21 ms·

Copying is an act of love. Please copy and share

• hanleybrand 13y ago
  A part of me likes this, and a part of me ❤s this. The rest of me wants to hear what a lawter like Lessig (or someone with a silar amount of experience and stake in the legalese of sharing) would say about it. My guess is this has as much legal meaning as putting "this is in the public domain" in a readme. (I.e. none)
• gioele 13y ago
  Lawyer perspective on non-licensing (it' dangerous): http://tieguy.org/blog/2013/01/27/taking-post-open-source-seriously-as-a-statement-about-copyright-law/ http://tieguy.org/blog/2013/01/27/taking-post-open-source-se... Non-lawyer perspective: http://waxy.org/2011/12/no_copyright_intended/ http://waxy.org/2011/12/no_copyright_intended/
• maresca 13y ago
  I think we're a couple decades to a century away from public perception allowing this.
  • deepvibrations 13y ago
    Agree, it comes down to us (humans) being able to act as one unit, and when we can, everyone will be happy to copy each others work etc as much as possible. Because if someone doesn't have food on the table, we will also be there to help. I really hope we can reach this point in the next few decades! :)
• marknutter 13y ago
  "People copy stuff they like. They don’t copy stuff they don’t like. The more a work is copied, the more valuable it becomes. Value isn’t taken away by fans, it is added by them, every time they copy." Awesome quote from the article which I wholeheartedly agree with.
  • leephillips 13y ago
    Then maybe you can help me understand what it means. Say I write a book but nobody purchases a copy, while thousands of unauthorized copies are downloaded from torrent sites. How does all this "value" put food on my table?
    • soneca 13y ago
      It does if you are smart enough to pursue this value. Money from selling books doesn't have to be your goal. If thousands of people are reading your work and getting value from it you may offer more value that they would, this time, exchange for money. Just like music stars earn a lot of money from live shows. You may become a speaker, you may sell additional stuff derived from your book (as a freemium modelo for book market). You may sell this fame of yours to sign profitable contracts to future books with a publisher. You may create online courses to offer to those who read your book (if it is a technical one) or try to sell the rights to TV movies if it is literature. Well, it is hard to create from an hypotetical situation, but I think you got the point.
      • rewind 13y ago
        This sounds nice, but the problem is that the author creates value, the downloaders receive value, but no exchange is made. The idea that the author has to create MORE value to MAYBE be able to participate in an exchange is just a weak argument for people who don't want to admit that an exchange should take place right off that bat, and if not, the downloaders should not receive any value from the author (i.e. don't download and read the book).
        • ZeroGravitas 13y ago
          This thread started talking about the value that readers provide. People listen to the Beatles partly because people listen to the Beatles. Where's the direct cash payment for that value add? If musicians aren't going to reward the people that advertise their work then they shouldn't release it in the first place.
        • 13y ago
• lucb1e 13y ago
  I don't have a copyright notice below my website because it's not needed in order to have copyright on your work. However I also won't explicitly allow people to copy all of my work. In most cases it's entirely flattering, but for the times that it's not, I do remain legally entitled to have the content removed (or have the design or anything else removed). Moreover, a copyright notice affects the entire page. I bet you didn't think about comments that are posted by users, they now fall under your copyright (or explicit share-right) as well. Do you really want to licence user data that way?
• leephillips 13y ago
  It's great if you want to make something and put it in the public domain. But I detect a normative undercurrent here, a suggestion that the author feels that restrictions on copying are bad, or at least not as nice, as her love-based approach. I would like to live in a world where people can support themselves through creative work. And online culture has failed to come up with a replacement for strictly enforced copyright that doesn't involve de-facto monopolies, rampant advertising, and spying on people through their computers. Jaron Lanier goes into these issues in insightful depth in his book You Are Not a Gadget.
  • technoslut 13y ago
    >I would like to live in a world where people can support themselves through creative work. With automation increasingly replacing many jobs, creativity remains the last area left where mankind can be successful in capitalism. If creativity has no worth as well then we are descending into a reality where nothing has value – including individuality itself.
  • betterunix 13y ago
    "And online culture has failed to come up with a replacement for strictly enforced copyright that doesn't involve de-facto monopolies, rampant advertising, and spying on people through their computers" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_One https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_One You do not need copyrights if you are willing to say, "Pay us for the next installment, or else we will not make it." No spying, no advertising, no monopolies.
    • leephillips 13y ago
      This is really interesting - I'd never heard of this. But glancing over the page you linked to, it looks like 4 million downloads netted about $20,000 to fund the next several episodes. So they are massively popular, but barely covering the cost of production of an extremely low-budget series. This is therefore a labor of love and not paying anyone's mortgage or feeding any families. But they seem to have a lot of love.
• niggler 13y ago
  Copying is all fun and games until Disney comes and "copies" your art in their products. (Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5513535 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5513535 ) Then we get out the pitchforks. I like the idea of sharing, but unless all the ducks are in a row someone is bound to get hurt, and it's not clear to me if the proposed legal statement is sound.
  • betterunix 13y ago
    We get out pitchforks when Disney violates copyrights because Disney is at the forefront of the copyright expansion effort. The fact that Disney wants us to retool our computers and the Internet to protect their business, while simultaneously playing fast and loose with other people's copyrights, is what makes people angry.
    • mrcharles 13y ago
      In theory, yes. But people will still be unreasonably angry if they say "go ahead and copy" and then a big corporation copies it and makes millions of dollars and you are entitled to nothing. Honestly, I fail to see what this adds over a well chosen creative commons attribution.
      • fossuser 13y ago
        I think most people are not in favor of commercial infringement - it's the non-profit file sharing that most of the argument is over.
        • betterunix 13y ago
          I am not sure that is really true. I have not met many people who are angry about bootleg DVD sales; most seem to dismiss them as being of low quality, or just get annoyed when the person trying to sell them does not take "no" for an answer.
        • youngerdryas 13y ago
• MRSallee 13y ago
  I want people to be able to profit from value they create, even if that value is easily copied. I also think that copying/sharing content -- writing, photographs, music, art, video -- has been incredibly healthy for the Internet and really everyone on the planet. I've seen a couple of "Donate" buttons attempt to solve monetization for content creators that don't sell ads. I think there's room for a standard like this, something that could be easily attached to a byline that could travel with copied work. If you "love" content enough to copy it, maybe you'll also copy a byline with a built-in donation link. If the content gets copied enough, and people get accustomed to easy and small donations just like Facebook Likes and Twitter Retweets, then perhaps the culture of sharing content can financially displace the monopolies imposed by copyright.
• GHFigs 13y ago
  There is something humorous in making a statement against copyright predicated on fans giving a PILE OF POO[1] about the creator's will. People already share what they like; they just don't like most of the stuff that's given away for free. [1] http://www.charbase.com/1f4a9-unicode-pile-of-poo http://www.charbase.com/1f4a9-unicode-pile-of-poo
  • mmastrac 13y ago
    I always love stumbling across links to that site I wrote years back. I had no idea that it was ranking in Google for "pile of poo". The source is available if anyone wants to improve it: http://github.com/mmastrac/charbase http://github.com/mmastrac/charbase
• lucian1900 13y ago
  I don't see how this is any better than Creative Commons.
• 6d0debc071 13y ago
  To stick down the idea of copying as a universal good is to oversimplify things just as much as to insist than an author has an infinite moral right to make completely unrestrained profit from the things they derive from society for the rest of time. It's an appealing notion, copying sounds fine when you phrase it as an act of love, and within certain limits; fan works and the like; it is. However, if you have unrestrained copying then people will copy in a predatory manner as well. For instance, by aggregating your work and others work through a portal so that you never see any advantage from it - or by putting your work into something that has a much greater cultural presence and effectively taking ownership of it.
• unicornporn 13y ago
  Seems very similar to what Kopimi [1][2] is all about. It has been in use for quite a while. Take a look at the footer of thepiratebay.is for instance. [1] http://www.kopimi.com/kopimi/ http://www.kopimi.com/kopimi/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piratbyr%C3%A5n#Kopimi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piratbyr%C3%A5n#Kopimi
• leot 13y ago
  Google (or some other search engine) needs to write something that makes it easy for anyone to "find the original" of some bunch of data (image, long-enough-string, music sample, etc.). Such a tool would ideally also be able to find derivative works. This way attribution is trivial, and people will be much more willing to give their works away, while others would feel better about copying and modifying it. It would also render watermarks redundant. Tin Eye, Google Image search, and Google's own algorithmic preference for original content probably get you half-way there, but it's easy to imagine how great it would be to have a full-featured "attribution discoverer" (or whatever).
• joshaidan 13y ago
  I think the ethos of the copyheart as expressed in this website needs to be a little different. Sure, don't restrict your audiences' ability to copy and distribute your work, but when somebody sees the ♡ symbol, it should be a call to action for the audience to ♡ the work and the artist(s) creating it. If that involves supporting the work financially, then so be it. The audience of a work is responsible for nurturing, caring for it, and supporting it's production. This is what copyright tries to do it, but fails because it focuses too much attention on controlling distribution.
• codex 13y ago
  I love the intention of this site, which is to clarify when something is placed into the public domain, even though their carefree approach is legally risky for anyone to depend on. However, I've never seen cognitive dissonance on such as scale as when people discuss copying and copyright, which makes most discussions useless. Rarely are arguments supported by scholarly evidence or appeals to utilitarianism, and the political statements on the above site are no exception. Fundamentally, people like copying things, and some forms of copying are restricted by law. So either the law is bad, or they are a bad person. Nobody thinks they are a bad person (an pillar of ego which will never be shaken), and people hate being lectured, so it's the law that breaks, often with the flimsiest of excuses and fallacies ranging from the moral to the theoretical. - In some cases, copying is beneficial to the copyright holder (usually through advertising, network effects, or market segmentation), ergo, all copying must be beneficial - Some authors are against copyright, ergo all authors are against copyright - It's copying is okay if one's motives are pure (end justifies the means) - If something is easy to do, and preventing it hard, then it must be right (naturalistic fallacy) - Copying is the natural state of the universe, so it must be right (moralistic fallacy) - A copyright holder doesn't deserve protection because they're evil ("behaved in a selfish way") stupid ("doesn't understand technology") or stubborn ("won't change business models") - Copyrights restrict personal freedom, which is a natural and inalienable right of man, even though personal freedoms are always restricted at conflict points to ensure societal harmony ("thou shall not kill") - Copyrights are based on property rights, but information is not property for reason "x", ergo copyrights are invalid on a technicality. In reality, many laws are enacted because of utilitarian value and need only require group consensus ("always stop at a stop sign; person on right goes first.") - I paid money in return for "x", therefore I can do whatever I want with "x" (refusal to honor contractual agreements and/or acknowledge exceptions to property rights, which are ubiquitous) - Copying is good for society because information sharing has no marginal cost (sophomoric application of economics) - Because some people create without expectation of monetary reward, all people or corporations will still invest in creative works even when the return on investment decreases, or is non-existent - Some people or corporations could, and thus all should, make money in secondary markets (personal appearances, product endorsements) rather than by selling copyrighted works directly I would give my right arm for a rational discussion on this topic.
• apotheon 13y ago
  Use a simple license written with at least some vague grasp of the needs of copyright law for licensing, please. Much as I respect the people associated with Copyheart (Nina Paley, who I think created this whole Copyheart thing, is the "artist in residence" at QuestionCopyright.org), I find the way some people try to basically just pretend copyright doesn't exist as a way to fight against the problems it creates somewhat naive and/or irresponsible. If you want to make your works available freely to others in the same spirit as the Copyheart thing, feel free to slap a Copyheart message on it, but please add a simple, clean, copyfree license on it (such as the COIL, Open Works License, or WTFPL) on the thing as well. The reason to do that is not for your benefit so much as it is for the work's benefit and that of the recipient. A vague, hand-wavy statement like the Copyheart message can expose people who copy, share, and possibly modify your works to legal difficulties down the road. Consider, for example, what happens if you get hit by a bus tomorrow and a week later your heirs start sending DMCA takedown notices to people circulating remixes or modifications of your work, even if those remixes are respectful, adhere to the spirit of your efforts, and give all due credit to you as the creator. Chances are very good that any attempts to fight such takedowns would not stand up well in court if the Copyheart message is all that you offered as "protection" for the people spreading your work to new fans. Please, do the responsible thing. Use a simple license that is very clear and complete in its intent, such as the COIL, Open Works License, or WTFPL -- or pick anything from the list of Copyfree Initiative certified licenses that suits your fancy, I suppose: http://copyfree.org/licenses http://copyfree.org/licenses