zrst@lemmy.cif.su 2 weeks ago
Copyright and patent laws need to die.
Anyone who doesn’t understand this is a useful idiot.
No, they have utility as people shouldn’t be able to rip off other teams work as that disincentivizes any product research , innovation or the ability to sustain yourself based on sales of your art.
The only thing idiotic is the notion that these systems need to die rather than be refined.
I agree. The only big problem I’m aware of is the length of validity for patents/copyright (and how large corporations for years were getting the laws changed so their IP could last even longer).
After a decade or two, surely you have profiteered enough or at least had enough time to try profiteering from your idea or works? Time for public domain? 75 years (i think it is for copyright) seems crazy to me.
Me not experto though, but I do think lowering the time you can hold your invention or works hostage from the world would be amazing for the general public and advancement of tech (even though when I say that, it sounds like stealing a baby from a mother).
For patents it is much shorter than copyright. Copyright being roughly the lifespan of the creator makes sense when you think George RR Martin has been writing Game of Thrones for 20 years before it appears on HBO. Under a shorter span you could have people selling fanfiction of works before their creators saw any real profit.
IMO what needs reform is that if the public invests in your research the state shoukd hold a percentage of the revenue from the sale of that good. The USA did this until Reagan.
Patent law is the foundation of which our entire civilisation rest upon. I can agree it can be flawed and/or exploited sometimes.
But only a useful idiot would want patents to not exist at all. It’s the only thing that protects your innovation from being stolen by those with means to outproduce you.
It’s literally there so when you invent a new product, others (wealthy companies) can’t just steal your design and flood the market with cheaper versions due to the fact that they can mass produce it.
Software patents are pretty close to universally bad. Software moves fast and twenty years is ridiculous, when video codecs have grown to be biggest format and then been overtaken by their successors which in turn are overtaken by their own successors before the first codecs lose their patent then you know something is going wrong. Hardware patents have their place as you say, but software moves very quickly and can innovate just fine without the need for patents.
In theory you could make them viable by shortening the life, to just 5 years or something, but at that point the cost of administering them probably outweighs any benefits (if there would actually be any).
Copyright is another matter, I think we probably need that in some form (though the stupid length of copyright at the moment is even stupider for software)
Software patents are pretty close to universally bad.
I’m far from an expert on this particular subject, but I could definitely see this being true.
Yeah, that’s fair
TIL civilisation didn’t exist before the 20th century
You’re an idiot… we’ve had patents since the 15:th century…
Bullshit! The truth is that to even sell your product in the first place you have to sell it to a big corporation for peanuts so that they can then get rich on your idea because you can’t afford the marketing or production cost to popularize your product on your own. And software patents have even less reason to exist. They’re just pure evil!
Yes you generally do need to involve a business partner that has the means to produce the product in any meaningful capacity.
Or, if we go by what you want. They don’t even have to partner with you. They’ll just start making it themselves and push you out of the market because there’s absolutely nothing that would prevent them to.
Eh who cares it’s all big corporations now any way.
Learn to keep secrets better. China isn’t exactly a vigorous enforcer of us patents anyway.
They don’t seem to be protecting creators from getting their work subsumed by AI, so they’re clearly not fit for purpose. But I do think there needs to be some protection for artists and creators, it’s just that either the present laws are shit or the courts can be bought.
prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
Current system is obviously broken, but you don’t believe that artists and creators should have a right to control their intellectual property at all?
floquant@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
Personally I don’t have an issue with individual intellectual property, it’s the acquisition and trade of it by corporations that I have an issue with. For example, I believe no copyright should last after the creator’s death. Disney is dead, Tolkien is dead, many musicians are dead, let alive creators contribute to their worlds.
QuoVadisHomines@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Walt Disney wasn’t the creator of most of his works.
echodot@feddit.uk 2 weeks ago
That isn’t the problem.
Copyright law does run out after a while it’s not immediately upon the holders death but after their death there’s a grace period and then the copyright runs out.
The problem is the likes of Disney get special treatment. Their patents should have run out long before any of us were born and yet they didn’t.
The problem isn’t the system itself, the problem is the abuse of the system.
floquant@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
No. The problem is that that system was created and lobbied for literally by Disney and other big “IP holders” like music labels. That “while” after the holder’s death has been increasing to ridiculous levels. They are not getting special treatment by abusing the system, they’re changing the system to their rules. Image (source)
Adalast@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I have a real issue here too. Though mine more centers around the purchase of IP to bury it because it would be competition. How many amazing creations that would benefit humanity and make all of our lives more livable are buried in archives at these big corpos?
This is what I would like to see fixed, in the most aggressive way possible. I want a clock on the ownership to bring a product to market based on the purchased patant and if that clock runs out, ownership reverts back to the creator.
daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
I do believe that.
Intellectual property leads to all kind of unfairness. It should be normalized that artist would be paid for the work done, nor for property ownership.
This adds to some other believes about people shouldn’t be paid just for “property ownership”.
And once the art is done and released is part of human race, that does include terrible human beings, but it also includes absolutely everyone else.
Some other argument for this… For instance, being an artist is one of the jobs with biggest pay disparity, from the poorest of them all to some of the richest. That’s a normal output of basing income on property ownership, things snowball once you have enough property.
I don’t think there’s a way to make private property (physical or intelectual) work in a fair economy. And remember, private property is not the same as personal property, just in case.
prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
You live in a dream world. Why would I release my music to the public when there are people who will make a living stealing it, putting their name on it, and selling 1000x more than you ever could because they already have name recognition? And those people WILL exist for every form of creative content.
ChaoticEntropy@feddit.uk 2 weeks ago
Yeah… victory belonging to the person with the widest reach and deepest pockets rather than the originator of the material/idea is one way to ensure that all creatives become paupers. This is one of those many on-paper ideas that, without the upheaval of pretty much every other established human social structure, would be awful in practice.
daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
Because you will be paid for it?
In the current world I could torrent your music and you’ll be “losing money” and will end up investing more work in anti-piracy and advertisement than in making good music.
If instead you would be paid for the making of the music regardless of how many copies of a digital file you sold by a better system that’s not based on private property and the means of capitalism, it would mean that you could 100% focus on making music and everyone could enjoy the things you made.
Everyone will be happy, except investors and people thriving of this inefficient and unfair system.
Doomsider@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
99+% of art is never sold. The vast majority of artist don’t make money. Who really cares about the extreme minority who use capitalism to control our culture. They don’t get to decide what the rest of the world does purely for their economic interests.
No they don’t need any mechanism. The arts and sciences existed for thousands of years without modern silly interpretations for commercial interests.
echodot@feddit.uk 2 weeks ago
People need to be compensated for their work, that may end up being an awful lot and probably in excess of what they need, but that’s how it has to work. Any other system would just disincentivize people from putting in the effort, in fact it would force them not to because they would have to do something else in order to earn enough money to live. The precise opposite of your desired outcome would happen, the rich would produce endless amounts of content just to more money, and all the smaller artists would have to go and get a job in Costco or something.
The only way your idea would work is if we completely change the economic system and got rid of money. Which I’m all in favour of but I suspect is probably outside of the scope of copyright law.
Doomsider@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
To answer your first question no.
Intellectual property is a societal construct and it is as real as racism is. Which isn’t saying much.
If an artist doesn’t want their music to be heard and possibly replicated, altered, or used in a way they don’t like then it is their responsibility to never release it. Only by hiding it can they keep the world from misusing it.
MotoAsh@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
rofl pure stupidity
prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
The thing that irks me the most is that everyone who disagrees is an idiot or a liberal or some shit. No matter how grounded and nuanced your take is.
Every leftist has their own, ultra specific orthodoxy, and they will always find something about yours that makes you “not a real leftist.”
Nothing new either, it’s happened countless times. It’s so self-sabotaging.
Doomsider@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Whatever you say Motoass!
zrst@lemmy.cif.su 2 weeks ago
It’s imaginary property. It’s not real and only exists in our heads. Saying someone stole your “intellectual property” is akin to saying they “stole your idea.”
It is about the money, as well.
If you want to prioritize controlling what others can do with an idea, then nobody should be able to restrict someone else from doing what they want with an idea.
Bruce Springsteen will just have to grow up and get over it.
prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
So just no music business then?
ChairmanMeow@programming.dev 2 weeks ago
It may surprise you to know that people produced music before IP laws existed.
Regrettable_incident@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
No art, no poetry, no video games. . .
IMO creators should have better protections - the current laws don’t seem to stop AI gobbling up their work. But at the same time this Nintendo thing is obviously bullshit. I’m surprised the court allowed it. Probably a decision made by a very old Christian man who doesn’t understand what games are and can’t use a smartphone.
Doomsider@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
bonus_crab@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Intellectual property is a means of production after its released. It requires no further input from the creator, and so they shouldnt have a monopoly over it.
If the internet actually enforced copyright to the letter of the law, it wouldnt exist in its current form. No memes, no game streamers or videogame youtubers, no unlicensed music, no image sharing. Copyright needs to be defended to the best of the holders ability otherwise they lose it. It would necessitate a constant stream of scanning and policing and litigation thatd be so taxing on platforms theyd just shut down. Video game streaming operates in a legal grey zone because the law is flawed.
Theres a reason programming tools are almost all open source. From languages to libraries to software, the alternative is just too inefficient.
Copyright is an old shitty system from the days when books required publishers who had to register an ISBN for everything they published. The modern equivalent would be if every unique copyrightable contribution on the internet first required submitting the media to a government agency to store a hash of it and issue a UUID.
chiliedogg@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Let’s say you design a revolutionary widget of some kind, but don’t have the means to to produce it at scale. How do you get it to market? You parter with a larger company. For a share of the proceeds, you have them produce the item. Without a patent, when you go to the manufacturer and show them the design, they can just start making it themselves and tell you to beat sand.
Also, patents require competitive companies to alter a product design in order to sell it. If everyone could just copy the same product, there would be further incentive to monopolize the means of production to produce the single product at a larger scale, since the only differentiation between products would be the price. Patents allow competition through limited-term protection of their innovations.
Is the patent system abused by large companies? Absolutely. But removing patents won’t make them.good actors. It’ll just remove any limitations on their theft.
prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
If the person who created it cannot profit from it, then nobody should be able to.
I think most artists would agree (unless they’re specifically interested in the concept of freely distributing their work).
luciferofastora@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
There should be a mechanism to reward artists for their work and enable them to keep creating, but without also allowing a system of vampires to control that mechanism and enslave them in a twisted web of dependency and power.
floquant@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
Whose law? Whose enforcers? The Internet is fundamentally incompatible with traditional sovereignty and jurisdiction concepts
SlothMama@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I also believe all intellectual property laws shouldn’t exist, so patent, copyright, and trademark.
surph_ninja@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Artists and creators already don’t control their intellectual property. The megacorporations do, and they have always violated the intellectual property rights of small artists with little to no consequences.
Intellectual property laws are a recent and catastrophic mistake. For the majority of the history of our species, no one could retain sole ownership of art. And it was better. We make the best art when we trade it back & forth and reiterate on it.
We should scrap intellectual property laws, and heavily tax corporate AI use to fund a national artists stipend to provide them a good standard of living.
ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
If you want a capitalist society it needs to die.
If Trump can sell Springsteen’s music cheaper than Springsteen then that’s just the free market.
prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
Exactly. And why would Springsteen have any incentive to distribute (or ultimately, even record maybe) any of his music in this proposed reality?
Not a fan of Springsteen, was just the first example that came to mind.
I’m just trying to imagine the incalculable amount of great music we would have been deprived of had we been living in a world without IP laws.
They might have written them, but we’d never get to hear it.