3 ms·

One of the reasons that copyright processes are so biased towards traditional rightsholders and against individual creators is that the latter group is simultan

• throw310822 2y ago
  The state of content producers (including app developers) on the internet today is the same as that of factory workers in the industrial revolution. Everyone's work is immediately replaceable with that of someone else, who is more than willing to step in to take the spot. Workers solved that with unions that can coordinate the workers' actions. In concrete terms, a content-creators union might act as a middleman who is able to make all the contents from all its members simultaneously and immediately unavailable on the targeted platforms until some agreement is met or either side gives up.
  • btown 2y ago
    While the presence of an algorithm that "auto-scabs" makes a full-fledged strike fundamentally difficult, a threat of a coordinated campaign where large creators encourage users to install ad blockers and go off-site for donations, rather than buying superchats/subscriptions on platform, might be meaningful enough to compel achievable asks like copyright strike reform.
• Hilift 2y ago
  The clear-headed perspective would be to assume that a YouTube channel could disappear at any minute and there is little recourse unless an attorney is hired. It's their ball and their game. What rule that does not exist today could exist tomorrow.
• thomastjeffery 2y ago
  Copyright's failure lies at its very foundations. The explicit goal of copyright is to promote art work. Copyright intends to accomplish this by promising each artist a profitable monopoly over the result of their work. The thinking is that even though an artist isn't paid directly for their labor, they can compel society to pretend their art is a singular object and sell it over and over again as a good. This is why pretentious gallery people refer to paintings and sculptures as individual "works", as if labor itself can be counted with integers. It isn't the instance of art (the copy) they are referring to as "a work": it is the abstract unit of labor and the copyright monopoly (the exclusive right to make another copy) that defines its domain. Because copyright redefines art as a good, each artist must invest their labor to create "a work". Only then can they leverage copyright to (hopefully) profit from their investment. This is already counterproductive, because the only prospective artists who are free to work are those who can afford the upfront investment of their own labor. Profit from this investment is nowhere near guaranteed, particularly today when the overwhelming majority of publishing goes through a tiny number of corporations. The most significant problem, though, is the monopoly itself. For copyright to function, an artist must be able to monopolize their "work": not the original copy they made, but the labor itself. In order to do so, the copyright holder must be able to prevent any work that intersects with their own. What this means is that copyright is made of incompatibility. Anyone who wants to collaborate with a work must have explicit permission; otherwise their own labor is illegal by virtue of the presence of someone else's existing work. Copyright demands that the labor of one individual be incompatible with the other. This incompatibility is what copyright is truly used for. We use copyright to destroy fraudulent copy. We use copyright to fill moats of incompatibility; and drown competition from those who seek to collaborate competitively. Copyright has been a bad idea from its very inception, but in today's world - where copy itself is practically free, and collaboration requires nearly zero coordination - copyright has become the foundation of the most significant and damaging parts of our society. It's time to start over.