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> But it's important to remember that no copyright at all would hurt small and medium creators immensely. Big corps could just pick things that are trending up,

> But it's important to remember that no copyright at all would hurt small and medium creators immensely. Big corps could just pick things that are trending up, rip them off instantly and scale their ripoff much better thanks to their great workforce and marketing reach The big assumption in this argument is that large corporations that depend on copyright would still exist, but it seems pretty clear that they would not. If copyright didn't exist, then there would be nothing for them to monetize. The first broadcast, distribution or performance of a work could recorded/copied and redistributed with no penalty, so large corporations are just as disadvantaged as small players. How do you see large corporations forming and perpetuating themselves in order to exploit these smaller players?

Centigonal 3y ago
H&M, Shein, etc are not IP-based organizations - their value comes from their massive and highly efficient production, supplychain, and distribution networks. They steal or dupe many of their designs, usually from smaller creators, designers, and boutiques. A no copyright environment would benefit businesses like this.
- naasking 3y ago
  Sure, and benefit all of us in turn given the lower costs for nice clothing due to economies of scale. That's ostensibly the point of copyright, no? To benefit society by advancing useful arts and sciences. So boutique designers that can charge high prices due to artificial scarcity would not be a thing. If there are no more boutique designers, then these firms will have to commission designers themselves, or we rely on open source design work, eg. students who are learning design, enthusiasts, and so on. I'm not really seeing a real downside here. Yes, things would be different, but would they be worse? I don't think so.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    >hat's ostensibly the point of copyright, no? To benefit society by advancing useful arts and sciences. Do people forget that copyright was made to protect the investor first, and then to progress society second? If the inventor has no incentive to invent, you can't benefit and advance society off their shoulders. So the inventor gets their due payment, then after benefiting for most their life or so (14 + 14, in a time where life expectancy was 40 years old), release to the public around the time that person is retired or dead. The downside is that the spark would never come in a lot of places. You can't lower the cost of what doesn't exist.
    - naasking 3y ago
      > If the inventor has no incentive to invent This is not correct. It's a failure to understand that invention does not come only from external motivation, but also, possibly mostly, from internal motivations. The motivation to understand the world, to improve people's lives, to build something cool, useful or meaningful. It's a huge motivation behind the success of OSS. I don't understand how people can just completely ignore all of the evidence that the world would not collapse if IP rights were significantly relaxed or even eliminated. People wrote, painted and composed music long before copyright. Sometimes this work was commissioned, sometimes it was done purely for pleasure. Some of the most creative periods of human history took place when there was no notion of IP rights. > Do people forget that copyright was made to protect the investor first, and then to progress society second? I don't think this is correct either. The whole purpose of giving inventors/authors these rights was to promote progress. The inventor comes second, not first: > The Congress shall have Power [...] to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries. In other words, "we grant these rights to authors and inventors in order to promote progress of science and useful arts", ie. these rights are conditional on the understanding that they promote progress. If they do not promote progress then they should be revised or rescinded.
      - johnnyanmac 3y ago
        >It's a failure to understand that invention does not come only from external motivation, but also, possibly mostly, from internal motivations. The motivation to understand the world, to improve people's lives, to build something cool, useful or meaningful. It's a huge motivation behind the success of OSS. It could be and is possible. But many important inventions weren't made by the rich elite that never had to worry about paying monthly expenses (many also were. But it just feeds back into the elite that way, which people seem to have in this topic). You're not going to get innovation from someone who's worried about if they can make rent that month. That's generally why entrepreneurs of all kinds either seek such funding with a pitch or simply work in industry in R&D. Both are ways to survive before the big break. >The whole purpose of giving inventors/authors these rights was to promote progress. The inventor comes second, not first: Sure that's the government's first angle. But the government has many other ways to promote progress; it won't be the biggest loser if copyright breaks down, especially not in such a globalized world. Inventors are the target audience of these laws to incentivize them to invent. So I the spirit of the law the inventor comes first. Similar to how gambling laws audience is to protect the vulnerable despite the real reasons government banning them coming down to a lack of ability to properly tax (and probably some puritanism value too).
- dventimi 3y ago
  Please. They don't have highly efficient production. What they have is access to cheap labor overseas, maintained again by the government. It may not be patents and copyrights, exactly, but it's the same basic idea: the government picking winners and losers.
sensanaty 3y ago
Maybe if we lived in a world that never had copyright law to begin with, but we don't. We live in a world where trillion dollar entities like Microsoft & Disney exist. Even if you abolished the concept of Copyright, Patents and all the rest of it now at this very moment, these companies would still have trillions in their coffers with which they could do plenty of harm to smaller entities. You think Microsoft, who already have a habit of harvesting as many things as they can en-masse, isn't gonna be able to do anything to harm the smaller players? You think Disney isn't just gonna go out and straight up hoover up every single byte of music & video in existence that they can get their hands on and start reselling it? > ...then there would be nothing for them to monetize... ... other than the works of every single person they could possibly get their hands on, as is happening with the AI companies.
- naasking 3y ago
  > Even if you abolished the concept of Copyright, Patents and all the rest of it now at this very moment, these companies would still have trillions in their coffers with which they could do plenty of harm to smaller entities And they would slowly dwindle and die as their revenue streams dried up. I'm still not seeing the issue. They're already "harming" small creators in these same ways, particularly because extended copyright means we can't have derivative works, thus stifling innovations of smaller creators right now. > You think Disney isn't just gonna go out and straight up hoover up every single byte of music & video in existence that they can get their hands on and start reselling it? Reselling what? Something you would be able to download for free on the Internet if copyright didn't exist? An open source Spotify would immediately pop up that would only charge you enough to cover hosting. What commercial enterprise do you think could compete with that long-term?
  - snowwrestler 3y ago
    > An open source Spotify would immediately pop up that would only charge you enough to cover hosting. What commercial enterprise do you think could compete with that long-term? What you are describing is a commercial enterprise.
snowwrestler 3y ago
Large-scale distribution is expensive and complicated. Companies don’t need to control copyright to make money doing it. In fact digital distribution companies make way more money today than copyright holders. Look how much Google, Apple, Amazon, etc are worth, compared to the labels. Spotify alone has more annual revenue than all the big music labels combined. Copyright is the legal lever that allows labels and artists to make a claim on some of that distribution revenue. This is in fact the origin of the legal concept of copyright: established printers who had more money and equipment than authors would print up copies of popular written works, distribute and sell them, and return nothing to the author.
- bloppe 3y ago
  > Large-scale distribution is expensive and complicated. Not anymore. Most CDN's will do that for free. Distribution is easy. Spotify makes money because open source pirating networks attract the attention of law enforcement.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    At the scale of Spotify and FAANG, hosting that data gets really expensive, really fast. It's again, why Amazon is a trillionarire from giving "cheap server data" to billionaires. It's also tech literacy. Artists under may be able to host their own servers, but not well. They'd be the biggest targets of all the big hacks (which still happen to said billion dollar corps in 2023), you would want someone who can secure them for you. And they may not know how to host a server to begin with.
    - naasking 3y ago
      You don't even need to host data and worry about scalability, you can exploit distributed networks like ipfs and BitTorrent.
- naasking 3y ago
  > Large-scale distribution is expensive and complicated. It is in fact neither expensive, nor complicated, eg. napster.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
beej71 3y ago
Is the argument here that without copyright the works would be effectively worthless, so the corporations couldn't make money off them?
- chrismcb 3y ago
  Basically. Studios wouldn't invest 100s of millions of Dollars to create blockbuster movies of they couldn't get their money back. Personally I like watching blockbuster movies. Same goes for almost anything that takes time to create.

Centigonal 3y ago

H&M, Shein, etc are not IP-based organizations - their value comes from their massive and highly efficient production, supplychain, and distribution networks. They steal or dupe many of their designs, usually from smaller creators, designers, and boutiques. A no copyright environment would benefit businesses like this.

naasking 3y ago
Sure, and benefit all of us in turn given the lower costs for nice clothing due to economies of scale. That's ostensibly the point of copyright, no? To benefit society by advancing useful arts and sciences. So boutique designers that can charge high prices due to artificial scarcity would not be a thing. If there are no more boutique designers, then these firms will have to commission designers themselves, or we rely on open source design work, eg. students who are learning design, enthusiasts, and so on. I'm not really seeing a real downside here. Yes, things would be different, but would they be worse? I don't think so.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  >hat's ostensibly the point of copyright, no? To benefit society by advancing useful arts and sciences. Do people forget that copyright was made to protect the investor first, and then to progress society second? If the inventor has no incentive to invent, you can't benefit and advance society off their shoulders. So the inventor gets their due payment, then after benefiting for most their life or so (14 + 14, in a time where life expectancy was 40 years old), release to the public around the time that person is retired or dead. The downside is that the spark would never come in a lot of places. You can't lower the cost of what doesn't exist.
  - naasking 3y ago
    > If the inventor has no incentive to invent This is not correct. It's a failure to understand that invention does not come only from external motivation, but also, possibly mostly, from internal motivations. The motivation to understand the world, to improve people's lives, to build something cool, useful or meaningful. It's a huge motivation behind the success of OSS. I don't understand how people can just completely ignore all of the evidence that the world would not collapse if IP rights were significantly relaxed or even eliminated. People wrote, painted and composed music long before copyright. Sometimes this work was commissioned, sometimes it was done purely for pleasure. Some of the most creative periods of human history took place when there was no notion of IP rights. > Do people forget that copyright was made to protect the investor first, and then to progress society second? I don't think this is correct either. The whole purpose of giving inventors/authors these rights was to promote progress. The inventor comes second, not first: > The Congress shall have Power [...] to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries. In other words, "we grant these rights to authors and inventors in order to promote progress of science and useful arts", ie. these rights are conditional on the understanding that they promote progress. If they do not promote progress then they should be revised or rescinded.
    - johnnyanmac 3y ago
      >It's a failure to understand that invention does not come only from external motivation, but also, possibly mostly, from internal motivations. The motivation to understand the world, to improve people's lives, to build something cool, useful or meaningful. It's a huge motivation behind the success of OSS. It could be and is possible. But many important inventions weren't made by the rich elite that never had to worry about paying monthly expenses (many also were. But it just feeds back into the elite that way, which people seem to have in this topic). You're not going to get innovation from someone who's worried about if they can make rent that month. That's generally why entrepreneurs of all kinds either seek such funding with a pitch or simply work in industry in R&D. Both are ways to survive before the big break. >The whole purpose of giving inventors/authors these rights was to promote progress. The inventor comes second, not first: Sure that's the government's first angle. But the government has many other ways to promote progress; it won't be the biggest loser if copyright breaks down, especially not in such a globalized world. Inventors are the target audience of these laws to incentivize them to invent. So I the spirit of the law the inventor comes first. Similar to how gambling laws audience is to protect the vulnerable despite the real reasons government banning them coming down to a lack of ability to properly tax (and probably some puritanism value too).
dventimi 3y ago
Please. They don't have highly efficient production. What they have is access to cheap labor overseas, maintained again by the government. It may not be patents and copyrights, exactly, but it's the same basic idea: the government picking winners and losers.

sensanaty 3y ago

Maybe if we lived in a world that never had copyright law to begin with, but we don't. We live in a world where trillion dollar entities like Microsoft & Disney exist. Even if you abolished the concept of Copyright, Patents and all the rest of it now at this very moment, these companies would still have trillions in their coffers with which they could do plenty of harm to smaller entities. You think Microsoft, who already have a habit of harvesting as many things as they can en-masse, isn't gonna be able to do anything to harm the smaller players? You think Disney isn't just gonna go out and straight up hoover up every single byte of music & video in existence that they can get their hands on and start reselling it? > ...then there would be nothing for them to monetize... ... other than the works of every single person they could possibly get their hands on, as is happening with the AI companies.

naasking 3y ago
> Even if you abolished the concept of Copyright, Patents and all the rest of it now at this very moment, these companies would still have trillions in their coffers with which they could do plenty of harm to smaller entities And they would slowly dwindle and die as their revenue streams dried up. I'm still not seeing the issue. They're already "harming" small creators in these same ways, particularly because extended copyright means we can't have derivative works, thus stifling innovations of smaller creators right now. > You think Disney isn't just gonna go out and straight up hoover up every single byte of music & video in existence that they can get their hands on and start reselling it? Reselling what? Something you would be able to download for free on the Internet if copyright didn't exist? An open source Spotify would immediately pop up that would only charge you enough to cover hosting. What commercial enterprise do you think could compete with that long-term?
- snowwrestler 3y ago
  > An open source Spotify would immediately pop up that would only charge you enough to cover hosting. What commercial enterprise do you think could compete with that long-term? What you are describing is a commercial enterprise.

snowwrestler 3y ago

Large-scale distribution is expensive and complicated. Companies don’t need to control copyright to make money doing it. In fact digital distribution companies make way more money today than copyright holders. Look how much Google, Apple, Amazon, etc are worth, compared to the labels. Spotify alone has more annual revenue than all the big music labels combined. Copyright is the legal lever that allows labels and artists to make a claim on some of that distribution revenue. This is in fact the origin of the legal concept of copyright: established printers who had more money and equipment than authors would print up copies of popular written works, distribute and sell them, and return nothing to the author.

bloppe 3y ago
> Large-scale distribution is expensive and complicated. Not anymore. Most CDN's will do that for free. Distribution is easy. Spotify makes money because open source pirating networks attract the attention of law enforcement.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  At the scale of Spotify and FAANG, hosting that data gets really expensive, really fast. It's again, why Amazon is a trillionarire from giving "cheap server data" to billionaires. It's also tech literacy. Artists under may be able to host their own servers, but not well. They'd be the biggest targets of all the big hacks (which still happen to said billion dollar corps in 2023), you would want someone who can secure them for you. And they may not know how to host a server to begin with.
  - naasking 3y ago
    You don't even need to host data and worry about scalability, you can exploit distributed networks like ipfs and BitTorrent.
naasking 3y ago
> Large-scale distribution is expensive and complicated. It is in fact neither expensive, nor complicated, eg. napster.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

beej71 3y ago

Is the argument here that without copyright the works would be effectively worthless, so the corporations couldn't make money off them?

chrismcb 3y ago
Basically. Studios wouldn't invest 100s of millions of Dollars to create blockbuster movies of they couldn't get their money back. Personally I like watching blockbuster movies. Same goes for almost anything that takes time to create.