4 ms·

Zero (0) years for corporate copyright, zero (0) years for human copyright is the golden zone in my book.

by Zambyte 1y ago

School-Cotton 1y ago
Why?
- Zambyte 1y ago
  It took me a while to be convinced that copyright is strictly a bad idea, but these two articles were very convincing to me. https://drewdevault.com/2020/08/24/Alice-in-Wonderland.html https://drewdevault.com/2020/08/24/Alice-in-Wonderland.html https://drewdevault.com/2021/12/23/Sustainable-creativity-post-copyright.html https://drewdevault.com/2021/12/23/Sustainable-creativity-po...
  - SketchySeaBeast 1y ago
    The first article is saying that "Copyright is bad because of corporations", and I can kind of get behind that, especially the very long term copyrights that have lost the intent, but the second article says that artists will be happier without copyright if we just solve capitalism first. I don't know about you, but that reads to me like "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch you must first invent the universe". If an artist produces a work they should have the rights to that work. If I self-publish a novel and then penguin decides that novel is really good and they want to publish it, without copyright they'd just do that, totally swamping me with their clout and punishing my ever putting the work out. That's a bad thing.
    - Zambyte 1y ago
      > If an artist produces a work they should have the rights to that work. That would indeed be nice, but as the article says, that's usually not the case. The rights holder and the author are almost never the same entity in commercial artistic endeavors. I know I'm not the rights holder for my erroneously-considered-art work (software). > If I self-publish a novel and then penguin decides that novel is really good and they want to publish it, without copyright they'd just do that, totally swamping me with their clout and punishing my ever putting the work out. That's a bad thing. Why? You created influential art and its influence was spread. Is that not the point of (good) art?
      - SketchySeaBeast 1y ago
        > The rights holder and the author are almost never the same entity in commercial artistic endeavors. There's definitely problems with corporatization of ownership of these things, I won't disagree. > Why? You created influential art and its influence was spread. Is that not the point of (good) art? Why do we expect artists to be selfless? Do you think Stephen King is still writing only because he loves the art? You don't simply make software because you love it, right? Should people not be able to make money off their effort?
        Zambyte 1y ago
        > You don't simply make software because you love it, right? I can't speak for Stephen but I absolutely do. I program for fun all the time. > Should people not be able to make money off their effort? Is anyone arguing otherwise?
        SketchySeaBeast 1y ago
        Removing copyright is removing a lot of the protections that enable users to get paid for their efforts. How would a novelist make money, and why would someone pay them, if their work is free to be copied at will?
        Zambyte 1y ago
        > How would a novelist make money Maybe selling books? Maybe other jobs? The same way that they made money for thousands of years before copyright, really. Books and other arts did exist before copyright! > and why would someone pay them, if their work is free to be copied at will? I don't think it's really a matter of if people will pay them. If their art is good, of course people will pay them. People feel good about paying for an original piece of art. The question is really more about if people will be able to get obscenely rich over being the original creator of some piece of art, to which the answer is it would indeed be less likely.
        1y ago
    - jasonjayr 1y ago
      But in this idealized copyright-free world, those self-publishing companies could just as easily take Penguin's top sellers and reproduce those. The thing that'd set apart these companies are the services + quality of their work.
      - SketchySeaBeast 1y ago
        Is not part of the quality of the work the contents of the book? What are these companies putting within the pages? We've taken the greatest and longest part of the effort and made it meaningless.
    - int_19h 1y ago
      The problem of "how do artists earn enough money to eat?" is legitimate, but I don't think it's a good idea to solve it by making things that inherently don't work like real property to work like it, just so that we can shove them into the same framework. And this is exactly what copyright does - it takes information, which can be copied essentially for free by its very fundamental nature, and tries to make it scarce through legal means solely so that it can be sold as if it were a real good. There are two reasons why it's a problem. The first reason is that any such abstraction is leaky, and those leaks are ripe for abuse. For example, in case of copyright on information, we made it behave like physical property for the consumers, but not for the producers (who still only need to expend resources to create a single work from scratch, and then duplicate it for free while still selling each copy for $$$). This means that selling information is much more lucrative than selling physical things, which is a big reason why our economy is so distorted towards the former now - just look at what the most profitable corporations on the market do. The second reason is that it artificially entrenches capitalism by enmeshing large parts of the economy into those mechanics, even if they aren't naturally a good fit. This then gets used as an argument to prop up the whole arrangement - "we can't change this, it would break too much!".
      - SketchySeaBeast 1y ago
        The end product being inexpensive is a good thing - it means that the producer can sell it well below the cost it took to produce it, otherwise a novel would cost whatever it takes for Stephen King to live for 3 months. I feel like you're shoving all information under the same label. The most profitable corporations are trading in information that isn't subject to copyright, and it's facts - how you drive, what you eat, where you live. It's newly generated ideas. Maybe it is in how the data is sorted, but they aren't copyrighting that either. If we're going to overthrow artificial entrenchments of capitalism, I feel like there's better places to start than a lot of copyright. Does it need changes? Absolutely, there's certainly exploitation, but I still don't see "get rid of copyright entirely" as being a good approach. Weirdly, it's one of the places that people are arguing for that. Sometimes the criminal justice system convicts the wrong person, and there should be reform. It's also often criticized as a measure of control for capitalistic oligarchs. Should step one be getting rid of the legal system entirely?
  - dmonitor 1y ago
    You need some mechanism in place to prevent any joe schmoe from spinning up FreeSteam and rehosting the whole thing.
    - pitaj 1y ago
      There can be many incentives for people to use official sources: early access, easy updates, live events, etc
      - Zambyte 1y ago
        "Early access" doesn't work in this context, but yes for the other means.
      - dmonitor 1y ago
        There's no reason FreeSteam can't also do that, though. There's no copyright, so just have an extension of the steamapp that changes it to point to your server when downloading games / checking ownership. Piracy stops being a service issue when pirates are allowed to make nice services.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - zelphirkalt 1y ago
      Just to challenge that idea: Why?
      - dmonitor 1y ago
        People would use that service instead of Steam, publishers would add annoying DRM to mitigate lost sales, etc etc. The current illegality of the piracy website prevents them from offering a service as nice as Steam. It has to be a sketchy torrent hub that changes URLs every few months. If it was as easy as changing the url to freesteampowered.com or installing an extension inside the steam launcher, the whole "piracy is a service issue" argument loses all relevance. The industry would become unsustainable without DRM (which would be technically legal to crack, but also more incentivized to make harder to crack).
- whamlastxmas 1y ago
  Because the concept of owning an idea is really gross. Copyright means I can’t write about whatever I want in my own home even if I never distribute it or no one ever sees it. I’m breaking the law by privately writing Harry Potter fanfic in my journal or whatever. Copyright is supposed to be about encouraging intangibles, and the reality is that it only massively stifles it
  - redwall_hp 1y ago
    Whole genres of music are based entirely on sampling, and they got screwed by copyright law as it evolved over the 90s and 2000s. Now only people with a sufficiently sized business backing them can truly participate, or they're stuck licensing things on Splice. And that's not even touching the spurious lawsuits about musical similarity. That's what musicians call a genre... It makes some sense for a very short term literal right to reproduction of a singular work, but any time the concept of derivative works comes into play, it's just a bizarrely dystopian suppression of art, under the supposition that art is commercial activity rather than an innate part of humanity.
  - flats 1y ago
    I don’t believe this is true? I’m pretty sure that you’re prohibited from making money from that fan fiction, not from writing it at all. So I don’t understand the claim that copyright “massively stifles” creativity. There are of course examples of people not being able to make money on specific “ideas” because of copyright laws, but that doesn’t seem to me to be “massively stifling” creativity itself, especially given that it also protects and supports many people generating these ideas. And if we got rid of copyright law, wouldn’t we be in that exact place, where people wouldn’t be allowed to make money off of creative endeavors? I mean, owning an idea is kinda gross, I agree. I also personally think that owning land is kinda gross. But we live in a capitalist society right now. If we allow AI companies to train LLMs on copyrighted works without paying for that access, we are choosing to reward these companies instead of the humans who created the data upon which these companies are utterly reliant for said LLMs. Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and all the other tech CEOs will benefit in place of all of the artists I love and admire. That, to me, sucks.
achierius 1y ago
Well what we're getting is lifetime for corporate, and zero (0) for human. Hope you're happy.
- Zambyte 1y ago
  I'm not, because that's not what I asked for.

Zero (0) years for corporate copyright, zero (0) years for human copyright is the golden zone in my book.

School-Cotton 1y ago

Why?

Zambyte 1y ago
It took me a while to be convinced that copyright is strictly a bad idea, but these two articles were very convincing to me. https://drewdevault.com/2020/08/24/Alice-in-Wonderland.html https://drewdevault.com/2020/08/24/Alice-in-Wonderland.html https://drewdevault.com/2021/12/23/Sustainable-creativity-post-copyright.html https://drewdevault.com/2021/12/23/Sustainable-creativity-po...
- SketchySeaBeast 1y ago
  The first article is saying that "Copyright is bad because of corporations", and I can kind of get behind that, especially the very long term copyrights that have lost the intent, but the second article says that artists will be happier without copyright if we just solve capitalism first. I don't know about you, but that reads to me like "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch you must first invent the universe". If an artist produces a work they should have the rights to that work. If I self-publish a novel and then penguin decides that novel is really good and they want to publish it, without copyright they'd just do that, totally swamping me with their clout and punishing my ever putting the work out. That's a bad thing.
  - Zambyte 1y ago
    > If an artist produces a work they should have the rights to that work. That would indeed be nice, but as the article says, that's usually not the case. The rights holder and the author are almost never the same entity in commercial artistic endeavors. I know I'm not the rights holder for my erroneously-considered-art work (software). > If I self-publish a novel and then penguin decides that novel is really good and they want to publish it, without copyright they'd just do that, totally swamping me with their clout and punishing my ever putting the work out. That's a bad thing. Why? You created influential art and its influence was spread. Is that not the point of (good) art?
    - SketchySeaBeast 1y ago
      > The rights holder and the author are almost never the same entity in commercial artistic endeavors. There's definitely problems with corporatization of ownership of these things, I won't disagree. > Why? You created influential art and its influence was spread. Is that not the point of (good) art? Why do we expect artists to be selfless? Do you think Stephen King is still writing only because he loves the art? You don't simply make software because you love it, right? Should people not be able to make money off their effort?
      - Zambyte 1y ago
        > You don't simply make software because you love it, right? I can't speak for Stephen but I absolutely do. I program for fun all the time. > Should people not be able to make money off their effort? Is anyone arguing otherwise?
        SketchySeaBeast 1y ago
        Removing copyright is removing a lot of the protections that enable users to get paid for their efforts. How would a novelist make money, and why would someone pay them, if their work is free to be copied at will?
        Zambyte 1y ago
        > How would a novelist make money Maybe selling books? Maybe other jobs? The same way that they made money for thousands of years before copyright, really. Books and other arts did exist before copyright! > and why would someone pay them, if their work is free to be copied at will? I don't think it's really a matter of if people will pay them. If their art is good, of course people will pay them. People feel good about paying for an original piece of art. The question is really more about if people will be able to get obscenely rich over being the original creator of some piece of art, to which the answer is it would indeed be less likely.
        1y ago
  - jasonjayr 1y ago
    But in this idealized copyright-free world, those self-publishing companies could just as easily take Penguin's top sellers and reproduce those. The thing that'd set apart these companies are the services + quality of their work.
    - SketchySeaBeast 1y ago
      Is not part of the quality of the work the contents of the book? What are these companies putting within the pages? We've taken the greatest and longest part of the effort and made it meaningless.
  - int_19h 1y ago
    The problem of "how do artists earn enough money to eat?" is legitimate, but I don't think it's a good idea to solve it by making things that inherently don't work like real property to work like it, just so that we can shove them into the same framework. And this is exactly what copyright does - it takes information, which can be copied essentially for free by its very fundamental nature, and tries to make it scarce through legal means solely so that it can be sold as if it were a real good. There are two reasons why it's a problem. The first reason is that any such abstraction is leaky, and those leaks are ripe for abuse. For example, in case of copyright on information, we made it behave like physical property for the consumers, but not for the producers (who still only need to expend resources to create a single work from scratch, and then duplicate it for free while still selling each copy for $$$). This means that selling information is much more lucrative than selling physical things, which is a big reason why our economy is so distorted towards the former now - just look at what the most profitable corporations on the market do. The second reason is that it artificially entrenches capitalism by enmeshing large parts of the economy into those mechanics, even if they aren't naturally a good fit. This then gets used as an argument to prop up the whole arrangement - "we can't change this, it would break too much!".
    - SketchySeaBeast 1y ago
      The end product being inexpensive is a good thing - it means that the producer can sell it well below the cost it took to produce it, otherwise a novel would cost whatever it takes for Stephen King to live for 3 months. I feel like you're shoving all information under the same label. The most profitable corporations are trading in information that isn't subject to copyright, and it's facts - how you drive, what you eat, where you live. It's newly generated ideas. Maybe it is in how the data is sorted, but they aren't copyrighting that either. If we're going to overthrow artificial entrenchments of capitalism, I feel like there's better places to start than a lot of copyright. Does it need changes? Absolutely, there's certainly exploitation, but I still don't see "get rid of copyright entirely" as being a good approach. Weirdly, it's one of the places that people are arguing for that. Sometimes the criminal justice system convicts the wrong person, and there should be reform. It's also often criticized as a measure of control for capitalistic oligarchs. Should step one be getting rid of the legal system entirely?
- dmonitor 1y ago
  You need some mechanism in place to prevent any joe schmoe from spinning up FreeSteam and rehosting the whole thing.
  - pitaj 1y ago
    There can be many incentives for people to use official sources: early access, easy updates, live events, etc
    - Zambyte 1y ago
      "Early access" doesn't work in this context, but yes for the other means.
    - dmonitor 1y ago
      There's no reason FreeSteam can't also do that, though. There's no copyright, so just have an extension of the steamapp that changes it to point to your server when downloading games / checking ownership. Piracy stops being a service issue when pirates are allowed to make nice services.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - zelphirkalt 1y ago
    Just to challenge that idea: Why?
    - dmonitor 1y ago
      People would use that service instead of Steam, publishers would add annoying DRM to mitigate lost sales, etc etc. The current illegality of the piracy website prevents them from offering a service as nice as Steam. It has to be a sketchy torrent hub that changes URLs every few months. If it was as easy as changing the url to freesteampowered.com or installing an extension inside the steam launcher, the whole "piracy is a service issue" argument loses all relevance. The industry would become unsustainable without DRM (which would be technically legal to crack, but also more incentivized to make harder to crack).
whamlastxmas 1y ago
Because the concept of owning an idea is really gross. Copyright means I can’t write about whatever I want in my own home even if I never distribute it or no one ever sees it. I’m breaking the law by privately writing Harry Potter fanfic in my journal or whatever. Copyright is supposed to be about encouraging intangibles, and the reality is that it only massively stifles it
- redwall_hp 1y ago
  Whole genres of music are based entirely on sampling, and they got screwed by copyright law as it evolved over the 90s and 2000s. Now only people with a sufficiently sized business backing them can truly participate, or they're stuck licensing things on Splice. And that's not even touching the spurious lawsuits about musical similarity. That's what musicians call a genre... It makes some sense for a very short term literal right to reproduction of a singular work, but any time the concept of derivative works comes into play, it's just a bizarrely dystopian suppression of art, under the supposition that art is commercial activity rather than an innate part of humanity.
- flats 1y ago
  I don’t believe this is true? I’m pretty sure that you’re prohibited from making money from that fan fiction, not from writing it at all. So I don’t understand the claim that copyright “massively stifles” creativity. There are of course examples of people not being able to make money on specific “ideas” because of copyright laws, but that doesn’t seem to me to be “massively stifling” creativity itself, especially given that it also protects and supports many people generating these ideas. And if we got rid of copyright law, wouldn’t we be in that exact place, where people wouldn’t be allowed to make money off of creative endeavors? I mean, owning an idea is kinda gross, I agree. I also personally think that owning land is kinda gross. But we live in a capitalist society right now. If we allow AI companies to train LLMs on copyrighted works without paying for that access, we are choosing to reward these companies instead of the humans who created the data upon which these companies are utterly reliant for said LLMs. Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and all the other tech CEOs will benefit in place of all of the artists I love and admire. That, to me, sucks.

achierius 1y ago

Well what we're getting is lifetime for corporate, and zero (0) for human. Hope you're happy.

Zambyte 1y ago
I'm not, because that's not what I asked for.