The idea of copyright itself isn’t a bad thing IMO - reward creatives by allowing them exclusivity over their works for an amount of time sufficient to recoup costs and make some profit.
Problem is monopolistic mega-corporations screwed it all up in the name of profits by extending copyright decades past its original intention, and by copyrighting not just the works but even the means of accessing any of them.
It’s no secret that the reuse of public domain inspirations was how many of the largest entertainment companies and largest publishers got to where they are, so of course they pulled the ladder to ensure it’d be a whole lot harder to follow them.
Copyright is broken, and you only need follow the money to see who broke it.
Medical patents are like 20 years, that should be the upper bound for all copyrights, patents, etc
Maybe for art and only in the case it’s individual artists that own it.
And copyrights should be redefined a bit (like foss licences).
But nothing should get you 20 years of exclusive rights, that is just not right.
Ppl will quote medical research, but that is the worst of copyright examples.
And I think medical research should be under public domain, non-profits or gov agencies researching with public money and not allowed to copyright the products.I personally disagree. If you write a song, why can’t I learn it and sing it? If you build a guitar, and I take it, then you can’t use it, but if I just learn to sing your song then I’m not depriving you of anything. Why should you be able to prevent me from singing what I want when it doesn’t harm you?
The idea that you should get to control your creative works and no one should be allowed to touch them feels to me like it’s just appeasing control freaks while costing massive amounts in terms of remixing, and creativity.
While rewarding artists is a good idea, in the digital age, copyright is a fundamentally bad way of doing it. The entire core concept of copyright exists because unlike physical goods, information can be copied and replicated nearly infinitely for zero cost, and when something is ubiquitous, capitalism says that its value is $0. So rather than embrace the fact that information now has effectively zero cost to distribute to everyone once it’s digitized, we spent billions on lawyers and laws, and engineers and technological walls, all just to create artificial scarcity so that it would have value again.
There is a fundamental difference between the properties and behaviour of information, and the properties and behaviour of physical matter, and at a core level copyright is a hamfisted way of trying to mash digital information distribution into a system designed for the distribution of physical goods.
Here’s a scenario: You make a song but your YouTube channel has 6 subscribers. It’s a good song and the views are slowly going up, this might be your big break. A week later, just when the views start inching towards the 5 digits, Drake comes out with the exact same song. Your version fades into obscurity, he never even mentions you, he makes millions off your single. It’s not exactly fair.
I think copyrights are currently much too strong and easy to abuse. Fair use should be expanded and the time limits greatly reduced but doing away with the whole concept isn’t the best solution imo.
Absolutely fair scenario, I’m not advocating to abandon copyright with nothing to replace it.
The fundamental structure of copyright right now, is one based around granting ownership and exclusivity rights, but only the second part is flawed, the exclusivity rights part.
A copyright system that makes sense in the digital age is an ownership and attribution system, whereby in that scenario, Drake would acknowledge that it’s your song and then a certain portion of his proceeds from that song would end up going to you automatically. If he didn’t he would face a regulator / court / arbitration system that could impose massive penalties to disincentivize non acknowledgement.
It doesn’t really change any of the economics of live art, but for digital art, rather than everyone paying for different subscriptions and having all the profits go to enriching middle men with exclusive, non competitive contracts, everyone would always have free access to everything and you’d have the streaming and viewership numbers etc influence how much money the government or an arm’s length arts agency / crown corporation is paying out to artists.
Well said. Realistically we need a completely new system that’s more in tune with the digital age and puts society first while incentivizing small time artists.
The best would probably be to couple it with profits, so any artist which makes more than X amount using an other persons work needs to hire lawyers and figure out who he has to pay or get sued.
Copyright is a classic case of “The few benefit at the expense of the many”. Ideas, medicine, innovation, culture, these should all be shared as widely as possible as quickly as possible to all of humanity. Especially when we can copy those things for no production cost unlike the times of the printing press. But somebody realized they could paywall it and get rich instead.
Copyright is an antiquated idea whose time has come to arrive on the chopping block. Any politician who aims to curtail or abolish copyright gets my vote.
Yes, copyrights aren’t that dissimilar to monopolies, and it’s holding humanity back.
Instead of sharing ‘the wealth’ and let everyone build on it we keep finding ways to concentrate it.
Copyright is classified as a legally enforced monopoly. So are patents.
Personally I think both have been made overly long in duration and broad in scope. But without some exclusive period I can’t see things like TV shows, movies, books, or games being made with even 1% of the current quality or quantity.
“Finally, my invention of the toilet paper holder is complete. And no, I will not share it with the world, I’ll patient it. After all, I didn’t do it for others, I did it for myself, even if all my needs are already met.”
Written by ai obviously
Yep. Copyright protects stuff like open source software (GPL license and others) and ensures it stays open and creators get credit. This article is making the case for AI to steal all that for itself. Copyright isn’t inherently a bad thing, the way it’s used and abused is. You can thank Disney for making copyrights seem like a negative thing all because they wanted to hold on to their damn mouse for centuries. They themselves also profited (and still do) off of works they didn’t originally create, like Bambi, Cinderella, etc.
Yup. AI firms have $ billions at stake.
AI firms would directly benefit from tighter copyright laws, it guarantees them a soft monopoly and kills any open source solution that can be run by individuals for free.
They will gladly pay Getty, Deviant art, Reddit, etc, if it means they can charge a monthly subscription to most businesses and individuals.
Except for all of the copyright they have violated and not paid for. (This is a broad brush.)
Just get rid of all copyright, its exclusively used for harming creators and enabling rich people to own ideas they didnt create.
