Why would copyright ever drive culture? The only thing it’s designed to do is drive profits.
this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2024
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Well in theory the idea is that it encourages people to create more by making doing so more lucrative. May have even made some sense back in the era before digitization.
I could see that working for the relative short term, but the renewal of what should be public domain copyrights is pretty insane.
Yeah even if you are pro-copyright as a way to encourage artistic creation there is no justification for how insanely long works stay under copyright. Or for banning free filesharing of copyrighted works.
I haven't ment anyone who supports a post life of the author copyright protection yet. IMO ~20-30 years seems solid. Enough time to express your ideas and elaborate on them, but short enough where authors will be driven to make more than one IP. That's also more inline with what it used to be.
Right, copyright was meant to give a profit incentive to creators, but the effectively infinite copyright we have now mainly gives profit incentive to large companies who can horde creative works, like Paramount+ in the above case.
It’s breaking the original compact where we give temporary exclusivity at the reward of more creation. Now it’s effectively permanent exclusivity, with creativity locked up by which obese monster can sit on the biggest hoard of treasure
But if copyright didn't generate profit for 3-4 generations how will my grandchildren buy yachts?!
I don't know about theory, more of the retrocon. If it was really there to encourage innovation we would have ironclad caselaw that prevented any artist from not getting properly paid. I take your meaning however.
if copyright wasn't a thing, disney would just re-publish everything any independent artist ever made as their own, and then probably use their unfathomable leverage to bully any platform hosting the original artist's work into not doing so
If copyright wasn’t a thing, Disney would be broke from lack of sales.
Disney exists to horde things in their vault. There is a reason they constantly fight to push back expiration dates, because copyright benefits them far more than no copyright ever could.
Hoard
Dragons have hoards, necromancers have hordes.
If copyright goes, it's a free-for-all. Disney wins in that scenario, because they have more resources to spend on getting their media out there.
Yes, disney abuses their leverage in the current system, but they'd abuse their leverage in any system. And them abusing their leverage in a system without copyright is significantly worse for independent artists than them abusing their leverage in a system with it.
No, they would not. If they would win from it, they would fight for it instead of fighting to stop it.
We would win because we have free access and use to all human creative works.
There is a reason these companies attack places like the Internet Archive, and it’s not because it the IA helps them make more profit and control others works.
Why do you think extending copyright past the life of the author helps the author? They're literally dead.
The only party that could benefit from something like that would be a corporation that can outlast a mortal's lifespan.
. . . I don’t?
I think it and all copyright benefits corporations. This is literally the argument I’ve been making this whole time.
I think copyright should be scrapped and human creations should not be walled off.
they would fight for it instead of fighting to stop it
Your argument is that Disney expanding copyright protections proves that copyright benefits them.
But Disney isn't expanding copyright protections in a way that benefits anybody but themselves. They're abusing their power in the existing system, just as they would in any system.
If it helps, forget about the literal Disney corporation. There will always be some corporation that exists with deeper pockets than any independent creator, because copyright isn't the only reason that corporations exist. It doesn't have to be Disney who steals your work, republishes it, and buries the original. Any corporation with more money than scruples can do it.
And no one can steal your work when it’s not ownable in the first place.
At the same time, everyone can profit from your work and you can't do anything about it. And big businesses, having more capital than you or I, would abuse that to their benefit like they do the current copyright system. But at least the current system gives small copyright owners some semblance of protection and an avenue to contest abuse. Not having copyright would give a creator no avenue to stop someone else abusing their hard work.
You publish a book. Disney publishes that book the next day, because they can afford to have people on payroll whose job it is to literally just scout out new books so that they can publish them themselves.
Me, a book enjoyer, is going to my local bookshop. I ask what's new, and I'm told about Disney's new book. I'm not told about your new book because after all it is the exact same book, and Disney has threatened the store to withdraw all business if they sell anybody's books but theirs.
I buy Disney's book. You get no money. You become poor and destitute.
How does a lack of copyright help you in this instance?
Why am I publishing a book? I release my creative works online for free, for anyone and everyone.
Human culture shouldn’t be paywalled off for the benefit of businesses.
Because you invested your time, effort and money to create this piece of art. Why on earth would anybody decide to create art if it was a guarantee that they'd die in a gutter?
In your anarchist utopia, maybe an artist can thrive. But we'd have to get all the way there first.
And in every step from where we are to where you want to get to, the artist is significantly worse off. You're just letting perfect be the enemy of good.
I invest my time, effort, and money into the games and stories I make and release for free online.
Why do I do this? Because creating is fun, and seeing others play or read them is inspiring.
because you can afford to because you already have a way to support yourself in society
also, not all creatives are idealists, so would need some form of incentive to put in the extra effort to release their work to the public
I appreciate that, and equally that there are really good artists who can not afford to create and survive on their work, without it. Surely there's a reasonable balance to be had, and megacorporations can be made to respect that balance (in theory), while also paying livable wages. In practice, it would require honest courts, lawyers, and politicians, so there's that.
Disney wins in that scenario, because they have more resources to spend on getting their media out there.
As... Opposed to now?
If Disney does plagiarize small artists' work, and becomes known for it, they take a reputation hit, and the artist gets an explosion of exposure, as long as it is provable he made the original story. (Disney making million-dollar budget movies of your OC, isn't even that bad for you, to be honest, but let's assume that it doesn't market the fuck out of your small artist story. In real life, stories are not in competition.)
If Disney doesn't, then it's an undeniable positive for worldwide creativity.
The only thing copyright protects, is big companies' exclusive right to public-consciousness characters.
As opposed to now where the original artist/author at least has some recourse against the big corporation. Versus none.
Why would the artist get an explosion of exposure when Disney's edition of the book was significantly more widely publicised, so everybody who might be interested in it already bought it from Disney.
The literal best case scenario here is that you have equal marketing, in which case Disney gets 50% of the sales and you get 50% of the sales. In what world is cutting your potential revenue in half a win for creators?
A "truly small" creator, would get , I dunno, let's say 5% of Disney's marketed sales, after being stolen from, from being known as the guy Disney stole from. Which would be enormously more than if he only had his "truly small" marketing.
A more successful and known creator, who would market himself more broadly on his own, would not be easy to steal from, since it would be quick enough for the stealing to be found out, to dampen Disney sales.
And all this, ignores the paradigm shift in monetisation (Uniquenameosaurus YouTube video), that could enhance this process immensely, and allow artist creativity to flourish even more, without even leaving the diseased economical rules of capitalism.
and irrelevant little aside
Also about this,
As opposed to now where the original artist/author at least has some recourse against the big corporation. Versus none.
Guns give some recourse to poor people, against the rich, because anyone could use a gun.
Guns allow the rich to equip their personal security teams, with guns.
Guns are not helping the poor, and neither does copyright.
you're now sitting here justifying paying artists in exposure?
to dampen Disney sales
disney doesn't avoid breaching copyright in our world because of the threat of being found out. they avoid breaching copyright because they'd be sued.
They already do that. What is it like half their movies come from public domain works?
Public domain because the authors are long-dead. You can't steal sales from a corpse.
I gotcha. Guess I can start making Mickey Mouse movies, not fucking steamboat, real Mickey.
you're comparing disney re-using work in a manner that directly competes with its living author with them re-using work of somebody who's dead
disney abuses the current system by pushing for copyright extensions because disney would abuse literally any system
disney's abuse of a no-copyright system would be significantly worse than disney's abuse of this copyright system
If we did ever get away from copyright we'd have a very different funding model for artistic creation. More patronage, patreon, and tipping based and less payment per sale. Artists, or groups of artists, would create and share their work, and people would direct money towards those they enjoyed the most. Physical copies of anything would decline in importance with all art available for free download, and would be sold and costed more based on the effort needed to manufacture that physical object than anything to do with the original creator or creators.
Patronage and tipping only goes so far.
I don't think anyone would say that American news media is healthy, but that is how a copyright fee media landscape would look. No one pays for media anymore, so the media becomes advertising. If we are lucky, we only get creative media turned into commercials for product. If we are unlucky, creative media becomes a new tool to sell Christian-fascism because no one else is willing to fund big movies.
Copyright should be abolished
Let's say you write a novel. It's really really good. But no one reads it because no one ever hears about it.
Later, I stumble upon your novel and recognize how great it is. Then I republish it verbatim, except with my name as the author. I am much better at business and marketing than you, so it goes viral. I receive millions in sales, am tapped to produce a movie version, and win a Pulitzer for it.
Is that fair? Or should you have some rights in all of this since it was your copy?
- The current system doesn't protect small writers either. Look at the amount of money plagiarism gets you, with copyright law in effect.
And
- at the stage where you're big enough for copyright to effectively protect you, provable publication dates take care of that problem through reputation. If you become known(read: found out) as a plagiarist, you get the boot from the public zeitgeist, never to receive public money again.
Copyright only protects the Mouse's bottom line, and strangleholds creativity.
It should be extremely limited. 3-5 years after copyright it should expire.
That's plagiarism.
You can have plagiarism law distinct from copyright.
That way, the original author will always be mentioned as a source in the derivative works and it is highly unlikely they will receive no attention should your derivative work become popular.
In this example I would have committed both crimes.
It's copyright infringement for me to republish and profit from your work without your consent (while that work is not in the public domain).
It's plagiarism for me to pass that work off as my own.
So it was a bad example.
Copyright has nothing to do with plagiarism. It is literally about the mechanical work of producing copies, which used to be expensive.
Exactly! AI should be able to train on anything and regurgitate any and every piece of art imaginable! We don't need artists! We can just copy everything with no recourse!
(/s if it wasn't obvious. Lemmy is full of short-sighted dunderheads that fail to see the world with any nuance)
AI has been determined to be legal and transformative enough for copyright law already
That's going to be very difficult to achieve. Anything below the Berne convention is a legal impossibility.
What I think should happen, is that digital preservation should become a recognized fair use.
For example, digital content should be offered without DRM and at minimum price to recognized libraries for archival purposes.
If this is not done, the libraries may break the DRM themselves.
As soon as the copyright holder stops offering the content at reasonable prices to the public, the libraries are free to lend out the DRM-free content to the public.
And when the copyright term expires and the works enter the public domain, the libraries may immediately offer the DRM-free copies to the public.
The advantage of such a scheme is that it only requires one country to legally mandate it. And that country will not be in violation of the Berne convention or other treaties.
Lemmy: copyright is bad
Also Lemmy: LLMs are evil because they use data that was put on the internet and anyone could have read.
Maintain a consistent position. I want copyright to be over. That means for everything every-it and everyone. From your local sewing circle, to children in refugee camps, to awful dictators, to LLMs, to hypothetical alien life forms living among us. Everyone! No exceptions. Information should be free, culture should be borrowed, derivative works should be praised.
No, it is consistent. Because it is not about the law itself, but about it being applied in a double standard. If a random person copies a product made by an industry, the law will punish them. If the industry copies work of random people, its fine and a sign of progress.
I would like a copyright to be nontransferable, bound to the individuals that created it, and limited for about 10 years or so (depending on what it is), to give the creators some way to earn a reward back, while also encouraging to create new stuff.
Fair point. It is consistent, in a shitty horrible way, but it is there.
And yes I do agree. If someone would make a copyright system that promised the creator would get paid and was reasonable in duration I would support it. Yes, I do think creatives should have control over their work and be paid for it. The nuts and bolts of how that can be achieved I admit I am not sure of, but I am confident better legal minds than mine can work it out. However, given that no country is going to build such a system I don't support copyright in any form.
Corny capitalism is the worst fucking way of doing anything. It is better to have literally no system than that.
Huh, quite a discussion here. I'm no fan of copyright (arr!) but I feel like the pro-cooyright folks make the better points here.
It made me remember a few years back, and correct me if I'm misremembering, Fortnight was caught stealing dances from black folk on (I think) TikTok and it brought into light the idea of copywriting dances. I forget how it ended, but it was a moment I felt like copyright was reasonable.
That said, Nintendo can fuck all the way off regarding emulation, so I guess it was depends on how it's used. Plus, a friend of mine got threats over stupidly using a copywrited image on her website (thanks Google search, ugh), but those people were just using bots to threaten small businesses into paying a fee just below the costs of a lawyer. So I'm really mixed feelings about copywrite law.
That Fortnite case reached a settlement out of court (like most cases do).
Also Japanese copyright law is much more strict and tightly enforced than it is in the states.