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, …
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
Sure, and there’s no reason it can’t include other art and culture, like TV shows, radio programs, etc. The main issue is the length of time before those become legal to redistribute. It sucks that only movies made in the early 1900s are legal to redistribute, when the most culturally relevant works are still 50+ years away from entering the public domain.
So we should be looking at shortening that time, trying to end copyright entirely isn’t going to happen.
Shortening the time is good, and adjusting it while it still does apply to allow for more legal free sharing of the work.
The problem is that copyright owners are concerned about losing sales, they care much less whether you’re making a profit on that lost sale.
One thing I think we should do is require stores to allow transfer of copyright. So if I buy a game or movie, I should be able to give that game or movie to someone else. I would no longer have access to it, so it would be like giving a physical disk or whatever.
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.
No copyright is about the “right” to “copy” the work in question, not the attribution. Works that are in the public domain still list the author.
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.