Damien Riehl and Noah Rubin are heroes!
I can’t wait until the day comes when we as a species no longer feel the need to claim intellectual property. This shit is so stupid.
I can’t wait until the day comes when we as a species no longer feel the need to claim intellectual property. This shit is so stupid.
But naturally in those cases there was actual and obvious theft, not just similar melodies.
But why is this a problem, though? Why does it matter if someone else makes money on something they copied? Isn't that how capitalism is supposed to work? The idea that nothing would be created unless there is financial incentive is silly - people create things all the time with the expectation (and hope!) that they will be copied and that others can enrich themselves on the basis of that.
And I think the point OP is making is that it would be great as a species to have less interest in who makes the most money, and more interest in other things, like maybe the art itself.
All while making platforms richer.
The problem is capitalism and the greed/ability to hoard wealth. The problem isn't that creators are having their work copied; art is going to be copied, that's what art is in the first place - inspiration, modification, creation from something else that already exists.
There ought not to be such capitalism that creates the 'need' for the copyright protections.
No. Capitalism works when people are equals, which is why we need a strong Democracy and brakes on unchecked money-earning optimisation. We must maximise people's freedom to create.
Personally the form of copyright I would support would be something like
1. Sharing without direct monetary gain is allowed. The reason I don't see a problem with this is because we already have a vibrant piracy culture and yet people want to pay creators. As long as you're not getting paid for warez it doesn't seem like it would be a problem in itself. Ad-supported torrent index sites would also be OK because they're not profiting off the warez themselves, they're just providing a search index. This is basically updating libraries to the 21st century.
2. As a creator you own an exclusive right to your creations and you cannot give that right away. So if you write a song as a "work for hire", you can still sample the song you wrote. You can change it and release it on your own. If you are a programmer, you cannot have your code taken away. If you write e.g. a UI component and then decide you want to make your own site, you can still use that UI component freely. Of course you can give a permanent non-exclusive license to your employer to do whatever they want with your code/song/dance/performance/etc.
This will maximise the freedom to create, minimise exploitation of artists and knowledge workers, and maximise the freedom to share culture, while still affording creators enough protection to make sure others aren't unduly profiting from their creations.
I'm not sure about the length of copyright though. The easy thing would be to say it should be 10 years, with exponentially increasing renewal fees, but I'm not sure that's the best idea. Another option is compulsory licensing, where someone who profits from your work has to pay you a fee proportional to how much of his creation uses how much of your creation. That idea has some gnarly enforcement problems however, and I suspect big companies will just tread over little guys who can't litigate anyway.
I would be a bit conscious about the "sharing without direct monetary gain" part, I'd like it to explicitly exclude "sharing for free in exchange for viewing ads (and accepting tracking)". I think "free with ads" business models are fundamentally anticompetitive and poisonous to our society; you can find them at the center of a lot of problems currently afflicting the western world. I would like to see these business models gone.
And the simple fix to 'eternal lock' is cutting copyright duration back toward 14+14.
That time investment is time you take away from other things. If that is also time that translates into money that actually enables you to live, the copier stands to benefit from your work, while you struggle for your livelihood.
That's why that is a problem. If there is no IP at all, you've limited the set of creators to people who are essentially independently wealthy and simultaneously want to actually invest time to master that domain. That's a small set.
Sure, once you fix the basic livelihood problem, copying might be good. Capitalism doesn't let you fix the livelihood problem. (Because it does attach value to your time)
This is a really fruitless way to take the discussion in and it misses the point entirely. I could argue that the way things are now, you've limited the set of artists to people who happen to get chosen by "the algorithm" for whatever reason, which is a similarly small set. We could then go and compare sizes of these small sets just to try and rationalize things. But that doesn't really advance the discussion does it? Groups who want to do bigger things still need to do fundraising to fix the "livelihood problem" and then they need to spend big on marketing in order to recoup the costs. What that means is the same as always: applying for grants, going to investors, running a crowdfunding campaign, etc. It really has nothing to do with copying at that point.
Where do you think that return on investment will come from if the product is free?
For better or worse this is literally what record labels and publishers do - invest in new talent, handle marketing and promotion, spread the investment around and hope to win big on a handful of hits which pay for the misses.
Do you really think tech VCs invented this model?
Publisher/investors/labels/agents/promoters have been doing it since at least the 19th century.
Anyway this is why I didn't want to discuss things in that direction, because it always leads to people attacking the argument with totally nonsensical conclusions. Of course the concept of patronage wasn't invented by tech VCs or kickstarter or whatever you're thinking of. Can we try to think about this constructively?
You asked " Why does it matter if someone else makes money on something they copied? Isn't that how capitalism is supposed to work?"
And I answered that question. It matters, because in the context of capitalism, no, you can't abandon the idea of making money for the original creator, because there's investment. Very few people are interested in investments that don't stand a good chance of recouping the costs.
Investors aren't going to give you money if creation is expensive, and copying is zero cost. (See also: Open source business models)
People aren't going to invest time (on the order of many years) in learning skills if there isn't a chance to recoup that cost.
Sorry if the answer to your question doesn't take the discussion where you want it to be. That doesn't make it a less valid answer. If you want a different discussion, maybe you're asking the wrong question?
>Investors aren't going to give you money if creation is expensive, and copying is zero cost.
Yes, they will. The trick is to make each copy generate you money in some other way. Additionally sometimes it isn't even directly about the money -- if the good becomes public and simultaneously brings up the value of all of their other investments, then the amount of copying really doesn't matter.
As is the implication that financial incentive doesn't work.
Somewhat separate from that, the idea of somebody making life-changing sacrifices to pursue art in the gaps between their soul-crushing job only to have a BigCorp claim that art as their own and profit off it without the actual creator getting anything for it is what I'd call fundamentally unjust and broken.
In sum, if good artists can't make a living off their art then we will enjoy less good art as a result. A lot of great artists don't care about money, but they need it to live and keep making art, and it's naive to suggest they should be "above" that.
Problem: Artists need to make money!
Solution: We'll make unauthorized use of certain material illegal for a fixed period.
It's certainly one approach, and it does mesh with the intuitive sense of "hey, it's fucked up to take somebody else's work and call it your own"- but it's not the only, or, in my view, the best approach.
edit: I guess I should also clarify that I believe artists are entitled to total control over something they've created until they say otherwise. If they want to license it as creative commons and go live in a wine cask, great. If they want to milk it for all (the money) it's worth, also great, at least for as long as we're living under the capitalist ethic that celebrates such exploitation of intellectual property and provides no safety net for those who are unwilling or unable to extract value from what they have available to them.
Like, a tax designed to be distributed to creators according to market principles in a manner that supports a vibrant and robust media society.
And while it is easy to imagine versions of that post-scarcity media market that would not work well, I think we really need to consider the possibility that it's just a matter of the right design.
When the copy competes with the original. The original required investment of effort and resources, the copy is near-zero effort.
This is the case for certain original content video channels, where their content is literally copied and monetized, competing for the same viral links and diverting traffic from the original.
Hindsight is 20/20, but to me, copyright law looks a bit like an ass-backwards, cart-before-horse approach. It's the legal equivalent of "solving" SQL injection by adding a client-side validation that prevents users from entering ' and the word "DROP" in their form fields. All it does is inviting exploitation.
Instead of making ridiculous kludges that end up benefiting those they were meant to curtail, perhaps we need to figure out a proper solution.
Without copyright, competition would not be for the ability to create -it would be for the ability to distribute. The end result would be much the same as we have now - an oligopoly of distribution channels, only they'd pay the artists less, if anything.
"Please stop giving my personal information to everyone!"
I don't think anyone is claiming that composers should be forced to publish their songs against their will.