Copyright is Broken
eev.ee
eev.ee
If you really wanted to work on this problem, an interesting option would be to approach the Cool Japan Fund.[2] This is a venture capital fund, funded by the government of Japan and some big banks at about the $1Bn level, to promote Japanese culture outside Japan. (The government of Korea has been pushing K-Pop, and Japan is working on catching up.) They own an anime translation operation, a free anime site (daisuki.net), a TV channel, and, most relevant to this, a content creator training academy.[3] Kadokawa Contents Academy[4] is a training school for anime and manga creators outside Japan. There are currently branches in Taiwan and Singapore, with more to come. They might be able to give some advice on the subject.
[1] http://www.animenation.net/blog/2014/08/12/34666/ [2] https://www.cj-fund.co.jp/en/ [3] https://www.cj-fund.co.jp/en/files/press_150330-1.pdf [4] http://www.kadokawa-ca.co.jp/
In the first link, it says,
>According to the 2012 CIA World Factbook, 98.5% of the residents of Japan are ethnically Japanese. Doujinshi arose largely due to the uniformity of intention, good will, perception, and morality of Japanese people.
This seems a rather poor reason to me. There doesn't seem to be any grounds to say that what's going on with doujinshi has anything to do with morality, and further the link between this sense of morality and being ethnically Japanese - as though this won't be found if other ethnicities were to co-exist on a larger scale.
Most countries are pretty homogeneous with regard to ethnicity (albeit not as high as Japan), so I'm wondering as to why the author has decided to pick up on this fact about people rather than the elements of culture that have nothing to do with how ethnically homogeneous a society is.
The author implies that the first sentence automatically will lead to the next - I think that's a false link to make. As someone who isn't ethnically Japanese in Japan, it makes me feel uneasy as it just seems to be widening this gap that people make between ethnicities and countries of origin, especially with regard to Japan.
It's a borderline 日本人論 statement that I've seen is popular in Japan. Countless books about "Japanese style" and how it's accomplished through the "harmony" achieved by something innate in Japanese people or culture (that God forbid cannot be learned, silly foreigner! /s) that's brought about through the fact that Japan is an ethnically homogeneous country.
tl;dr rant about how I think the author makes a link between two unrelated things, and furthers the divide between two groups of people while still managing to be offensive during the course of it.
Steam API, which gives you
- Achievements
- Leaderboards
- Cloud save
- Steam Workshop - user generated mods and content
- Multiplayer infrastructure
Steam community, which gives you
- Forum
- Social network - user generated content such as screenshots, game guides and fanart
- Reviews - endorsements from several thousand actual players sells games far better than a flashy trailer
Whether these features are worth the 30% cut is arguable, but these services are far more valuable to independent developers, who don't have the time or ability to implement these, than to developers under large publishers, who may share these infrastructure within the games they publish.
Steam itself, by dint of being another layer between gamers and their games, have to justify its existence and value to them, and generally does through a variety of features as well as its legendary sales. But being a marketplace and distribution network alone does not get you anywhere, not when the cost of setting up shop on the Internet is so low these days.
Actually I don't think anyone has said it yet, but the truth is 90% of the value of Steam is in marketing. Steam gives you millions upon millions of impressions from people actively looking to buy a game right now.
Steam also does a lot to reduce piracy by providing a seamless way to patch your game. This allows you to release tons of patches which make it very hard to torrent the current version of your game.
The problem is the "just fine" part. For indie game shops it has been far from "just fine".
And adds to development time. And doesn't scale beyond ~1000 users online at a given time.
I managed to get steam achievements working in an hour of developing and zero servers. There's no way I could get that in two weeks of development time on a server.
If you actually try making the sorta thing steam provides (all those things are distributed/scale, managed by other people, backed by support, etc) you'll find your costs instantly go higher than most indie games will make in their lifetime.
And, well, the discovery bit is something you just can't replicate. However slick your site is, you won't reach steam users unless you're on steam, and steam has wholly won in this area.
These are nice little bonus features but they're nothing more than bonus features. If you offered me a tiny discount to not get them, I'd take it just about every time. It's not in the same ballpark as 30%.
The discovery is critical but also way off in left field, because it's a network effect that causes itself. Steam could in theory have those network effects without actually providing direct services.
However, those numbers were for one indie game with light usage. If you want your poor little server to support multiple games, you'll need a a few hundred $/mo more in servers, possibly a second devop, and massively more development time.
Whether that stuff is worth it or not can very well be gauged by the fact that people pay for it.
If it weren't worth it, people would sell on alternate platforms like their own website or what have you.
You're stating your opinion as fact, but the numbers don't agree with you.
But that was just a number I threw out. How about looking at 5% of steam's 30% across roughly a billion sales, that is way way more than it would take to run some forums and leaderboards and cloud saves etc.
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More importantly, I don't think you're following what my core point is.
I'm not saying that steam is a bad deal.
I'm saying that all those things mediumdeviation listed are pennies on the dollar of the value steam actually provides. If steam only gave that, everyone would go elsewhere rather than pay 30%.
Steam's value is in people finding your game, paying for your game, and downloading your game. Very little else matters.
So when Eevee says they charge 30% to be a gatekeeper? Yeah, that's a valid point. They have a minor feature list a mile long but it's nothing compared to the core feature of being a gatekeeper store.
Is access to tens of millions of active users worth 30%? Fuck yes it is. And if you don't agree then sell your game direct and on your own. It is a free market after all.
In this world you would never even know if a sequel to a game or movie is made by the original author or a cloner.
Maybe copyright periods are too long, but there is no way I should be able to release a game called Undertale tomorrow with the same characters and plot and slightly different art.
Doesn't seem right.
I don't know what guaranteed profit you are talking about. Most IPs do not produce any profit even 2-5 years after they are created. Mario for example has required millions if not billions of dollars of follow on investments from Nintendo so that the ip is still valuable. Most other NES games do not continue to generate profit.
"....the rest of us don't get for our work" - I don't even understand what you mean by this. Are you talking about the employment contract you strike with an employer? Because that contract varies and some employees do see profits for decades on previous works. I think you need to provide an example here.
So, the question is, should my work and company have to keep innovating to earn at or above the market rate while a select few get 100+ year monopolies on their work? I think not.
Further, your employment contract reply is a strawman that doesn't reflect America's situation. People are typically hired by a company with either no contract or a contract written by the company for the company's benefit. Laws, passed again with corruption, often grant the company the I.P. if the slightest bit was done on their time. Other laws let the companies throw away employees without consequence. The result is that the labor market is rigged highly in favor of big companies and their lawyers with supply-and-demand lowering the wages of workers each year.
Except big companies with a nice selection of copyrights, patents, and other legal monopolies. ;) So, it's worthwhile to ask whether we should continue giving monopolies that mainly benefit richest few and were largely created via corruption. I'm opposed to it as I think artists will create regardless. I'm for models more like Patreon or non-profits behind software.
> I should be able to release a game called Undertale
And I believe the author is actually asking you to imagine what it would be like to live in a world where characters could not be prevented from appearing in any other work of art (in any medium) by any artist. I'm not sure if it would be a net good or bad, but it would definitely be fascinating. As a pure thought experiment I've always imagined that were I to produce some popular work of fiction that I'd release all rights to all characters to the public domain and see what came of it, as the seed for a kind of ultimate anarchic remix culture. Who's to say what's canon when nobody owns the universe?
And OS X took advantage of Microsoft's marketing budget for the idea of Laptops / computers.
Who cares if you're gaining recognition by making a derivative of something that already exists? When some parent product marketed something, it was for its own benefit. If I also benefit, that doesn't mean I'm stealing their marketing budget out from under them, it means I'm taking advantage of what people already are familiar with.
I do think your statement that someone making a derivative work is taking advantage of the original's marketing budget, recognition, etc.... I just don't see why that matters. Hell, the derivative work often-as-not can act as further marketing for the original.
Even if you did do that: why would anyone buy it in lieu of the original?
Because of market confusion. I would generate sales from people who didn't realize they were not buying the original. This happens right now but it would be much worse if we removed all the controls.
"You seem to be assuming that derivative work doesn't require hard work of its own. I tried to make the point that this game is itself a derivative of other things, without which it couldn't exist."
I didn't say that at all. Honestly that seems irrelevant. It also requires hard work to plan and successfully rob a bank.
Eevee is not arguing for removing all the controls; there's not a word about removing trademark law
Being a derivative in the sense of borrowing game mechanics [1] or drawing influence [2] isn't nearly the same as copying (or deriving from) the content. Many artists put hard work into developing their content, and it cannot be right to say "Hmm, that's popular, I should use it to market my product" without getting proper licensing. Even if it happens to be a corporation in ownership of the content.
I do agree that there might be some benefits to copyright reform, especially relating to culture and literary value. The latter part of your article hints at some interesting alternatives, but I not sure I believe them to be 'absolutely' better.
[1] http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl108.html
[2] Copyright is only applicable to fixed expression.
Why should drawing an artistic illustration of a block of cheese be different from drawing a videogame character? Both had substantial investment in their appearance. Both have a primary function different from being simple pictures. I am not copying a picture, I am making an illustration of something I saw in real life.
For other cases, fair use also plays a role depending on the circumstance. It isn't entirely binary. I support expanding fair use in ways that benefit the public while not hindering artists.
But the article mentions selling a derivation of a company's creative work, and I don't think the rationale is particularly better than liking the work and wanting money by using a popular brand. They are, more or less, directly competing with the original author. I think the societal benefits are questionable.
In case of actual still-lifes, the labels might bear illustrations or otherwise protected content, like fonts, distinct bootle designes, or trademarks. While the latter might be allowed under fair use, what about reproduced, if even only stylized, illustrations? Do you expect an artist to find the illustrator and pay a license fee, in order to sell their own work?
Also, fair use is a us-american practice and isn't applicable to copyright and similar concepts in general, as far as I'm aware.
If a derivative of the label were, for example, being used on another wine bottle without licensing, it would unambiguously be copyright infringement.
However, a painting which includes the label in the described way, could be considered fair use, namely that it is transformative and does not diminish the market of the original work. Commercialization of the derivative work as well as other context may also affect the claim of fair use. Trademark also has a fair use defense in the US, which might be relevant here.
I do use 'fair use' in the US sense; there are similar concepts in some other countries, but not always 1:1 with the concept to which I'm referring.
To be honest, I don't think the copyright is the most important part here, but rather trademark laws, as another user noted here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10442882 since it'd be causing a disrupting confusion, IE making consumers believe they buy a product which they actually don't buy.
The problem with fair use is that it's ambigous. Only courts can declare fair use with authority; an artist claiming fair use for their work has no authority, in the sense that they can still get sued, and neither do their lawers hold defining authority about this aspect. This, effectively, creates a large legal gray zone. eevee is arguing from the perspective of a creator, and people seem to get a little worked up with elaborate, imaginary examples. The important part, though, is the idea behind the post, that being: Artists are subject to a lot of legal insecurity. Copyright is one of the most empowering and simulatanously most crippling insecurities. Remixes and DJ-sets on youtube and soundcloud, publishing street photography, creating fan art, as some examples. All of these are to a varying degree both legal and illegal, most importantly depending on your specific location. In my case, my country knows a case similar to fair use: if said bottle label was reproduced in a recognizable manner, and it was a major part of the work, it would be an infrigement. If it was a minor part (dubbed 'padding') of the art work, it's considered a sibling of US fair use. But only courts can decide either. And artists often aren't well-funded, hence avoid anything which might smell like a lawsuit, hence freedom of expression is hindered in a significant way, for no particular reason but lack of legal clarity. I'm just writing all this, because you seemed very emphatic in your view. But this is a really ambigious topic, which requires a lot of consideration and empathy on all sides. So I wanted to add a little perspective. /edit: not you, swhipple, but hn seemed very emphatic, while you, swhipple, seemed to recognize a need for clarity, so I wanted to add some perspective under your considerate opionion. Pardon my misaccredition. I didn't mean to sound rude or devalue your view as inconsiderate. Your "It isn't entirely binary. I support expanding fair use in ways that benefit the public while not hindering artists." made me chime in.
They should be. Cheese appearance doesn't happen by itself, it takes actual work to achieve and cheese makers strive to make the cheese look good. It isn't under copyright because the shape is also utilitarian and utilitarian items aren't under copyright (see: clothes), but there is fundamentally no difference between the way a piece of Brie looks and the way a game character looks.
Great relevant post that I'm sorta parroting: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2015/06/they-too...
Maybe risk of having your marketing budget shamelessly exploited would make you put less money into it. Which would be great because marketing is ever growing tax on creativity.
Steam cost real money to develop and operate. Valve also has additional operating expenses as a business. It's a free market and others are free to compete with Steam with a lower priced product. Additionally, the creator had a choice whether or not to distribute via Steam, and obviously the decided that the benefit outweighs the cost.
I don't mean to be rude, but I lost interest in finishing what at first appeared to be a potentially interesting article based on the naivety of these remarks. I would suggest to the author to give it more thought.
It's more readable to do so.
1. What counts as copying? 2. What counts as creative work? 3. What counts as fair use?
For me all this three are huge gray areas. I honestly can't decide if derivative works from this game's characters could be sold freely despite what the original author says under the current US law. Please don't mix trademark into the question, I don't know if Undertale or its characters are trademarked or not. For the sake of clear discussion about copyright let's assume that they are not.
> Commissions are all well and good, but they don’t pay very well and there’s a physical limit on how many a single person can do.
Which is why the creator of a creative work might be okay with something like that.
> The merchandise I had in mind was buttons and stickers and prints and other physical incarnations of art. You see this kind of stuff sold rather a lot at anime conventions
Which is precisely why it's not okay. You're not adding anything of your own, you're just profiting off of someone else's stuff.
Here's the question you should be asking: are you making a profit from something you did not create? If so, that money is not yours, you did not earn that money. You didn't make the video game, the story, the art.
> Copyright was originally invented for books.
While true, that's only because books were the first mass-produced creative works. By the time the US constitution came around (and the copyright clause in it), the concept had been well extended beyond that, even to the point where the idea had been generalized to technology andn scientific discoveries (in the form of patents).
> Fan work is created from scratch. It’s new.
No, it is a "derivative work." Putting someone else's pictures given meaning by a game they created onto a button and selling it is not a "new" work. If it weren't, why not just leave out the stuff you didn't create and sell it on your own? You can't, that's why.
> Gatekeeping
This is a really idiotic excuse. Steam isn't the one telling you that you can't sell other people's art and taking all the money for yourself, the people who made the art are telling you that.
> When copyright was introduced, “creators” were a sort of elite. You had to have a lot of equipment and resources, or more likely, you had to attract the attention of someone who had a lot of equipment and resources.
More self-serving rationalizations. Writing only takes talent and some time. Whether or not it was good enough to make copies of and sell is another thing. Copyright was set up so that anyone could afford it if they were even a little bit serious. Copyright protects the little guy against a bigger person with more resources at their disposal to copy your idea and make a profit off it. It gives them the right to their work because they're the ones that created it.
> Abuse
This section is completely irrelevant. The problems we have with our copyright and patent laws has nothing to do with protecting a small, indie developer, who made a legitimately good game, from being outcompeted by enterprising salesman who are trying to sell merchandising of someone else's work. When did people like Undertale become "multinational corporations"? You can't make someone seem like a faceless and souless being that it's okay to ripoff when you linked to their Twitter account earlier in the article.
It's people like the author of this article that copyright laws are rightfully meant to protect content-creators from - people who can argue themselves in circles to not feel bad about ripping people off because they think putting someone else's game logo on a button is an "entirely new" work.
Also, this is a thing many people already do, so I'm really advocating that it's fine for them to continue doing it.
It gets stickier when you dive into other types of derivative work. Let's say you write a book and I translate it to Spanish. It's my translation of your story. Based on your framework, is it okay to sell at conferences in paperback form? If not, how is it any different than drawing a character I created and selling it on buttons?
I look at a translation as like a tracing of someone else's artwork. Not an original drawing of the same character.
> Which is precisely why it's not okay. You're not adding anything of your own, you're just profiting off of someone else's stuff.
Why should it be the original author's right to dictate whether certain forms of creativity can be expressed based on their work? The net effect cannot be anything other than to stifle creativity; this could be justified by ascribing to the author some inherent moral right to the integrity of their idea (as French law does, among others); but the sheer wealth of ideas and creativity - cultural richness - associated with many fan works makes it very hard for me to accept such a puritanical stance. Especially when the "author" is a giant corporation which doesn't actually care much about artistic integrity, but does care about money: as you mention, this is not the case for Undertale, but it is for the majority of culturally important works these days.
By the way, by "ideas and creativity" I don't mainly mean putting their picture on a button: I mean things like fan fiction, fan animation, fan games, all sorts of things you can find from dedicated communities on the internet. The original article mentioned Super Mario Bros. - there was recently a new speedrun record on that game. In case you haven't heard of it, there's a big community on the internet dedicated to speedrunning games, meaning completing them as fast as possible. Most do it in person, practicing the routes through the levels over and over like some sort of athletic routine; while some instead see value in painstakingly building a sequence of button inputs which beats the game when played back by an emulator or robot, thereby exploring the game's boundaries of possibility in a way humans can't quite attain, which is more like art. Well, guess what? While speedrunning itself isn't copyright infringement, streaming or uploading videos of your runs is. If game publishers enforced their rights, they could shut down the whole thing, never mind that most of the creative value created by speedrunning has little to do with the original developers. Now it turns out some people at Nintendo don't like emulators, which are required for the latter category (tool-assisted speedruns), so recently some TAS of Super Mario Bros. 3 was semi-randomly taken down from YouTube. Thankfully, the Internet is not so strictly regulated that the video can't be preserved elsewhere; but what if it was? Would it really be culturally positive to enforce the law in this case?
That said, even going back to the merch case - if I want to express my personality by putting a button with some character on my shirt - again, how exactly is this hurting the original author? Why should my ability to do so depend on whether they've gotten around to setting up some distribution arrangement yet?
Well, the above ignores the obvious money argument. If someone is going to profit from something whose value is mostly based on it containing person X's creative work (with some value added by the work of actually printing it onto buttons and arranging to transport it to a convention or whatnot, as well as the physical materials), shouldn't it be X?
In my opinion, yes. That's why I'd support having mandatory royalties instead of the absolute control imposed by current copyright laws. It's not exactly unprecedented - it's what we currently have for both radio stations playing original copies of songs and general distribution of covers. Why not apply it more broadly?
This could not possibly be more wrong. The entire purpose of copyright law is to enable creativity. Two main reasons for this:
1. If anyone can take the stories and characters and images you create, and exploit them commercially without having to worry about copyright, that is a massive stifling effect on creativity. You made a popular character? Tough, some big company is going to make all the money off of it and you're going to be left broke. No incentive whatsoever to actually put in the time and effort to create things if you can't reap the benefits. Copyright law exists precisely to let the creator actually benefit from their creations.
2. If everyone can make money by copying other people, who's actually creating stuff anymore? The other main reason for copyright law is to encourage people to come up with their own unique creations, instead of just copying each other.
Now, it's certainly true that corporations have managed to extend copyright law far beyond what most people would consider reasonable. But that doesn't negate copyright law's reason for existing.
> if I want to express my personality by putting a button with some character on my shirt - again, how exactly is this hurting the original author
Because the author has now lost control over the distribution of their work (which is one of the exclusive rights granted by copyright), and any income that said distribution would have generated. Even if they don't want to sell buttons themselves, that's entirely their right to do so, and maybe they have good reasons for not wanting to flood the market with every possible expression of their character. Maybe they don't want to dilute the character, or don't want to have bad reproductions or low-quality merchandise hurting their public perception. Or maybe they just don't care about buttons but would be happy to sign a licensing deal to let someone else sell them if that someone else actually went through the effort of proposing an appropriate deal.
No matter what the reason is, it's absolutely their right to control their creation. We as a society have decided that artistic creation is a valid form of work, just as valid as any other kind of work, and that the artist is entitled to benefit from their work. You are not entitled to copy someone else's stuff just because you like it; the very fact that you assign value to their creation means that their creation is valuable, and your copies are literally stealing that value from the creator. If the creator doesn't want to sell the merchandise you want to buy, that's absolutely their right, and the fact that you want something does not entitle you to that thing.
> Putting someone else's pictures given meaning by a game they created onto a button and selling it is not a "new" work.
> you can't sell other people's art and taking all the money for yourself
I think you've missed something fundamental. He's not arguing for taking existing images and putting them on buttons etc. He's arguing for drawing new art featuring characters from another work and the same person selling that art on merchandise.
This is a separate issue to stuff costing too much, or DRM.
Everything you create that is original is copyright to you. This is known as your moral rights. This means that if you come up with a novel character, design or mechanical item, you have the ability to exclusively produce, market, license or sell that thing.
This is good, because thats how the economy works. If you make an item, and a large corporation comes along takes them all and sells them as their own, that would be theft.
This however is a problem for giants like google, youtube and facebook. When you publish something to the giants, you sign away your moral rights. This is mainly to allow things like recompression and excerpts. (Because your emails/videos/photos are your own copyright, google must seek permission to display, alter or create derivative works.)
Its very much in their interest to dilute and dissolve copyright laws. They have managed to capture the general dissatisfaction at the high price of music and movies to push their agenda, which is to sell adverts on the back of someone else's work.
If we take a specific thing like dōjinshi, The people creating the subtitles are not breaking the law. The act of transcription is their own copyright. What is illegal is selling/distributing the video as well without paying the original owners.
In the digital economy, we need strong copyright, or us small people will never be able to make a living.
Yet, anyone reading your comment might be mislead to think that companies are very reasonable about this and there might even be something as easy as Amazon.com to get licenses from. Not the case as it wouldn't make enough for the greedy and powerful as author said. If they want these rights, I think some equally-strong responsibilities are in order in exchange.
Getting licenses from large companies isn't that hard either. Are you gonna make a bunch of money? Turns out big corporations love money. So if you're gonna make a bunch of money just contact their licensing department. It's available on their public website.
Most people fail at most things they try. Most businesses fail. Most ideas suck. Most personal projects never see the light of day. And because some people can't bothered to send a damn e-mail you propose... ?
In my wedding video example, it was so hard to get them on the phone and get the two licenses that some companies briefly specialized in doing just that part for people. Fee was typically around $10,000. Far cry from my teacher in middle school contacting Cinderella copyright holder and paying a quarter or so royalty to allow us to do a Cinderella play.
So, if we're giving them control, I say there should be a requirement to make it easy to get a license from them.
Actually it is greedy for one man doing one thing to legally control that thing and charge whatever he wants for 100+ years. The things many workers create are much more valuable with little to no legal protection and far from guaranteed pay. So, there's should be a strong benefit to the public over no copyright if we're going to give the owner this much special treatment, power, and money.
For most content, I'm not seeing much of a difference between the one's that do it for pay vs those that do it for fun. Only seems to factor in when the development or production cost is high enough where one needs to recover it. Complex software, video games, and SFX movies come to mind.
Even then, the protections could be weakened after the return on investment came. Instead, we're seeing a lot of great stuff pulled off the market or still charged full price to force you to buy the next thing. That benefits only owners with provable harm to the public, esp with legacy software. The opposite of what system claims to provide. So, it's worth remembering that there's first part of getting authors paid and second part of what happens after. Both are corrupt in current scheme.
Which is particularly egregious given that Disney never owned the rights to Happy Birthday at any point in time! (you're thinking of Warner Music)
Why shouldn't I be able to draw artistic representations of a game character?
I can draw a representation of Donald Trump with no problem (as many political cartoonists do) and I own that because I made it. Why the hell does some random digital character have more rights than a human? I know this is a bit of a silly analogy, but your comment is silly to begin with.
It's obvious that if I'm taking someone's art or work and re-selling it with some minor transformations, that's wrong. But if I put work into making something that has my flair, my touch, my innovation, why should the original artist profit from it?
Create your own characters and the problem is solved. Or ask for a license. The creator may give you a free license if your drawings and use of it match his liking.
A copyright is a protection, not an interdiction. Ask the permission to the creator. The decision belongs to him and that is, in my opinion, right.
Don't down vote me if you simply disagree with me.
Other people like me don't feel that it is self-evident, rather, we feel that it is only justified if it effectively encourages the sciences and the arts. Our axiom, the self-evident truth that we're working for, is the flourishing of arts and science, and if we can find a way to do that which doesn't allow creators to dictate what people do with their copy of Mario, all the better.
Once we realise that we're assuming different axioms, we can stop talking past each other.