7 ms·

Years from now we're gonna look back and realize that copyright industry groups effectively destroyed the internet, and none of us would be laughing about it as

Years from now we're gonna look back and realize that copyright industry groups effectively destroyed the internet, and none of us would be laughing about it as we do now.

tpmoney 3y ago
I've been thinking recently about what sort of impact two significant changes to IP law might have in shaping things. 1) Copyrights can only be owned by natural persons and can not be transferred. They can be licensed, but the physical creator of a work always owns the copyright. Disney can't own copyright, only it's artists and animators. They have to negotiate a license to distribute with everyone. The idea here is that if an idea continues to have value for a company, then it continues to have value to the person who created it. And if Disney or whoever decides that something isn't worth having anymore, the creators are free to go out and find someone who does value it. Immediate concern here is how messy this gets deciding what anyone actually owns. Do animators own the copyright to a character jointly? Separately? Do they only own the copyrights to their specific drawings and a character is then inherently uncopyrightable? Joint ownership seems obvious, but then how is that any better for the individuals than Disney having exclusive ownership? It only takes one to prevent you from making money on your work. Separate but equal ownership seems interesting, but how much do you have to contribute to get that? Does everyone who ever drew a sketch for Lilo and Stitch now own the IP rights to the entire character? Likewise how would you keep licensing agreements from looking like convoluted versions of modern copyright anyway? I guess that's more on the unions and guilds but if every employee signs a 200 year exclusive license, that's not any different from what we have today really. 2) Trademarks can not be sold. A trademark's purpose is to assure a buyer of the source of a given good. The whole reason we protect them is because if I buy a product with Apple's branding on it, I want to know I got it from Apple, not from "Bob's Fancy Electronics Shack and Bait Shop". Problem is, if you can sell a trademark, you've changed who is actually the source of the good, but the consumer may not know that. Food items make a good example here. "Uncle Roger's Superior MSG" might be a small company, but when Kraft buys them out, it's not Uncle Roger who's selling it anymore, it's Kraft. And Kraft may change that recipe, or otherwise make decisions that Uncle Roger wouldn't. A consumer should know it's no longer "Uncle Roger's Superior MSG" they're buying, it's now "Kraft MSG" and while it might be based on Uncle Roger's recipe, it's not from Uncle Roger and Kraft should have to rebrand it and fight for brand reputation all over again. Zombie brands are another example of this. Whoever is making Craftsman tools isn't Sears and Roebuck anymore, and they're not the same, and shouldn't be sold as the same. Again there are some immediate concerns that come to mind. Part of the value of buying a company is that trademarks carry the reputation of the company. Distinguishing between a change of owners as part of the course of business and a change of owners as in a sale of the whole company is also difficult. I don't think if "Uncle Roger" and "Auntie Helen" split and the 50/50 ownership structure becomes 100% ownership, does that require a rebrand? Probably not, but then what are the limits of this? If Kraft sells Uncle Roger a 0.0001% ownership in Kraft, does that also mean there's no need to rebrand?
- beej71 3y ago
  With the copyright, multiple creators could work on it with a signed deal saying they'd be paid, but the sole ownership would go to a single person. A profit sharing plan could be put in place if desired.
- redwall_hp 3y ago
  > Whoever is making Craftsman tools isn't Sears and Roebuck anymore It never was. Sears, even many decades ago, always contracted other vendors to make their products, just like Costco does with their house brand now. The product numbers even used the first three digits to identify the vendor. A Kenmore appliance would be made by Whirlpool, Maytag, LG, Samsung, whatever. It would be a distinct product, with its own exterior design and feature set (rather than just changing a logo). It definitely was worth finding out who made which, to favor manufacturers like LG over Whirlpool. Craftsman was made by the Stanley/Black&Decker/DeWalt corporation for a long time before they finally bought the brand during the final Sears collapse a few years ago. Here's the prefix list for appliances, but there are larger ones for all products: https://www.applianceaid.com/sears-manufacturing-codes.php https://www.applianceaid.com/sears-manufacturing-codes.php I recall seeing references to companies like "Tandy" for some electronic products, which should indicate that this practice goes back well into the 70s and 80s...
- aleph_minus_one 3y ago
  > 1) Copyrights can only be owned by natural persons and can not be transferred. They can be licensed, but the physical creator of a work always owns the copyright. Disney can't own copyright, only it's artists and animators. They have to negotiate a license to distribute with everyone. This is, as I understand your idea, the situation that actually exists in Germany in the Urheberrecht. Here, two concepts exists: - Urheberschaft (authorship): the property of being the author and be attributed as such; cannot be sold. - Nutzungsrechte (usage rights): these can be sold
bboygravity 3y ago
Who's laughing?
hcks 3y ago
Please explain how enforcing their right to be paid for what they sell is destroying the internet
- MrVandemar 3y ago
  "Sell"? They don't sell anything anymore. You get a licence, revocable at any time. And you keep paying and paying and paying.
  - ThePowerOfFuet 3y ago
    >You get a licence, revocable at any time. And without refund.
- geon 3y ago
  If I pirate some content, how is that different to them compared to me just not buying it? Should they be allowed to disconnect my internet because I don’t buy their content? The studios can so easily kill all piracy, and they just about did it with Spotify and Netflix. But no, the greed made them split up into a dozen different services nobody wants, and here we are again.
  - awjlogan 3y ago
    Because you are getting something produced by someone for free if you pirate it and you are relying on others to fund your consumption. Take that to the logical extreme: everybody pirates everything. That is _very_ different to everyone not buying it. There is demand for the product and it has a cost to produce. If you steal something from somebody, there is recourse in law. I don't disagree about the greed part, but I guess fragmentation is almost inevitable until the profit margin is driven down to near zero. Shortsighted, probably, but it would essentially require all the producers to back (and therefore yield profit to), one or two Netflix/Spotify type entities.
    - haswell 3y ago
      Taking this to the logical extreme is fallacious. The piracy wars up to this point have already shown that people buy content if it’s reasonably priced, and that piracy in many cases actually increases sales of the original content. The fact that piracy is back in the limelight has everything to do with the failing business models of greedy companies, and is the market reacting accordingly. The fact that there are penalties for stealing physical goods does not imply that just any penalty is fine. The analogy doesn’t work. Removal of Internet access in 2023 is debilitating. Punishments are supposed to fit the crime, and the complete loss of access to what has become a fundamental point of access does not fit the crime. And there’s also the very old arguments that I won’t rehash here about the clear difference between digital copies of content and physical items.
kitanata 3y ago
[flagged]
- johndunne 3y ago
  Not challenging you, just had an eye brow nearly leave my face... I've been coming to HN for years now and genuinely interested in where your angle comes from? I'm missing something and would like to know... thanks
- christophilus 3y ago
  My guess is that Meta employees are a small minority of HN readership, so I think you’ll need to explain how you think the HN community is responsible. Unless you just mean the tech community at large. But that’s tautological, as the enshittifiers of tech are categorically a subset of the broad tech community.
  - RetroTechie 3y ago
    Lol - kitanata's is funniest comment I read today! But spot on if you think about it. That subset of HN users that work for FAANG, advertising company or similar, are like the sharp edge blade wielded by the business folks. So yeah, in a way parent is right. Not that I'd ever hold it against those HN users. You're (at most) the tool used, not the one wielding it.
    - dasil003 3y ago
      The framing is guaranteed to draw downvotes because many here are doing all they can to resist enshitification, even within FAANG, but unfortunately large corporations will always bend towards profits and the average consumer will always bend towards cheap and convenient. At the end of the day it’s extremely difficult to see what any individual (even the business folks) can really do to effect broad change. Some systemic change would be necessary, but it’s hard to see what changes would lead us in the right direction, especially given the inherent corruptability of incentives in any human-instituted system.
  - jprete 3y ago
sseagull 3y ago
Years from now? I've been mad at this for at least a decade. Look at how much control media companies have exerted over pretty much everything. Look at all the anti-piracy stuff with HDCP, or the DRM stuff in browsers, and how some services don't allow you to watch high-definition streams with some browsers. And unskippable ads on DVDs, ultimately enforced by the movie industry. Also, look at how music files are treated so differently from regular files on iOS. And copyright strikes and demonetization on youtube and others, the Sony rootkit scandal, the list goes on. These people have inserted themselves into every aspect of our digital lives, and (along with advertisers) basically ruin everything or at least make everything more complicated just to protect their revenue streams. Edit: Wait, a decade is only 2013? How did that happen. Make that two decades.
- beej71 3y ago
  I recall trying to find an HDMI cable that would allow me to stream 4k from my legit Netflix account to my legit Roku to my legit TV... Ffffff--
ravenstine 3y ago
As much as I agree that copyright in its current form is a joke, I don't believe it's responsible for destroying the internet. The internet is a wasteland because too many people are on it. It started out as a thing for academics, then became available to non-academics with enough skills to use it (and whom appreciate it), then young people got access to it in school, then smartphones put it in everyone's pocket, and finally we have virtually everyone in every part of the bell curve on it whether they comprehend it or not. The greater the audience, the more the internet is dragged towards the mean. Of course it will no longer serve the same purpose it once did. The original types who were on it early make up less than 1% of the current internet population. Don't get me wrong, copyright enforcement has degraded many things, but the old internet wouldn't be significantly different today if all other variables remained static.
- partitioned 3y ago
  It was right around the time everyone's grandma figured out how to get a facebook account that it all went to hell.
  - renzobanks 3y ago
    i can second that
  - batch12 3y ago
    This debate predates facebook by a while. Napster came out 5 years prior, and that's when I remember the biggest push from media companies, but there were efforts even before this to limit the free exchange of information.
- wkat4242 3y ago
  I often wonder if we could start a new sub-internet. Like a wide area mesh VPN. Perhaps something like tor but not so focused on anonymity so it doesn't immediately degrade into the cesspool that tor has become.
  - ravenstine 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
geon 3y ago
”Destroyed the internet”? Try society.
Mistletoe 3y ago
I’d say the ad and privacy machine destroyed the internet by several orders of magnitude over the copyright industry.
- justinclift 3y ago
  Maybe that attacked it from two different sides at the same time?
skah 3y ago
[flagged]

Years from now we're gonna look back and realize that copyright industry groups effectively destroyed the internet, and none of us would be laughing about it as we do now.

tpmoney 3y ago

I've been thinking recently about what sort of impact two significant changes to IP law might have in shaping things. 1) Copyrights can only be owned by natural persons and can not be transferred. They can be licensed, but the physical creator of a work always owns the copyright. Disney can't own copyright, only it's artists and animators. They have to negotiate a license to distribute with everyone. The idea here is that if an idea continues to have value for a company, then it continues to have value to the person who created it. And if Disney or whoever decides that something isn't worth having anymore, the creators are free to go out and find someone who does value it. Immediate concern here is how messy this gets deciding what anyone actually owns. Do animators own the copyright to a character jointly? Separately? Do they only own the copyrights to their specific drawings and a character is then inherently uncopyrightable? Joint ownership seems obvious, but then how is that any better for the individuals than Disney having exclusive ownership? It only takes one to prevent you from making money on your work. Separate but equal ownership seems interesting, but how much do you have to contribute to get that? Does everyone who ever drew a sketch for Lilo and Stitch now own the IP rights to the entire character? Likewise how would you keep licensing agreements from looking like convoluted versions of modern copyright anyway? I guess that's more on the unions and guilds but if every employee signs a 200 year exclusive license, that's not any different from what we have today really. 2) Trademarks can not be sold. A trademark's purpose is to assure a buyer of the source of a given good. The whole reason we protect them is because if I buy a product with Apple's branding on it, I want to know I got it from Apple, not from "Bob's Fancy Electronics Shack and Bait Shop". Problem is, if you can sell a trademark, you've changed who is actually the source of the good, but the consumer may not know that. Food items make a good example here. "Uncle Roger's Superior MSG" might be a small company, but when Kraft buys them out, it's not Uncle Roger who's selling it anymore, it's Kraft. And Kraft may change that recipe, or otherwise make decisions that Uncle Roger wouldn't. A consumer should know it's no longer "Uncle Roger's Superior MSG" they're buying, it's now "Kraft MSG" and while it might be based on Uncle Roger's recipe, it's not from Uncle Roger and Kraft should have to rebrand it and fight for brand reputation all over again. Zombie brands are another example of this. Whoever is making Craftsman tools isn't Sears and Roebuck anymore, and they're not the same, and shouldn't be sold as the same. Again there are some immediate concerns that come to mind. Part of the value of buying a company is that trademarks carry the reputation of the company. Distinguishing between a change of owners as part of the course of business and a change of owners as in a sale of the whole company is also difficult. I don't think if "Uncle Roger" and "Auntie Helen" split and the 50/50 ownership structure becomes 100% ownership, does that require a rebrand? Probably not, but then what are the limits of this? If Kraft sells Uncle Roger a 0.0001% ownership in Kraft, does that also mean there's no need to rebrand?

beej71 3y ago
With the copyright, multiple creators could work on it with a signed deal saying they'd be paid, but the sole ownership would go to a single person. A profit sharing plan could be put in place if desired.
redwall_hp 3y ago
> Whoever is making Craftsman tools isn't Sears and Roebuck anymore It never was. Sears, even many decades ago, always contracted other vendors to make their products, just like Costco does with their house brand now. The product numbers even used the first three digits to identify the vendor. A Kenmore appliance would be made by Whirlpool, Maytag, LG, Samsung, whatever. It would be a distinct product, with its own exterior design and feature set (rather than just changing a logo). It definitely was worth finding out who made which, to favor manufacturers like LG over Whirlpool. Craftsman was made by the Stanley/Black&Decker/DeWalt corporation for a long time before they finally bought the brand during the final Sears collapse a few years ago. Here's the prefix list for appliances, but there are larger ones for all products: https://www.applianceaid.com/sears-manufacturing-codes.php https://www.applianceaid.com/sears-manufacturing-codes.php I recall seeing references to companies like "Tandy" for some electronic products, which should indicate that this practice goes back well into the 70s and 80s...
aleph_minus_one 3y ago
> 1) Copyrights can only be owned by natural persons and can not be transferred. They can be licensed, but the physical creator of a work always owns the copyright. Disney can't own copyright, only it's artists and animators. They have to negotiate a license to distribute with everyone. This is, as I understand your idea, the situation that actually exists in Germany in the Urheberrecht. Here, two concepts exists: - Urheberschaft (authorship): the property of being the author and be attributed as such; cannot be sold. - Nutzungsrechte (usage rights): these can be sold

bboygravity 3y ago

Who's laughing?

hcks 3y ago

Please explain how enforcing their right to be paid for what they sell is destroying the internet

MrVandemar 3y ago
"Sell"? They don't sell anything anymore. You get a licence, revocable at any time. And you keep paying and paying and paying.
- ThePowerOfFuet 3y ago
  >You get a licence, revocable at any time. And without refund.
geon 3y ago
If I pirate some content, how is that different to them compared to me just not buying it? Should they be allowed to disconnect my internet because I don’t buy their content? The studios can so easily kill all piracy, and they just about did it with Spotify and Netflix. But no, the greed made them split up into a dozen different services nobody wants, and here we are again.
- awjlogan 3y ago
  Because you are getting something produced by someone for free if you pirate it and you are relying on others to fund your consumption. Take that to the logical extreme: everybody pirates everything. That is _very_ different to everyone not buying it. There is demand for the product and it has a cost to produce. If you steal something from somebody, there is recourse in law. I don't disagree about the greed part, but I guess fragmentation is almost inevitable until the profit margin is driven down to near zero. Shortsighted, probably, but it would essentially require all the producers to back (and therefore yield profit to), one or two Netflix/Spotify type entities.
  - haswell 3y ago
    Taking this to the logical extreme is fallacious. The piracy wars up to this point have already shown that people buy content if it’s reasonably priced, and that piracy in many cases actually increases sales of the original content. The fact that piracy is back in the limelight has everything to do with the failing business models of greedy companies, and is the market reacting accordingly. The fact that there are penalties for stealing physical goods does not imply that just any penalty is fine. The analogy doesn’t work. Removal of Internet access in 2023 is debilitating. Punishments are supposed to fit the crime, and the complete loss of access to what has become a fundamental point of access does not fit the crime. And there’s also the very old arguments that I won’t rehash here about the clear difference between digital copies of content and physical items.

kitanata 3y ago

[flagged]

johndunne 3y ago
Not challenging you, just had an eye brow nearly leave my face... I've been coming to HN for years now and genuinely interested in where your angle comes from? I'm missing something and would like to know... thanks
christophilus 3y ago
My guess is that Meta employees are a small minority of HN readership, so I think you’ll need to explain how you think the HN community is responsible. Unless you just mean the tech community at large. But that’s tautological, as the enshittifiers of tech are categorically a subset of the broad tech community.
- RetroTechie 3y ago
  Lol - kitanata's is funniest comment I read today! But spot on if you think about it. That subset of HN users that work for FAANG, advertising company or similar, are like the sharp edge blade wielded by the business folks. So yeah, in a way parent is right. Not that I'd ever hold it against those HN users. You're (at most) the tool used, not the one wielding it.
  - dasil003 3y ago
    The framing is guaranteed to draw downvotes because many here are doing all they can to resist enshitification, even within FAANG, but unfortunately large corporations will always bend towards profits and the average consumer will always bend towards cheap and convenient. At the end of the day it’s extremely difficult to see what any individual (even the business folks) can really do to effect broad change. Some systemic change would be necessary, but it’s hard to see what changes would lead us in the right direction, especially given the inherent corruptability of incentives in any human-instituted system.
- jprete 3y ago

sseagull 3y ago

Years from now? I've been mad at this for at least a decade. Look at how much control media companies have exerted over pretty much everything. Look at all the anti-piracy stuff with HDCP, or the DRM stuff in browsers, and how some services don't allow you to watch high-definition streams with some browsers. And unskippable ads on DVDs, ultimately enforced by the movie industry. Also, look at how music files are treated so differently from regular files on iOS. And copyright strikes and demonetization on youtube and others, the Sony rootkit scandal, the list goes on. These people have inserted themselves into every aspect of our digital lives, and (along with advertisers) basically ruin everything or at least make everything more complicated just to protect their revenue streams. Edit: Wait, a decade is only 2013? How did that happen. Make that two decades.

beej71 3y ago
I recall trying to find an HDMI cable that would allow me to stream 4k from my legit Netflix account to my legit Roku to my legit TV... Ffffff--

ravenstine 3y ago

As much as I agree that copyright in its current form is a joke, I don't believe it's responsible for destroying the internet. The internet is a wasteland because too many people are on it. It started out as a thing for academics, then became available to non-academics with enough skills to use it (and whom appreciate it), then young people got access to it in school, then smartphones put it in everyone's pocket, and finally we have virtually everyone in every part of the bell curve on it whether they comprehend it or not. The greater the audience, the more the internet is dragged towards the mean. Of course it will no longer serve the same purpose it once did. The original types who were on it early make up less than 1% of the current internet population. Don't get me wrong, copyright enforcement has degraded many things, but the old internet wouldn't be significantly different today if all other variables remained static.

partitioned 3y ago
It was right around the time everyone's grandma figured out how to get a facebook account that it all went to hell.
- renzobanks 3y ago
  i can second that
- batch12 3y ago
  This debate predates facebook by a while. Napster came out 5 years prior, and that's when I remember the biggest push from media companies, but there were efforts even before this to limit the free exchange of information.
wkat4242 3y ago
I often wonder if we could start a new sub-internet. Like a wide area mesh VPN. Perhaps something like tor but not so focused on anonymity so it doesn't immediately degrade into the cesspool that tor has become.
- ravenstine 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

geon 3y ago

”Destroyed the internet”? Try society.

Mistletoe 3y ago

I’d say the ad and privacy machine destroyed the internet by several orders of magnitude over the copyright industry.

justinclift 3y ago
Maybe that attacked it from two different sides at the same time?

skah 3y ago

[flagged]