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In Serving Big Company Interests, Copyright Is in Crisis:
We're taking part in Copyright Week, a series of actions and discussions supporting key principles that should guide copyright policy. Every day this week, various groups are taking on different elements of copyright law and policy, addressing what's at stake and what we need to do to make sure that copyright promotes creativity and innovation.
Copyright rules are made with the needs of the entertainment industry in mind, designed to provide the legal framework for creators, investors, distributors, production houses, and other parts of the industry to navigate their disputes and assert their interests.
A good copyright policy would be one that encouraged diverse forms of expression from diverse creators who were fairly compensated for their role in a profitable industry. But copyright has signally failed to accomplish this end, largely because of the role it plays in the monopolization of the entertainment industry (and, in the digital era, every industry where copyrighted software plays a role). Copyright's primary approach is to give creators monopolies over their works, in the hopes that they can use these as leverage in overmatched battles with corporate interests. But monopolies have a tendency to accumulate, piling up in the vaults of big companies, who use these government-backed exclusive rights to dominate the industry so that anyone hoping to enter it must first surrender their little monopolies to the hoards of the big gatekeepers.
Creators get a raw deal in a concentrated marketplace, selling their work into a buyer's market. Giving them more monopolies – longer copyright terms, copyright over the "feel" of music, copyright over samples – just gives the industry more monopolies to confiscate in one-sided negotiations and add to their arsenals. Expecting more copyright to help artists beat a concentrated industry is like expecting more lunch money to help your kid defeat the bullies who beat him up on the playground every day. No matter how much lunch money you give that kid, all you'll ever do is make the bullies richer.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Sunday January 26 2020, @01:01PM (16 children)
1. Emo about copyright.
Authors and artists are among the biggest opponents of proposed changes that reduce the power of copyright. I've talked with enough wanna-be authors to see that. It was unanimous. They really believe copyright is their life blood. Won't consider any other system. I tried asking on a forum for writers, and the sort of response I got was revealing: "we don't encourage piracy." I wasn't trying to encourage it, I was trying to talk about it, but they all acted as if merely talking about it was encouraging it. They pointed to their policy that states those who encourage piracy will be kicked out. Oh well, opinion collected.
I used to think successful authors were a cut above, smarter than the average bear. Surely none of them could be so dense, so blind, as to themselves commit one of the staple crimes often written about, the shooting of the messenger. Burn the bearer of bad news at the stake! You might think at the least authors of SF might get it. Nope! Not even them. We have these crazy SF settings in which science and technology are so advanced we can travel faster than light, colonizing planets in other solar systems is no big deal, money has been radically changed, but somehow copyright is still the same as it was in the late 20th century. Makes for some painfully stupid and jarring SF in places. Among the stupidest is the magic transporter/teleportation device. Copying being so forbidden, shoved waay in the back of authors' minds by self-censorship, the logical difficulty that most hypothetical devices which can transport people could more easily just clone people is simply ignored, and we all just sort of play along and act oblivious to that.
That brings me to one of the worst problems with copyright. It pushes several of our emotional buttons. We like to think we're all unique. Individuality is one of the traits we supposedly possess that we cherish the most. SF "teleporation" schemes have to erase the original, make the original die, to preserve that so cherished individuality. Make new copy at target location, kill original. Copyright is in a way, one legal manifestation of that desire.
Another emotional button all too easily pushed is fear of loss. It is way too easy for interested parties to tar copying as no different than stealing. Scream that copiers are evil pirates no better than common thieves, and that the file sharing and the enabling tech, bittorrent and the Internet itself, are monstrous. And of course, cry that artists will all starve, and we shall have no more art. Just a teensy bit over the top, wouldn't you agree? The ones pushing this narrative the hardest are masters of emotional manipulation, having built their entire business around drama and anything else that sells more movie tickets, records, and books. They feel so strongly about it all that they even performed several legal lynchings of ordinary citizens, in part to inspire fear, and still think they were totally justified in doing so, fighting the good fight, trying to keep that copying genie from oozing any further out of the bottle. They resorted to lying and slandering and other dirty moves, targeting for legal action those least able to defend themselves, feeling that the end goal of maintaining copyright against all threats was so desirable that almost any means was justified. They try to turn others into copyright police. A grandkid downloads a song, and they want to hold grandma responsible and hang her from the neck until dead, because she didn't police the kid enough. Ah well, those who would "shoot the messenger" certainly would also commit "the end justifies the means".
A closely related issue is plagiarism. Now that really is stealing. However copyright extremists have too often gotten away with conflating copying and plagiarism, and have succeeded at suggesting that to allow copying is to remove all defense against plagiarism. It need not be so.
All this emotional baggage is yet another reason why I think copyright needs to step down in favor of something better.
2. What can replace copyright?
In a word, crowdfunding. Patronage. Patronage has worked for centuries. Today, we can do it a lot better. Lovers of art should focus their efforts on building better systems, making crowdfunding better, not defending a bad and broken one.
It is really funny sad odd how ardent defenders of copyright like to act as if nothing better than holy copyright can possibly exist or work. Crowdfunding? Copyleft? That's -- that's --- Communism! Treason! Artists starving to death! Artists' children, homeless, wandering the streets, begging for scraps of food! (Come on, shed a tear here for that tearjerker.) It's all just an excuse for taking! And, IT WON'T WORK! In defiance of all evidence that crowdfunding does work, they continue to insist it doesn't.
3. copyright is evil
There's more, much more. Yet another problem with copyright is that it's monopolistic. Monopolies are bad. We;ve seen that time and time again.
Education is copying! At a most fundamental level, the passing on of knowledge to our children is a massive copying of everything important we've spent millennia learning and discovering, so that they cab build on top, rather than having to start from scratch.
Copying is a natural right. And now, thanks to technological advancement, copying at last belongs to the masses. The Gutenberg Press has been rated the #1 influential invention of the past millennium. The Internet and data storage tech is bigger. No amount of law making is going to put this genie back in the bottle, and it is folly and cruel woe to try. How many more of our children have to die, because knowledge was hoarded and buried?
Also consider how much effort has been wasted on DRM. Why do so many persist in thinking that maybe, DRM can somehow work. Steam is DRM done right? WTF??
Copyright really has warped our thinking.
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 26 2020, @02:12PM (5 children)
A work of art is a natural monopoly when there is only one original. Monopolies are not inherently bad, nobody is harmed by you painting a mural on your bedroom ceiling anymore than we are harmed by only having one Sistine Chapel.
No it isn't. Copying somebody else's manuscript and claiming it as your own is fraudulent, a bad faith act of intellectual theft - cheating. If you'd said mimicry, fine, apes do it. This is also why the "feel" lawsuit in TFA is utter bullshit.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 26 2020, @02:38PM (3 children)
bzipboo didn't say anything about copying someone's manuscript and claiming it as his own, aka plagiarism.
I will download every book, movie, science article, etc. ever made without paying. The low technological barriers to copying and storage makes it more likely that these will exist 1000 years from now.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 26 2020, @05:48PM (2 children)
You accept that it is fraud but not that unauthorized reproduction and distribution of a work is also fraud?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 26 2020, @09:10PM
it's only fraud if you are misrepresenting someone's work as your own. wtf does that have to do with copying someone's work to use for yourself? are you fucking retarded?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 26 2020, @09:17PM
I don't accept your sperging. I just commit the crime of copying information for my own use.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 26 2020, @04:58PM
There's another in Goring-by-Sea [english-martyrs.co.uk]
(Score: 3, Touché) by JoeMerchant on Sunday January 26 2020, @02:57PM
More timely: how many unwanted children have to be born and suffer, because knowledge was hoarded and buried?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Sunday January 26 2020, @03:12PM (2 children)
I live by what you are describing here, I write and meme expecting, planning, hoping, I will be copied and shared, and in so doing I advertise and incorporate the work of hundreds if not thousands of other people.
Consider my latest,
https://archive.is/Ljm4X [archive.is]
https://archive.is/9T2tC [archive.is]
These are old movies, could I be prosecuted for screenshotting them? Should I be? I am not selling them, I am just posting them. And then relying on patronage.
Guess what though, patronage works through cultural hegemony. The people with money got that money by obeying the cultural hegemony, they do not know anything *even exists* outside of their cultural hegemony. There is a giant dialectic here, with one side still watching mass media cnn/fox and using fb/twitter, and then the people who have had to go elsewhere. And the people within that bubble, that delusional highly manipulated, sadly fanatically zionist, bubble, have this superhuge advantage.
Did you know psychoĺogists are telling people that marxism was the cause of all of the problems of the 20th century? True story, the guy makes 10k a month on patreon and he already has money, so what is that even? Patreon is not for rich professors who get their books published on a whim, that is not how that is supposed to work. Anyway.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzXXjiwlxmU [youtube.com]
The people outside that window are in chaos, scattered in all directions, deplatformed, cancelled, and their work, my work, is not being seen by potential patrons.
https://archive.is/5b8cm [archive.is]
Consider the danger I have to deal with just to make this objectively hilarious series based on one of my favorite movie scenes of all time, and mashed up wth salvadore dali and the russian vr cow:
https://archive.is/YYbVG [archive.is] blank
https://archive.is/dzr5o [archive.is] meta
https://archive.is/ULMpO [archive.is] dali
https://archive.is/L7LfU [archive.is] cow vr
Just consider how many 7-degrees of people I connect with just what I have posted in this one comment, how many peoples' work went into this, stagehands, people who host seedboxes, Julia Roberts, the russian cow photographer, Salvador Dali, and then I just give you the blank one to make your own frameup.
Maybe I am tooting my own horn here, but I am saying that after a year of doing this and more, not a single patron have I found. We are in agreement on how this is supposed to work, but how are anti-intellectual crypto-capitalist disinfo stooges who are already rich succeeding on the internet better than I am? And I am not looking for fame or wealth, I just want to get by so I can do my work. And the systems available *to me* simply do not work, have never worked, and I tried all the others before trying this one.
So I paid around 300 bucks on hosting and spent around 400 hours writing and crafting original content, and at the end of the day I get told I am the one who is privileged? That I am not working hard enough, to attract a single contribution? That I have to work through the major, centralized, censored, channels, operated by my clear ideological opponents, otherwise I can't be a writer or artist of any kind?
Something is rotten in denmark, that is not how any of this is supposed to work. And I spent a lot of time thinking about it this year, and I came to a diagnosis. We are dealing with a real totalitarian system, and it is designed to exclude people who aren't with the program. Who question their copyright system, like you are doing. And then that trickles down. Those authors who told you they love copyright, they have agents, and those agents love copyright, and those agents won't work with anyone who doesn't, and those writers are afraid to lose their agents. Real fear, real self-censorship, real ideological conformity prior to consideration.
So I made this to explain it, if you are not on the left hand side of this img, the left hand side knows that(and flip it in the mirror if you want right/left is arbitrarary here), and that is what we are dealing with on a primal level, beneath the copyright, ethos .org, or even trump impeachment debate.
https://archive.is/ws6XQ [archive.is]
If you cannot deal with this dialectic, you will just be swept up in it until all you believe is lies, and you are afraid to say a single word to question them.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Sunday January 26 2020, @08:02PM (1 child)
> not a single patron have I found.
How good is your work, really? Have you asked for constructive criticism on it? Any beta-readers seen it? The first quick look I took, I found the text impossibly small and reduced. Couldn't read it on archive.is. Persisting, I reached coinsh.red, where, while still small, and mangled somewhat by JPEG compression artifacts, I could at least read it.
I find interesting the proposal of 13 months of 28 days each. Did you know that during the French Revolution, there was a proposal for Metric Time? 10 hours per day, along with other decimal divisions. Thing is, people hate changing what they have. It's far easier to build something new than to change an existing thing. Maybe work out something for Mars and Earth when (if?) a colony is ever established, then import it back to Earth when accepted. Uh, what day of the week is New Years? None at all, it seems. That breaks the heck out of the 7 day week.
The other material, I don't know. The impression I got is that it's a lot of unsupported assertions. Will take more study to understand it all.
(Score: 2) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Monday January 27 2020, @02:17PM
right click and save.
magnifiy in the viewer.
I have to do this with all of the most famous and informative memes I scraped from diverse places.
It comes with the terrirory, it is part of it, no one is going to hold your hand, you have to think.
The most common shill response to my work is nitpicking like this, you will notice it in response to my comments if you look.
Every website, you can change the text size and color, that is all your choice, not my imposition.
If you want someone to babysit you, there are other websites for that.
And yes, you should read and investigate. The calendar is the least important idea discussed in any of the memes, but it is a good one.
Another common shill method is, 'oh non one will ever change, people are so blah' etc etc. Azumi H. says that all the time.
No point in doing anything, everything is already the way it is, and people are such slugs, no point in doing anything, rinse repeat.
But anyone in that boat is just on the side of tyranny and worse at this point.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mcgrew on Sunday January 26 2020, @05:45PM (4 children)
Authors and artists are among the biggest opponents of proposed changes that reduce the power of copyright.
There's no reason to reduce its power, mut many reasons to reduce its ridiculous length. No copyright should outlive its creator, and I'd be more than happy to see the Bono Act repealed. But I don't want Random House to be able to sell any of my books without my permission. Give them away? Sure, as long as they're not making money doing it. Note that I only charge for printed books; my eBooks are free.
There's more, much more. Yet another problem with copyright is that it's monopolistic. Monopolies are bad.
How about your local water and sewer? That monopoly is completely necessary, as necessary as a limited time monopoly for creative works. That said, those of us who write, paint, play music, do it because we have to. It's a compulsion.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 2) by loonycyborg on Monday January 27 2020, @09:14AM (3 children)
Something that is naturally necessary will not be enforced by law, because such laws are just empty waste of paper. Copyright is most definitely not considered necessary by most people. Authors who think they need copyright to create something are an archetypal example of vocal minority. But copyright harms authors too by giving too much power to marketing and making actual authors interchangeable for purpose of actually making money. Since they just need baseline level of creative skill to be marketable. Industry can market limited number of authors(because of nature of monopoly it becomes small number of gatekeepers with limited resources each) to large audiences and those who won't be will get nearly nothing. This makes it so authors are likely chosen mostly based on loyalty and popularity gained via means unrelated to their artistic prowess. And particularly hard artistic endeavors also tend to be niche and thus bring little money under this system making patronage only option for them. So copyright is like smoking. You think you need it but actually it's bad for you.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Monday January 27 2020, @04:29PM (2 children)
Authors who think they need copyright to create something are an archetypal example of vocal minority.
You seem to misunderstand copyright. Copyright is to keep Random House, who has tons of cash for marketing, from making tons more cash selling books that I wrote without paying me; I don't have their marketing capital. But I should NOT have a monopoly on my books for the rest of my life, the twenty years they were protected in the 20th century and earlier is plenty long. For computer programs that's way too long, the hardware becomes obsolete before the software reaches the public domain.
Copyright needs reform, but a lot of you want to throw the baby out with the bath water.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 2) by loonycyborg on Monday January 27 2020, @05:19PM
Why would you want to be paid for every reprint of your work? You do not expend any effort for copies that you don't make yourself. This whole idea of getting paid per work copied is nonsense that leads to perverse incentives. Only actual effort put into making the creative work is really valuable but it's not directly related to number of works copied. Most definitely it doesn't scale linearly with number of copies.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Friday January 31 2020, @07:34PM
> Copyright is to keep Random House ... from making tons more cash selling books that I wrote without paying me
Firstly, the whole system of charging per copy has to eventually give way to reality. The only reason it works now is through inertia, a certain degree of convenience that publishers are at last providing through tablets, and most of all, the mercy and benevolence of the public who really do feel that artists deserve compensation for creating entertaining and/or thought provoking works, and that buying a copy is a good way to do that. Also, there persists belief that publishers do an adequate job of screening out bad art.
As to big publishers screwing over individual authors, yes, that is a problem. But copyright is very much itself a "throwing the baby out with the bathwater" solution that just blanket forbids all copying to everyone that artists don't approve, and there is little mechanism for artists to engage in discriminating in favor of the kinds of copying they might actually want to allow. It's default "no", and again, in large part it's an emo thing. Allow any copying at all, weaken the monopoly just a little, and artists might lose money and their children will go hungry!!! That even obvious fair use cases can still be challenged in court is absurd.
This problem can be resolved by growing other, far more permissive systems for collecting, figuring, and delivering compensation to artists and contributors such as editors. No more "mother may I?" for every little thing. Then we would be a whole lot freer to use our culture. Public libraries could at last go fully digital. Maybe copyright should be retained, perhaps in a weaker form, until these other systems are established. But on the other hand, where's the incentive to get busy on replacements, if there's no push to end copyright? I'd like to see copyright sunsetted. For instance, have all existing and new copyrights granted in the future terminate on Feb 1, 2048, 28 years from today. Artists obtaining copyrights in 2030 will have only 18 years of copyright protection. By 2047, with just 1 year left, artists likely wouldn't bother.
Those who think copyright, if it worked, is best at maximizing artists' profits, should consider that public libraries loan out books to far more people than they have copies. Not one cent of used book store sales goes to authors, or publishers. And of course, friends can give books, records, and flash drives to one another. Of course there is also the Economics 101 argument about demand curves. There's a great deal of art I would have enjoyed had it not been out of my reach for a variety of reasons. We are Cord Nevers. Our town did not have a movie theater, just a Blockbusters. Didn't go there much anyway. My parents felt that movies and the TV were basically a waste of time. I saw few movies, and never any shows that appeared only on cable TV, and I often didn't know to what my friends were alluding.
(Score: 2) by loonycyborg on Monday January 27 2020, @08:54AM
Eclipse Phase [wikipedia.org] actually has copying yourself without destroying the original as distinct possibility that occurs often and as a plot point. Also, entire thing is distributed under CC license.