• FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today
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    4 months ago

    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.

    • psychothumbs@lemmy.worldOP
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      4 months ago

      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.

      • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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        4 months ago

        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.

        • psychothumbs@lemmy.worldOP
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          4 months ago

          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

      • FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today
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        4 months ago

        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.

        • psychothumbs@lemmy.worldOP
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          4 months ago

          “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.

          • FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today
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            4 months ago

            No, it would empower anybody, especially corporations, to take the new artists’ ideas and work and repackage them as an item for sale to others. Anything you share would not be covered by copyright and therefor no longer be your property.

            Individuals cannot compete with organizations.

            • psychothumbs@lemmy.worldOP
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              4 months ago

              If you are already sharing something for free in order to gain publicity, what is the downside of others repackaging them and spreading them further? That is exactly the kind of publicity you’re trying to gain.

              • FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today
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                4 months ago

                But you’re not profiting off of it. The corporation is. They have no incentive to give you credit, every incentive to claim that they made it which they would of course be allowed to do. They could even start making their own derivative pieces or continuations. The artist has gained nothing from this hypothetical.

                • psychothumbs@lemmy.worldOP
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                  4 months ago

                  Eliminating copyright doesn’t mean they’d be allowed to lie about who wrote what they were publishing. Anything an artist creates blowing up and gaining wide appreciation is very good for that artist’s future prospects. An artist who is spreading their work for free anyway is much better off in the scenario where there’s no copyright and everyone understands the need to tip / patronize their favorite artists.

          • FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today
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            4 months ago

            Pretty sure that’s a basic function of a publicly operated archive, but for sure there was a lot of nuance.

            • conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works
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              4 months ago

              That’s the point, though. The law is very clear that mass distributing wholesale copyrighted works isn’t fair use. Digitizing it was the part justified by fair use “archival”. Distribution isn’t.

              You have to start over and throw out the old laws. Right now there’s no framework to own a file at all (outside of actually holding the copyright). It’s always a license.

              • FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today
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                4 months ago

                Throwing them out and restarting is a lot harder than restarting without throwing them out.

                • conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works
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                  4 months ago

                  The core concept of ownership and copying needs to change if you want anything resembling what IA did to be protected. Because the underlying premise behind copyright legislation that that any unauthorized copy needs a specific exception to be legal, and it’s impossible to use digital files without numerous copies.

                  That’s starting from scratch.

    • Doomsider@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      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.

      • FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today
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        4 months ago

        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.

        • Doomsider@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          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.

            • Doomsider@lemmy.world
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              4 months ago

              The average cost of litigating a federal copyright case from pre-trial through appeals is $278,000. But sure, keep pretending you could play with the big boys.

              • FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today
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                4 months ago

                With a good case a lot of lawyers would be willing to work pro bono, especially when it’s an individual infringed by a corporation who have plenty to take from.

                For example, the script for the movie The Purge was stolen from an individual in 2012, and after 4 years of litigation Universal paid out a massive settlement in 2018 and also ended the series despite its success.

                • Doomsider@lemmy.world
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                  4 months ago

                  A lot of lawyers would be willing to work pro bono on a IP case? You have no way to pay for your rights then. Sounds like a system that is going to work well for you.

                  Reforming a bad idea does not make it a good idea. Until you can come to terms with just how imbalanced the system is then you probably don’t know what is really going on.

          • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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            4 months ago

            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.

            The gatekeeping of modern social media plus the data harvesting of LLM is strangling independent ownership, without a doubt.

            It’s a shame folks on Lemmy can’t see it. But then Reddit is the Ur-example of big business robbing people of their work product.

          • FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today
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            4 months ago

            As much as Copyright=Capitalism, yeah.

            Anarchy by definition is:

            1. Absence of any form of political authority.

            2. Political disorder and confusion.

            3. Absence of any cohesive principle, such as a common standard or purpose.

            Literally what that word has meant for generations, etymology stemming from middle French “Anarchie” in 16th century.

            • Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.works
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              4 months ago

              Oh as in you mean no copyright makes things more like an anarchy instead of becoming 100% anarchy. I see what you mean now.

    • rottingleaf@lemmy.zip
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      4 months ago

      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.

      • FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today
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        4 months ago

        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.

  • HexesofVexes@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    Well, I guess we’ll never see any developments in mathematics or theoretical physics. No copyright there except journals paywalling our work and paying us absolutely nothing. Oh wait…

    We live in an era of copyblight - it’s an era we won’t leave until the caveman mentality of “this mine, no touch or I hurt” fizzles out. Give it another 5000 or so years maybe?

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      The thing that will bring down the copywrite system will be countries without copywrite making enforcement impossible.

  • Kairos@lemmy.today
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    4 months ago

    This title is actually false under some logical fallacy. It should be “Yet more examples of copyright destroying culture rather than driving it.”

    • FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today
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      4 months ago

      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.

      • Kairos@lemmy.today
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        4 months ago

        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.

        • FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today
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          4 months ago

          You can say they’re incorrect, but you cannot correct their intentions. Only they can do that.

  • 14th_cylon@lemm.ee
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    4 months ago

    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

    • xanu@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      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.