One of the supposed justifications for the intellectual monopoly called copyright is that it drives creativity and culture. In the last few weeks alone we have had multiple demonstrations of why the opposite is true: copyright destroys culture, and not by accident, but wilfully. For example, the MTVNews.com site, along with its sister site CMT.com, …
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That is literally what Copyright is. Removing it means exactly that.
IA didn’t get sued for archiving. They got sued for mass redistribution.
Pretty sure that’s a basic function of a publicly operated archive, but for sure there was a lot of nuance.
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.
Throwing them out and restarting is a lot harder than restarting without throwing them out.
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.
Okay but you can literally just overwrite laws without making a period inbetween where anything and everything is allowed. That’s fucking stupid.
Where did anyone say anything that resembles “make a free for all in between” in any way?
The core concepts of current laws are completely incompatible with any form of actual ownership in a digital world. You need to write new laws that start from the ground up with concepts that work.
You, then.