7 ms·

Copyright is broken and needs drastic changes. It is not fulfilling its purpose for a long time now and is holding back humanity as a whole.

rstupek 3y ago
I'm curious how copyright is holding back humanity?
- inglor_cz 3y ago
  I would argue that, like every economic compromise, copyright introduces certain friction. For example, authors cannot easily build on works of other authors; even if you had a brilliant idea about a new Mickey Mouse movie, you would have to obtain licence from Disney for that. That sort of goes against the entire cultural tradition of humanity before copyright; Disney themselves made enormous money on adaptations of folk tales in public domain. Art does not exist in a vacuum and most works are at least inspired by previous works. Ofc authors and publishers benefit from this friction, that is why copyright exists at all. But it is a legitimate question where precisely that tradeoff should lie. Already in the 18th century in England, the Law Lords rejected "eternal" copyright as undesirable. 95 years isn't exactly eternity, but it is a lot longer than the original 14+14 format.
- 1letterunixname 3y ago
  It prevents archival, reproduction, and examination of interesting legacy works before they and their contemporary supporting materials disappear.
  - c0pium 3y ago
    …for people who are unwilling to pay. There are explicit carve outs in the DMCA for anyone who is legitimately doing any of those things to break DRM to make copies. You just need to actually pay for the material.
    - hn_acker 3y ago
      It's not just about payment. It's about licensing. Preserving/archiving legally-obtained copyrighted works without a license is in a grey area even if you never share the archive with anyone until the term is over. Grey area means "do at your own risk". Preservation without distribution is not fair use, since fair use can only be decided on a case-by-case basis in court. What if the copyright holder charges an unaffordable amount for a license for archival? (Don't forget, the preservationist is the one doing the preservation work.) What if the copyright holder doesn't offer a license to archive their works for any price? What if the copyright holder wants their work to go away forever, even though that completely flies against the stated purpose of the Copyright Clause [1]? (You can't have progress of knowledge if the knowledge disappears.) What if the US Copyright Office didn't grant an exception for archival in the current three-year round of DMCA 1201 rule-making? (Why do these crucial exceptions to DMCA 1201 have to expire every three years?) What if you can't find the copyright holder, especially in the case of orphan works? Copyright is a real, not hypothetical, obstacle to preservation [2]: > Films have disintegrated because preservationists can’t digitize them. The works of historians and journalists are incomplete. Artists find their cultural heritage off limits. (See studies like the Hargreaves Review commissioned by the UK ns of the availability of copyrighted works and public domain works, and economic studies of the effects of copyright.) I'm not arguing about whether copyright "holds back humanity". I'm just pointing out that "you just need to pay for the material" is a fundamental misunderstanding in the context of preserving copyrighted works. And personally, I think the US Congress should add a bright-line exception to copyright for preservation/archival without distribution by anyone. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause#Effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause#Effect [2] https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2024/ https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2024/
      - c0pium 3y ago
        Archiving doesn’t mean what you think it means; ripping a disc and then preserving the file so you can watch it on your phone is not “archiving”. The congress has added a process for the rule-making authority to draw bright-line distinctions for actual archivists to archive things, and they have done so. It’s just that it only applies to people who are actually archiving, not people who want to violate the terms of a license because they think they’re entitled to for some nebulous hand-wavy reason. The rest is just being mad that people who own a thing, in this instance copyright to a work, are allowed to do whatever they want with their thing. Rights holders are not people who are temporarily holding something which belongs to mankind, quite the opposite. It’s their thing, they can do whatever they please with it. If you don’t like it you can kick rocks.
- sjfjsjdjwvwvc 3y ago
  Learning materials are under lock and key and people need education. We desperately need more and better scientists yet publishing houses hold them hostage. Hundreds of thousands of lives are being wasted working on the legal systems in place to protect a few huge companies profits. And that is just from the top of my head.
  - hadlock 3y ago
    In just the last 20 years there has probably been more free learning materials produced, than in the last 5000 years, and we can translate them all in to nearly any language instantly for free thanks to LLMs. There is no shortage of materials, we just need more people to point young people in their direction. MIT's entire computer science courses have been freely available on youtube since ~2008 and they're quite good and updated moderately frequently (more than is neccessary)
  - tptacek 3y ago
    Learning materials are more available to more people, especially people without resources, than at any point in the preceding 150 years. That expansion of material and access to material occurred during a historic expansion of copyright.
- starttoaster 3y ago
  The way I see it, which is potentially overly naive, there are two trains of thought that make sense to me. Either you believe that it is more valuable for humans to compete with each other for technological advances to sell them as a product in the free market. These people would probably argue that the ability to sell your idea in a market with some amount of anti-competitor protection is what spurs people to make these advancements at all. Or you believe that it is more valuable for humans to collaborate and build off of each other's ideas, which copyrights and similar legal protection concepts stifle. These people probably believe that their argument prevails over the previous camp's argument, or they may even believe that people would ultimately advance technology without copyright protections anyway. Looking at it in one of those two ways, it seems pretty clear how one could draw the conclusion that copyrighting holds back humanity.
- swayvil 3y ago
  Knowledge is an empowering thing. To transmit and copy it freely means empowering all of humanity. Therefore any constraint to that holds back humanity. Copyright is such a constraint.
1letterunixname 3y ago
100, author+50, or author+70 years is absolutely absurd rent-seeking corporate greed that subsumed the protections of individual creators because of damn corporate personhood. Copyright should exist for a period of 2x "life sentence" used by Scandinavian criminal courts: 42 years. No extensions, no exceptions.
- dahart 3y ago
  My fear is that shortening copyright now won’t do anything to stem corporate greed at all, but it would let the corporations pillage all the modern works of the massive sea of independent artists and individual creators while they’re still alive and trying to make a living.
- xracy 3y ago
  I feel like... 10 years... might be the right amount here. But honestly, I'd be inclined to see how bad it is if the answer is like 3 years. not about to jump right back into it with "42 years" That's still half a lifetime. Seems unnecessarily long.
  - grishka 3y ago
    Nothing but greed will break if it becomes 3 years. On the contrary, IMO this will actually considerably reduce piracy, because things entering public domain would be something one can wait for. You either go to a cinema to see the hot new movie right now, or you see it legally for free in 3 years.
  - CaptainFever 3y ago
    As a copyright abolitionist I think 10 years is an alright compromise if alternative funding models really don't work out. Long enough to be painful enough to spend money, short enough that you can build upon the previous decade's work. If you have a childhood show, once you become a young adult, you can build on it legally. Simple to calculate too!
shmerl 3y ago
For sure. The term should be rolled back to sane levels. Breaking DRM should not be banned and so on.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

rstupek 3y ago

I'm curious how copyright is holding back humanity?

inglor_cz 3y ago
I would argue that, like every economic compromise, copyright introduces certain friction. For example, authors cannot easily build on works of other authors; even if you had a brilliant idea about a new Mickey Mouse movie, you would have to obtain licence from Disney for that. That sort of goes against the entire cultural tradition of humanity before copyright; Disney themselves made enormous money on adaptations of folk tales in public domain. Art does not exist in a vacuum and most works are at least inspired by previous works. Ofc authors and publishers benefit from this friction, that is why copyright exists at all. But it is a legitimate question where precisely that tradeoff should lie. Already in the 18th century in England, the Law Lords rejected "eternal" copyright as undesirable. 95 years isn't exactly eternity, but it is a lot longer than the original 14+14 format.
1letterunixname 3y ago
It prevents archival, reproduction, and examination of interesting legacy works before they and their contemporary supporting materials disappear.
- c0pium 3y ago
  …for people who are unwilling to pay. There are explicit carve outs in the DMCA for anyone who is legitimately doing any of those things to break DRM to make copies. You just need to actually pay for the material.
  - hn_acker 3y ago
    It's not just about payment. It's about licensing. Preserving/archiving legally-obtained copyrighted works without a license is in a grey area even if you never share the archive with anyone until the term is over. Grey area means "do at your own risk". Preservation without distribution is not fair use, since fair use can only be decided on a case-by-case basis in court. What if the copyright holder charges an unaffordable amount for a license for archival? (Don't forget, the preservationist is the one doing the preservation work.) What if the copyright holder doesn't offer a license to archive their works for any price? What if the copyright holder wants their work to go away forever, even though that completely flies against the stated purpose of the Copyright Clause [1]? (You can't have progress of knowledge if the knowledge disappears.) What if the US Copyright Office didn't grant an exception for archival in the current three-year round of DMCA 1201 rule-making? (Why do these crucial exceptions to DMCA 1201 have to expire every three years?) What if you can't find the copyright holder, especially in the case of orphan works? Copyright is a real, not hypothetical, obstacle to preservation [2]: > Films have disintegrated because preservationists can’t digitize them. The works of historians and journalists are incomplete. Artists find their cultural heritage off limits. (See studies like the Hargreaves Review commissioned by the UK ns of the availability of copyrighted works and public domain works, and economic studies of the effects of copyright.) I'm not arguing about whether copyright "holds back humanity". I'm just pointing out that "you just need to pay for the material" is a fundamental misunderstanding in the context of preserving copyrighted works. And personally, I think the US Congress should add a bright-line exception to copyright for preservation/archival without distribution by anyone. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause#Effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause#Effect [2] https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2024/ https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2024/
    - c0pium 3y ago
      Archiving doesn’t mean what you think it means; ripping a disc and then preserving the file so you can watch it on your phone is not “archiving”. The congress has added a process for the rule-making authority to draw bright-line distinctions for actual archivists to archive things, and they have done so. It’s just that it only applies to people who are actually archiving, not people who want to violate the terms of a license because they think they’re entitled to for some nebulous hand-wavy reason. The rest is just being mad that people who own a thing, in this instance copyright to a work, are allowed to do whatever they want with their thing. Rights holders are not people who are temporarily holding something which belongs to mankind, quite the opposite. It’s their thing, they can do whatever they please with it. If you don’t like it you can kick rocks.
sjfjsjdjwvwvc 3y ago
Learning materials are under lock and key and people need education. We desperately need more and better scientists yet publishing houses hold them hostage. Hundreds of thousands of lives are being wasted working on the legal systems in place to protect a few huge companies profits. And that is just from the top of my head.
- hadlock 3y ago
  In just the last 20 years there has probably been more free learning materials produced, than in the last 5000 years, and we can translate them all in to nearly any language instantly for free thanks to LLMs. There is no shortage of materials, we just need more people to point young people in their direction. MIT's entire computer science courses have been freely available on youtube since ~2008 and they're quite good and updated moderately frequently (more than is neccessary)
- tptacek 3y ago
  Learning materials are more available to more people, especially people without resources, than at any point in the preceding 150 years. That expansion of material and access to material occurred during a historic expansion of copyright.
starttoaster 3y ago
The way I see it, which is potentially overly naive, there are two trains of thought that make sense to me. Either you believe that it is more valuable for humans to compete with each other for technological advances to sell them as a product in the free market. These people would probably argue that the ability to sell your idea in a market with some amount of anti-competitor protection is what spurs people to make these advancements at all. Or you believe that it is more valuable for humans to collaborate and build off of each other's ideas, which copyrights and similar legal protection concepts stifle. These people probably believe that their argument prevails over the previous camp's argument, or they may even believe that people would ultimately advance technology without copyright protections anyway. Looking at it in one of those two ways, it seems pretty clear how one could draw the conclusion that copyrighting holds back humanity.
swayvil 3y ago
Knowledge is an empowering thing. To transmit and copy it freely means empowering all of humanity. Therefore any constraint to that holds back humanity. Copyright is such a constraint.

1letterunixname 3y ago

100, author+50, or author+70 years is absolutely absurd rent-seeking corporate greed that subsumed the protections of individual creators because of damn corporate personhood. Copyright should exist for a period of 2x "life sentence" used by Scandinavian criminal courts: 42 years. No extensions, no exceptions.

dahart 3y ago
My fear is that shortening copyright now won’t do anything to stem corporate greed at all, but it would let the corporations pillage all the modern works of the massive sea of independent artists and individual creators while they’re still alive and trying to make a living.
xracy 3y ago
I feel like... 10 years... might be the right amount here. But honestly, I'd be inclined to see how bad it is if the answer is like 3 years. not about to jump right back into it with "42 years" That's still half a lifetime. Seems unnecessarily long.
- grishka 3y ago
  Nothing but greed will break if it becomes 3 years. On the contrary, IMO this will actually considerably reduce piracy, because things entering public domain would be something one can wait for. You either go to a cinema to see the hot new movie right now, or you see it legally for free in 3 years.
- CaptainFever 3y ago
  As a copyright abolitionist I think 10 years is an alright compromise if alternative funding models really don't work out. Long enough to be painful enough to spend money, short enough that you can build upon the previous decade's work. If you have a childhood show, once you become a young adult, you can build on it legally. Simple to calculate too!

shmerl 3y ago

For sure. The term should be rolled back to sane levels. Breaking DRM should not be banned and so on.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]