7 ms·

Without copyright, entire industries would've been dead a long time ago, including many movies, games, books, tv, music, etc. Just because their lobbies tend t

by adra 2y ago

Without copyright, entire industries would've been dead a long time ago, including many movies, games, books, tv, music, etc. Just because their lobbies tend to push the boundary of copyright into the absurd doesn't mean these industries aren't worth saving. There should be actually respectful lawmakers who seek for a balance of public and commercial interests.

pdonis 2y ago
> Without copyright, entire industries would've been dead a long time ago, including many movies, games, books, tv, music, etc. Citation needed. There are many ways to make money from producing content other than restricting how copies of it can be distributed. The owner should be able to choose copyright as a means of control, but that doesn't mean nobody would create any content at all without copyright as a means of control.
- boplicity 2y ago
  There's nothing preventing people from producing works and releasing them without copyright restriction. If that were a more sustainable model, it would be happening far more often. As it is now, especially in the creative fields (which I am most knowledgeable about), the current system has allowed for a incredible flourishing of creation, which you'd have to be pretty daft to deny.
  - TylerE 2y ago
    Given that copyrighting is automatic at the instant of creation, that is, um, debatable. Slapping 3 lines in LICENSE.TXT doesn’t override the Berne convention.
    - trogdor 2y ago
      Are you claiming that an author cannot place their work in the public domain?
      - pdonis 2y ago
        Yes, they can't, because there is no legally reliable way to do it (briefly, because the law really doesn't like the idea of property that doesn't have an owner, so if you try to place a work of yours in the public domain, what you're actually doing is making it abandoned property so anyone who wants to can claim they own it and restrict everyone else, including you, from using it). The best an author can do is to give a license that basically lets anyone do what they want with the work. Creative Commons has licenses that do that.
      - tpush 2y ago
        In most of the world no, they can't.
  - chii 2y ago
    > If that were a more sustainable model, it would be happening far more often. that's not the argument. The fact that there currently are restrictions on producing derivative works is the problem. You cannot produce a star wars story, without getting consent from disney. You cannot write a harry potter story, without consent from Rowling.
    - boplicity 2y ago
      That's not actually true. There's nothing stopping you from producing derivative works. Publishing and/or profiting from other people's work does have some restrictions though. There's actually a huge and thriving community of people publishing derivative works, in a not-for-profit basis, on Archive of Our Own. (Among other places.)
      - pdonis 2y ago
        > There's actually a huge and thriving community of people publishing derivative works, in a not-for-profit basis, on Archive of Our Own. (Among other places.) Yes, and none of those people are making a living at creating things. That's why they are allowed by the copyright owners to do what they're doing--because it's not commercial. Try to actually sell a derivative work of something you don't own the copyright for and see how fast the big media companies come after you. You acknowledge that when you say there are "restrictions" (an understatement if I ever saw one) on profiting from other people's work (where "other people" here means the media companies, not the people who actually created the work). It is true that without our current copyright regime, the "industries" that produce Star Wars, Disney, etc. products would not exist in their current form. But does that mean works like those would not have been created? Does it mean we would have less of them? I strongly doubt it. What it would mean is that more of the profits from those works would go to the actual creative people instead of middlemen.
        boplicity 2y ago
        > Yes, and none of those people are making a living at creating things. Again, not true. One of the most famous examples is likely Naomi Novik, who is a bestselling author, in addition to a prolific producer of derivative works published on AO3. Many other commercially successful authors publish derivative works on this platform as well. > It is true that without our current copyright regime, the "industries" that produce Star Wars, Disney, etc. products would not exist in their current form. But does that mean works like those would not have been created? Does it mean we would have less of them? I strongly doubt it. What it would mean is that more of the profits from those works would go to the actual creative people instead of middlemen. Speculate all you want about an alternative system, but you really don't know what would have happened, or what would happen moving forward.
  - copywrong2 2y ago
    People do not put out their stuff. People get lured into contracts selling their IP to a shitty company that then publishes stuff, of course WITH copyright so they can make money while the artist doesnt
  - pdonis 2y ago
    > the current system has allowed for a incredible flourishing of creation No, the current system has allowed for an incredible flourishing of middlemen who don't create anything themselves but coerce creative people into agreements that give the middlemen virtually all the profits.
- seadan83 2y ago
  Copyright laws prevent piracy. It is interesting to live in a country with no enforced copyrights and EVERYTHING is pirated. I think it is easy to not know about that context and just see the stick side of copyright vis-a-vis big money corporations
  - account42 2y ago
    Technically speaking, copyright laws create piracy as without them we would still have our free speech rights to share whatever we want without the approval from third parties and thus so-called piracy aka copyrigh infringement would not be a thing. Laws also hardly prevent sharing of copyrighted content, they only make it illegal.
    - seadan83 2y ago
      > we would still have our free speech rights to share whatever we want This is a false dichotomy. It's not "free speech" to copy someone else's video game and then sell it for your own profit. By "copy", in the old days that was literally copying the distribution CDs and providing a cracked keycode (it was not even a question of trademarks being close or what not. It's literally people taking the stuff, duplicating it, and selling it for their own profit. Eastern European mafia were greatly financed by this and ran this type of operation at industrial scale). > Laws also hardly prevent sharing of copyrighted content, they only make it illegal. Yeah, that's the point. Without that, everything is bootlegged. Imagine video games - they get bootlegged. DVDs, all bootlegged. Clothing bootlegged. Whatever your business is - bootlegged. Zero copyright is not a utopia of free speech, it is people ripping everyone else off. Per lived experience, I'm just saying the other extreme is not a utopia.
cvwright 2y ago
So true! Copyrights that last 20 years would be completely reasonable. Maybe with exponentially increasing fees for successive renewals, for super valuable properties like Disney movies.
TylerE 2y ago
For that matter, if you think China ripping everyone else off is bad now… well, just wait until every company can do that.
- Qwertious 2y ago
  If everyone could do it, it wouldn't be as big a deal - small western businesses would be on a more level playing field, since they would be almost as immune from being sued by big businesses as Chinese businesses are. As it is, small businesses aren't protected by patents (because a patent is a $10k+ ticket to a $100k+ lawsuit against a competitor with a $1M+ budget for lawyers) while still being bound by the restrictions of big business's patents. It's lose/lose.
- DoItToMe81 2y ago
  Trademark isn't copyright, so no.
matheusmoreira 2y ago
Nobody cares anymore. We're sick of their rent seeking, of their perpetual monopolies on culture. Balance? Compromise? We don't want to hear it. Nearly two hundred years ago one man warned everyone this would happen. Nobody listened. These are the consequences. "At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesman of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions. Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot. On which side indeed should the public sympathy be when the question is whether some book as popular as “Robinson Crusoe” or the “Pilgrim’s Progress” shall be in every cottage, or whether it shall be confined to the libraries of the rich for the advantage of the great-grandson of a bookseller who, a hundred years before, drove a hard bargain for the copyright with the author when in great distress? Remember too that, when once it ceases to be considered as wrong and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say where the invasion will stop. The public seldom makes nice distinctions. The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create. And you will find that, in attempting to impose unreasonable restraints on the reprinting of the works of the dead, you have, to a great extent, annulled those restraints which now prevent men from pillaging and defrauding the living." https://www.thepublicdomain.org/2014/07/24/macaulay-on-copyright/ https://www.thepublicdomain.org/2014/07/24/macaulay-on-copyr...
Zambyte 2y ago
Books, music, and games are a lot older than copyright.
- adra 2y ago
  Have you looked at who created these things by and large? For the most part, you have: - aristocrats that were wealthy that didn't need to "work" to survive and put food on the table - crafts people supported through the patronage of a rich person (or religious order) who deign to support your art - (kinda modern world) national governments who want to support their national art often as a fear that other larger nations cultural influences will dwarf their Are you implying that these three pillars will be able to produce anywhere near the current amount of content we produce? How in the world where digital copies are effectively free to copy and infinitum would a creator reap any benefits from that network effect? A modern equivalent would be famous YouTubers who all they do all day is "watch" other people's hard earned videos. The super lazy ones will not direct people to the original, don't provide meaningful commentary, just consumes the video as 'content' to feed their own audience and provides no value to the original creator. The position to kill copyright entirely would amplify this "just bypass the original source" to lower value of the original creator to zero.
  - Zambyte 2y ago
    > Are you implying that these three pillars will be able to produce anywhere near the current amount of content we produce? Do you think the vast "amount of content we produce" is actually propped up by copyright? Have you ever heard of someone who started their career on YouTube due to copyright? On the contrary, how often have you heard of people stopping their YouTube career due to copyright, or explicitly limiting the content they create? I have only heard of cases of the latter. In fact, the latter partially happened to me. > How in the world where digital copies are effectively free to copy and infinitum would a creator reap any benefits from that network effect? You are making an assumption that people should reap (monetary) benefits for creating things. What you are ignoring is that the world where digital copies are effectively free is also the world where original works are insanely cheap as well. In this world, people create regardless of monetary gain. To make this point: how much money did you make from this comment that you posted? It's covered by copyright, so surely you would not have created it if not for your own benefit.
copywrong2 2y ago
Yeah many industries like: - Big Corps that buy IP - Patent Trolls - Companies that fuck over artists
- freejazz 2y ago
  Why would anyone make video games if they couldn't make money from selling them?
  - sham1 2y ago
    Out of passion for the art. See also: free (libre) software video games released and distributed for free (gratis). Of course, money is a huge motivator, but so is self-expression.
    - freejazz 2y ago
      Well they certainly aren't on level with each other in terms of motivation, so I don't think it's fair for you to say they are both huge motivators.
  - account42 2y ago
    Video games would actually be better of if the profit incentive was removed. Modern high-budget video games have become indistinguishable from slot machines that are optimized by literal psychologists to get you to waste as much of your money (and time) as possible without providing any meaningful experience. I'd rather see much fewer games created if what remains are games focused on having artistic and/or educational value rather than investment opportunities for wall street.
    - freejazz 2y ago
      This is just your own sanctimony, go to a gamestop and ask people if they think we should have an IP regime where there is no gta or football games. What a ridiculous response.

by adra 2y ago

pdonis 2y ago

> Without copyright, entire industries would've been dead a long time ago, including many movies, games, books, tv, music, etc. Citation needed. There are many ways to make money from producing content other than restricting how copies of it can be distributed. The owner should be able to choose copyright as a means of control, but that doesn't mean nobody would create any content at all without copyright as a means of control.

boplicity 2y ago
There's nothing preventing people from producing works and releasing them without copyright restriction. If that were a more sustainable model, it would be happening far more often. As it is now, especially in the creative fields (which I am most knowledgeable about), the current system has allowed for a incredible flourishing of creation, which you'd have to be pretty daft to deny.
- TylerE 2y ago
  Given that copyrighting is automatic at the instant of creation, that is, um, debatable. Slapping 3 lines in LICENSE.TXT doesn’t override the Berne convention.
  - trogdor 2y ago
    Are you claiming that an author cannot place their work in the public domain?
    - pdonis 2y ago
      Yes, they can't, because there is no legally reliable way to do it (briefly, because the law really doesn't like the idea of property that doesn't have an owner, so if you try to place a work of yours in the public domain, what you're actually doing is making it abandoned property so anyone who wants to can claim they own it and restrict everyone else, including you, from using it). The best an author can do is to give a license that basically lets anyone do what they want with the work. Creative Commons has licenses that do that.
    - tpush 2y ago
      In most of the world no, they can't.
- chii 2y ago
  > If that were a more sustainable model, it would be happening far more often. that's not the argument. The fact that there currently are restrictions on producing derivative works is the problem. You cannot produce a star wars story, without getting consent from disney. You cannot write a harry potter story, without consent from Rowling.
  - boplicity 2y ago
    That's not actually true. There's nothing stopping you from producing derivative works. Publishing and/or profiting from other people's work does have some restrictions though. There's actually a huge and thriving community of people publishing derivative works, in a not-for-profit basis, on Archive of Our Own. (Among other places.)
    - pdonis 2y ago
      > There's actually a huge and thriving community of people publishing derivative works, in a not-for-profit basis, on Archive of Our Own. (Among other places.) Yes, and none of those people are making a living at creating things. That's why they are allowed by the copyright owners to do what they're doing--because it's not commercial. Try to actually sell a derivative work of something you don't own the copyright for and see how fast the big media companies come after you. You acknowledge that when you say there are "restrictions" (an understatement if I ever saw one) on profiting from other people's work (where "other people" here means the media companies, not the people who actually created the work). It is true that without our current copyright regime, the "industries" that produce Star Wars, Disney, etc. products would not exist in their current form. But does that mean works like those would not have been created? Does it mean we would have less of them? I strongly doubt it. What it would mean is that more of the profits from those works would go to the actual creative people instead of middlemen.
      - boplicity 2y ago
        > Yes, and none of those people are making a living at creating things. Again, not true. One of the most famous examples is likely Naomi Novik, who is a bestselling author, in addition to a prolific producer of derivative works published on AO3. Many other commercially successful authors publish derivative works on this platform as well. > It is true that without our current copyright regime, the "industries" that produce Star Wars, Disney, etc. products would not exist in their current form. But does that mean works like those would not have been created? Does it mean we would have less of them? I strongly doubt it. What it would mean is that more of the profits from those works would go to the actual creative people instead of middlemen. Speculate all you want about an alternative system, but you really don't know what would have happened, or what would happen moving forward.
- copywrong2 2y ago
  People do not put out their stuff. People get lured into contracts selling their IP to a shitty company that then publishes stuff, of course WITH copyright so they can make money while the artist doesnt
- pdonis 2y ago
  > the current system has allowed for a incredible flourishing of creation No, the current system has allowed for an incredible flourishing of middlemen who don't create anything themselves but coerce creative people into agreements that give the middlemen virtually all the profits.
seadan83 2y ago
Copyright laws prevent piracy. It is interesting to live in a country with no enforced copyrights and EVERYTHING is pirated. I think it is easy to not know about that context and just see the stick side of copyright vis-a-vis big money corporations
- account42 2y ago
  Technically speaking, copyright laws create piracy as without them we would still have our free speech rights to share whatever we want without the approval from third parties and thus so-called piracy aka copyrigh infringement would not be a thing. Laws also hardly prevent sharing of copyrighted content, they only make it illegal.
  - seadan83 2y ago
    > we would still have our free speech rights to share whatever we want This is a false dichotomy. It's not "free speech" to copy someone else's video game and then sell it for your own profit. By "copy", in the old days that was literally copying the distribution CDs and providing a cracked keycode (it was not even a question of trademarks being close or what not. It's literally people taking the stuff, duplicating it, and selling it for their own profit. Eastern European mafia were greatly financed by this and ran this type of operation at industrial scale). > Laws also hardly prevent sharing of copyrighted content, they only make it illegal. Yeah, that's the point. Without that, everything is bootlegged. Imagine video games - they get bootlegged. DVDs, all bootlegged. Clothing bootlegged. Whatever your business is - bootlegged. Zero copyright is not a utopia of free speech, it is people ripping everyone else off. Per lived experience, I'm just saying the other extreme is not a utopia.

cvwright 2y ago

So true! Copyrights that last 20 years would be completely reasonable. Maybe with exponentially increasing fees for successive renewals, for super valuable properties like Disney movies.

TylerE 2y ago

For that matter, if you think China ripping everyone else off is bad now… well, just wait until every company can do that.

Qwertious 2y ago
If everyone could do it, it wouldn't be as big a deal - small western businesses would be on a more level playing field, since they would be almost as immune from being sued by big businesses as Chinese businesses are. As it is, small businesses aren't protected by patents (because a patent is a $10k+ ticket to a $100k+ lawsuit against a competitor with a $1M+ budget for lawyers) while still being bound by the restrictions of big business's patents. It's lose/lose.
DoItToMe81 2y ago
Trademark isn't copyright, so no.

matheusmoreira 2y ago

Nobody cares anymore. We're sick of their rent seeking, of their perpetual monopolies on culture. Balance? Compromise? We don't want to hear it. Nearly two hundred years ago one man warned everyone this would happen. Nobody listened. These are the consequences. "At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesman of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions. Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot. On which side indeed should the public sympathy be when the question is whether some book as popular as “Robinson Crusoe” or the “Pilgrim’s Progress” shall be in every cottage, or whether it shall be confined to the libraries of the rich for the advantage of the great-grandson of a bookseller who, a hundred years before, drove a hard bargain for the copyright with the author when in great distress? Remember too that, when once it ceases to be considered as wrong and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say where the invasion will stop. The public seldom makes nice distinctions. The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create. And you will find that, in attempting to impose unreasonable restraints on the reprinting of the works of the dead, you have, to a great extent, annulled those restraints which now prevent men from pillaging and defrauding the living." https://www.thepublicdomain.org/2014/07/24/macaulay-on-copyright/ https://www.thepublicdomain.org/2014/07/24/macaulay-on-copyr...

Zambyte 2y ago

Books, music, and games are a lot older than copyright.

adra 2y ago
Have you looked at who created these things by and large? For the most part, you have: - aristocrats that were wealthy that didn't need to "work" to survive and put food on the table - crafts people supported through the patronage of a rich person (or religious order) who deign to support your art - (kinda modern world) national governments who want to support their national art often as a fear that other larger nations cultural influences will dwarf their Are you implying that these three pillars will be able to produce anywhere near the current amount of content we produce? How in the world where digital copies are effectively free to copy and infinitum would a creator reap any benefits from that network effect? A modern equivalent would be famous YouTubers who all they do all day is "watch" other people's hard earned videos. The super lazy ones will not direct people to the original, don't provide meaningful commentary, just consumes the video as 'content' to feed their own audience and provides no value to the original creator. The position to kill copyright entirely would amplify this "just bypass the original source" to lower value of the original creator to zero.
- Zambyte 2y ago
  > Are you implying that these three pillars will be able to produce anywhere near the current amount of content we produce? Do you think the vast "amount of content we produce" is actually propped up by copyright? Have you ever heard of someone who started their career on YouTube due to copyright? On the contrary, how often have you heard of people stopping their YouTube career due to copyright, or explicitly limiting the content they create? I have only heard of cases of the latter. In fact, the latter partially happened to me. > How in the world where digital copies are effectively free to copy and infinitum would a creator reap any benefits from that network effect? You are making an assumption that people should reap (monetary) benefits for creating things. What you are ignoring is that the world where digital copies are effectively free is also the world where original works are insanely cheap as well. In this world, people create regardless of monetary gain. To make this point: how much money did you make from this comment that you posted? It's covered by copyright, so surely you would not have created it if not for your own benefit.

copywrong2 2y ago

Yeah many industries like: - Big Corps that buy IP - Patent Trolls - Companies that fuck over artists

freejazz 2y ago
Why would anyone make video games if they couldn't make money from selling them?
- sham1 2y ago
  Out of passion for the art. See also: free (libre) software video games released and distributed for free (gratis). Of course, money is a huge motivator, but so is self-expression.
  - freejazz 2y ago
    Well they certainly aren't on level with each other in terms of motivation, so I don't think it's fair for you to say they are both huge motivators.
- account42 2y ago
  Video games would actually be better of if the profit incentive was removed. Modern high-budget video games have become indistinguishable from slot machines that are optimized by literal psychologists to get you to waste as much of your money (and time) as possible without providing any meaningful experience. I'd rather see much fewer games created if what remains are games focused on having artistic and/or educational value rather than investment opportunities for wall street.
  - freejazz 2y ago
    This is just your own sanctimony, go to a gamestop and ask people if they think we should have an IP regime where there is no gta or football games. What a ridiculous response.