-right and all that, which we're all used to dismissing as plainly silly and bad. A difference of small degree.
  - Angostura 3y ago
    If you are left a billion, do you instantly become evil? If you work to disperse it to good causes, are you not a philanthropist?
haroldp 3y ago
You can't copyright a dress, but there's still a fashion industry: https://www.ted.com/talks/johanna_blakley_lessons_from_fashion_s_free_culture/transcript https://www.ted.com/talks/johanna_blakley_lessons_from_fashi...
- pbhjpbhj 3y ago
  >can't copyright a dress // That seems highly unlikely to me. What seems most likely is that it's hard to pass the distinctiveness bar for a dress. Unless you mean "for the fabric shape of a dress alone"? In which case you can get a design patent/registered design.
  - haroldp 3y ago
    > That seems highly unlikely to me. I mean, I provided a reference for my claim.
    - pbhjpbhj 3y ago
      I'm not sure a person making assertions counts as a reference. I only skimmed the transcript but spotted a couple of errors, this person doesn't appear to be an IPR expert? Also, I don't feel this is going to get anywhere, the space of "nuance of legislation across all jurisdictions in the World" isn't really conducive to casual conversation. That said, in the UK our caselaw on fashion is almost nonexistent, but the key rulings are well summarised in [0] at page 8. The bar is high but seems attainable. (A summary of Hensher v Restawhile [1]). An opinion piece at WIPO [2] suggests it's easier to get copyright on garments in USA, they cite some law, at least, but their conclusion on UK law opposes my position (paraphrasing, they say "garments can't be protected"). My position has not changed. [0] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/606207/160408_guidance_s52_final_web_accessible.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/... [1] https://www.cipil.law.cam.ac.uk/virtual-museum/hensher-v-restawile-1976-ac-64 https://www.cipil.law.cam.ac.uk/virtual-museum/hensher-v-res... [2] https://www.wipo.int/wipo_magazine/en/2014/03/article_0007.html https://www.wipo.int/wipo_magazine/en/2014/03/article_0007.h...
swatcoder 3y ago
For a millenia or two (at least), creatives have lived on a spectrum between folk production for small, immediate audiences and commercial production for the aristocracy or markets distribution. Copyright, since its much more recent introduction, is the tool for commercial creative to keep the folk creatives away from their money. The upside for media consumers is higher production value and grander spectacle, which is pretty cool. Copyright lets producers pour a lot of money into art and that allows for a different kind of work. But yeah, it’s pretty brutal for the countless folk creatives who see something inspiring and aren’t allowed to do cool things with it. Copyright does indeed work against them.
jwmcq 3y ago
And then you realise that this also applies to pretty much every industry and its workers (hooray for lobbying!) and then you get sad.
Tao3300 3y ago
I think in this case the situation for fonts isn't such a bad compromise. As it is, BigTypeCompany can't go kicking LittleIndieDesigner who can't afford to go to court because their letter-A looks confusingly similar.
munificent 3y ago
> Instead, it seems that those with the deepest pockets - <cough> looking at you, Disney(!) I think this is mostly a case of survivorship bias. You only read about copyright in the news when it's related to giant well-known corporations or egregious abuse of the law. The bread and butter uses of copyright benefit millions of authors and artists every day but you never hear about it in the news. For example, I wrote and self-published two books. While you can read them for free on the web, I still retain the copyright and sell physical copies. Fairly often, someone will rip a copy of the book and try to publish their own (poorly executed) eBooks or print versions. Copyright is what lets me have those taken down.
- monetus 3y ago
  The trade-off is that a lot of poor people will never hear about your book, or only read a substandard version of it. I've seen official torrents from the owners of the copyright, simply for quality control purposes.
  - munificent 3y ago
    > The trade-off is that a lot of poor people will never hear about your book There is always a trade-off between accessibility and compensation in creative works. I think the value of copyright is that it gives the author of the work—the one who has the most skin in the game—some agency in picking a point in that trade-off. (For example, I chose to allow anyone to read the books for free on the web, which maximizes accessibility for those who can't afford it, while selling print and eBook copies which enables me to be compensated by those who can.) You can argue that copyright prevents poor people from accessing works. But that argument presumes a world where the work already exists. Without some ability to reliably predict and control compensation, there are many works that would simply never be made. You may then argue that if someone really has that creative drive, then they'll make it even without compensation. But that means that only those with independent means will have the luxury of being creative. And the last thing I want to do is put even more cultural control in the hands of the rich.
    - 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
cj 3y ago
> it seems that those with the deepest pockets Trademarks, patents, and copyrights are only as valuable as your willingness to pay a lawyer to confront those who are infringing. You can have all of the patents, trademarks, and copyrights in the world, but they're useless unless you defend them. Which costs a lot of money. I'm not sure what the alternative would be, though. We can't do away with the system completely. Disney needs to be able to earn a profit on content they produce otherwise they won't invest in producing content.
antisthenes 3y ago
> As I've grown older I've become less and less convinced that any of our current legal frameworks actually protect the output of "creatives". I think most of "creatives" are just high and dry because most of the output is just not very good. Creative output in a digital world is a winner-take-all scenario, so mediocre artists just get 0 exposure. If I have limited amount of time to commit to watching something or listening to a song or using a font, I will naturally gravitate to things that are already popular/good and make money. What would help creatives here is a better discovery process, but it's pretty tangential to the legal framework.
zackmorris 3y ago
I was just thinking that it might be useful to add up how much money has been made by selling fonts since the dawn of time. I suspect that it's on the order of $1 billion. Adobe probably owns a big share of that, followed by various publishing houses, creative institutes, etc. But that's about 10 cents per person. Why are we so concerned with protecting the profits of a vanishingly small segment of the population to the detriment of billions of other people? I think that there are some weak points here that we could collectively attack and dismantle to reduce wealth inequality. One of the screws to turn might be copyright law, at least reducing the term from author's lifetime plus 70 years to something reasonable, perhaps 3-5 years with an option to renew for up to 10 years total. Another would be patent law, and certainly the elimination of all patents around software, genes, etc. Short of that, we could form guilds where one of the conditions is that seeking IP retribution revokes one's membership. Then only do business with people and organizations in the guilds or face consequences, sort of like what happened with Drew Barrymore when she went around SAG/WGA.

Angostura 3y ago

> When I read sentences including both "Abigail Disney" and "philanthropist" it makes me want to vomit. Why?

kylebenzle 3y ago
[flagged]
- dkonofalski 3y ago
  >Maybe because it is a pharse Surely you meant 'farce'.
- frogpelt 3y ago
  /sarcasm?
  - hotnfresh 3y ago
    Nah, you can’t earn a billion dollars. Dig the hourly rate for someone working 50 years to hit a billion. It’s just not possible. Nobody actually does that much good or delivers that much value. They just happen to capture or steal it somehow, combination of guile and right-place-right-time. If they “earn” it at all. It’s an artifact of our system that creates a few kinda capitalist-aristocrats, with about the same (poor) level of justification for the power they wield as feudalism had for dukes and kings and shit. Complete with it often having a hereditary element. [EDIT] Nb I'm not proposing an alternative, and I'm not sure how we might eliminate that wart on our system without doing more harm than good. But once you break a few tens-of-millions net worth, the rules of our economic system start doing some weird and probably not all that great things, "risk" becomes mostly pretend, and you can "earn" more than most do in a lifetime just being a middleman on access to your capital, and not necessarily a very good one. That reaching these levels isn't super connected to competence or expertise at acting as that sort of middleman—doubly so if it's inherited—makes it all rather inefficient and unfortunate and certainly unfair and even corrosive to democracy (since money converts so well into power), but, it's the system we've got and no, I don't have a better suggestion. But it's surely comparably unjust and evil to rule-by-divine-right and all that, which we're all used to dismissing as plainly silly and bad. A difference of small degree.
- Angostura 3y ago
  If you are left a billion, do you instantly become evil? If you work to disperse it to good causes, are you not a philanthropist?

haroldp 3y ago

You can't copyright a dress, but there's still a fashion industry: https://www.ted.com/talks/johanna_blakley_lessons_from_fashion_s_free_culture/transcript https://www.ted.com/talks/johanna_blakley_lessons_from_fashi...

pbhjpbhj 3y ago
>can't copyright a dress // That seems highly unlikely to me. What seems most likely is that it's hard to pass the distinctiveness bar for a dress. Unless you mean "for the fabric shape of a dress alone"? In which case you can get a design patent/registered design.
- haroldp 3y ago
  > That seems highly unlikely to me. I mean, I provided a reference for my claim.
  - pbhjpbhj 3y ago
    I'm not sure a person making assertions counts as a reference. I only skimmed the transcript but spotted a couple of errors, this person doesn't appear to be an IPR expert? Also, I don't feel this is going to get anywhere, the space of "nuance of legislation across all jurisdictions in the World" isn't really conducive to casual conversation. That said, in the UK our caselaw on fashion is almost nonexistent, but the key rulings are well summarised in [0] at page 8. The bar is high but seems attainable. (A summary of Hensher v Restawhile [1]). An opinion piece at WIPO [2] suggests it's easier to get copyright on garments in USA, they cite some law, at least, but their conclusion on UK law opposes my position (paraphrasing, they say "garments can't be protected"). My position has not changed. [0] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/606207/160408_guidance_s52_final_web_accessible.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/... [1] https://www.cipil.law.cam.ac.uk/virtual-museum/hensher-v-restawile-1976-ac-64 https://www.cipil.law.cam.ac.uk/virtual-museum/hensher-v-res... [2] https://www.wipo.int/wipo_magazine/en/2014/03/article_0007.html https://www.wipo.int/wipo_magazine/en/2014/03/article_0007.h...

swatcoder 3y ago

For a millenia or two (at least), creatives have lived on a spectrum between folk production for small, immediate audiences and commercial production for the aristocracy or markets distribution. Copyright, since its much more recent introduction, is the tool for commercial creative to keep the folk creatives away from their money. The upside for media consumers is higher production value and grander spectacle, which is pretty cool. Copyright lets producers pour a lot of money into art and that allows for a different kind of work. But yeah, it’s pretty brutal for the countless folk creatives who see something inspiring and aren’t allowed to do cool things with it. Copyright does indeed work against them.

jwmcq 3y ago

And then you realise that this also applies to pretty much every industry and its workers (hooray for lobbying!) and then you get sad.

Tao3300 3y ago

I think in this case the situation for fonts isn't such a bad compromise. As it is, BigTypeCompany can't go kicking LittleIndieDesigner who can't afford to go to court because their letter-A looks confusingly similar.

munificent 3y ago

> Instead, it seems that those with the deepest pockets - <cough> looking at you, Disney(!) I think this is mostly a case of survivorship bias. You only read about copyright in the news when it's related to giant well-known corporations or egregious abuse of the law. The bread and butter uses of copyright benefit millions of authors and artists every day but you never hear about it in the news. For example, I wrote and self-published two books. While you can read them for free on the web, I still retain the copyright and sell physical copies. Fairly often, someone will rip a copy of the book and try to publish their own (poorly executed) eBooks or print versions. Copyright is what lets me have those taken down.

monetus 3y ago
The trade-off is that a lot of poor people will never hear about your book, or only read a substandard version of it. I've seen official torrents from the owners of the copyright, simply for quality control purposes.
- munificent 3y ago
  > The trade-off is that a lot of poor people will never hear about your book There is always a trade-off between accessibility and compensation in creative works. I think the value of copyright is that it gives the author of the work—the one who has the most skin in the game—some agency in picking a point in that trade-off. (For example, I chose to allow anyone to read the books for free on the web, which maximizes accessibility for those who can't afford it, while selling print and eBook copies which enables me to be compensated by those who can.) You can argue that copyright prevents poor people from accessing works. But that argument presumes a world where the work already exists. Without some ability to reliably predict and control compensation, there are many works that would simply never be made. You may then argue that if someone really has that creative drive, then they'll make it even without compensation. But that means that only those with independent means will have the luxury of being creative. And the last thing I want to do is put even more cultural control in the hands of the rich.
  - 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

cj 3y ago

> it seems that those with the deepest pockets Trademarks, patents, and copyrights are only as valuable as your willingness to pay a lawyer to confront those who are infringing. You can have all of the patents, trademarks, and copyrights in the world, but they're useless unless you defend them. Which costs a lot of money. I'm not sure what the alternative would be, though. We can't do away with the system completely. Disney needs to be able to earn a profit on content they produce otherwise they won't invest in producing content.

antisthenes 3y ago

> As I've grown older I've become less and less convinced that any of our current legal frameworks actually protect the output of "creatives". I think most of "creatives" are just high and dry because most of the output is just not very good. Creative output in a digital world is a winner-take-all scenario, so mediocre artists just get 0 exposure. If I have limited amount of time to commit to watching something or listening to a song or using a font, I will naturally gravitate to things that are already popular/good and make money. What would help creatives here is a better discovery process, but it's pretty tangential to the legal framework.

zackmorris 3y ago

I was just thinking that it might be useful to add up how much money has been made by selling fonts since the dawn of time. I suspect that it's on the order of $1 billion. Adobe probably owns a big share of that, followed by various publishing houses, creative institutes, etc. But that's about 10 cents per person. Why are we so concerned with protecting the profits of a vanishingly small segment of the population to the detriment of billions of other people? I think that there are some weak points here that we could collectively attack and dismantle to reduce wealth inequality. One of the screws to turn might be copyright law, at least reducing the term from author's lifetime plus 70 years to something reasonable, perhaps 3-5 years with an option to renew for up to 10 years total. Another would be patent law, and certainly the elimination of all patents around software, genes, etc. Short of that, we could form guilds where one of the conditions is that seeking IP retribution revokes one's membership. Then only do business with people and organizations in the guilds or face consequences, sort of like what happened with Drew Barrymore when she went around SAG/WGA.