Years from now we're gonna look back and realize that copyright industry groups effectively destroyed the internet, and none of us would be laughing about it as we do now.
Look at how much control media companies have exerted over pretty much everything. Look at all the anti-piracy stuff with HDCP, or the DRM stuff in browsers, and how some services don't allow you to watch high-definition streams with some browsers. And unskippable ads on DVDs, ultimately enforced by the movie industry.
Also, look at how music files are treated so differently from regular files on iOS. And copyright strikes and demonetization on youtube and others, the Sony rootkit scandal, the list goes on.
These people have inserted themselves into every aspect of our digital lives, and (along with advertisers) basically ruin everything or at least make everything more complicated just to protect their revenue streams.
Edit: Wait, a decade is only 2013? How did that happen. Make that two decades.
Don't get me wrong, copyright enforcement has degraded many things, but the old internet wouldn't be significantly different today if all other variables remained static.
https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/
Though I haven't really bothered joining a larger network yet.
1) Copyrights can only be owned by natural persons and can not be transferred. They can be licensed, but the physical creator of a work always owns the copyright. Disney can't own copyright, only it's artists and animators. They have to negotiate a license to distribute with everyone. The idea here is that if an idea continues to have value for a company, then it continues to have value to the person who created it. And if Disney or whoever decides that something isn't worth having anymore, the creators are free to go out and find someone who does value it.
Immediate concern here is how messy this gets deciding what anyone actually owns. Do animators own the copyright to a character jointly? Separately? Do they only own the copyrights to their specific drawings and a character is then inherently uncopyrightable? Joint ownership seems obvious, but then how is that any better for the individuals than Disney having exclusive ownership? It only takes one to prevent you from making money on your work. Separate but equal ownership seems interesting, but how much do you have to contribute to get that? Does everyone who ever drew a sketch for Lilo and Stitch now own the IP rights to the entire character? Likewise how would you keep licensing agreements from looking like convoluted versions of modern copyright anyway? I guess that's more on the unions and guilds but if every employee signs a 200 year exclusive license, that's not any different from what we have today really.
2) Trademarks can not be sold. A trademark's purpose is to assure a buyer of the source of a given good. The whole reason we protect them is because if I buy a product with Apple's branding on it, I want to know I got it from Apple, not from "Bob's Fancy Electronics Shack and Bait Shop". Problem is, if you can sell a trademark, you've changed who is actually the source of the good, but the consumer may not know that. Food items make a good example here. "Uncle Roger's Superior MSG" might be a small company, but when Kraft buys them out, it's not Uncle Roger who's selling it anymore, it's Kraft. And Kraft may change that recipe, or otherwise make decisions that Uncle Roger wouldn't. A consumer should know it's no longer "Uncle Roger's Superior MSG" they're buying, it's now "Kraft MSG" and while it might be based on Uncle Roger's recipe, it's not from Uncle Roger and Kraft should have to rebrand it and fight for brand reputation all over again. Zombie brands are another example of this. Whoever is making Craftsman tools isn't Sears and Roebuck anymore, and they're not the same, and shouldn't be sold as the same.
Again there are some immediate concerns that come to mind. Part of the value of buying a company is that trademarks carry the reputation of the company. Distinguishing between a change of owners as part of the course of business and a change of owners as in a sale of the whole company is also difficult. I don't think if "Uncle Roger" and "Auntie Helen" split and the 50/50 ownership structure becomes 100% ownership, does that require a rebrand? Probably not, but then what are the limits of this? If Kraft sells Uncle Roger a 0.0001% ownership in Kraft, does that also mean there's no need to rebrand?
It never was. Sears, even many decades ago, always contracted other vendors to make their products, just like Costco does with their house brand now. The product numbers even used the first three digits to identify the vendor.
A Kenmore appliance would be made by Whirlpool, Maytag, LG, Samsung, whatever. It would be a distinct product, with its own exterior design and feature set (rather than just changing a logo). It definitely was worth finding out who made which, to favor manufacturers like LG over Whirlpool.
Craftsman was made by the Stanley/Black&Decker/DeWalt corporation for a long time before they finally bought the brand during the final Sears collapse a few years ago.
Here's the prefix list for appliances, but there are larger ones for all products: https://www.applianceaid.com/sears-manufacturing-codes.php
I recall seeing references to companies like "Tandy" for some electronic products, which should indicate that this practice goes back well into the 70s and 80s...
This is, as I understand your idea, the situation that actually exists in Germany in the Urheberrecht. Here, two concepts exists:
- Urheberschaft (authorship): the property of being the author and be attributed as such; cannot be sold.
- Nutzungsrechte (usage rights): these can be sold
The studios can so easily kill all piracy, and they just about did it with Spotify and Netflix. But no, the greed made them split up into a dozen different services nobody wants, and here we are again.
I don't disagree about the greed part, but I guess fragmentation is almost inevitable until the profit margin is driven down to near zero. Shortsighted, probably, but it would essentially require all the producers to back (and therefore yield profit to), one or two Netflix/Spotify type entities.
The fact that there are penalties for stealing physical goods does not imply that just any penalty is fine. The analogy doesn’t work. Removal of Internet access in 2023 is debilitating. Punishments are supposed to fit the crime, and the complete loss of access to what has become a fundamental point of access does not fit the crime.
And there’s also the very old arguments that I won’t rehash here about the clear difference between digital copies of content and physical items.
There is zero difference between a digital and physical item if you are the producer. A digital good has the cost of production front loaded, it just has next to zero marginal cost. That may be the cost of education and experience, for example. If you make something of value, you absolutely have the right to choose how you are rewarded - if the buyer decides that choice isn't right for them, you can either change the offer or you look for your next customer. You may choose to give it away, if your reward is the satisfaction of someone using it, but that is your choice, not the consumer's.
There's absolutely a difference. If you produce a physical good, and somebody takes it, you no longer have it. If you produce a digital good and somebody copies it, you still have the original, you're still free to use and enjoy it as you see fit.
Fundamentally property rights are a negative right: you have the right not to have your stuff taken. Negative rights don't conflict with eachother, that's why they make a good basis for society. Intellectual property is a positive right: you have the right to control how other people use their property, which conflicts with people's right to use their property as they see fit.
You can absolutely argue that IP law is cynically applied, but in principle it protects high capital and low operating expense businesses from those who would like to do the low operating expense part without bothering about the high capital part.
We need to collectively stop using these kinds of physical goods analogies in discussions about piracy. To claim that there is no difference is a fundamental miscalculation.
To be clear, I do not condone piracy. I purchase the content that I view. But these kinds of fallacious analogies are misleading and dangerous to Internet freedom.
Fundamentally, it's the same problem - producers have to adjust their prices to reflect the threat to their income. If I produce something, and I forecast X% of my overall market to be stolen, I have to adjust my selling price according. It doesn't matter if that something is physical or digital.
If I produce something that is digital I have the luxury of being able to reduce the cost as low as I like to capture as much value as I can, but that is still my choice as the producer.
The bottom line is it there is a lot of nuance here, and simple analogies that make one act appear to be the same as the other lead to some reductionist conclusions that have been repeatedly taken up by lawmakers who do not understand these nuances.
-[0] https://phys.org/news/2015-04-downloading-ethics-digital-pir...
I’ve been transitioning away from a career in tech into creating educational content for a niche I love, and I’m sensitive to the need for recourse. At the same time, I think I’m far less likely as an individual creator to have much recourse because I don’t have a team of lawyers.
This is the other aspect of these piracy discussions that always bothers me. It’s really the behemoths vs. individuals, which to me points at very misaligned thinking when it comes to the resulting policy/laws.
Digital goods have far more legal protection against this than physical ones.
They are not the same.
Perhaps similarly, people convicted of internet piracy could be required to operate with their torrent ports blocked, or with some sort of nanny state spyware installed on their devices.
So we need a pirate registry? And if you're convicted of 'internet piracy' (a term that is an excellent example of propaganda) then you forfeit any rights you have protecting your privacy and shielding you from warrantless government searches. Doesn't sound like an appropriate punishment for the offense to me.
I think it’s extremely problematic to compare piracy to drunk driving, and to model a punishment for piracy on the punishment for drunk driving for the reasons stated above.
I'm not trying to take a position on this either way, but within the context of 'internet piracy causes some sort of damage' I don't think the comparison is particularly problematic.
My point was that comparing this to a crime that kills people by the tens of thousands every year seems very stretched.
If everyone is doing it then it does seem pretty normalized, but if everyone is doing it then your presumption as to society's values seems flawed.
In reality these media producers seem to be making healthy profits so perhaps internet piracy is not as normalized as you think.
Precisely. You can't just take stuff people made at cost, that's violating copyright! You need to instead be a megacorporation that competes so brutally on intermediating yourself in the pipe that profit is driven towards zero, so you can't afford to pay any artists!
That's the legal way to screw over creators.
And without refund.
There is no scarcity in digital media. Supply and demand will inevitably drive down the price to near zero.