Do we need copyright? (2012)
lemire.me
lemire.me
I give my stuff away for free online, but I don't want O'Reilly or whomever selling it for money. (I sell print copies for money.) I have no mechanism to stop that other than copyright law.
I do think the copyright term should be a maximum of 20 years from the publishing date, though (which would put some earlier versions of my works into the public domain).
About the only useful thing copyright does anymore is protect the little guy, contrary to this argument. I am one of those little guys!
I can't tell if the author has written any books, but I'd be happy to put them up for sale on Amazon if he does, assuming he has no problem with me pocketing the proceeds.
[1]: https://virginica.substack.com/p/the-printing-press-nfts-and...
From the article. It seems like the author's position is that because his job as a professor means he gets paid independent of the distribution of the things he produces, copyright is irrelevant. Not so much that exclusive right to sell a work doesn't have monetary value, but that this guy makes money without having to take advantage of that value, so obviously nobody needs it.
I'm generally a believer in copyright reform and against bashing academics as out-of-touch, but people like this person make holding either position a real challenge sometimes.
> When authors do get paid, a natural model is patronage. That is the model used by most scientists. Copyright is of no help whatsoever to mathematicians.
> “But, Daniel, you are delusional! Not every writer can find a patron.” Am I? I have funded several book projects myself. For example, a lady called Kio Stark got $38,928 from us to write a handbook on alternatives to schooling.
> Several authors get funded on kickstarter:
> ...
> In fact, if you think about it for a minute, whenever you buy a book or a movie, you are being a patron to this project. So all work is the result of patronage. Cory Doctorow makes all his novels available for free from his web site. He happens to be one of the most successful writer of his generation. You can be confident that he is doing well financially. It works for him because people are willing to support him: his paying readers are his patrons.
(Note https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Case_Studies/Cory_Doct... )
> Cory Doctorow's literary works are released under Creative Commons Atrribution NonCommercial ShareAlike or Attribution NonCommercial NoDerivatives. His latest work, Little Brother, has spent 4 weeks on the NYTimes bestseller list and is released as BY-NC-SA.
Consider the question "without copyright, how could he enforce the NonCommercial NoDerivatives clauses? And related: https://doctorow.medium.com/why-none-of-my-books-are-availab...
> ACX has some nominal checks to ensure that the audiobooks that land on its platform are duly licensed from their rightsholders, but these are trivial to circumvent. Here’s how I know that: on multiple occasions, I’ve discovered that my own books have been turned into unauthorized audiobooks over ACX.
> Scammers claiming to have the rights to my books commission narrators to record them on the cheap, with the promise of a royalty split when they are live. Inexperienced narrators, excited at the prospect of recording a major book by a bestselling author, put long, grueling hours into recording them. Then the book goes live, and I discover it, and have it taken down. The scammer disappears with the profits from the sales in the interim, and the narrator is screwed.
> As am I.
> Because these illegal ACX audiobooks compete with my own, self-produced editions, for which I pay narrators, directors and editors a fair wage for their creative labor. These unauthorized ACX audiobooks show up in searches for my name on Audible and Amazon, where my own (vastly superior, authorized) DRM-free audiobooks are not allowed.
And while he does have an issue with scammers and mandatory DRM on audible, if there wasn't any copyrights on them, would he have any case at all?
---
And so, I don't agree with TFA on how regular people can get paid for their creative works without relying on copyright.
There are definitely some creative types who have optimized their business around the affordances copyright has provided. But can they pivot to a less copyright-dependent model? Maybe the musicians who just do studio work have to start touring instead.
No more value in composition, only in live performance? What if you're a great composer but not much of a performer? Most people remember The Beatles for their studio work.
Preventing O'Reilly is a net negative to me
In nonfiction where things get dated fairly quickly 20 years is plenty, few non-fiction books make any money after 20 year, but in the fiction world most books are not an instant success and the author only sees money from them decades down the line when they have established their reputation and their early works get reprinted. A 20 year copyright would make an already difficult area to make a living in nearly impossible for anyone but those with aspirations towards the best seller lists and pandering to the current trends. Same goes for the arts in general. A 20 year copyright would cater to a short sighted view.
1. Many artists are commercial failures for over two decades, but eventually succeed;
2. These artists’ newer successful works don’t result in income equivalent to working a full-time non-creative job for that time;
3. Fans will not pay them for the old works without the threat of legal action;
4. There is no other way to monetise the old works by e.g. recording a commentary, audiobook, screenplay adaptation, manuscripts, compilations, special editions, etc.;
5. Artists don’t pander to current trends only because they know they might be able to make some money over 20 years later;
6. The money they will get paid in royalties under a contract where they sold the rights to a publisher when they were an unknown nobody is greater than the amount of money they would make selling it directly in the public domain after becoming commercially successful.
The long tail exists and is very long--longer today in a world with Amazon--and that they don't have to write a screenplay adaptation and can instead eat and keep a roof over their heads while they write the next book is a feature, not a bug. It accrues over time and the gap between personal prosperity and precarity grows over time because the back catalog keeps selling.
1. Yes, and many never succeed in their life but getting royalties from old works is something to keep you going and a reason not to give up.
2. Those successful works will not be bringing in money for decades to come, just a year or two and then slow to a trickle of royalties. Having a single work which sells well does not mean you are set for life, just means you can breathe easier for awhile.
3. Piracy would not be an issue if that were the case, many already do not pay for it. Sure many say that is because they don't want to support the industry but they are also taking from the writer much of the time.
4. But anyone can now monetize it in all those ways and now the author has to compete for their own work on top of all these extra business dealings and working on new output. And even then things like a bad movie version (which author has little control over) can seriously hurt future sales. This is just trying to turn artist into a brand and not many have pulled that off successfully.
5. This is not really a condition for your point and not even a point.
6. Generally rights are not sold, publishing right are sold to the publisher for a certain number of years and after that time is up the author is free to go make a deal with another publisher or self publish it or what ever they desire.
I'd be willing to tune that number if it is truly prohibitive, but I'd like to see some figures.
This is less of an issue with books, where the printing quality would have to be truly horrible before it'd start impacting recovery of the original text (though it might be an issue with illustrations and pictures if all you've got available is a cheap print with noticeably rasterized b/w images), but definitively relevant for music and movies.
A lot of vinyl-era music got a better quality CD (or nowadays online) re-release only at a point by which copyright would either have already expired (> 20 years since original release), or in any case was about to expire very soon under that proposal. On top of that, some tracks or sometimes even whole albums were only released at all more than 20 years after the original recording. The same thing applies to movies with the upgrade path from VHS to DVD to the current varieties of HD video.
Without copyright, one likely major incentive for the continued preservation of those master copies disappears, especially if that master copy is held by some commercial enterprise which must make money in order to survive.
So on the one hand, yes, I do agree that life + 70 years is somewhat on the too long side, and all the more so for out-of-print, orphaned or otherwise once-published-but-now-unavailable works. On the other hand I've also been enjoying quite a few CD/digital re-releases of vinyl-era music as well as some releases of tracks that had remained officially unreleased for a few decades, both of which likely wouldn't have happened if those works weren't still in copyright (and therefore of commercial value) at that point.
Maybe it's less of an issue these days (at least regarding the quality problem [1]), but I still think it's something you need to think about – who should handle preserving the master version if you take away the commercial incentive for doing that after a relatively short amount of time, and how do you get creators to hand over the master copy to whatever entity is then tasked with preservation of media, instead of simply discarding it once its become valueless?
(The latter is especially a problem for as-of-yet unreleased works – you might be able to force an arrangement whereby a high-quality master copy needs to be put in escrow with some public archive in order to receive copyright protection, but you can't force the same for unreleased works. I think the only thing that could work in that case is if the twenty years only start running after the initial publication, so if something stays unreleased for forty years and is published only then it still receives copyright protection in order to make the publishing commercially viable. Though on the other hand such a thing might possibly cause problems regarding the handling of orphan works, if you want to do something about those, too…)
[1] At least if you're content with stereo audio, we've reached the limits of human hearing with CD quality audio already, and we're arguably sort of getting there regarding video, too.
Folks, this is that beej.
> I give my stuff away for free online, but I don't want O'Reilly or whomever selling it for money. (I sell print copies for money.) I have no mechanism to stop that other than copyright law.
I for one am grateful that you remain the steward of your work.
I think it was mentioned somewhere that this would be count as outright fraud. So, may be copyright isn't needed in such case.
I am thankful for your networking books, helped me a lot.
Regardless, though, what repercussions are you referring to? There are no legal repercussions for taking public domain works and pretending you created them. Sure, there are potential social repercussions, but I don't think that's what we're talking about here.
(For the record, I would never sell another author's copyrighted work without permission. And I'd certainly never stick my name on something I didn't write because I value my reputation. But just because _I_ wouldn't doesn't mean people wouldn't. I'd bet plenty of money that they most certainly would.)
Yes it would.
Droit Moral is part of copyright.
O'Reilly is free to sell D compilers if they want to, for as much as they want to.
Copyright is explicitly defined in law as a limited time monopoly granted by government.
Don’t use the word “property” or “intellectual property” or any property based argument in discussing copyright. Even using the term concedes the point. Copyright is not property, it is a limited government-granted monopoly. Stick to that definition and don’t give any credence to “intellectual property is property “. It isn’t. You can discuss all other aspects of impact of copyright without agreeing that it is property.
Ownership of objects usually consists of restrictions on other people taking those objects from you or damaging those objects. When you remove the objects from this idea, it just becomes a restriction on other people.
That isn’t a “natural” concept, it’s still a legal one.
Vs. even comprehending the concepts of copyright and intellectual property requires a very modern human education and worldview.
(But consider how many $millions are paid to a great many lawyers, contingent on their managing to convince a great many people that those two very different concepts of "property" are the same, and a certain famous quote by Upton Sinclair.)
And I don't think animals see this banana as "property of the gorilla" as you suggested.
I think they see it as "if I try to take this banana from that gorilla, I will get slapped"
is there a semantically relevant distinction between property and possession?
i might be inclined to have said "the gorilla is in possession of the banana" but im not sure about "property of"...?
It means the right to benefit from the value of making copies.
It doesn't matter if those copies are made by pushing bits over the Internet or hewn into the side of a mountain by thousands of masons.
It's an access and use right, not a physical instantiation.
Copyleft, open source, CC-by-N etc don't change this or subvert the concept. They're simply ways of asserting that the benefit should be collective instead of individual.
This makes perfect sense for group efforts, but no sense at all for content creators who would derive no benefit at all if copyright didn't exist.
Either you believe in property and access/benefit rights or you don't. You can't believe in them selectively just because you want something and are terribly offended if you're asked to pay for it.
And if you don't believe in property rights - fine. Let's make everything collectively owned, including money. (Which is in fact just bits that can be pushed over the Internet.)
Information isn't property. Property is a concept we use to maintain order and peace around scarce resources. Information is not scarce anymore and never will be again, and applying notions of property to it has always been a misuse.
If you want to encourage the arts, then shorten the work week. People don't need to be incentivized to create art. You couldn't stop them if you tried. And we have more movies, music, books, television, photos, etc than anyone could ever hope to enjoy even in 10 lifetimes.
If you want to encourage basic research, give money to scientists and then get out of their way. People don't need to be incentivized to investigate the universe. You couldn't stop them if you tried.
If you want to encourage innovation, then make source code and blueprints for commercial products open source by law. People don't need to be incentivized to learn about and improve the tools they own. You couldn't stop them if you tried.
And artists wouldn't stop making money. Commissions don't depend on copyright. Neither do thank yous and more elaborate call outs to patrons. As long as an artist can make a decent living at some other job, they'll make art in the time left over that any would-be greatest free country in the world makes sure all its citizens have to actually be free in.
Assuming we want the world's best research by the world's best researchers for the public good, then we need to pay for their equipment, supplies, and workspace. And then when we want the worlds best trained graduates, we pay the researchers to teach them.
And as for innovation, that's not really something we need to incentivize at least right now. We have more technology available then we can keep up with. We don't need dishwashers with Bluetooth, we need dishwashers that you can pay the neighbor's kid 50 bucks under the table to repair, and you'll only be one of four people who paid them this week. Not to mention the gigantic leg up it will give to developing countries struggling to bootstrap their industries.
If you want to play around with patent law for businesses above a certain size (either by revenue, customer base, employee count, or whatever), then I think there's plenty we can do there to challenge big businesses to stay ahead of the curve while making sure small and maybe medium businesses keep nipping at their heels.
But at the end of the day, information is not scarce. So let's stop pretending that we need to manage it like it is.
Yes, there are security mechanisms and social norms that would prevent most people from doing that sort of thing. Yet there are more than enough people out there who would gladly take exception to that sort of thing and gladly take the Tesla as their own. The whole notion of property rights is a social construct. We use governments to enforce that social construct. Until humanity can learn how to share things (rather than just take things), we are certainly better off for it.
Copyright is somewhat different in the sense that it is relatively easy to copy without depriving someone of their copy, yet it can still be viewed as depriving the creator of the potential value of their work.
[1] Don't worry. I don't drive.
The word "have" is just a linguistic feature (in English, no less[1]), or (at most) a concept. It's not inherent in the physical world.[2]
The concept of ownership is ultimately a linguistic and/or social convention. (Some) humans choose to think in terms of ownership, but they need not do so.
[1] - which might not even be present in some other languages, or might not be as natural to talk about as in English
[2] - except to the extent that all thoughts might be argued to be physical, if they are considered to be in the brain and everything in the brain is physical
Some languages do. It doesn't mean that all languages do, and even in those that do the use of such language may not be as natural as it is in English.
> Even animals have property they defend
Animals do things that some humans may interpret as defense, and and that some humans may interpret as "property", but that doesn't mean that that's what animals are doing, much less that animals think of anything as "their property".
Sure, but the GGP said they think of all kinds of property as a "government-granted monopoly". The linguistic and social conventions you refer to have nothing to do with government.
They usually don't without an exceptional reason.
But if they want to, they can.
> Is it really the case individuals can not assert their rights without a governments backing?
I should've left the quoted part out as its presumptuous, my bad.
But in places of the world[0] where government doesn't have its hands (and eyes and ears) into everything, property rights are sometimes enforced on an individual level, if the social construct fails. You might point a gun at someone who tries to steal from you, and you might even pull the trigger if the threat of that gun doesn't deter them.
And conversely, there are communities (sadly not so many these days) where property rights don't need to be enforced by anyone, because the social construct is just that strong.
[0] Or times in the past.
The United States views rights (including life, liberty, and property) as being natural, i.e. they exist in the absence of governments, and that government can only infringe on those rights to the minimum extent necessary to accomplish the tasks set out for it in the Constitution. Things have drifted quite a bit over time but that’s the foundational notion behind the US Constitution.
It’s really a remarkable document in that conceptually it makes the government subject to the citizens, not the citizens subjects of the government. If you read it carefully it says quite clearly “the government is allowed to do these X things, and nothing else, and by the way it is expressly forbidden from doing these other things that we didn’t give it authority to do but we know that they’ll try to do anyway so just no”.
"Natural rights" is being noted as a framing or validation that's used by defenders of copyright.
I don't have to make my work publicly available. I could make it hidden forever or for long time, or to closely share it with a limited number of people.
I can compose a music piece, paint an art, or write a book, and never tell anyone about it. I can do it just out of a pure creativity interest, and without the need to make anything in exchange from the public.
In this case my creativity would be a property in it's very ultimate sense.
I believe that in it's very root the Copyright laws were established to offer something to creative people who truly don't need to be a part of the society, who make their creativity for themself out of a pure genius without the need to receive any reward for their labour. In exchange that they make their work available to public too, so the entire society would benefit from their creations.
This is the offer of the government that grants the author a personal monopoly to their creativity, but this creativity is a Property before it was published.
We can erase this offer, saying that one's work is not truly a property. Well, we can do so, but we can't enforce an author to give up of his property and make it publicly accessed whether we consider it a property or not.
I do not see the high prices for peer reviewed journals promoting the "Progress of Science and useful Arts," not do I see any other copyright helping this Progress.
I do not see the ever-increasing terms of copyright being "for limited Times."
I do not see any laws "securing ... to Authors and Inventors" anything. I see corporate lawyers getting rich.
Given the lack of compliance with the highest law of the land in the USA, I can not describe anyone who follow copyright law as being ethical. I have to find those who promote the profits of corporations and impede the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for never-ending Times to corporate lawyers the exclusive Right to others Writings and Discoveries to be highly unethical.
I think the experiment to allow someone to have "exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries" was a good idea in the 1780's, when publishing was largely driven by authors. Today, compulsory licensing makes more sense.
Neither do I, but the Supreme Court disagreed in Eldred v. Ashcroft.
> In a 7-2 opinion delivered by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Court held that Congress acted within its authority and did not transgress constitutional limitations in placing existing and future copyrights in parity in the CTEA. Disagreeing with the argument that a copyright once set is fixed, the majority found that the CTEA "continues the unbroken congressional practice of treating future and existing copyrights in parity for term extension purposes," and is a permissible exercise of Congress's power under the Copyright Clause. … Justices John Paul Stevens and Stephen G. Breyer dissented, arguing that the CTEA amounted to a grant of perpetual copyright that undermined public interests.
> animals own a piece of food only as long as their threat of violence keeps other animals at bay... and yet we are trained to hold copyright as a natural right
I'd rather chafe under some copyright restrictions on minor parts of my life than be in a life and death struggle over every bite of food, so... so far, you're making the copyright regime look good in comparison to living as a beast without it, and I'm speaking as someone who'd like extensive copyright reform.
A social construct would be one which operates through common understanding and agreement amongst multiple animals, typically of a single species, and generally amongst a single tribe or herd. I don't think of examples off the top of my head, though I suspect they exist. I'd also probably want to distinguish instinctual behaviours (e.g., bees, ants, termites) from cultural behaviours, learned, taught, and passed down within a specific group. A cleavage between the two concepts would be that instinctual behaviours re-emerge even when individuals are not raised or taught by older generations, whilst cultural behaviours are lost where the social transmission via teaching is broken.
(And yes, the thought comes to mind that several phenomena widely labled as "social constructs" amongst humans would likely be re-labled as instinctual based on the distinction I've drawn here.)
Merriam-Webster: "an idea that has been created and accepted by the people in a society".
<https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/social%20construc...>
ThoughtCo has a brief introduction to the concept of social construct:
Taking that away only gives even more power to the super rich by transforming all human intellectual products into free labor for portals and paywalls to aggregate and sell back to us.
They already do that of course but without copyright there would be no way to prevent them from doing it with any work.
My dad slaved away for years writing his books. He knew they'd never make money, he did it for the academic reputation. Going over his papers after he passed, he made a few hundred dollars off of them. I expect that meant a couple pennies an hour for his labor.
For another example, the current music industry is pretty much post-copyright. Musicians don't make money from streaming or CDs, they make it from live performances, performing at private events, endorsements, etc.
As for me, I'm the CEO of the D Language Foundation, and we give away all our work for free under the most permissible license we could find - the Boost license.
The main reason that's the case is due to record labels forcing musicians into bad deals, because they are often the gatekeepers to popularity. Some of the streaming platforms are better about this now, but the economics of streaming have been set by the record labels and the streaming companies, so even if it's a bad deal, independent artists just have to deal with it. This doesn't have to be the case, it's just where we've unfortunately ended up.
> they make it from live performances, performing at private events, endorsements, etc.
Sometimes musicians write songs that they don't perform themselves. They license the performance rights to others. Copyright enables that.
These things are aided by copyright, though, even if the songwriter and performer is the same person. If a musician writes a song, and doesn't have copyright to protect it, other musicians could perform it as well. Maybe people start liking another performer's rendition more, and the original songwriter doesn't get to make money at live performances anymore, and gets no royalties from other performances. You could argue that's just tough luck, I suppose, but I don't think that's particularly fair.
> My dad slaved away for years writing his books. He knew they'd never make money, he did it for the academic reputation.
That's just a reflection of the idea that the value in a copyrighted work isn't necessarily monetary. Presumably your dad used the reputation he gained from writing those books for some purpose that was valuable to him. Without copyright, someone could have taken his work and used it for their own gains. After a while, the original provenance of his work may have gotten muddied enough that he couldn't use that work to enhance his own reputation anymore.
> we give away all our work for free under the most permissible license we could find - the Boost license.
That's great, but not everyone wants to do that. Who are you to say that no one should be able to retain GPL-like control over their software if they want? Who are you to say that someone shouldn't be allowed to release something while prohibiting commercial use?
And hell, the Boost license is certainly not even the most permissible license available: it still requires that the copyright/license notice be included with any distributions or derived work. Copyright enables you to make that requirement. If you didn't want that requirement, then you could have released into the public domain (or licensed similarly to public domain, for jurisdictions that don't have that concept). You didn't do that, and your license relies on copyright in order to function.
I will be the first person to agree that we need heavy copyright reform. DMCA should be gutted if not completely repealed. Copyright term should be reduced (the only thing from TFA I agree with) to something on the order of 20 years, or perhaps something where you have a shorter term with the option to renew for another short term if the work ends up being important to you. There should be no criminal penalties for copyright infringement; all of it should be dealt with in civil court, and monetary penalties should be based on what the infringer gained, not some made-up number that the rightsholder "lost". Unfortunately these reforms are unlikely.
> Who are you to say ...
I made my career creating intellectual property. I'd say that entitles me to have an opinion on it as much as anyone.
As to the songwriter who cannot perform, if I was a band that couldn't write hit songs, I'd pay him to write a hit song for me. As for other musicians playing the songs, I have a friend who is a major Beatles fan. I said once that I liked some of the covers of Beatles songs better than the Beatles version, and he about had apoplexy. People are always gonna wanna pay big bux to watch the Beatles perform their songs, just like if a painting's provenance proves it's a Rembrandt, an otherwise unremarkable painting would become worth $$$$millions$$$$.
> the original provenance of his work may have gotten muddied enough that he couldn't use that work to enhance his own reputation anymore
I'm not buying that. I've had people take my game Empire and claim they developed it more than once. I've been able to prove provenance each time. These days its pretty easy to prove with a github repository, which is a big reason why I'm a big github fan. Yes, other people have also claimed they developed my compilers.
GPL exists to avoid free software being used to create proprietary software. If proprietary software didn't exist, what would be the point of GPL?
The fashion industry is highly reliant on trademark. I don't think many would say this is better. It also deals in art whose individual products are much easier to design than writing a novel.
> The evidence points in the opposite direction. Germany had weak copyright laws up until the Copyright Act of 1901. Yet, maybe because of these weak laws, it became a literary and scientific power:
This is nonsense from Eckhard Höffner. England in the 1830s had a low publication rate because it had a strangling and punative publisher cartel, which Höffner completely ignores in order to make an otherwise ludicrous academic claim.
For HN, here's the big one: without copyright there would be no viral licenses.
If ^ that imposes restrictions on the combined work, it is a viral license. Because it spreads beyond its original bounds.
They absolutely do exist.
https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ14.pdf
> A derivative work is a work based on or derived from one or more already existing works. Common derivative works include translations, musical arrangements, motion picture versions of literary material or plays, art reproductions, abridgments, and condensations of preexisting works. Another common type of derivative work is a “new edition” of a preexisting work in which the editorial revisions, annotations, elaborations, or other modifications represent, as a whole, an original work.
The viral licenses of open source grants that to anyone who also follows the same license rather than requiring the equivalent a playwright to contact the right holder of a novel to ask permission to use their story as the basis for a play.
And then, as a derivative work... if someone wants to make a movie based on the play, they need to contact the playwright and the author novel and get permission again.
The restrictions of the original novel's copyright have extended beyond its original bounds of text on paper to a play and a movie.
Without copyright, people can widely leak source code and freely create works based on leaks
...and no purpose for them, as their work would be done.
Or do the people who release under the AGPL want something beyond what the GPL provides? And if that is the case, what can they use to get it other than the rights granted by copyright? Surely they could use something other than copyright to get that if it was possible.
It's better. Otherwise you would be arguing for the right to impersonate other people and businesses.
I say it's better. How is it not?
If someone wants to spend $$$$ on a dress from some well-known designer because they want to show off their wealth, then that's fine. Other people who don't care about the brand name can spend $$ on a near-copy of that dress and look just as good, without spending so much money. If there's enough suckers out there to keep the expensive brands in business, without needing copyright laws to protect them, I don't see the problem here at all.
I think copyright is broken and overextended in America, in desperate need of reform, but without copyright, this balance would tip even further to "wealthy individuals and corporations" - I say this as someone married to a composer, with friends who are writers and artists who, while not wealthy, are able to protect what income they have thanks to copyright, and who have built careers thanks to their ability to claim ownership over works they've created.
Let's use that fashion industry example he suggested, apparently having only the most fleeting idea of what he's talking about. If you pay attention to this sort of thing, you see (for one example) Urban Outfitters being called out again and again for using the work of artists unaffiliated with the brand, without compensating the people who originated the work. In the case where the artist can afford legal representation, they're able to pursue this in court and get paid what they are due because of the protections afforded them by copyright law. URBN isn't doing well because out-innovating the competition, they just have money and power and market share, and the people they hire to create new designs are willing to risk pulling something off the internet that they like and putting it on a shirt. It's a long chain of exploitation of the creative class. And if you want to get into the nuances around how high fashion runway crap trickles down into fast fashion knockoffs, that's an entirely different conversation.
Of course this guy thinks that because he creates research papers about computer science, he's a "writer" - I'm glad he's sharing his opinion, and I'm sure he's just going to gravitate back into his lane naturally. Given the much-pilloried "AI can paint the rest of the Mona Lisa" tweet, we're going to see a lot of people who've never valued art talking confidently about how art and money really ought to work.
The author's remedy for this is: abandon expectation that you can capture value from your work - seek ye instead a wealthy patron. Someone else will monetize your work better than you, so why bother trying?
I have a lot of problems with the recording industry as a whole, and the publishing industry as a whole, but - when Eminem samples Dido, or when Prodigy samples The Art of Noise, when the Beach Boys rip off Chuck Berry, there's a whole machine that can go to work to help enable paying the original artist for their work through well established channels. It's precisely because of their use of copyright law and certain mandates around attribution that you're more aware of well off writers and artists than you are of fashion designers. Or typographers!
There are plenty of bad uses of copyright law as well, in my opinion. Should the Rolling Stones have sued The Verve out of existence over Bittersweet Symphony? Why were so many African American hip hop acts sued publicly, with sample heavy white acts not receiving the same negative attention? (Vanilla Ice not withstanding) The grandchildren and estates of deceased artists asking outrageous licensing fees for creative works that they merely inherit, due to copyright extension, is poisoning the well - copyright is meant to expire, works go into the public domain, to seed new interpretations and allow wider access.
Anyway, I'm on a tear. I think artists who create original works should be given power to capture value produced by their labor.
Nobody thinks artists should not have that power. The relevant question is should artists be able to impinge on the freedom of other people to do what they want.
If I am riding a bike, and you take my bike, that deprives me the use of said bike, and I have to take the bus. That is that theft looks like.
If I write a song and you copy the song and start charging audiences to come to a performance or sell a cd, I can still charge audiences to come to a performance or sell a cd.
In fact it is often the case that artists are more successful after someone has copied their work than before.
Yes, and someone else doing that will almost certainly mean less money for you. You seem comfortable with that; fine, others are not.
> In fact it is often the case that artists are more successful after someone has copied their work than before.
Big fat "citation needed" there. I won't say that never happens, because certainly it does, but saying it happens "often" (at least, often enough to indicate abolishing copyright) doesn't pass the smell test with me, and requires some evidence.
Wrong. Economies are not zero-sum. Demand can be created.
A composer shouldn't own a sequence of notes. An artist shouldn't own a sequence of color on paper. Pure art and producing work for money are polar opposites. Anyone producing art for money can hardly be called an artist.
You're also basically arguing the only people who should be artists are the independently wealthy. I'd rather have moderately long lived copyright than lose the works of the many artists I've enjoyed who make a living from what they produce.
Ultimately what should actually matter is what makes the world a better/best place for the most people. Our current copyright regime isn't doing that, but it's not at all clear that having no copyright at all would be better than having some much more limited form of copyright.
"My argument would work if the whole world was different, therefore my argument is correct!"
Or as I like to say
"If we had some ham, we could have ham and cheese sandwiches – if we had some cheese."
What are you even saying?
If we lived without copyright the world would be different because of it. Insisting that a world without copyright look exactly like our own is dishonest
The original author is arguing that the world would be better, but I don't think he successfully argues that. (And I personally do believe a no-copyright-at-all world would be worse than what we have now.)
This is confusing. It's a political gesture and yet people wanted it enough to value that gesture. So clearly some people wanted to protect authors. Plus a whole social system has been built on top of copyright over the last 300 years and that matters a lot more than whatever a bunch of rich people in the 1700s thought.
>In most countries, copyright holds for 70 years after the death of the author. Such a long-term copyright cannot possibly be meant to protect authors.
Supporting one's family is a major goal of many people.
Ets, etc.
I’m sympathetic to the idea of providing some means of posthumous support to an author’s widow and children.
I’m rather less sympathetic when it manifests as an exclusive monopoly lasting well into the lifetime of the third, fourth, or even fifth generation of descendants.
I inherited my dad's copyrights. The annual royalties might pay for a movie ticket.
I wouldn’t jump all the way to concluding that destroying copyright wouldn’t have ill effect though. The concept was created to incentivize and monetize creative production. There is a Chesterton’s fence prohibition against tearing up the incentive machine without knowing exactly what would replace it.
The biggest, strongest example is pharmaceuticals. It costs hundreds of millions of dollars to develop a new drug and get it through the approvals process. It costs almost nothing to copy the drug once its developed. Without the protection of copyright, nobody in their right mind would invest the money it takes to develop new pharmaceuticals.
There are lots of important debates to be had about how pharmaceutical companies game that system in practice, and whether or not we should tweak the rules to make that harder. However, it seems undeniable to me that pharmaceutical innovation would completely grind to a halt if copyright were abolished.
I think a "reasonable" transitional copyright duration would be something like 70 years from publication. Basically the length of a life, strictly shorter than it is currently, not so short as to make corporations extremely upset, and no potential perverse incentives to kill someone to end their copyright. Shorter would be nicer though.
And this is the last thing a programmer want to think about when starting a new programming project. So they pick up just some random, but widely used OSS license from Internet, as other people around do. This creates a self-supporting trend where picking something different to a widely used OSS license will look inappropriate. It is much easier to accept an idea that all you need to do is to use a "ready to use" license from Internet, rather than the idea that you should hire a lawyer to write you one, or worse to research the pack of corresponding laws and law practices by yourself. Of course the arguments of the opponents of Copyright and the proponents of the free-software expressed in plain English even reinforce this trend.
My opinion is that we just can't have a fair discuss around this topic. To have such discussion we need more people who fairly tried to go both ways, but the current free-artist programmers community is too much shifted towards using of free licenses that basically bypass the majority of the benefits and the trade-offs the Copyright laws can offer.
> State-enforced copyright came about with the Statute of Anne in 1710. It was the result lobby of a group English publishers who sought to regain their monopoly on publishing. Handing out the initial copyright to the authors was a political gesture: the goal has always been to get authors to hand over the copyright to the publisher, effectively giving the publisher a monopoly.
> In most countries, copyright holds for 70 years after the death of the author. Such a long-term copyright cannot possibly be meant to protect authors.
Please ...
I'm quite critical of copyright, particularly the extended terms, but these are absurd arguments, and any criticism of copyright that doesn't have the courage to question whether authors (and their descendants) should get a monopoly on their work for 70 years after their death is not worth considering.
Historically, who lobbied for copyright and why is irrelevant. Authors and publishers obviously have the same interests here. If anyone questions copyright on twitter, even just the extended terms, they always get mobbed by a bunch of authors.
As for the fact that copyright holds for 70 years after the death of the author, that is obviously also in the interest of the author and his descendents, because it makes the copyright more valuable. Even if the author doesn't care about his descendants, he can sell the copyright before his death for more money.
We should ask ourselves how long copyright terms are necessary. We should make this judgement considering not only the interests of authors, but also those of readers, of society, of an intellectual discourse that everyone can participate in, not denying that the interests of authors might not perfectly overlap with those of society.
But the current situation is so insane that it's entirely reasonable to posit that no copyright at all might be better.
The moral right of claiming ownership to a work should still be protected forever.
I find the culture of “ownership” of ideas morally repugnant. That’s not culture I perpetuate or encourage.
I’m willing to tolerate some of in the form of limited time monopolies if it benefits humanity.
I see that we're starting off with a misrepresentation already. Copyright isn't a patent.
Copyright isn't solely ownership of 'ideas,' it's ownership of actual work. You cannot 'copyright' an idea.
> It’s just your culture.
I'm sure when it's the 'culture' of every single country in the world, it's an alright culture.
>I’m willing to tolerate
> That’s not culture I perpetuate or encourage.
See what's great about this is that your extremist ideas are in a minority, and you do not get to make the laws. So what you're willing to 'tolerate' or not is irrelevant. No one is looking to you to 'encourage' or 'perpetuate' the culture. Demonizing artists by going "You don't own your own work, I should be able to own it, I made this!" will only get you so far.
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You shouldn't have free reign to profit off of artistic hard work of someone else without a way for them to benefit from that as well.
You were indoctrinated into this world view and believe it to be a natural law. I was not and I don’t.
You seem pretty angry that somebody would think differently, too.
I can’t conceive of looking at the world that way and being morally okay with it.
I'm not the person you're replying to, but I can say I'm not angry about this at all (frankly, it feels like you're the one with the axe to grind here). I don't know about indoctrination; certainly I am a product of my environment, at the very least.
But I guarantee you that if copyright weren't a thing, the catalog of creative works in the world would be a tiny fraction of what it is today. And that would continue to be the case unless the human race can get to a point of post-scarcity, where we don't have to work to put food on the table or roofs over our heads, or have a decently nice standard of living.
Because the majority of people in the world who make things that fall under copyright would not be financially able to keep creating those things if they couldn't make money off of it. And sure, there are sometimes ways to make money off creative works without relying on copyright, but I don't think those ways cover enough to be meaningful.
I'm not angry at all, I just don't see the world purely in black and white as you seem to do. On the other hand, you're the one throwing around words such as "indoctrinated" and all that.
I mean, you're the one who insinuated that it should be 100% okay for me to write a work with 100k words, and you taking those words, adding 200 more words, calling the story 'yours' and profiting off it. If THAT is what you believe 'natural law' is, then I'm absurdly glad that it does not work that way.
>I can’t conceive of looking at the world that way and being morally okay with it.
I can't conceive of having a morality that is basically "it should be okay to take/steal other people's works and do whatever you want with them, regardless of that person's feeling in that matter."
This is why we have open source licenses for people who WANT to grant others that ability to do so. You, as someone who has arguably been in the industry for so long, should be fairly familiar with it.
So in other words you are absolutely fine with the concept of the ownership of ideas, you just disagree on what the legal terms should be around it. Which is fine! I disagree with the current copyright regime too.
But I think having some form of (much more limited) copyright would benefit humanity much more than having no copyright at all.
> Why shouldn't I have protection for works I created?
It's hard to argue about negatives. In my opinion, the real question is: why should copyright exist in the first place?
Copyright in its modern form has existed for what, 400 years? It's not exactly a requirement for a culture to develop. Obviously, you want protection; many people do.
There are answers to this question. For one, big companies wouldn't be spending billions on movies, tv, and music, if piracy was legal. The internet allowing instant copies of any work has also changed the situation significantly. On the other hand, piracy is easier than ever, there is way too much free online content to compete with to warrant the prices of a lot of media, and piracy is already effectively legal enough that typing "<Movie name> 2023 free stream" into Google will give you a variety of piracy websites to choose from.
On the other hand, most of the internet is very copyright-hostile. From meme templates to fanfiction and embedding foreign site content, most online communities have a very relaxed take on what copyright means. Imagine what would happen if the person who drew the original trollface were to go around demanding copyright fees and starting lawsuits for violating the rights to his property!
> What gives someone else the right to just take my story, add tidbits, sell it and make profit?
What gives you the right to prevent them from improving your work? If I don't like one of your character and consider the story better if I put in a character of my own, who are you to decide what I do with this idea or not?
I'm not anti-copyright (although I think the current form is absolutely ridiculous with its "70 years after the death of the author" terms) and I do enjoy the feeling of having control over my works, but I can't come up with a good rational reason why I have the right to tell someone else what they can or cannot do with the works I create.
We probably need some way to protect small creators (Patreon and friends are an excellent development!) but I would prefer to live in a world where https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GFW-eEWXlc can exist without the ever-present threat of lawyers.
If this were the case I'd just not publish, and keep my story with me, limited to a few people I trust. This is what you'll get if copyright wasn't there.
>On the other hand, most of the internet is very copyright-hostile. From meme templates to fanfiction and embedding foreign site content, most online communities have a very relaxed take on what copyright means. Imagine what would happen if the person who drew the original trollface were to go around demanding copyright fees and starting lawsuits for violating the rights to his property!
Most of the artistic internet doesn't contain works (outside of certain OSS communities) that may have taken someone years to complete and consists of hundreds of thousands of words. I'm amused that you should be somehow okay with the idea of taking a 300,000 words story, adding 10k words, modifying some bits, and selling it as "yours" and profiting off my work.
>Copyright in its modern form has existed for what, 400 years? It's not exactly a requirement for a culture to develop.
>In my opinion, the real question is: why should copyright exist in the first place?
I mean, you can just say that about modern forms of democracies and civil rights. Then why have them in the first place. We can have monarchies, autocracies, theocratic/thalassocratic republics just fine.
One of the relatively few issues that actually has angered me a fair bit in recent years is the hoarding of content by companies that basically act as "landlords" and often do as little as possible beyond that.
In particular, I've had experiences with this as a researcher - doing the work and, these days, really doing all of the writing, editing, graphics, layout, etc. (i.e., "publishers" often don't do even the tiniest bit of traditional "publishing work" if at all possible) only to have the content then locked behind a paywall with websites demanding outrageous fees for access.
I've also had experiences with this in trying to support musicians whose work I love. It's virtually impossible to buy music through any of the larger companies and have any reasonable % go to the artists! I've tried multiple times to find services with reasonably extensive catalogues where, oh, I don't know, say even 30% of the money I spend would go to the people who MADE the music, and I've failed each time I've looked! So, instead, I mostly acquire music in other ways, and try to give money directly to the people who made it (and professionals involved in its actual production etc.) in other ways.
Now, I know if there's any forum in which I will be corrected if wrong, it's this one. And, I'd be grateful if anyone can point me to better options regarding music, and video (as well), etc.
I've been heartened by some of the firms publishing books using better models - providing unencumbered PDFs and the like. Also, significant efforts in academic publishing to change models, like "eLife", the various PLoS journals, etc. But, like many industries with questionable / potentially fading justifications for their models / continued existences in current form, many "traditional publishers" of various kinds have only become more of a PITA in their activities as time continues to pass.
Yes, we first learn about it when getting photocopies of books with copyright pages
Just one point of evidence: those people who license their original code under a copyleft license (thus the code might perhaps not be used as data to train neural networks) do accept (some concept of) copyright, since without copyright the copyleft restrictions (having to deliver the source code under an identical/suitable license for derivates of the program) could not be enforced.
We could have regulations around distributing source code that are completely divorced from copyright—it could be seen as a matter of "right to repair" or transparency or just as a right on its own. I expect that people ideologically in favor of free software would prefer that to needing copyleft licenses.
The fact that copyleft builds on top of copyright is a nice bit of legal judo, using the existing framework to achieve the opposite of what it's intended for—but it's ultimately just an implementation detail.
I want my code to be a learning resource, whether it be humans or machines learning from it.
That's certainly my reading and based on precedents like search snippets I don't have any reason to think otherwise.
No, they observe that there are laws called copyright laws, and people will hit you with sticks and drag you to a locked room and leave you there for years if you ignore those laws.
Copyleft is a way of using copyright to force people to copy things that they don't even want to copy.
If you're some massively capitalized corporation building an LLM however, the copyrights of little people don't mean anything.
He said the legitimate reason for both is to protect the real investment that was made. The classic is an author. Historically might write a couple of dozen major works of which maybe three have any long term value. Or a patent on some physical thing. The real world is NP Hard. His point about software patents and copyright is software isn't hard enough to be afforded that sort of protection.
So I agree protection really aught to be based on how much effort + the reward structure.
If we're just talking about rent seeking well fuck that.
There are many ways to get what you want
I use the best, well I use the rest
Well I use the enemy
I use anarchy
'Cause I, I want to be, anarchy
Fuck the rat race man
That last example may have actually been the result of going through the proper channels to get approval, since it's big artists on either side of it, but generally it's such common practice to sample others' work when making music that suing for copyright claims is extremely rare compared to the prevalence of possibly infringing cases.
Sampling to me, and other practices like it, are basically vehicles for creativity and innovation, and it's quite clear that copyright law really only serves to limit this innovation by attempting to restrict usage of creative works. I think Wax Tailor's "Once Upon a Past"[1] sums it up best:
> Where a cultural production - at least musically - was full of possibilities, by virtue of being able to freely appropriate from the musical past to make new combinations, and thus new meanings, the story demonstrates that a society "free to borrow and built upon the past" is culturally richer than a controlled one
While it's true that there's all kinds of music made by sampling other music, when a sample-heavy song starts to gain commercial momentum, copyright comes into harsh focus real fast - sometimes it's lawsuits, but more often there are licensing conversations had in order to avoid those lawsuits. Is it applied evenly? Definitely not, and this is the topic of a thousand longform blogs and multiple documentaries and articles and so on.
For example - you may think that because you've never heard about EMI suing Danger Mouse over the Grey Album, that this was "innovation mostly free from copyright ... especially in hip-hop" - but just because nothing went to court doesn't mean there weren't a lot of conversations between lawyers, and agreements made around what exactly happened there.