As an artist, I like having the ability to tell people they cannot host my commercial works, cannot claim my own writing or characters for themselves, cannot reproduce them for profit, need my permission to sell them.
I think copyright abuse is rampant and favors corporate entities far too much in most countries, but I think the solution is reform not destruction of the system.
Do you like suing people in a court of law to enforce these rights?
What if in a world of billions of people someone makes stories or characters similar to yours. Should you sue them? What if they sue you and have better lawyers and more money. Are you prepared to go to court?
I think you are experiencing a sunken cost fallacy. Unless you have the time and money to enforce copyright then it will never work for you, only against you.
I like having the options to sue in a court of law to enforce these rights a lot more than not having rights at all.
Keep saying that when a big corporation takes your work for theirs and then sues you.
We have already past the tipping point where content creators are now paying more for their work to be heard then getting paid for their work.
Corporations are controlling our very culture with the framework that makes you feel like you have rights. There is a major disconnect here.
I’m more open to burning the whole edifice of copyright law down than you are, but the key reform that I want that maybe we could agree on is that it should be legal to distribute coprighted works for free. No need to to let someone else try to make a profit by undercutting your sales, but if someone is willing to make and distribute copies (or ecopies) of a work to no profit for themselves they should be allowed to. What that would mean in practice if it was legal would be an online content library containing all human art and culture, freely available for download to all comers. It might hurt the income of some creators, but you’d still have a lot of other ways to make money that don’t entail depriving people of that library.
You can have that library today (see: Project Gutenberg), just on a delay. The problem, IMO, is that the delay is much too long. If copyright only lasted 10 years, it would be much more useful as a store of human knowledge. We could even allow an application for a longer term for smaller creators who need more time to monetize their works.
That’s pretty close to how it used to work in the US, it has just been twisted by large orgs like Disney and the RIAA.
Yeah Project Gutenberg really demonstrates how this is all pretty much already built, just illegal to include recent works in. Though of course that’s just books where the post copyright free library could also include all other art and culture such as tv, radio, movies, images, games, etc
Alright but Archiving is already an exception to most laws (clearly not well enforced seeing what happened to the IA) and your proposal would harm new artists who need to share their works in order to gain publicity for something they intend to sell and sustain themselves on.
“your proposal would harm young artists who need to share their works in order to gain publicity for something they intend to sell and sustain themselves on.”
The default is already for young artists to share a lot of their work hoping to get noticed. Getting rid of copyright would be reorienting the whole system to center that experience more rather than the established artists and art producing corporations who now are in a strong enough position to charge. “Making it” would just mean that your patreon was doing gangbusters rather than selling a lot of copies of whatever your art is.
cannot claim my own writing or characters for themselves
If by “claim” you mean falsify authorship, I suspect this would still be illegal even without all the copyright laws.
I like having the ability to tell people … cannot reproduce them
Well, this is a problem.
If by “claim” you mean falsify authorship, I suspect this would still be illegal even without all the copyright laws.
You would be wrong, in the USA at least.
Another concerns equity and accessibility:
removal of more than 500,000 books from public access is a serious blow to lower-income families, people with disabilities, rural communities, and LGBTQ+ people, among many others.
so low-income people in the argument are pretty obvious
how about people with disabilities or rural communities? why are they there? do they have easier access to libraries than bookstore?
and what the hell are lgbt people doing there? do they read disproportionately more more than average non-lgbt population, or why are they singled out?
seems like this whole paragraph is just “lets throw in some minorities, no one can talk back at that” lame argument
Libraries are safe spaces for minorities and the LGBTQ+ community. Books in general spread awareness and raise empathy and can also help struggling young people understand that they are not alone.
That quote isn’t saying people of these communities read or use a public library more than those who aren’t; it’s pointing out that the erasure of public safe spaces and resources affects groups that benefit from their existence more.
All of that doesn’t even mention the content that was likely present in those 500,000 books.
The argument centers around the equality of access, which is especially relevant in the digital age. Rural & disabled population may have problem accessing content with certain restrictions (e.g. need physical access, lack of accessibility features, only available in some region).
rural communities
Online lending allows people in remote or rural places much more economical access to more titles than otherwise, even if they have access to a decent local library
This title is actually false under some logical fallacy. It should be “Yet more examples of copyright destroying culture rather than driving it.”
No, because OP clearly believes all copyright is bad while your corrected title would be at least some/most copyright has proven to be bad.
Eh. Belief doesn’t really override logical fallacies. I know. In being pendantic, but I hate misleading headlines, especially when its a statistic.
If it’s a beleif the author should state that.
Exists culture Exists copyright s.t. copyright ‘destroys’ culture and not copyright ‘drives’ culture.
I mean, you’re putting an implied universal where the author is only offering existential. That one is on you!
“Copyright always destroys culture” would have the universal quantifier you object to.
Of course, both of these results are formally undecided, mostly because ‘drives’ is not well defined nor decidable in itself!
As a non English speaker, I can’t tell the difference. Might be the same for OP.
In English, the simple present often implies a general truth, regardless of time. While the present continuous strongly implies that the statement is true for the present, and weakly implies that it was false in the past.
From your profile you apparently speak Danish, right? Note that, in Danish, this distinction is mostly handled through adverbs, so I’m not surprised that you can’t tell the difference. Easier shown with an example:
| Danish | English |
|---|---|
| Jeg læser ofte. | I read often. (generally true statement) |
| Jeg læser lige nu. | I’m reading right now. (true in the present) |
Note how English is suddenly using a different verb form for the second one.
The title isn’t a mistake.
It’s openly stating that they believe that to be an inherent feature of at least our current legislation.
On itself, a simple claim (like “copyright destroys culture”) cannot be fallacious. It can be only true or false. For a fallacy, you need a reasoning flaw.
Also note that, even if you find a fallacy behind a conclusion, that is not enough grounds to claim that the conclusion is false. A non-fallacious argument with true premises yields a true conclusion, but a fallacious one may yield true or false conclusions.
The issue that you’re noticing with the title is not one of logic, but one of implicature due to the aspect of the verb. “X destroys Y” implies that, every time that X happens, Y gets destroyed; while “X [is] destroying Y” implies that this is only happening now.
Any monopoly incentive does, it’s the same in developing countries with monopolized industries - people need them, so they keep paying, people don’t have choice, so they don’t leave, and no competition arises because of cronyism.
Thus, say, utility companies in Armenia are such crap. Actually any companies in Armenia, it’s thoroughly oligopolized to the degree that locals think it’s all fine, because it’s all the same. Living in Armenia is as expensive as living near Moscow, while wages, eh, are definitely not the same. What I don’t understand is the locals’ stubborn belief that they can make things better without changing the society where oligopolies, things working via acquaintances, theft being socially acceptable, bendable rules and no responsibility are usual ; I suspect envy for people explaining why they can’t is a reason too.
Why did I type this …
Well I for one have never heard about anybody doing anything creative without being paid for it.
/s
