I actually don't understand your reasoning here... What have you made in your life that leads you to think that copyright should be limited at all? Have you never written a story? Composed or recorded a song? Drawn a picture or taken a photograph? Written some computer code?
I've done all of these things, and I don't see any logic in the idea that I shouldn't have exclusive legal rights over a work that I've created throughout my lifetime, at the very least. I write a song and I only get 15 years to perform and sell it? I paint an illustration and I only get 15 years to prevent other people from drop-shipping t-shirts and posters of it on Amazon?
Copyright exists, in theory, to protect the original creators of works. Whether it does a good job of that or not is a secondary point. It seems that you're essentially arguing that artists should have less rights, power and value simply to justify piracy. No offense, but this strikes me as the argument of a consumer trying to justify piracy, with zero consideration of protecting writers, artists, musicians, and other creators of "intellectual property".
Indeed, one solution to corporations getting away with breaking the law is to make the law more lax for everyone. But another (much more preferable) solution is to simply enforce the laws equally and take action to protect creators.
unknownuserunknownlocation@kbin.earth 2 days ago
The more I think about how to fix copyright, the more I wonder whether we really need copyright.
I mean, think about it, the original idea behind copyright is to protect the small guy who creates media and wants to sell it from companies that might want to sell it themselves. Well, it's not working whatsoever. The small guy gets pennies on the dollar, while the big companies rake in the profits.
So honestly, let's just abolish copyright altogether and work on more of a donation base (that actually gets to the artists, since they control it) which is already being used with video a lot, and to ensure that artists can afford the necessities, add universal basic inco... OK shit I'm at it again.
Jayjader@jlai.lu 1 day ago
It’s “funny” how it always seems to come down to
thispeople shouldn’t need to make someone else richer just to survive…realitista@lemmus.org 1 day ago
I think it’s simple, just make copyright non-transferable. Someone can sign a contract to distribute your works but can never own the rights to them. You can’t pass them to anyone when you die, they go to the public domain.
adespoton@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
The problem with that is the rash of deaths of people with copyright over desirable content.
And this isn’t just speculative.
Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com 14 hours ago
Okay transferrable but 5 years tops.
That’s wildly enough IMO.
mrmaplebar@fedia.io 1 day ago
Exactly. This is why you can't tie property ownership to life and death, because then you're simply creating a business incentive to seeing that people with valuable property die.
So to solve that, instead of tying the property to a specific person's lifetime, you tie it to a generic estimation of human lifetime (say 80-110 years, optimistically), and that brings us right back to where we are.
unknownuserunknownlocation@kbin.earth 1 day ago
That, and it only solves one of the problems copyright causes. The problems in regards to using content to create more content is still there. The problems with massive companies raking in millions while giving the creator pennis is still there. The problems with access to content. All the spinoff issues with DRM are still there. To give a couple of examples.
realitista@lemmus.org 1 day ago
Fair point
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
See, I think copyright has value, I think it has just lost sight of its original goals and intentions because corporations (which never die) have vested interest in copyright being as long as possible.
According to the research of Rufus Pollock, optimal copyright term is between 15 and 38 years. This provides a range that the majority of copyright holders will make the majority of their income from copyright on, while also promoting the originals goals of copyright which was to allow artists to support themselves while also promoting creation of new media. The majority of copyrighted works only have a real shelf-life of 15 to 38 years before people aren’t really looking to pay for them, so why should we have copyright that exists beyond that when most will have already made all the profit they will ever make from their works within that timeframe.
I personally think UBI is a pretty weak replacement for copyright. UBI shouldn’t wholesale replace markets but rather be a safety net for people who are struggling and need a basic amount of support to reasonably survive.
artyom@piefed.social 1 day ago
Or we could not do that and actually solve the problem that causes those kind of splits…
mrmaplebar@fedia.io 1 day ago
Are you think about this from the standpoint of a creator? Have you written anything? Have you composed or recorded a song? Have you drawn or painted a picture? Taken an artistic photo? Even written some source code?
Or are you simply looking at copyright from the perspective of a consumer, who sees it as little more than an inconvenience to your access to free media? (I understand the populism of this, because consumers always outnumber creators, and we all like having the power to pirate media in an economy where so much is becoming unaffordable to us.)
The original idea of copyright was that if you write a story (for example), you exclusively own it, and thus do not have to compete for the ability to print and sell it. This was meant to be a real solution to a real problem at the dawn of industrialization; how can the person who writes a story compete with a person who owns a printing press?
Sure, we can argue that the publisher still often wins today, because artists are so BROKE and desperate for cash that they will too often agree to a contract with bad terms. (See Spotify, for just one of many examples.) But without copyright, the writer loses and the printing company wins 100% of the time. The author would have zero ability to capitalize of their work, and the entity with the largest printing press would be unbeatable in the free market.
If AI is going to be treated like a printing press, artists should be protected from it like they were protected from the printing press. That demands stronger copyright laws, not weaker ones.
As an artist myself, I'm tired of hearing non-artists propose solutions in which artists can only "afford the necessities" while billionaire tech bros hoard 99.9% of the wealth for themselves. Whether it's some kind of social safety net or UBI, what you're proposing amounts to little more than an allowance or table scraps from society, for the people who do what I think is the important work of creating large parts of human culture. Promising creative people a meager future in which they scrape by on only the bare minimum needed to survive is not the glamorous sales pitch that some people seem to think it is...
Why is the prescription a society where creative people are the only ones who can't capitalize on their creations?
If we are to abolish intellectual property, we might as well abolish all property (including land, patents and money as well) because then at least everybody is in the same boat. But if we do so, we'd better be careful to make sure that we aren't simply giving the federal government (and the shitheads who run it) even more power and control over everything. A society like that would need a MUCH stronger Bill of Rights, and one that is actually enforced.
leftascenter@jlai.lu 4 hours ago
That’s a bit messy.
Patents are IP, with the caveat that they usually protect corporation over inventors.
Money is a medium for measuring transactions. Hoarding it is very much like having people owing you a service.
Land is more complex and needs for a society to clarify “property” first : property because of use or property in a more abstract way allowing others to use it for your benefit. This also implies a split between single-person usage (t’is my plot for I toil it for my family) and a more common use (10 persons toil the field which provides enough for 20).
t3rmit3@beehaw.org 1 day ago
You do realize that copyright is solely a function of the federal government, right? There is no state or municipal copyright, it’s already the federal government who decides whether your copyright as a creator is valid or enforceable, or whether to just hand it over to another company/ billionaire.
unknownuserunknownlocation@kbin.earth 1 day ago
Yes I have, yes I have, yes I have, yes I have, and yes I have.
And yes, I'm thinking about this from the point of view of a creator. It's fucking difficult to make ends meet. Talk to any artist that hasn't managed to get a salaried job as an artist (you have to be really, I mean really good at what you do) or gotten lucky enough to make it big. They're saving money anywhere they can. They're working second and third jobs. Honestly, on average, artists are the poorest people I know. Despite copyright protection being strong (put the AI thing aside for a minute, since it's a fairly new problem). The lab results are in. It doesn't work.
You know what they would like? To focus on their art, and not their financial issues. Oh, and many would like to not worry about the legal grey area/hellhole when it comes to remixing or rearranging others' work. I've made an arrangement for a song I was fascinated with, but I haven't released it, partly because I don't want to deal with all the legal BS.
You're mixing up your history here. Copyright is much, much newer than the printing press. And even if you take that assumption, that calculation has changed, since again there's next to no cost to making copies anymore. So now, the companies have used copyright to become gatekeepers while also keeping as much of the profit as humanly possible.
...except they can. There are plenty of media creators that get their audience to sponsor them, to varying degrees of success.
But honestly, if there's no worry about food insecurity or housing insecurity, do you want to create art or just profit from it?
I'm not going to go into the slippery slope tirade at the end except to say this: look at how filthy rich companies like Disney, Sony, etc. are. They are that ridiculously rich because of copyright. Is that really what you want?
SteevyT@beehaw.org 20 hours ago
Sometimes I wonder why copyright isn’t the same length as a patent? I don’t think it particularly matters whether you use utility patent or design patent length. Patent law has it’s faults, but as someone who both has patents and has had to deal with someone else beating me to an idea, it seems to be a better system than whatever the fuck Disney has managed to turn copyright into.