Comment by 0xfffafaCrash | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 0xfffafaCrash | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I’d argue that copyright and intellectual property more broadly shouldn’t exist.

That wouldn’t lead to the end of culture but a cultural explosion as people became able to remix and propagate ideas more freely without the fear of punishment for violating artificial state-enforced monopolies.

No one is obligated to create a work and no one is obligated to share their created works with others. There’s no inherent right to anything once you put an idea out there and the legal constructs are just novel artificial ways to keep the have-nots from competing with the haves.

Culture existed well before notions of intellectual property and if anything today we have far better means of both producing works ourselves and collectively funding works that might not exist without compensation.

Rewarding the top 0.0001% of lucky creators with huge compensation isn’t worth the broad societal damage that is done by preventing people from sharing or making use of ideas.

Copyright and intellectual property exist because we've decided as a society that we want people to spend serious time and energy making these worthwhile things. Absent protections, the upfront investment of time and effort aren't worth it. If one cannot control the use of one's original works, only the wealthy can afford to chase that sense of accomplishment.

I am an author who is able to earn a modest income from my body of work, but only because I have spent almost 20 years creating a diverse collection of writings, and copyright law mostly protects me from having to compete with other people selling my writings. I say "mostly" because I find my work plagiarized once in a while (often with the word-for-word copies of my work earning more money for the plagiarizers than it does for me).

On a surface level, I understand the critics of intellectual property. I concede that all art is derivative to some degree, and nothing springs from a vacuum. I acknowledge that even greater art can be achieved if something can be iterated upon by a diversity of artists. But the harsh reality is that most of the people who want to repurpose art aren't doing it to create something new and distinct, they just want to profit from hard work without doing any themselves.

Thanks for the thoughtful response. And congrats! I've written several novels, mostly for fun, but even if I wanted to publish them now that self-publishing is such a thing: two are lost on a DOS floppy, one is lost on a Zip drive, and one is lost on a MacBook hard drive. And one is still around in hardcopy form, but I'd never be able to re-type it without getting sucked into editing it.

If you're willing to share, do you have a sense of how your income balances between newer and older works?

Plagiarism done for profiting from book sales is a symptom of copyright in this form (punishment over monetary loss, not lack of attribution).

Having consumers of the artworks (if they aren't commissioned) donate to the author along with severe enforcement of attribution requirements (especially bans on claiming other's work as one's own, so the donations wouldn't go to the plagiarizer), doesn't require bans on copying/reproduction.

Yes, it would change what art gets the funding: e.g. less Marvel Avengers (dominated by casual consumers), more art house cinema (say, something like "Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri"). Less autotune'd popstars, more "Nirvana"/"Taylor Swift"/"Marina and the Diamonds".

But in the realm of the "useful arts ", we're talking more about commissioned works, be it the way an architect is commissioned by a bank that needs a new HQ, or be it the way a fan base causes so many sales of the new Final Fantasy that the creators make a sequel (the commissioning tactic would be one exhibited by, for example, "Dropkick on My Devil! X" (the third season of a splatter (in the way Doom is) comedy anime, which reached its crowdfunding goal in 33 hours)).

I strongly believe that for useful arts, like, say, engineering reference books and ISO standard documents, crowdfunding could sufficiently cover cost of creation, using for example selling of voting power in the ISO standard creation process for individual standards as the incentive to coax industry into paying up-front instead of afterwards for their paper/digital copies. Or have that industry's guild/association sponsor the standard writing.

After all, IETF RFCs prove that standards don't need to be paywalled to continuously be created.

Then how should any artists make any income at all from their work? I'm not talking about 0.0001% lucky creators with huge compensation. I mean the 70 year old with cancer who cannot write anymore. I mean the 35 year old disabled artist who cannot work a "normal" salaried job. I mean the artist from an underdeveloped country who became popular and now the "wealthy" countries want to translate and publish their work in their relatively wealthy markets. [These are all real cases I'm familiar with, as a person who actually is in community regularly with working-class authors.]

The world in which you speak of where art existed outside of notions of intellectual property meant only the wealthy and well-connected could be artists, whereas with copyright a cancer-fighting, aging, midlist author can still demand royalty payments if Disney bought his books and are still selling them for profit (Alan Dean Foster, specifically). Peter S. Beagle (The Last Unicorn author) was put through elder abuse and lived in poverty, and only many years later was he able to regain rights to his work back as well as force recompense for harm committed to him- this wouldn't work if the rights to his work expired while he was being abused.

We have the technology now to balance copyright - simply put - if an item is not available for a reasonable price, then the copyright expires or becomes "cannot be sold except by original author" or something. Needing to keep things like books that are currently in print protected shouldn't prevent people from obtaining works that have fallen out of print, apparently irrevocably.

Print-on-demand and digital copies means that even a small author can keep their works available "for pay" easily now.

I'm completely comfortable with a "if no one's making it available reasonably, it should be made so" policy. I'm only concerned for living creators to retain rights to their work and be compensated for their creations while they are still actively using their work to give themselves a living, so I would be fine with ensuring work isn't irrevocably lost due to lack of copies.

I think the other side of copyrights where you can irrevocably sign over your rights (which may be more of a US thing, UK seems to have some inalienable ones) is a significant issue (as mentioned, the Foster thing where Disney wasn't even paying him because they argued they'd acquired assets without liabilities - https://winteriscoming.net/2021/04/23/disney-star-wars-autho... ).

It's hard to fully balance. Another example would be Don Rosa's McDuck comics - he had to fully assign all copyright on them to Disney when making them, so the way the reprinters get him some money is by having him write forwards/commentary, those he can retain the copyright on - https://career-end.donrosa.de has more

Alan Dean Foster's situation was not an irrevocably signing over his rights; he signed a specific business agreement that Disney tried to renege on dubious claims that would totally change corporate law if it was made valid precedent.

Don Rosa's situation doesn't really have much to do with the original advocacy to do away with copyright altogether, so I don't understand your point here. Are you arguing that copyright is bad because it's sellable under unfair terms, and therefore no one should be able to sell their work?

I'm just pointing out that our current system of copyright doesn't really do enough to protect the authors and artists that create the works we enjoy; there's certainly room for improvement.

> I mean the 70 year old with cancer who cannot write anymore. I mean the 35 year old disabled artist who cannot work a "normal" salaried job. I mean the artist from an underdeveloped country who became popular and now the "wealthy" countries want to translate and publish their work in their relatively wealthy markets.

You can apply all those scenarious to other jobs that don't earn effectively-perpetual income from their work. They generally have to rely on the government to keep them alive. Why should "creatives" get a better deal?

I'm all for making sure that artists (and everyone else) has enough to live so that they can make a positive contribution to society. But out of all the different possible ways to accomplish that, infringing on the basic rights of everyone to share and build on their culture has got to be one of the worst.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com