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.
Why would copyright ever drive culture? The only thing it’s designed to do is drive profits.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
