14 ms·

I don't condone or endorse breaking any laws. That said, trademark laws like life of the author + 95 years are absolutely absurd. The ONLY reason to have any l

• 4gotunameagain 2y ago
  It is not about trademark laws. It is about where laws apply. If you torrent a movie right now, you'll be fined in many advanced countries. But a huge corporation led by a sociopath scrapes the entire internet and builds a product with other people's work ? Totally fine.
  • genewitch 2y ago
    Which huge corporation led by a sociopath? There's so many to choose from.
    • noduerme 2y ago
      The wickedest idea that social media run by sociopaths has implanted in the human psyche is the idea that anyone else would take advantage of immoral tactics if they had the means or could afford the payoffs.
  • fx1994 2y ago
    It was always me and them. They are either "nobel" or just rich. me is the rest of peasants. We pay everything and we give everything to the rich ones. Thats it.
  • avereveard 2y ago
    This. It seem the situation is controversial now because of the beloved Studio Ghibli IP, but I want to see the venn diagram of people outrage at this, and the people clamoring for overbearing Disney chatachter protection when the copyright expired and siding with paloworld in the Nintendo lawsuit. It seem most of the discussion is emotionally loaded, and people lost the plot of both why copyright exists and what copyright protects and are twisting that to protect whatever media they like most. But one cannot pick and choose where laws apply, and then the better question would be how we plug the gap that let a multibilion Corp get away with distribution at scale and what derivative work and personal use mean in a image generation as a service world, and artist should be very careful in what their wishes are here, because I bet there's a lot of commission work edging on style transfer and personal use.
• csallen 2y ago
  > The ONLY reason to have any law prohibiting unlicensed copying of intangible property is to incentivize the creation of intangible property. That was the original purpose. It has since been coopted by people and corporations whose incentives are to make as much money as possible by monopolizing valuable intangible "property" for as long as they can. And the chief strategic move these people have made is to convince the average person that ideas are in fact property. That the first person to think something and write it down rightfully "owns" that thought, and that others who express it or share it are not merely infringing copyright, they are "stealing." This plan has largely worked, and now the average person speaks and thinks in these terms, and feels it in their bones.
  • the_other 2y ago
    Philosophers were waaaay ahead of this game.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • specproc 2y ago
    It's been a US-led project for the benefit of American corporations. If I was running the trade emergency room in any European state right now, I'd have "stop enforcing US copyright" up there next to "reciprocal tarrifs".
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    • InDubioProRubio 2y ago
      Worked for china
      • fennecfoxy 2y ago
        In the context of when they want to borrow others' stuff. But then Chinese companies are _more_ than happy to take advantage of Western laws to defend their own IP. It's hypocrisy.
• kazinator 2y ago
  New rule: you get to keep your belongings for 20 years and that's it. Then they are taken away. Every dollar you made twenty or more years ago, every asset you acquired, gone. That oughtta be enough to incentivize people to work and build their wealth. Anything more than that is unnecessary.
  • FeepingCreature 2y ago
    We should never have accepted the term "intellectual property" at all, if this is the mindset it leads to.
  • lazyasciiart 2y ago
    I think you mean "20 years after you die". That seems like a perfectly rational way to deal with people who want to be buried in their gold and jewels in a pyramid.
    • kazinator 2y ago
      OK, so you can have your dad's piano for 20 years after he dies, after that it's public property.
      • umbra07 2y ago
        Some people would surprisingly agree with that.
        • kazinator 2y ago
          Well, yes; some people would agree with the stronger proposition of you not getting that piano, or not without paying some tax on it.
          • lazyasciiart 2y ago
            How on earth do you classify estate taxes as stronger than fixed term ownership?
• ghaff 2y ago
  You’re thinking of copyright law, not trademark law. Which serves a different function. If you’re going to critique something it’s useful to get your facts right.
• noduerme 2y ago
  You're conflating trademark with copyright. Regardless, it's not just copyright laws that are at issue here. This is reproducing human likenesses - like Harrison Ford's - and integrating them into new works. So if I want to make an ad for a soap company, and I get an AI to reproduce a likeness of Harrison Ford, does that mean I can use that likeness in my soap commercials without paying him? I can imagine any court asking "how is this not simply laundering someone's likeness through a third party which claims to not have an image / filter / app / artist reproducing my client's likeness?" All seemingly complicated scams come down to a very basic, obvious, even primitive grift. Someone somewhere in a regulatory capacity is either fooled or paid into accepting that no crime was committed. It's just that simple. This, however, is so glaring that even a child could understand the illegality of it. I'm looking forward to all of Hollywood joining the cause against the rampant abuse of IP by Silicon Valley. I think there are legal grounds here to force all of these models to be taken offline. Additionally, "guardrails" that prevent 1:1 copies of film stills from being reprinted are clearly not only insufficient, they are evidence that the pirates in this case seek to obscure the nature of their piracy. They are the evidence that generative AI is not much more than a copyright laundering scheme, and the obsession with these guardrails is evidence of conspiracy, not some kind of public good.
  • planb 2y ago
    > So if I want to make an ad for a soap company, and I get an AI to reproduce a likeness of Harrison Ford, does that mean I can use that likeness in my soap commercials without paying him? No, you can't! But it shouldn't be the tool that prohibits this. You are not allowed to use existing images of Harrison Ford for your commercial and you also will be sued into oblivion by Disney if you paint a picture of Mickey Mouse advertising your soap, so why should it be any different if an AI painted this for you?
    • noduerme 2y ago
      Well, precisely. What then is the AI company's justification for charging money to paint a picture of Harrison Ford to its users? The justification so far seems to have been loosely based on the idea that derivative artworks are protected as free expression. That argument loses currency if these are not considered derivative but more like highly compressed images in a novel, obfuscated compression format. Layers and layers of neurons holding a copy of Harrison Ford's face is novel, but it's hard to see why it's any different legally than running a JPEG of it through some filters and encoding it in base64. You can't just decode it and use it without attribution.
• RataNova 2y ago
  While I think the laws are broken, I also get why companies fight so hard to defend their IP: it is valuable, and they've built empires around it. But at some point, we have to ask: are we preserving culture or just hoarding it?
  • seadan83 2y ago
    Missing is why laws fight so hard too, missing the opposite of what we have (in the west), namely blatant and rampant piracy. The other extreme is really bad, creators of any type pirated by organized crime. There was no video game nor movie market in eastern Europe for example, can't compete against large scale piracy. Which is to say, preservation without awareness of the threat will look like hoarding. A secondary question is to what extent is that threat real? Without seeing what true rampant piracy looks like, I think it would be easy to be ignorant of the threat.
• Joel_Mckay 2y ago
  Trademarks are very different from copyrights. In general, they never expire as long as the fees are paid in the region, and products bearing the mark are still manufactured. Note, legal firms will usually advise people that one can't camp on Trademarks like other areas of IP law. For example, Aspirin is known as an adult dose of acetylsalicylic acid by almost every consumer, and is Trademarked to prevent some clandestine chemist in their garage making a similarly branded harmful/ineffective substance that damages the Goodwill Bayer earned with customers over decades of business. Despite popular entertainment folklore, sustainable businesses actually want consumer goodwill associated with their products and services. While I agree in many WIPO countries copyright law has essentially degenerated into monetized censorship by removing the proof of fiscal damages criteria (like selling works you don't own.) However, Trademarks ensure your corporate mark or product name is not hijacked in local Markets for questionable purposes. Every castle needs a moat, but I do kind of want to know more about the presidential "Tesler". lol =) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFZUB1eJb34 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFZUB1eJb34
• jl6 2y ago
  > There are approximately zero people who decide they'll create something if they're protected for 95 years after their death but won't if it's 94 years. I’m sure you’re right for individual authors who are driven by a creative spark, but for, say, movies made by large studios, the length of copyright is directly tied to the value of the movie as an asset. If that asset generates revenue for 120 years, then it’s slightly more valuable than an asset that generates revenue for 119 years, and considerably more valuable than an asset that generates revenue for 20 years. The value of the asset is in turn directly linked to how much the studio is willing to pay for that asset. They will invest more money in a film they can milk for 120 years than one that goes public domain after 20. Would studios be willing to invest $200m+ in movie projects if their revenue was curtailed by a shorter copyright term? I don’t know. Probably yes, if we were talking about 120->70. But 120->20? Maybe not. A dramatic shortening of copyright terms is something of a referendum on whether we want big-budget IP to exist. In a world of 20 year copyright, we would probably still have the LOTR books, but we probably wouldn’t have the LOTR movies.
  • pegasus 2y ago
    Seems to me most of that inflated budget is needed for the entertainment role of films, not the art in them, which a low budget can often stimulate rather than inhibit. In which case nothing of importance would be lost by a drastic shortening of copyright terms.
    • jpc0 2y ago
      You are putting a pretty blatant cap on what constitutes "art"...
  • londons_explore 2y ago
    > If that asset generates revenue for 120 years, then it’s slightly more valuable than an asset that generates revenue for 119 years, and considerably more valuable than an asset that generates revenue for 20 years Due to the fairy high cost of capital right now, pretty much anything more than 5 years away is irrelevant. 10 years max, even for insanely high returns on investment.
  • 2y ago
• jpc0 2y ago
  You are missing a bunch of edge cases, and the law is all about edge cases. An artist who works professionally has family members, family members who are dependent on them. If they pass young, become popular just before they pass and their extremely popular works are now public domain. Their family sees nothing from their work, that is absolutely being commercialized ( publishing and creation generally spawns two seperate copyrights).
  • TeMPOraL 2y ago
    GP's not missing those edge cases; GP recognizes those edge cases are themselves a product of IP laws. Those laws are effectively attempting to make information behave as physical objects, by giving them simulated "mass" through a rent-seeking structure. The case you describe is where this simulated physical substrate stops behaving like physical substrate, and choice was made to paper over that with extra rules, so that family can inherit and profit from IP of a dead creator, much like they would inherit physical products of a dead craftsman and profit from selling them. It's a valid question whether or not this is taking things too far, just for the sake of making information conform to rules of markets for physical goods.
  • Matumio 2y ago
    You seem to talk about fairness. Copyright law isn't supposed to be fair, it's supposed to benefit society. On one side you have the interest of the public to make use of already created work. On the other side is the financial incentive to create such work in the first place. So the question to ask is whether the artist would have created the work and published it, even knowing that it isn't an insurance to their family in case of their early death.
    • hinkley 2y ago
      I don’t know how much time you’ve spent on task scheduling or public strategy, but minmaxing of The Public Good versus the private benefit of art is, in fact, a question of fairness. It’s a compromise to give both parties as much of what they want or need as possible.
  • anhner 2y ago
• southernplaces7 2y ago
  >I don't condone or endorse breaking any laws. Really? Because there are a lot of very stupid laws out there that should absolutely be broken, regularly, flagrantly, by as many people as possible for the sake of making enforcement completely null and pointless. Why write in neutered corporate-speak while commenting on a casual comment thread while also (correctly) pointing out the absurdity of certain laws.
• Ntrails 2y ago
  I honestly don't see why anyone who isn't JK Rowling should be allowed to coopt her world. I probably feel even more strongly for worlds/characters I like. Why am I wrong?
• raytopia 2y ago
  Trademark isn't copyright, those are two different things. Trademarks can be renewed roughly every 10 years [1] until the end of time and are about protecting a brand. Now copyright law lasts for "author plus 70 years. For anonymous works, pseudonymous works, or works made for hire, the copyright term is 95 years from the year of first publication or 120 years from creation, whichever comes first." [2] Is copyright too long? Yes. Is it only that long to protect large media companies? Yes. But I would argue that AI companies are pushing the limits of fair use if not violating fair use, which is used as a affirmative defense by the way meaning that AI companies have to go to court to argue what they are doing is okay. They don't just get to wave their hands and say everything is okay because what we're doing is fair use and we get to scrape the world's entire creative output for our own profit. [1] https://www.uspto.gov/learning-and-resources/trademark-faqs#type-browse-faqs_1961 https://www.uspto.gov/learning-and-resources/trademark-faqs#... [2] https://www.copyright.gov/history/copyright-exhibit/lifecycle/ https://www.copyright.gov/history/copyright-exhibit/lifecycl...
  • computerphage 2y ago
    Trademark isn't the same as Registered Trademark either, while we're at it
• thayne 2y ago
  I'd go further and say 10 years from time of creation is probably sufficient. If the work is popular it will make plenty of money in that time. If it isn't popular, it probably won't make much more money after that.
• kerkeslager 2y ago
  > There are approximately zero people who decide they'll create something if they're protected for 95 years after their death but won't if it's 94 years. I wouldn't be surprised if it was the same for 1 year past death. I think life of creator + some reasonable approximation of family members life expectancy would make sense. Content creators do create to ensure their family's security in some cases, I would guess.
• yieldcrv 2y ago
  this reminds me of the time I tried to use a prepaid lawyer to research some copyright issues they went down the rabbit hole on trademark laws, which are not only not copyright related, they are an entirely different federal agency at the Patent Office gave me a giggle and the last time I used cheapo prepaid lawyers
• capnrefsmmat 2y ago
  For what it's worth, this is a uniquely American view of copyright: > The ONLY reason to have any law prohibiting unlicensed copying of intangible property is to incentivize the creation of intangible property. In Europe, particularly France, copyright arose for a very different reason: to protect an author's moral rights as the creator of the work. It was seen as immoral to allow someone's work -- their intellectual offspring -- to be meddled with by others without their permission. Your work represents you and your reputation, and for others to redistribute it is an insult to your dignity. That is why copyrights in Europe started with much longer durations than they did in the United States, and the US has gradually caught up. It is not entirely a Disney effect, but a fundamental difference in the purpose of copyright.
  • djoldman 2y ago
    That's an interesting perspective, and yes wholly foreign to my very American economics influenced background. Are the origins the same when looking at other intellectual property like patents? How did they deal with quoting and/or critiquing other's ideas? Did they allow limited quotation? What about parody and satire?
    • capnrefsmmat 2y ago
      I'm not sure about other intellectual property rights. I do know there's a similar dichotomy for privacy: Americans tend to view it in terms of property rights (ownership of your image, data, etc.) while Europeans view it as a matter of protecting personal dignity. That leads to different decisions: for instance, there's a famous French case of an artist making a nude sketch of a portrait subject, and being unable to sell the sketch because it violated the subject's privacy rights, despite being the owner of the intellectual property. Peter Baldwin's Copyright Wars is a good overview of the European vs American attitudes to copyright in general.
      • djoldman 2y ago
        Thanks. I put it on hold at the library.
• teaearlgraycold 2y ago
  I condone and endorse breaking copyright laws.
• Breza 2y ago
  I agree with your specific point. I think copyright should last for 50 years. That would protect long running franchises like Harry Potter or the Dresden Files but still allow things like Spiderman and Aretha Franklin to be freely reimagined. However, most of the examples in the article should still be protected. Lara Croft first appeared 29 years ago. Any copyright system should still be protecting IP from 1996.